Sam Elkington joined Teesside University in September 2018 where he leads on the University’s learning and teaching enhancement portfolio. Sam is a PFHEA and National Teaching Fellow (NTF, 2021) and has worked in Higher Education for over 15 years and has extensive experience working across teaching, research and academic leadership and policy domains. Most recently Sam worked for Advance HE (formerly the Higher Education Academy) where he was national lead for Assessment and Feedback and Flexible Learning in Higher Education.

Sam maintains a diverse range of research interests with a track record in developing high impact pedagogic research work in the areas of assessment and feedback, student engagement, learning spaces, and creativity in higher education. Sam’s latest book (Irons and Elkington, 2021) showcases the latest thinking in Enhancing Student Learning through Formative Assessment and Feedback. Sam has also published widely around aspects of leisure, health and wellbeing covering such topics as optimal leisure lifestyles and leisure space and place, and co-authored, with Robert Stebbins, The Serious Leisure Perspective: An Introduction (Elkington and Stebbins, 2014). In more recent work Sam has combined these research areas to develop and co-host, with University of West of England, the Leisure, Health and Wellbeing podcast series and is co-editing a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure exploring the complex relationship between ‘Leisure and the University’ (Elkington and Carnicelli, forthcoming).