Sue Tarrant

Sue is a part-time Postgraduate Research Student studying a PhD in Higher Education in the Curriculum and Educational Development Team (CEDT). A Senior Lecturer in Law, Innovation and Enterprise at Kent Business School, Sue is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). Her research explores the emotional journey learners take as they seek to acquire particularly troublesome knowledge, and what role tutor, self and peer resolution of potentially obstructive emotions plays in acquiring deeper understanding.

Prior to academia Sue worked in the newspaper and ICT industries as a marketing and thought-leadership copywriter before setting up her own successful business that she ran for twenty years. Since joining KBS in 2010 Sue has served as Director of Studies for Business & Management; Interim Lead of the Medway School; Chair of the KBS Academic Disciplinary Committee, and Medway’s Senior Tutor. In 2019 Sue was awarded the University of Kent’s Social Sciences Faculty Teaching Prize in recognition of her teaching and use of gamification within legal education.

Sue’s PhD research draws on Meyer and Land’s (2005) conceptualisation of threshold concepts to examine the role of cognitively-productive emotions in engendering deeper learning. A key element of the study is a legal mooting game Sue developed that effectively places students in a liminal space through which they grapple with understanding challenging legal concepts and acquiring associated legal studies’ skills. The research is intended to provide a greater understanding as to what emotions students experience while they journey through such a liminal space, and how potentially obstructive emotions can be successfully resolved before they become counter-productive. As such, Sue’s research aims to contribute to the understanding of the effects of specifically epistemic emotions on learning in higher education (Kang et al 2009; D’Mello et al 2012; Pekrun et al 2017; Vogl et al 2019). It further aims to inform how practitioners can create learning events that are academically productive and enjoyable alternatives to more traditional learning activities, both within legal studies and in any discipline where students face troublesome thresholds in problem solving.