What if scholarship was never meant to be an output?

This question, raised by Kelly Matthews on LinkedIn following her keynote at the HERDSA Queensland Professional Development Day, offered a timely provocation for higher education, particularly as Artificial Intelligence (AI) reshapes how knowledge is created and shared.

A subsequent exchange between Manisha and Kelly led Manisha to crystalise the idea of scholarship as relational movement, where ideas take root through participation, conversation, and shared spaces. Janis then joined the conversation, and together we recognised that this concept might name a form of work many of us are already doing but rarely make explicit.

From outputs to movement

Many of us working closely with teaching and learning recognise a tension that is rarely named. Publishing research does not, on its own, change teaching practice. Yet many of our reward and recognition systems continue to operate as if it does.

In working through this tension, Kelly has come to articulate a concept she had been circling- ‘Scholarly Translation’. At the keynote, she described it as:

“… the continuous, living movement of carrying knowledge across the overlapping boundaries of people, practice, policy, and purpose as a relational change process shaping more meaningful higher education learning experiences through everyday teaching practices.”

This shifts attention from knowledge as something produced to knowledge as something that moves through people, relationships, and contexts.

Where change actually happens

If we are honest, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) outputs do not, on their own, change teaching practice. Across the sector, expectations are shifting toward translation, engagement, and impact.

In practice, change happens through people, through colleagues working together to rethink teaching,  through influence across teams, programs, and disciplines,  through ideas being interpreted, adapted, and enacted in context.

This is the work of scholarly translation. It is relational, ongoing, and often invisible, making it difficult to capture, recognise, or reward within traditional systems.

What this looks like in practice

Manisha’s context

At Torrens University of Australia, through faculty-led community of practices such as the Scholarly Hub for Innovation and Future Teaching (SHIFT), scholarly translation becomes visible through sustained collaboration. Academics come together to reflect on practice, share ideas, and support one another in rethinking teaching and assessment. This has led to outcomes such as SoTL projects, conference presentations, and cross-disciplinary initiatives. More importantly, it has influenced how teaching is enacted across subjects and programs. The value lies not only in outputs, but in how ideas are interpreted and applied in context, shaping both practice and student learning.

Janis’s context

As one of the original education-focused academics at UNSW, my scholarly work has been shaped by the need to establish legitimacy within a research-intensive context where outputs dominate. This has involved modelling evidence-informed and critically reflective practice to demonstrate that education-focused work is intellectually grounded. Through teaching, mentoring, and collegial conversations, I have seen scholarship operate beyond outputs - supporting colleagues to recognise themselves as scholars and reshaping how teaching is understood. Here, scholarship is not simply produced, but enacted through changes in practice, identity, and learning.

Kelly’s context

At the University of Queensland, teaching impact is understood as extending beyond individual classrooms and beyond research outputs alone. Impact can be demonstrated through contributions to knowledge (tradition research outputs), or through influence on policy, or through influencing the practices of others. This “or” matters. It opens multiple pathways for recognising scholarly impact. Workload models now include a teaching impact allocation, and promotion guidance reflects this broader understanding for Teaching-Focused Academics (UQ Procedure). We are increasingly seeing academics promoted to Associate Professor and Professor through their impact on policy and on colleagues’ practices (not citation counts)—recognising scholarly translation as legitimate and valued work.

Why this matters now

The emergence of GenAI makes this reframing more urgent.

Many of the challenges we face, such as academic integrity, assessment design, and meaningful learning, cannot be addressed through policies or outputs alone. They require shared understanding and collective sense-making.

If knowledge can now be generated at scale, what does that mean for scholarship? Is it defined by outputs alone, or is there something more fundamental at play?

Reclaiming scholarship

If we continue to equate scholarship with outputs, we risk rewarding work that does not shift practice while overlooking the work that does.

Scholarship, in its fuller sense, includes changes in teaching, improvements in student learning, and more responsive learning environments. These forms of impact are not always visible in metrics, yet they are central to higher education.

Rather than seeing outputs as endpoints, scholarly translation invites us to see them as part of an ongoing process through which knowledge is carried into practice.

Connecting to wider conversations  

This provocation builds on the many scholarly conversations in the literature that have already begun to expand how we think about scholarship.  

TEQSA’s guidance on scholarship opens the door to more expansive interpretations of scholarly work in higher education. Boyer’s later and lesser read work on the scholarship of engagement foregrounds the importance of connection between knowledge and practice. Work on academic practice  and super complexity similarly points to the relational, contextual nature of higher education work.  

Scholarly translation does not replace these perspectives. It offers a way to bring them together and to more explicitly name the work of moving knowledge into practice that involves teachers teaching differently with learning benefits flowing to students through education as a public good.

And perhaps, in an AI-mediated world, this relational and practice-oriented understanding of scholarship may be essential to sustaining meaningful learning, teaching, and student success.

A conversation worth continuing  

If we continue to equate scholarship with outputs alone, we risk rewarding work that does not shift practice while overlooking the relational work that does.

We offer this as a provocation to the HERDSA community.

• What would it mean to recognise scholarly translation as core scholarly work?  
• How might our definitions of scholarship expand?    
• How might our reward systems shift?    
• What might we begin to see that is currently invisible?  

 Is this a conversation worth pursuing?

References & Resources

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