Teaching, Learning and Research in Higher Education

A Critical Approach

Mark Tennant, Cathi McMullen, Dan Kaczynski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415962636
• eBook ISBN: 9781135895525
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teaching, Learning and Research in Higher Education offers a combination of critical perspectives and practical advice that is ideally suited for individuals interested in enhancing their practice through analysis and critique. The aim is to promote a critical understanding of one's own practices: to foster personal and professional formation through a reflexive engagement with one's environment and circumstances. At a practical level this means to continuously think about how to adjust practice rather than following a formulaic approach derived from any particular educational theory.

Teaching, Learning and Research in Higher Education argues that academics can find space for their own agency in the midst of institutional policies and practices that serve to frame, as well as delimit and constrain, what counts as good academic work in teaching and research. This text bridges a gap between those books that provide a high-level analysis of contemporary higher education, the more practical texts on how to be a good teacher in higher education, and those texts which aim to improve teaching through better understanding of the learning process.

Topical chapters include:

Teacher-learner relationship, Learning groups, Practice-oriented learning, Teaching for diversity, e-learning, Assessment, Approaches to Staff Development, Quality assurance, Supervision and Research education, Doing research, and Teaching & Research.

A must-have resource for higher education professions, academic developers, professionals, and anyone looking to improve their teaching and learning practices, Teaching, Learning and Research in Higher Education is also appropriate for continuing and professional development courses in the UK and teaching and learning courses in the US.

Mark Tennant is Dean of the University Graduate School, University of Technology, Sydney.

Cathi McMullen is Lecturer in the School of Marketing and Management at Charles Sturt University.

Dan Kaczynski is Professor in the Educational Leadership department at Central Michigan University.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

The overarching argument of this book is that academics can find space for their own agency in the midst of system-wide and institutional policies and practices that serve to frame, as well as delimit and constrain, what counts as good academic work in teaching and research. We argue that academics can develop a sense of agency through a reflexive engagement with the circumstances in which they find themselves. How do the various systemic, institutional and personal circumstances present themselves? What do they say about who you should ‘be’ as an academic? Is there a single uniform voice on how to be? Arguably, such questions are necessary starting points for developing a critical understanding of your own developing practices and how you position yourself as a worker in contemporary academic life. And so we commence with an exploration of some of the forces and trends at play in higher education in the past few decades.

It is possible to characterise these trends in a variety of ways, but there are some key features that lie at their heart: the growth of participation in higher education worldwide, the increasing diversity of the student population, the transforming effect of information and communication technologies, the demand from stakeholders that education be relevant to working life, the growing global competition in the production and distribution of knowledge and the renewed concern with accountability, standards and quality assurance.

As a result the university sector has been transformed with contemporary academic workplaces characterised by ongoing change, complexity and diversity. Universities are now very different places from the universities where current academics studied as students and perhaps began their teaching and research careers. This has had a significant impact on the practices and identities of university teachers and their students.

Our aim in this chapter is to present a broad overview of some of the changes in the higher education sector and the impact these changes have had and will continue to have on university work. While these changes have brought benefits, such as greater attention to the quality of teaching, greater access to university education and the benefits of electronic communication (Anderson, Johnson & Saha, 2002), they have presented many challenges to those working in the sector.

Growth and Diversity

The second half of the 20th century was characterised by a move towards mass higher education. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates there are now around 132 million students enrolled in tertiary education globally, up from 68 million in 1991 (‘tertiary education’ here includes community and technical colleges). This constitutes an average growth of over 5% per year over the period of 1991 to 2004 (Nuthall, 2008).

There has been growth in the participation of women, different ethnic groups and older adults, together with growth in international student enrolments. It is likely that the student population in higher education will continue to become more diverse given that the participation of non-traditional groups remains lower than for other groups, and that international student numbers are predicted to grow.

