Dominant Discourses in Higher Education

Critical Perspectives, Cartographies and Practice

Ian M. Kinchin, Karen Gravett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350229778
• eBook ISBN: 9781350180307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

This book examines the dominant discourses in higher education. From the moment teachers enter higher education, they are met with dominant discourses that are often adopted uncritically, including concepts such as teaching excellence, student voice, and student engagement. Teachers are also met with simplistic binaries such as teaching vs. research, quantitative vs. qualitative research, and constructivists vs. positivists. Kinchin and Gravett suggest that this may present a distorted view, contributing to the disconnect between the aims and observable practice of higher education. Rather than celebrating difference, dominant discourses tend to seek similarities in an attempt to simplify and manage the environment. In this book, the authors share their belief that teaching and learning should be a thoughtful endeavour. Thinking with a breadth of theories, the authors explore the overlaps between different perspectives in order to offer a richer and more inclusive interrogation of the dominant discourses that pervade higher education. Offering methodological approaches to explore these perspectives, the authors bring together academics working in different parts of the university and examine the concept of a 'rich cartography', considering how this can offer meaning within higher education research and practice.

Part 1 Considering the Landscape

1 Thinking beyond Neoliberal Discourses

The Authors

This book has emerged from dialogues between the authors over time. We are two academics with very different disciplinary backgrounds and different routes into educational research. One of us has a first degree in biological sciences and had a first career in secondary science teaching. The other has a first degree in English literature and had a first career as an academic librarian and then as a student learning developer. As such, our experiences as students were markedly different, and our experiences as teachers also evolved within very different contexts. However, these different origins have led us both into the domain of higher education teaching and research. In writing these chapters we have drawn upon diverse bodies of literature that reflect our unique professional histories and particular academic interests. We have tried not to compromise too often, or to settle on a mid-way path between our differences, as that would be to aim for the middle ground – the safe option. Safety is an option that satisfies no one. Rather, it results in a bland acceptance of what is and misses the opportunity to offer a radical imagining of what might be. Instead, we have learned from each other and respected our academic differences, and in so doing we have created spaces for new avenues of dialogue, and new questions, as predicted by Andreotti et al. (2016: 85):

It is precisely by making the limits and juxtapositions (borders) of discursive assemblages visible that social cartographies can open up the possibility of the emergence of new and different discursive assemblages.

We are interested, then, in exploring what might emerge when discourses are made visible. What might happen when the borders of discourses are exposed, akin to the ‘radical copresence’ needed to generate an ‘ecology of knowledges’ (as explored by Santos [2014]), or the ‘consilience’ described by Wilson (1998), where the ‘Great Branches of Learning’ join forces. It has been suggested that the added complications, uncertainties and apprehensions created by working at the borders in this way may offer a ‘fruitful disorientation’ (Lenz Taguchi and St. Pierre 2017: 644). This disorientation is one that we have actively welcomed and engaged with in dialogue – between ourselves and with our peers. This has sometimes generated our own ‘epistemological shudders’ where long-held assumptions are destabilized (Charteris 2014). The result is a text that explores university teaching from a new perspective that is personal to us, but which we hope will resonate with many.

The text offers openings that do not fit with the traditional textbook on teaching, and we readily accept that this may be in tension with the dominant view of current practice, which often ‘assumes that knowledge can, and indeed should, be presented efficiently: in concise, simplified, methodized forms’ (Doll 2006: 86). We feel that this divergence from the typical is a necessary step for higher education to evolve and for university teaching, in particular, to move away from being regarded as a routine operation that can be measured as a technical competence, towards a scholarly activity that has long been claimed in the literature, but often derided in practice. In recognizing the value of difference and the entanglements of our own academic voices with those in the literature, we concur with Smagorinsky, Augustine and Gallas (2006: 100), who concluded that

sharing authorship requires the sharing of much more than ownership. It also requires a shared perspective on the part of university-based teachers and researchers on how classroom-based teachers and researchers experience their work. Sharing authorship is rhizomatic rather than arborescent – it involves, as we conceive it, the reterritorialization of cultural practices as part of a new and mutual process of becoming.

