Abstract

This paper argues that research-informed teaching often exists within curricula but remains implicit, inconsistent, and unevenly distributed. Drawing on a Fashion Business School curriculum mapping project, we demonstrate how making research visible, through systematic mapping of teaching practices, reveals gaps, hidden strengths, and misalignments between institutional ambitions and lived teaching realities. Using the Research-Teaching Taxonomy, the project surfaces how research engagement varies across courses, levels, and staff practices. The key message is that visibility is a critical first step: without clearly evidencing where and how research operates in the curriculum, meaningful, scalable, and equitable integration of research-informed teaching cannot be achieved.

Session and activities

The presentation introduces a research-informed teaching (RIT) curriculum mapping project undertaken within the Fashion Business School at London College of fashion, designed to strengthen the relationship between research and teaching. The project responds to institutional priorities to enhance teaching quality through research integration (UAL Research Strategy 2023-2028, Objective 4), while addressing a persistent challenge: research-informed teaching is often present, but fragmented, implicit, and dependent on individual staff practices rather than embedded systematically

The session outlines a two-stage methodology. First, a curriculum mapping exercise analysed 109 units across eleven undergraduate and postgraduate courses using Healey’s Research-Teaching Taxonomy (2005), identifying the presence of research-led, research-oriented, research-based, and research-tutored practices. Second, semi-structured interviews with teaching staff explored how research-informed teaching is understood and enacted in practice. Together, these approaches enabled both a structural and experiential understanding of how research operates within the curriculum.

The presentation focuses on three guiding questions:

• How is research-informed teaching currently integrated across the curriculum, and how is it understood and enacted by staff?
• What effective practices and models of research-informed teaching can be identified and made visible for wider adoption?
• Where are the gaps and inconsistencies, and how can these insights inform a more structured and scalable approach to embedding research in the curriculum?

Findings reveal significant inconsistencies in how research is embedded, including uneven application of the taxonomy, gaps in research skills development at undergraduate level, and a lack of shared understanding of research-informed teaching among staff. At the same time, examples of strong practice demonstrate the potential for more coherent and integrated approaches.

The paper argues that curriculum mapping functions not only as an audit tool but as a form of pedagogic inquiry, making visible the often-hidden dynamics of research in teaching. Importantly, this visibility provides the foundation for a series of evidence-based recommendations to be taken forward, informing the next phase of the project and supporting a more intentional, transparent, and institutionally aligned approach to research-informed curriculum design within fashion business education.

Presenting on behalf of the research team: Bethan Alexander, Julie Dennison, Maxi Heitmayer and Gabriela Daniels