The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough."Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro (1913)
Seeing and describing
Ezra Pound’s two-line poem is often used to illustrate imagism; the idea that careful attention to a single, fleeting moment can reveal more than pages of explanation. No commentary, no framework, no attempt to generalise. Just the image, held long enough for something human to come into view.
It is an unlikely place to begin a discussion about fellowship, professional standards, or the language of teaching in higher education. And yet it points to something that feels increasingly difficult to do in our sector: to describe what we actually see.
The drift into uniform language
Across applications, case studies and reflective accounts, the language of higher education has become more uniform. Practice is “embedded”, impact is “evidenced”, approaches are “strategically aligned”.
These phrases do important work, but they also do a quieter kind of damage. They smooth away the particular. By replacing the moment with the summary, they make it harder to notice what teaching and learning actually is.
Fellowship, at its best, was never meant to sound like this. It was intended as a form of reflective professional voice: grounded in practice, attentive to students, and capable of holding the complexity of teaching as it is lived, not just reported; values the Advance HE Professional Standards Framework (PSF, 2023) at its centre.
But somewhere along the way, the balance has shifted. What was once a space for careful observation risks becoming an exercise in translation from experience into acceptable language.
What slips out of view
What slips out of view are the small, partial, easily overlooked moments that make up most of our practice. The moment a question lands differently than expected, and you adjust your explanation in real time. The pause before responding, where you decide whether to follow the plan or follow the room. The offhand example that suddenly brings a concept into focus.
Individually, these moments rarely meet the threshold for reporting. Collectively, they are where much of teaching actually happens.
We recognise these moments, even if we rarely name them. They sit just beneath the surface of formal accounts shaping decisions, informing judgement, but difficult to articulate in the terms our systems expect.
Language shapes attention
This is not just a question of style though - the language we use to describe teaching shapes what we are able to notice and what we learn to ignore.
When writing moves too quickly to summary, it becomes harder to stay with detail and nuance. Vivid moments are packaged into categories and impact before they are fully unpacked. Over time, that translation becomes habitual. We begin to anticipate the language that will be recognised and adjust our accounts accordingly.
The result is a narrowing of register, and a growing distance between what we do and how we describe it. For those working towards fellowship, this has a practical consequence: the moments where professional judgement is formed can disappear from view, even as we try to evidence it. Teaching practice is inherently entangled and situated (Fawns, 2022), yet these are precisely the moments that formal accounts struggle to hold.
The systemic pull
There are structural reasons for this shift. As fellowship becomes more widely expected and tied to progression, it begins to carry a different imperative. What begins as reflective practice can become something to be completed, demonstrated and recognised.
Many of us are familiar with this. Systems of audit, inspection and quality assurance shape how we present practice. The issue is not their existence, but their reach and the point at which structure begins to shape the substance of practice itself.
This is easy to recognise in the phrasing of professional accounts: teaching that is “designed to enhance the student experience”, practice that “demonstrates a commitment to inclusive learning”, impact that is “evidenced through improvements in engagement and attainment”.
These statements are not wrong. But they operate in a predictable register, repeated almost to the point of parody. They summarise achievement, but it is difficult to feel what was seen. Fellowship, at its best, should offer a space to resist that distance, not reproduce it.
What we might do differently
In mentoring conversations, this often looks very different.
A colleague describes a seminar that did not go as planned. They describe the moment a student’s question shifted the direction of the discussion, the pause before deciding whether to follow it, the uncertainty about whether the session had worked at all.
The account is tentative, specific, and full of judgement in motion. When written up, it becomes something else: a clear example of inclusive practice, effectively implemented and positively received.
Reclaiming that kind of attention is not about rejecting standards or evidence, but about resisting the urge to translate too quickly. It means staying with the moment; not shying away from the messy middle, the imperfections, or the missteps along the way. It’s describing, briefly and honestly, what was seen, what was said, what changed.
Even within tightly structured applications, this can be as simple as beginning with a brief, specific account of a teaching moment before mapping it to frameworks. In that detail, professional judgement becomes visible.
This is not about replacing one register with another but widening what counts as professional voice and valuing a greater range.
Because if we lose the ability to describe what we see, we do not simply lose a way of writing. We lose a way of paying attention to what we are doing.
Pound held two images for a fraction of a second and something human came into view. We might ask what becomes visible when we do the same with teaching…and what we risk losing when we no longer try?
Joanne Irving-Walton is a Principal Lecturer (Learning and Teaching) specialising in transnational education. Her work focuses on judgement, AI and the hidden dynamics of learning, with a particular interest in professional development and how higher education teaching practice is shaped across complex, distributed systems.
References
Fawns, T. An Entangled Pedagogy: Looking Beyond the Pedagogy—Technology Dichotomy. Postdigit Sci Educ 4, 711–728 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00302-7