Challenging the Teaching Excellence Framework

Diversity Deficits in Higher Education Evaluations

Amanda French, Kate Carruthers Thomas, Amanda French, Kate Carruthers Thomas

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781787695368
• eBook ISBN: 9781787695351
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Amministrazione nella didattica

The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)'s aims, implementation and effect on the English higher education sector remains a controversial and often contested subject. This text offers a stimulating and wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussion of the implications of the TEF on the UK's fast-moving policy environment, and increasingly neoliberal higher education sector.  

Questioning the basic premise of the TEF, the authors tease out how students and staff are affected in different and often unfair ways by its implementation. Whilst acknowledging that the TEF has focused management attention on ways in which a diverse student population is, or is not, supported in their learning, this book highlights how it remains problematically silent on other kinds of diversity in the system such as specialised courses, diverse teaching styles, and varying institution sizes. 

Offering readers ways of rethinking and resisting 'teaching excellence', this book provides a timely examination of how, in various ways, the TEF, treated as an exclusionary quality assurance system, is likely to reinforce extant structural inequalities and competitive hierarchies in the sector.

1

Elusive and Elastic, and ‘Incorrigibly Plural’: Definitions and Conceptualisations of Teaching Excellence

John Sanders, Joanne Moore and Anna Mountford-Zimdars

Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to the problematic notion of teaching excellence in higher education, which is a focus of this collection. It draws on an extensive review of relevant literature to explore how teaching excellence is defined and conceptualised and what factors underpin different conceptions. It notes that definitions are disparate, often context-specific and are influenced by a range of different ‘players’. It then examines how different conceptualisations play out at the macro, meso and micro levels and highlights the tensions between performative and transformative notions of teaching excellence. It notes the move from ‘surface’ to ‘deep’ excellence and efforts to articulate a more holistic conception of teaching excellence that emphasises the relational, emotional and moral dimensions of teaching. It suggests that, rather than seeking singular definitions and conceptions, it may be more useful to talk of ‘teaching excellences’, to reflect a stratified and plural sector, a diverse student body and different disciplinary families. Equally, it argues for further investigation of the intersections of teaching excellence with other key drivers of institutional change, such as student engagement and well-being, inclusion and diversity, widening participation and retention and success.

Keywords: Teaching excellence; higher education; teaching quality; learning and teaching; teaching excellence framework; institutional change

Introduction

Twenty years on from the Dearing Report's prescription for ‘national excellence in teaching and the management of learning’ in higher education, to be achieved within two decades (NCIHE, 1997), the fledgling Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) finally emerged in the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act as a controversial new feature of the HE landscape. Floated in a Green Paper (BIS, 2015) and fleshed out in the subsequent White Paper and technical consultation documents (BIS, 2016a; 2016b), the TEF aimed to ‘drive up the standard of teaching in all universities’ (2016a, p. 13) and to inform student choice, as well as potentially allowing up to 80% of providers to increase their tuition fees (QAA, 2015). This link between meeting teaching excellence criteria and the ability to charge higher tuition fees, alongside the reputational implications of the quasi-Olympian categorisation of institutions, has ensured that the excellence in teaching agenda has moved to a pivotal position in the priorities of universities.

The Higher Education Green Paper Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice starts from the assumption that ‘teaching is the poor cousin to research’ (BIS, 2015, p. 8). In part, the TEF process reflects a desire to address the perceived imbalance between the research and teaching functions of universities (Blackmore, Blackwell, & Edmondson, 2016; Cashmore, Cane, & Cane, 2013; Locke, 2014) and to challenge the ‘dominant rhetoric of excellence in research’ (Gunn & Fisk, 2013, p. 10). As Skelton (2009) notes, citing Barnett (2003), ‘teaching and research have become “rival ideologies” in the University, often competing for resources and personnel’ (p. 110). The rebalancing of higher education's knowledge economy aims to ‘build a culture where teaching has equal status with research’ (Johnson, 2015), thereby returning to some extent to the historic, pre-Humboldtian teaching-centred origins of universities. This renewed focus on the status and importance of teaching, for all the contingent ideological differences and operational difficulties explored below, has been welcomed by commentators and HE lecturers alike (Bartram, Hathaway, & Rao, 2019; Hubble, Foster, & Bolton, 2016; McGhee, 2016; Wood & Su, 2017).