For the authors, this ‘mutual process of becoming’ is now a way for us to perceive our roles as teachers and educational researchers. This aligns with the idea of ‘research-as-pedagogy’ (Kinchin, Kingsbury and Buhmann 2018), and ‘researcher-led academic development’ (Kinchin et al. 2018) in which the research-versus-teaching dualism is broken. This book is underpinned by our own non-linear professional transitions (sensu Gravett 2021b), and as articulated by Stewart (2015: 1180): our ‘contemplation of past pedagogical and curriculum activities has not been linear or sequential … Although the final document may appear linear, its writing and production were anything but’.

Dominant Discourses in Higher Education

In this book we share our belief that teaching and learning should be a thoughtful endeavour. We explore how discourses and narratives underpin the way we understand our environment and shape our thoughts and practices. In 1969, Foucault’s writings on discourse surfaced the role of the individual, or subject, as embedded within language, contending that the subject must be ‘analysed as a complex and variable function of discourse’ (1969: 138). Foucault’s work (1969; 1970) encourages us to see discourses as powerful, and to ask certain questions: how does discourse function and what does it do? How does it regulate? As St. Pierre (2000: 485) comments: ‘once a discourse becomes “normal” and “natural,” it is difficult to think and act outside it.’ Indebted to Foucault and St. Pierre, an understanding of how subjectivities are interwoven and shaped by discourses informs this text.

More recently, Charteris et al. (2016) explain how subjectivities are produced and often constrained within powerful higher education discourses. Charteris and colleagues (2016) explore how academic spaces and environments have become ‘saturated’ with particular dominant ‘knowledge economy’ discourses, and how academics’ relations have become discursively constructed within this frame. Similarly, in 2019, Meyerhoff explored the individual’s relationship to higher education’s normative narratives, or ‘romantic stories’. As Meyerhoff suggests, one example of these stories is that ‘for students, the prescribed happiness is seen through their romantic relation to education: they are framed as heroes in a romance narrative of climbing the educational ladder, overcoming obstacles on the way toward a happy life after graduation’ (2019: 11). Instead, Meyerhoff (2019: 201) contends that we must ‘unsettle our subscriptions to these narratives and expand our horizons to alternative modes of study and world-making’.

In our own consideration of the role of discourses, we have employed the poststructural and posthuman inflected ideas of a breadth of scholars, for example, Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti, Barad, Foucault, St. Pierre (and many others), in order to offer a similar unsettling. This is not to displace other narratives, but to offer a challenge, and to refresh the perspectives that currently dominate higher education discourses and to escape from the simplistic bifurcations identified in recent work by Macfarlane (2015). We contend that these dominant discourses have become taken-for-granted and have produced various terms and phrases that are often used as shorthand answers to close down debate and plaster over critique – creating a sedative discourse (sensu Guattari 2014). These narratives include commonly accepted and significant terms such as student-centred; widening participation; teaching excellence; student voice; student engagement; resilience; employability and so on. Many of these terms have been borne from good intentions, but meaning may have been lost through overuse and divergence into contested meanings. This is not to say that everything in higher education is wrong! There are many excellent initiatives in the sector, but we contend that all aspects of university practice should be subject to regular scholarly critique, so that we may be in a position to more clearly see and unsettle dominant discourses that romanticize, limit or obscure, and so that any decision to ‘stick or twist’ is made on reasoned judgements and not because ‘that’s the way it is’.

