Skip to main content

Staff profile

Overview

Dr Teti Dragas

Associate Professor (Education) & PRP Programme Lead

Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Associate Professor (Education) & PRP Programme Lead in the Durham Centre for Academic Development (DCAD)
Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities

Biography

Personal Profile

I am an Associate Professor in Durham Centre for Academic Development (DCAD). I am part of in the Academic Excellence Team and Lead Durham's Advance HE accredited Professional Recognition Pathway (PRP) that supports staff to gain a Fellowship recognition in teaching and learning at four categories: Associate Fellow, Fellow, Senior Fellow and Principal Fellow (See Advance HE). The Pathway is essential to core education strategy and involves staff from across the institution at all levels of seniority from both academic and professional services. I am responsible for leading and developing all aspects of the pathway, which includes the training and development of staff who support the pathway from across the institution. Recent & upcoming developments I have introduced include: an institution-wide PRP Hub and associated sites with materials supporting the pathway at all levels; a PRP Mentor and Assessor Network and application-specific mentoring across the institution; a dialogic route for Senior Fellowship; a new Talking HE podcast (with Dr Mark Childs) to support the dialogic route and disseminate practice across the institution and beyond.

From March 2025, I begin a secondary role (40%) in the Institute of Medical Humanities as part of a fixed term secondment where I am leading the development of a CPD offering to outside stakeholders in the public health sector linked to the Narrative Practices Lab, part of the Discovery Research Platform. I will be drawing on expertise from across the platform and in particular working closely with the Creative Facilitation Unit Lead  Mary Robson, to develop an innovative offering which draws on creative narrative methods and practices to support skills and knowledge for staff in the public health sector including, NHS trusts, the County councils, and charities for example.

My research and pedagogically-focused scholarship draws on my multidisciplinary background which I have developed by working across disciplines and disciplinary cultures: Literary Studies, Creative Writing, TESOL/ English Language Teacher Education, Higher Education Learning and Teaching and Academic Development. Drawing on expertise from my monograph, The Return of the Storyteller in Contemporary Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2014) on storytelling practices and my extensive experience in curriculum development and reflective practices I was awarded a DCAD Collaborative Innovation Grant to explore the affordances of Digital Storytelling to support learning discipline-specific contexts. As part of this grant, I launched and led a number of successful curriculum development initiatives collaborating with staff from a range of Durham departments (English Studies, Archeaology, IHRR, School of Education) and in other HE institutions as part of various international consultancies in Europe and the US. The projects and Digital stories by staff and students and the impact of these are housed  Digital Storytelling Durham website which I developed to showcase the work. Highlights on the impact of this work include: one of the digital stories produced as part of a core Education module at Durham won the 'Education' award at the First International Digital Storytelling Festival in Zakynthos this year; partnering with JISC colleagues and Dr Richard Beggs from the University of Ulster we have launched a sector-wide Community of Practice in Digital Storytelling and are disseminating practice across the sector. I am currently working on scholarship and research outputs drawn from this work with my collaborators some of which has been published, and some disseminated at conferences.

Teaching and Learning

I have a multidisciplinary profile and my HE teaching and learning experience  evidences this, spanning over two decades. I have worked across the following disciplines and disciplinary cultures (Literary Studies, Creative Writing, TESOL/ English Language Teacher Education, Academic Development) designing courses, degree programmes that have been both staff and student-facing and working across and contexts. My varied experience has helped me gain a good understanding of how teaching and learning operates in HE and in my current role as an academic developer I aim to espouse a humansitic, conscious and reflective approach which is compassionate and mindful of the challenges and rewards inherent in both the staff and student experience.

A overview of these include:

Literary Studies and Creative Writing: have taught and led a number of UG modules in this field at Durham University and at the University of Sunderland, specialising in literary and critical theory. I developed modules as part of a BA in English and Creative Writing and taught modules spanning poetry, drama, the short story, literature and film.

MA TESOL, English for Academic Purposes, and English Language Teacher Education courses: I have extensive experience in this field which includes: managing programmes across areas (General English, EAP and English Language Teacher Education); teacher training on Cambridge ESOL Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA); leading a successful curriculum development of MA TESOL and MA Applied Linguistics for TESOL (during my role as Director 2011-18) and developing and advising on a total of 11 modules across the programmes. PGT modules I taught focused on English language teacher training and development aiming to initiate new practitioners into the field and develop experienced practitioners through an exploration of both theoretical and practical issues pertinent to the language classroom.

Academic Development: I lead on reflective practice for professional development and consult on reflective assessments and curriculum development. I have developed modules across our educational development prospectus including the PCGAP, developing and launching the Teaching and Learning Workshop Programme in 2021 and leading the Professional Recognition Pathway. From 2019-21, I was a key member of the Durham Team working with colleagues from the University of Frankfurt, Germany and the University of Padua, Italy, on a 400K European ERASMUS + funded project IntReF: Intercultural Reflection on Teaching that focused on enhancing and internationalising academic development by implementing and evaluating a range of innovative methods for reflecting on teaching in order to developing HE teaching practice. Its intercultural dimension was linked to the aim of creating international collaborative networks by linking academics and academic developers across national, institutional, departmental and disciplinary boundaries.

Research interests

  • Academic Professional Development & Education
  • Narrative Methods with a focus on Digital Storytelling
  • Higher Education Pedagogic Research
  • Culture and Intercultural Communication
  • Medical Humanities Research with a focus on Stories and Storytelling
  • Narrative Theory and Narrative Practices

Esteem Indicators

  • 2023: Launched a Community of Practice in Digital Storytelling with JISC:
  • 2016: MA TESOL; MA TESOL with ICT; Diploma in TESOL, University of Brighton, MA TESOL:
  • 2016: MA English Language Teaching; MA Applied Linguistics, University of Sussex:
  • 2016: Senior Fellow of the HEA:

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

Conference Paper

Journal Article

Monograph

Presentation