Dr Hilary Wason

Non-faculty academics
Learning and Teaching Enhancement Centre (LTEC)
Kingston Hill

Associate Professor and Head of Curriculum Development and Enhancement

[email protected]

About

My role involves working in collaboration with colleagues across the University to lead curriculum reviews and the design and development of programmes, including embedding new learning, teaching and assessment practices. I also oversee the work of the academic staff development team who run the suite of Kingston Academic Practice Standards programmes, the Course Leaders programme, New Academic Staff Induction and on demand CPD workshops.

I am co-project lead for the Future Skills Staff and Toolkit project group and co-lead the design and implementation of an institutional CPD programme to support all colleagues to embed graduate attributes within their curricula. I won a Kingston University People Award for most ambitious team for this work.

My research interests are in pedagogies to support staff to embed critical thinking and dialogic pedagogy in their teaching. I have received my Doctorate in Education for my thesis 'Learning to Teach Critical Thinking in Higher Education'. I am an AdvanceHE National Teaching Fellow, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Institutional Teaching Fellowship at Kingston University.

I previously worked in academic staff development at Kingston and taught business at Kingston University Business School and Kingston FE college. I worked for 12 years in the marketing industry holding senior client and agency roles.

Qualifications

Doctorate in Education
Bachelor of Laws
Chartered Institute of Marketing Diploma

Domains

I am a senior fellow of the AdvanceHE, a University Teaching Fellow, a National Teaching Fellow and a reviewer for Advance HE's prestigious National Teaching Fellowship Scheme. I oversee the team who lead on Kingston's Academic Practice experiential scheme and taught programmes which support colleagues to achieve a range of AdvanceHE fellowships. I also oversee the Course Leaders programme, Academic Induction, continuous professional development and curriculum development and enhancement support. I am a member of the National Association of National Teaching Fellows and contribute regularly to their symposiums and blogs. I am an active participant in the Staff Educational Development Association and achieved runner-up in SEDA's Educational Development Initiative of the Year in 2018 for the CritTALK Community of Practice which I set up (Embedding critical thinking in curricula using a collaborative learning, teaching and assessment approach). I am co-founder of the SEDA sector wide Curriculum Development Network with the University of Warwick and Staffordshire University. Using money from a SEDA small research grant, I have produced (with the University of Surrey) a compendium of good practice for lecturers to use dialogic teaching to support the Critical Thinking Skills Toolkit (2016).

I have initiated and developed an international collaboration with the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) since 2016* and have worked closely with their Associate Dean, Dr. Melodi Guilbault and the Dean of NJIT, Professor Oya Tukel to embed critical thinking across their school's business programmes. In 2017, I visited the Martin Tuchman School of Management to present the critical thinking skills toolkit to colleagues and to teach critical thinking to their business students. In 2018, Dr Guilbault and I presented a paper 'Developing critical thinking skills in the UK and the US: what can we learn from each other', sharing the result of a critical thinking diagnostic we had implemented in our respective institutions. I successfully mentored Dr Guilbault to achieve a Teaching in Excellence Award at NJIT drawing on our collaborative work about critical thinking teaching and my experience with the KAPS scheme, Kingston Learning Teaching Fellow Award and the National Teaching Fellow Award. Finally, I was invited by the Dean of NJIT for a curriculum development visit in September 2020 which was postponed due to COVID. I work with the Singapore Ministry of Education to train their teachers to embed critical thinking in their business curriculum and in my own time have developed a blended critical thinking module based on my Critical Thinking Skills Toolkit (Wason, 2016) with supporting teacher trainer materials for an institution in South Asia.

I have mentored students with their critical thinking development involving them in projects to further their own CV's. This led to a final year business students submitting a paper at the Researching, Advancing, Inspiring Student Engagement, participating in CritTALK community of practice and providing an endorsement for the new Chatfield Book ' How to Think'. These students were also joint research collaborators in the SEDA research project detailed above.

* Conference paper details can be found in my research profile

Qualifications

Transformative Learning
Critical Thinking Teaching
Curriculum Development
Dialogic Teaching
Staff Development

Courses taught

Marketing and Advertising BSc (Hons)

Publications

The troublesome nature of learning to teach critical thinking: using threshold concepts theory to support teacher education

Wason, Dr Hilary, 2025, Thinking Skills and Creativity (55), Published

View this article

Amplifying the value of the third space to support strategic curriculum change

Yonkers, Annie and Wason, Hilary, 2025, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (33), Published

View this article

Supporting critical thinking through purposeful classroom talk

Wason, Hilary and Heron, Marion, 2023, Educational Developments (24) pp 4-8, Published

View this article

Developing dialogic stance through professional development workshops

Heron, Marion and Wason, Hilary, 2023, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, Published

View this article

Supporting business students' transition into higher education: the case of marketing downloads

Anderson, Deborah, Wason, Hilary and Southall, Jane, 2016, Teaching in Higher Education (21), 8 pp 978-989, Published

View this article

Using innovative assessment to enhance student engagement and develop critical thinking skills: the case of The Big Debate

Southall, Jane and Wason, Hilary, 2016, Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal (1), 1, Published

View this article

Evaluating the use of synoptic assessment to engage and develop lower level Higher Education students within a Further Education setting

Southall, Jane and Wason, Hilary, 2016, Practitioner Research in Higher Education (10), 1 pp 192-202, Published

View this article

The transition to Higher Education for non-traditional, commuter students - a synthesis of recent literature to enhance understanding of their needs

Southall, J., Wason, H. and Avery, B., 2016, Student Engagement and Experience Journal (5), 1, Published

View this article

How positioning strategies affect co-branding outcomes

Wason, Hilary and Charlton, Nathalie, 2015, Cogent Business & Management (2) pp 1092192-1092192, Published

View this article

Implementing strategic curriculum change: developing an equitable and inclusive staff development programme

Yonkers, Annie and Wason, Hilary(2024). [Published]

Dr Hilary Wason

About

Qualifications

Domains

Teaching and learning

Research

Leadership and management

Publications

Articles

Book Sections/Chapters

Conference Items

Theses

Other