Throughout the book, we consider and analyse dominant discourses that are currently shaping teaching and learning in higher education. Some of these act as stabilizing lines of force while others might be conceived as destabilizing lines of flight that disrupt the status quo. We explore this with a number of questions in our minds concerning the value these discourses have added to the lives of those who are engaged as teachers or students at university. For example, the idea that we should adopt a student-centred approach to our teaching seems to be based on good and common sense. However, when we then start to move into the arena of student-staff partnership work (Gravett, Yakovchuk and Kinchin 2020), we start to uncover a tension as it seems unfair to have a partnership that privileges one of the partners. Moreover, adopting a more rhizomatic conception of learning (Gravett 2021b) highlights problems associated with viewing any conception of learning as being ‘centred’ on one specific location. The student partnership work also uncovers another unhelpful dichotomy in the university. Whereas the world of teaching often stresses values such as inclusivity, collegiality and cooperation for the good of the institution, the world of research is more explicitly concerned with competition between individuals who require personal recognition and accumulated prestige for their work. Although it can also be argued that teaching is becoming increasingly individualistic as a result of neoliberal forces, for example, as evidenced via the adoption of teaching awards across the sector, or metrics such as module evaluation questionnaires that scrutinize individuals’ ‘performances’ in the classroom. Nonetheless, undertaking research with undergraduates places many academics at an uncomfortable junction that challenges their identities as teachers or researchers – a situation requiring considerable mettle (sensu Walker 2014).

Dualisms and Linearity

Underpinning our thinking throughout the book are two subtle phenomena that we recognize as inhibitory. The first is the idea of dualisms (or binaries) that acts as a shorthand way of referring to complex descriptions and that constrains thinking. A critique of binary oppositions is a key premise of many posthuman and poststructural theorists, for example, Derrida (1972), who evocatively describes such concepts as ‘violent hierarchies’, indicating the harmful impact of language and its interrelationship to structures and mechanisms of power. These are ideas we explore more fully in Chapter 2. The other notion we wish to unravel is the concept of linearity. We recognize the effects of linearity within teaching at all levels that impedes and constricts the richness of experience that universities offer to their students. In combination, these restrictive phenomena (often self-imposed) prevent institutions from matching experience with aspiration.

Macfarlane (2015) has identified a number of common dualisms that are likely to resonate with the readers of this book: descriptors such as ‘deep and surface learning’; ‘research and teaching’ and ‘student-centred versus teacher-centred teaching’. These dualisms summarize complex notions about the nature of teaching, of learning and of academic practice more generally, as if activities can be neatly compartmentalized in mutually exclusive boxes. These dualisms imply an either/or scenario in each case and fail to acknowledge any blurring of these boundaries. In addition, they have a hierarchical impact because a value judgement is placed on these activities: ‘deep learning good, surface learning bad’ or ‘student-centred good, teacher-centred bad’, reminding us of Derrida’s surfacing of the violence of hierarchical ideas.

In addition, Macfarlane has identified some more subtle dualisms in higher education that nonetheless may have a deep impact on the psychology of those affected. One example is the distinction between ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ staff. This dualism is often overwritten with a reinforcing dualism of ‘research-active’ and ‘not research-active’. Rather than seen as ‘good or bad’, these are more related to the idea of prestige (Blackmore 2015), and how discourses contribute to prestige being unequally distributed across the university: ‘teaching = low prestige’ versus ‘researching = high prestige’ (Young 2006). Often underpinning these assumptions of prestige is the categorization of UK universities within the research literature. Macfarlane (2015: 114) has identified how researchers rely on distinctions such as ‘old’ and ‘new’ universities to justify their sampling methods and to suggest some kind of inclusive research policy. Someone completely unfamiliar with the UK higher education sector may be forgiven for assuming that if a university was founded in 1096, anyone teaching there must be an integral part of that history, making them a distinct category of teacher. While working in such an institution may colour one’s perspective on university life, the binary assumption described above overlooks the mobile nature of academic staff in the twenty-first century, and the range of active connections and collaborations between universities. Macfarlane (2015: 116) concludes that, ‘bifurcation dangerously over-simplifies the world of higher education research’.

Once sensitized to its existence, the second phenomenon, linearity, can be observed to be operating within many aspects of university life – from assumptions about student transitions into and through higher education (Gravett, Kinchin and Winstone 2020a) to the ways in which content is presented in lectures (Kinchin, Chadha and Kokotailo 2008). Linearity is also a guiding princ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Part 1 Considering the Landscape
• Part 2 Putting Theory to Work
• Part 3 Emerging Polyvalent Lines of Flight
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page