However, for O'Leary and Wood (2018), the inauguration of the TEF represents a worrying ‘turning point for the sector’ (p. 4), whilst Brabon (2016) has characterised it as a Rubicon-crossing moment. As French (2017) points out, though, ‘political interest in the quality of teaching standards’ has a long history in compulsory education and has been signalled consistently in government publications on higher education since the time of the Dearing Report (p. 5). The long march to this pivotal point began some time ago. Indeed, as Little, Locke, Parker, and Richardson (2007) note: ‘Since the late 1990s, more explicit attention has been given to higher education teaching and learning through the development of institutional teaching and learning strategies, linked to broader underlying mission statements’ (p. 1). There have also been several policy-driven initiatives across some or all the four UK nations, including Teaching Quality Assessments and Subject Reviews (until 2001), the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS: 2000 onwards), Centres of Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs: 2005–2010) and the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF: 2003 onwards). All have placed an increasing emphasis on the importance of university teaching and its professionalisation. The role of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), created in 2003, has been central to a number of these initiatives and to the articulation of notions of teaching excellence.

The emphasis on teaching excellence mirrors a sharper policy focus on student engagement and ‘the student experience’, both vigorously contested concepts (see, Taylor & Robinson, 2012 and Sabri, 2011). It also reflects the increasing importance attached to student-orientated learning and teaching (Trigwell, 2010; 2012) and to the outcomes of a university education. In an increasingly differentiated and marketised sector (John & Fanghanel, 2015) operating during a period of economic turbulence, notions of value for money, rhetoric about student choice (Brown & Carasso, 2013) and debates about the purposes of universities and the relative importance of the different roles of universities (see Barnett, 2010) have increasingly come to the fore. In addition, some commentators argue that technology, eLearning and the mass scale of higher education have fundamentally changed teaching and the nature of interactions with students (De Courcy, 2015).

The strong reemergence of a discourse around excellence in teaching has been a worldwide phenomenon rather than just a UK-specific development (see, Brockerhoff, Strensaker & Huisman, 2014; Brusoni et al., 2014; De Courcy, 2015; Henard & Roseveare, 2012; Gunn & Fisk, 2013; Skelton, 2007); though, as Courtney (2016) predicted, the development of the TEF has placed England (and Northern Ireland) very much in the vanguard. Plenty of institutions, countries and transnational organisations have been talking about excellence in teaching, but few have put in place coherent national frameworks (Klemeric & Ashwin, 2015). As Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute commented in 2016, there was ‘no off-the-shelf solution available from another country’ (HEPI, 2016).

Moreover, as Stephanie Marshall notes in her foreword to Gunn and Fisk's (2013) review, ‘in the UK, and across the globe, there is little narrative around what is meant by “teaching excellence” and no country has defined an agreed concept of excellence in teaching’ (p. 5). Whilst descriptors for research excellence are usually uniform, descriptors of teaching excellence vary greatly across and within institutions (Wespel, Orr, & Jaegar, 2013). Gunn and Fisk (2013) argue that there is ‘a lack of sophistication in conceptualisation of university teaching excellence both generally but more particularly in terms of changing expectations and roles’ (p. 7).