This combination of rising student numbers, rising student–staff ratios and a more diverse student body has presented new challenges for university teachers. New kinds of students are often less prepared for traditional styles of university study – they may ask different questions, have different perspectives on issues, react differently to group exercises and generally bring different experiences to the classroom. This may not, or should not, be a problem, but it is a challenge because teachers can no longer rely on the assumptions they may have held for more homogenous groups. Some of these challenges are explored in Chapter 6.

The Marketisation of Higher Education and Global Competition

Universities are more than ever positioned as important sites for the production and dissemination of knowledge and innovation in the service of national economic prosperity. As such they are becoming more corporate in their outlook, which stands in contrast to the values of collegial decision-making. Naidoo (2005) neatly captures this trend:

Governments world-wide have begun to implement funding and governance frameworks based on market principles … there has been a global trend away from forms of funding and regulation which were based on Keynesian welfare principles and the ‘social compact’ that evolved between higher education, the state and society over the last century … In addition, management principles derived from the private sector which monitor, measure, compare and judge professional activities have been applied in the hope that the functioning of higher education will be enhanced. Such mechanisms are also expected to aid consumer choice. (pp. 27–28)

She argues that rather than providing student empowerment, student choice, equity, efficiency and higher quality, the trend towards market forces results instead in the commodification of higher education, which ultimately deters innovation and promotes passive and instrumental attitudes among students and researchers. Thus students are reconfigured as ‘consumers’ of educational ‘product’ and research is valued according to its capacity to generate income. Whether one agrees with her argument in its entirety or not, it is fair to say that most academics have experienced this shift in their working lives.

This trend towards the market has a global dimension as nation states, and the universities within them, are increasingly operating and being evaluated in a global marketplace. Testimony to this is the growing significance and impact of world league tables. There have already been two significant studies of the impact of the world leagues tables, one conducted by the OECD and the other by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The OECD paper (2007) points out that there are approximately 17,000 higher education institutions around the globe but that there seems to be almost an obsession with the status and trajectory of the top 100. Hazelkorn (2007) remarks:

Over recent decades, rankings or ‘league tables’ have become a feature of many countries. They are usually published by government and accreditation agencies, higher education, research and commercial organisations or the popular media.

As higher education has become globalised and internationalised, worldwide rankings have appeared, such as the Shanghai Jiao Tong list and that produced by the THES. The former has effectively become the brand leader, regularly referenced by university leaders and government ministers.

The OECD survey of senior managers in 202 higher education institutions across 41 countries revealed that:

• 58% of respondents were not happy with their current ranking
• 70% want to be in the top 10% nationally
• 71% want to be in the top 25% internationally
• 57% believe league tables and rankings are influencing the willingness of other institutions to form partnerships with them
• 56% have a formal internal mechanism for reviewing their rank order.

What impact can world rankings have on academics working in a discipline or field of study within their university? The answer to this can be found in the way in which national governments and individual higher education institutions have responded to the rankings. Hazelkorn found that nearly all the universities who participated in the survey have taken internal steps to improve their ranking.

The majority have a formal process to review the results, usually by the president/rector, and are taking strategic, organisational, managerial and/or academic actions. These include embedding rankings in strategic decision-making processes and ‘target agreements’ with faculties, establishing a ‘new section to monitor rankings’, ‘developing better management tools’, and providing ‘more scholarships and staff appointments’.

Hazelkorn also points out that the excellence initiatives in Germany, Russia, China and France are directly related to the rankings process. The European Union is now planning to develop its own international university ranking system (Marshall, 2008). The point is that academics cannot isolate themselves from how the world defines and constrains what it means to be an excellent university and by implication, what it means to be an excellent academic. At the very least they need to engage in this debate as it is increasingly being shaped by the metrics used in world and national rankings.

