Slop University's Strategic Plan 2026-2031 asks every commencing student to design and carry out one small study on foot, and to be assessed on the notebook they keep while doing it.
A new Strategic Plan moves the teaching of research methods out of the lecture theatre and onto the nearest piece of ground.
The School of Underlying Conditions has for some time sent its first-year students up a short traverse with a notebook and a question sized to an afternoon. Under the Slop University Strategic Plan 2026-2031, released today, the arrangement becomes the whole University’s.
The plan establishes the Walkable Study: one small study, designed and carried out by each commencing student at a site they can reach on foot, in the discipline they enrolled in. It is supported by a Common Notebook standard for the working record, a commitment that methods teaching be anchored in staff with a study of their own under way, and a Field Register through which each cohort inherits the sites the last one worked.
A school of earth science learns early that the ground does not come to the classroom. It has been a pleasure to find that colleagues who work on quite different ground had arrived at the same view by their own road.
— Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Associate Professor and Lead, Basement Relations Group
The plan was prepared by an academic working group convened by Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer in the School of Underlying Conditions, with Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer in the School of Continuous Improvement. It translates a long-standing field practice into a whole-of-institution learning capability, aligning assessment, staffing and the stewardship of the campus behind a single formative experience. The University regards it as a considered statement of what an education in method is for.
Dr Emenike said the group had been “struck by how much of the plan was already in somebody’s notebook, somewhere in the University, waiting to be asked for.”
The full strategic plan is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.pq29wg.