Role
Ellen is a Senior Educational Developer in the Centre for Academic Development and Quality (CADQ). Specialising in active collaborative learning, Ellen is responsible for developing and promoting the adoption of SCALE-UP (Student Centred Active Learning Environments with Upside Pedagogies) and Team Based Learning (TBL) with a view to enhancing student engagement and decreasing progression and attainment gaps. Ellen is currently the project lead for the TBL pilot, alongside leading on a wider active collaborative learning mapping project at NTU. Passionate about widening participation and promoting the success of all students, Ellen’s professional interests are in active learning, academic success coaching, decoloniality, intersectionality, and LGBT+ staff/student inclusion.
Career overview
Ellen joined NTU in 2023 as Senior Educational Developer within CADQ, following 4 years working in academic success coaching.
Ellen’s career in teaching and learning began in 2016 at the University of Sheffield where she worked as an English Literature seminar tutor for undergraduate students while completing her PhD. Utilising active collaborative techniques to encourage enquiry and debate, Ellen developed an interest in teaching approaches which sought to dismantle the binary between teacher/student, looking to techniques that sought out horizontal relationships and equal power dynamics in the classroom.
Following the completion of her doctorate in 2019, Ellen moved to the higher education department at Derby College, where she pursued her interests in non-hierarchal teaching and learning from the position of an academic coach. Working 1:1 with students alongside teaching study skills in-curriculum, Ellen nurtured her passion for teaching and learning, developing her knowledge of widening participation, and achieving fellowship of AdvanceHE.
In 2021, Ellen moved to Loughborough University, working in the Student Success Academy as an Academic Success Co-ordinator. Helping to set up and lead a 1:1 academic success coaching provision targeted at addressing the ethnicity and low-household income awarding gaps, Ellen also nurtured her passion for EDI as well as becoming Events Lead and an active member of the LGBT+ staff network.
Research areas
Ellen completed her doctorate at the University of Sheffield in 2019, following the successful submission of her thesis, entitled ‘The “Aching Pleasure” of John Keats’s Poetry 1818-1820’. Drawing upon Keats’s dual professions as a poet and an apothecary/surgeon’s dresser, Ellen’s research explored the dynamic relationships between pleasure and pain in Keats’s works, arguing that poetic language and form become sites of experimentation through which Keats tests how far pain and pleasure are entertwined.
In the context of teaching and learning, Ellen also has research interests in widening participation, vulnerability theory, coaching in higher education, and active collaborative learning. She has undertaken action research in barriers to accessing higher education in the context of further education and plans to pursue her interests in the relationship between decoloniality and active collaborative learning.
Publications
Publications
Nicholls, E. (2023). Pride and Allyship: The Legacy of LGBT+ History on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Loughborough University LGBT+ Staff Network Blog, <https://blog.lboro.ac.uk/lgbt/pride-and-allyship/> [Accessed 23/10/23].
Nicholls, E. (2022). Queerness and the Literary Canon, Loughborough University LGBT+ Staff Network Blog. Available at: <https://blog.lboro.ac.uk/lgbt/queerness-and-the-literary-canon/> [Accessed 23/10/23].
Nicholls, E. (2019). Keats’s Bees in the ‘Ode to Autumn’— Written on this Day in 1819, BARS Blog. Available at: <https://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=2580> [Accessed 23/10/23].
Nicholls, E. (2019). ‘The “Aching Pleasure” of John Keats’s Poetry 1818-1820’, Ph.D Thesis, University of Sheffield, Sheffield.
Nicholls, E. (2019). ‘Foreword‘ in Inspiration Poetry: John Keats. Flame Tree Publishing: London.
Nicholls, E. (2017). On this Day in 1817: Keats and Negative Capability, 21-27 December, BARS Blog. Available at: < https://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=1876> [Accessed 23/10/23].
Nicholls, E. (2016). Review of Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature by J. Davies, British Society for Literature and Science. Available at: < https://www.bsls.ac.uk/reviews/romantic-and-victorian/jeremy-davies-bodily-pain-in-romantic-literature/> [Accessed 23/10/23].
Conference Presentations
Nicholls, E. (2019). Keats’s Bees and the Odesof 1819. Public Lecture at Keats House, Hampstead.
Nicholls, E. (2018). ‘Insensibly Subdued / To Settled Quiet’: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Painful Pleasures of Numbness. Wordsworth Summer Conference, Rydale Hall, Cumbria.
Nicholls, E. (2018). Reading ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Keats’s ‘Medical Books’ in the ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ Letter. Keats’s Reading/Reading Keats Conference, London.
Nicholls, E. (2017). Tears and the Fluidity of the Keatsian Sonnet. ‘Tensions’: University of Sheffield Postgraduate Colloquium, University of Sheffield.
Nicholls, E. (2017). ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ and the ‘Gentle Luxury’ of Keats’s Tears. The Keats Foundation: John Keats, 1817: Moments, Meetings, and the Making of a Poet, Hampstead.
Nicholls, E. (2016). ‘[T]o Write, and Plunge into Abstract Images’: Keats’s Escape from the Pains of the Sickroom. The Keats Foundation: Keats in London, Keats out of Town, Hampstead.
Nicholls, E. (2016). ‘To Unperplex Bliss from its Neighbour Pain’: Terror and Negative Capability in Christabel and Lamia. Summer of 1816: Creativity and Turmoil,University of Sheffield.