Uniformity of Systems and Processes

The drive to establish more uniform systems and processes in higher education is partly a risk management response to growth and diversity in the sector, and partly a response to the increasing demands for the mobility of qualifications, students and staff. This is well illustrated by the European initiative known as the Bologna process, which aims to establish, by 2010, a European Higher Education Area among the 46 signatory nations. The idea is to have a uniform degree structure comprising undergraduate level study (3 years), masters level study (2 years) and doctoral study (3 years). This is combined with a common credit point system (60 credits for one full-time year of study) and a Diploma Supplement which is a uniform and consistent method of describing the nature, level, context, content and status of studies. Finally there are to be quality assurance systems at institutional, national and European levels. This is all in the interests of the mutual recognition of qualifications and the adoption of common standards in order both to promote the mobility, across borders, of students and staff working in the higher education sector, and to provide employers and the public generally with a common understanding of what a degree in a particular area means. Philip Fine, writing in University World News (2008), points to the universal interest in the Bologna process:

The Bologna process, the initiative that tries to smooth the jagged edges off Europe’s differing degree and credit structure, has caught the world’s attention in a big way. From the Caribbean to Canada, from China to Australia, the plan designed to solve a European problem and that then brought in bordering countries now has nations far beyond those borders looking at some academic retooling.

But the system described above does not accord very well with the preference in North America for four-year undergraduate degrees or with some pathways in Australia which follow the four-year undergraduate degree with a one-year Masters. It also does not accord very well with the honours year added onto many Australian three-year degrees. There is evidence that some Asian countries are looking to align with the Bologna model but Singapore, China and Hong Kong are increasingly favouring the North American structure. And so there is evidence of resistance to the Bologna model in the US and Asia and even within Europe. However, the US itself is taking notice of the Bologna model, with a recent report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington (Adelman, 2008) stating that ‘it has sufficient momentum to become the dominant global higher education model within the next two decades’ (p. 2) – the Report itself recommends a number of initiatives in response to the European reforms, including the development of a qualifications framework for state higher education institutions and the development of a US version of the Diploma Supplement. The prevailing question for universities outside Europe and North America is whether to align with one or the other of these structures, or to not align at all. The problem with the latter is that a lack of alignment will be an impediment to the mobility of students in study abroad schemes. It will also cause uncertainty about the acceptability of overseas qualifications for the purposes of employment or further higher degree study, and a potential erosion of international student demand. Once again such initiatives eventually embroil individual academics as they engage in internal institutional debates about credit points, the length of degrees and the value of generic statements of attainment such as the Diploma Supplement.

Internationalisation

Internationalisation has emerged as a strategic goal for many universities. Internationalisation normally refers to two things; first, the opening up of universities to international students; and, second, the need for universities to develop a genuinely international curriculum focus in order to prepare students to work in the global labour market. A recent OECD report (2007) shows that the number of students studying outside their own country is more than 2.7 million globally, which is a fourfold increase over the last three decades (OECD by UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics). The US has long been the top destination for overseas students but its market share is falling, while it has been growing in Australia, France, Japan and New Zealand. The US has nearly twice the number of international students that Britain has, its nearest rival (at 12% share), followed by Germany (10%), France (9%), Australia (6%) and then Japan (5%). Australia has the highest percentage of international students as a percentage of its overall enrolment (17%) while the OECD average is only 6.7%.

There are many advantages to having a large international cohort of students – they bring fees to the institution, they help to promote an international outlook among the domestic students, they may form connections at university which are later transformed into business or other collaborations. Most of the concerns about international students have to do with their literacy levels in the host country (predominantly English), their employability, their need for additional support, the potential lowering of admission and assessment standards and the ‘replacement’ of domestic student places with international student places. While a large cohort of international students puts pressure on universities and individual academics, it also highlights the need for academics to adapt to people from different backgrounds who have different values and ways of being in the world – which also applies where there are a large cohort of ‘non-traditional’ domestic students.

Finally, the internationalisation of the curriculum is a goal adopted by many universities but its realisation in practice is subtle and difficult. It is often addressed by a period of ‘study abroad’ without any connection back to the domestic curriculum upon return. Many academics feel that knowledge is global and therefore nothing really has to be done in this area. However, while this may be true in areas such as pure mathematics and physics, in most areas of study the questions that are asked, the knowledge being generated and the teaching approaches adopted are often linked to specific social and historical contexts. Moving beyond these contexts is a significant challenge for academics working in a globally focused university.