This chapter provides a broad overview of the research literature pertaining to teaching excellence and explores key definitions and conceptions of teaching excellence. It encompasses both published academic outputs (peer-reviewed articles and evaluative studies, earlier literature reviews and books) and key policy and governmental reports and a range of ‘grey’ literature (including unpublished institutional research, blogs, thought pieces and reviews) which pertain to teaching excellence. Much of this latter material has been the result of the publication of the Green and White Papers and, prior to that, of the successful divining of the direction of policy travel. The main focus is on material published in the last decade. However, the review cites earlier studies whose focus or findings remain current and relevant. Similarly, whilst the prime geographical concentration is on UK higher education, international evidence is drawn on where particular insights or comparisons are judged to link directly to the issues explored in this overview.

Defining and Conceptualising Teaching Excellence

Ground Clearing

A key challenge in conceptualising teaching excellence is that this is ‘a contested concept’ (Macfarlane, 2007, p. 48), and a compound one at that. It is ‘socially constructed’ (Rostan & Vaira, 2011) and a ‘notion that is riven with uncertainties that reflect different political, social and intellectual positions’ (Knight, 2006, p. 637). As Bartram et al. (2019) note, the UK government's case for introducing the TEF has been framed explicitly in terms of notions of value for money, consumer choice and free market ideology, working on the basis that

Competition between providers in any market incentivises them to raise their game, offering greater choice of more innovative and better quality products and services at lower cost. Higher Education is no exception.

(BIS, 2016a, p. 8)

Critics of this approach, by contrast, ‘reject the underlying authoritarian assumptions about competition and performativity inherent in neoliberal ideology’ in favour of ‘a more expansive view…which sees academic practices of teaching, scholarly activity and research as inter-connected’ (Wood & Su, 2017, p. 452). In this view, not only is ‘teaching excellence’ contested but so is the focus on teaching rather than learning, as is the use of the term ‘excellence’ on its own.

Before exploring different dimensions of the notion of ‘teaching excellence’, it is worth noting the (perhaps obvious) point that ‘teaching excellence’ is not necessarily the same thing as ‘teacher excellence’ or ‘excellent teaching’, though there are many potential areas of overlap. Little et al. (2007), for example, note that ‘excellent teaching’ is often used in the context of microinteractions between teachers and students and in some research and policy documents is taken to be synonymous with ‘effective teaching’ (p. 2). Gunn and Fisk (2013) similarly see ‘teacher excellence’ as being related to individual philosophies and practices, whilst ‘teaching excellence’ pertains to overall system-wide conceptions of excellence (p. 19). For them ‘teaching excellence embraces but is not confined to teacher excellence’ (p. 7).

Equally, though it is widely recognised that the teacher delivering a course or module is a key factor in determining student outcomes (Gibbs, 2010), ‘teaching excellence’ and ‘excellent student learning’ are not the same thing, merely seen from a different angle. As Little et al. (2007) note, ‘teaching and student learning are distinct, although related, phenomena’ (p. 4) and ‘excellence in student learning may or may not require excellent teaching’ (p. 2). Gunn and Fisk's (2013) follow-up survey reiterates ‘the difficulties of evaluating how excellence in teaching actually affects student learning’. Citing the different positions of Trigwell (2010) and Haggis (2004), they comment that ‘quantitative measuremen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: Teaching Excellence as ‘Institutional Polishing’?
• 1 Elusive and Elastic, and ‘Incorrigibly Plural’: Definitions and Conceptualisations of Teaching Excellence
• 2 Operationalising Teaching Excellence in Higher Education: From ‘Sheep-dipping’ to ‘Virtuous Practice’
• 3 ‘Wishing Won't Make It So’: Deliverology, TEF and the Wicked Problem of Inclusive Teaching Excellence
• 4 Rapport and Relationships: The Student Perspective on Teaching Excellence
• 5 ‘It's not what Gets Taught, or How Well It may Be Taught, but who Is Doing the Teaching’: Can Student Evaluations Ever Deliver a Fair Assessment on Teaching Excellence in Higher Education?
• 6 Queering the TEF
• 7 Diversity Deficits: Resisting the TEF
• Postscript
• About the Contributors
• Index