Information and Communication Technologies

Information and communication technologies are also transforming academic workplaces and the experiences of students, allowing new possibilities for online research collaborations, global online networking and, perhaps most significantly, the online delivery of content. The New Media Consortium in its annual Horizon Report (2008) points to the key contemporary technologies likely to shape the future of learning and teaching. Two examples are ‘grassroots video’ and ‘collaboration webs’. Grassroots video refers to the widespread production and dissemination of video content through hosting services like YouTube and iTunes. The ease of video production and dissemination through inexpensive everyday devices allows more possibilities for teachers to use video for teaching, assignments, data collection and assessment. The second example is ‘collaboration webs’, which refers to the ever-increasing availability of web-based tools, infrastructure and applications that allow for collaborative work among those who are geographically separated:

The essential attribute of the technologies in this set is that they make it easy for people to share interests and ideas, work on joint projects, and easily monitor collective progress. All of these are needs common to student work, research, collaborative teaching, writing and authoring, development of grant proposals, and more. Using them, groups can collaborate on projects online, anywhere there is Internet access; interim results of research can be shared among a team, supporting illustrations and tables created, and all changes and iterations tracked, documented, and archived. In class situations, faculty can evaluate student work as it progresses, leaving detailed comments right in the documents if desired in almost real time. Students can work with other students in distant locations, or with faculty as they engage in fieldwork. (p. 14)

While the possibilities are exciting, they also bring challenges to our traditional understandings of teaching and research: the ‘classroom’ necessarily becomes more public and interactive, with new patterns of participation among students, new ways of engaging with the material and new sets of relationships between teachers and students. An example of the latter is the increased one-to-one contact between students and teachers through email or online sites. The downside of this increased communication is the way in which it impacts academic workloads. In their study titled, Changes in academic work, Anderson, Johnson and Saha (2002) found a near unanimous view that dealing responsibly with students’ emails takes a large amount of time, more time than student contact in the pre-electronic era. The impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on teaching and learning in higher education is the focus of Chapter 9.

New Conceptions of Knowledge

Formal educational institutions are under scrutiny to provide education that is more ‘relevant’, that is, pertinent to the needs of employers, which often means learning which is less abstract and discipline-bound and closer to the problems and issues found in work contexts. There is an ever-increasing call for teaching and research to address the urgent problems presented in working and social life. Because these problems typically cut across disciplinary boundaries, interdisciplinary approaches are needed. This requires quite a perspective shift in thinking about the activities of teaching and research given that they are historically located within disciplinary paradigms. A disciplinary approach is cumulative in the sense that it adds to the stock of knowledge, and progressive in that it moves inexorably towards better solutions. By contrast, an interdisciplinary approach crosses disciplinary and theoretical domains and learning fields. It argues that a single disciplinary focus does not engage in the complexities of contemporary work and lives. It aims to integrate perspectives from multiple disciplines so that conventional boundaries are transcended and new ways of thinking become possible (Solomon, 2008). This issue is addressed partly in the chapter on workplace learning (Chapter 8) and partly in the chapter on teaching and research (Chapter 11).

Accountability and Quality Assurance

Higher education has been increasingly viewed as an economic resource that should be organised to maximise its contribution to economic development. This has been accompanied by increasing demands for accountability from stakeholders – universities are seen as having a responsibility to society, which expects something in return for the public investment provided for them.

The US, for example, is pursuing a renewed agenda focusing on accountability and quality assurance. Testimony to this is the recent report (2006) commissioned by the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Perspectives on Quality Teaching
• 3 Reconceptualising the Development of University Teaching Expertise
• 4 Framing Teacher–Learner Relationships
• 5 Learning Groups
• 6 Teaching for Diversity
• 7 Assessment
• 8 Promoting Workplace-Oriented Learning
• 9 Learning in the Digital Age
• 10 Postgraduate Research Education
• 11 Teaching and Research
• References