Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Disciplinary Approaches to Educational Enquiry

Elizabeth Cleaver, Maxine Lintern, Mike McLinden

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526452955
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

This book explores best practice approaches to undertaking enquiry into learning and teaching in higher education for staff from all academic disciplines. A general introduction to the methods most commonly used in undertaking enquiry in the field of education is complemented by chapters exploring how research methods from a range of disciplinary areas can be adapted and used for educational enquiry.

New to this second edition:

· Chapters on interdisciplinary educational enquiry in geography and using ethnographic methods for educational enquiry

· New case studies and suggested activities

· A reflective final chapter inviting readers and their institutions to develop and promote an organisational culture founded on critical enquiry

This is essential reading for anyone undertaking HE qualifications in learning and teaching (including PGCTLHE and PGCAP) and for academics wishing to apply their skills of research and enquiry to their learning and teaching practice.

Part One Understanding Educational Enquiry

• Chapter 1: What is educational enquiry and why is it important? Elizabeth Cleaver, Maxine Lintern and Mike McLinden
• Chapter 2: What do I need to know before I read educational literature? Mike McLinden, Elizabeth Cleaver and Maxine Lintern
• Chapter 3: How is educational literature evidenced and reviewed? Mike McLinden, Elizabeth Cleaver and Maxine Lintern
• Chapter 4: What about ethics and safety? Elizabeth Cleaver, Maxine Lintern and Mike McLinden
• Chapter 5: What kind of data should I collect and use? Maxine Lintern, Mike McLinden and Elizabeth Cleaver
• Chapter 6: What about dissemination and impact? Maxine Lintern, Mike McLinden and Elizabeth Cleaver

Chapter 1 What is Educational Enquiry and Why is it Important?

Elizabeth Cleaver

Maxine Lintern

Mike McLinden

Learning outcomes

By the end of this chapter it is anticipated that you will:

• understand the broad context in which the growing emphasis on and expectations around educational enquiry are taking place;
• recognise the skills, understanding and knowledge that you can bring to the educational enquiry process; and
• understand the potential benefits of adopting an enquiry-based approach when seeking to improve your own teaching practice and the learning of your students.

Introduction

In this first chapter we provide an overview of the broad context in which the current refocusing of institutional policies towards excellence in learning and teaching practice within higher education has taken place in the United Kingdom (UK). In doing so, we examine the growing expectation for academic staff to use their skills of research, scholarship and higher-order thinking to improve and enhance their teaching practice and their students’ learning experiences. Since the first edition of this book in 2014, this emphasis has become even more explicit in the UK, with the introduction of the ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’¹ (TEF) and the now annual collection by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) of data on each institution’s staff members with relevant teaching qualifications and/or teaching-related professional fellowships. Your reading of this chapter should help you to understand the context in which these expectations have arisen and the reasons why we consider that undertaking educational improvements and enhancements are important. Our main aim is to encourage you, as academics in higher education, to enhance your practice and the learning experience of your students by asking the right questions; carefully monitoring and evaluating any changes made to practice and making evidence-informed decisions for change. Such an approach will not be alien to you as an academic as it informs all research work in higher education, business or industry. Through this book we hope to show you how you can apply approaches and methods of research, with which you are familiar, to your own learning and teaching practice.

1 In TEF Year 3, the full name of the scheme became the ‘Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework’, however the acronym TEF remains. From 2019, under the new Office for Students regulatory framework in England, participation in the TEF will be compulsory for all English providers over a certain size who wish to register. The Higher Education Research Act (HM Government, 2017) also allows for TEF to rate the institutions from devolved nations with the consent of devolved ministers responsible for higher education. However, participation of institutions from the devolved nations (Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland) remains voluntary at the time of writing.

We recognise that for many readers, this will not be the first time that you use the skills of research, scholarship and higher-order thinking for the improvement of your learning and teaching: we are all responsible for ensuring that the latest developments in disciplinary knowledge are synthesised and integrated into our higher education curricula. What may be less familiar, however, is a focus on making sure that the approaches to teaching this knowledge are also the most up-to-date and appropriate ones for your subject area. The challenge for us all is, in essence, no different from the challenge that we pose our students on a daily basis: namely that of moving from assumption, supposition and non-informed opinion to a more evidence-based consideration that involves information gathering, analysis, conclusion drawing and decision making.

Our experience suggests that, for many colleagues, this is not always an easy journey to make. Research and scholarship can be conceived of and defined in very particular ways within different disciplinary areas. Yet within formal higher education teaching development programmes in UK higher education² or continuing professional development opportunities, there may be an expectation that academics will adopt a ‘social-scientific’ approach to researching, evaluating and writing about their learning and teaching. And while there is a clear logic to these expectations, as the social sciences are built around the study of people within their social and cultural contexts (such as higher education settings), such an approach may require you to venture into largely unknown territory, particularly, if the social sciences are characterised by potentially unfamiliar paradigms, language, research approaches and methods as well as a different understanding of what constitutes ‘validity’. As Stierer notes, academic colleagues can find entering the ‘strange land’ of higher education studies extremely challenging (2008: 35). Indeed, MacDonald-Ross goes further, stating that ‘[t]here is widespread dis-satisfaction with educational research as being restricted to a relatively narrow range of techniques and values, and complaints come from all quarters’ (2005: 17).

2 These are named differently in different institutions, but often use the titles Postgraduate Certificate (PGCert) in Learning and Teaching, in Higher Education or in Academic Practice.

We fundamentally believe that the process of ‘enhancement’ is key to educational improvements (curricular, pedagogic and experiential) and that this should, wherever appropriate, adopt and adapt the approaches that have been developed and valued in higher education, including the processes of rigorous evidence-gathering and unbiased critical analysis. We nevertheless seek to question a frequently unquestioned approach to teaching and learning development: namely that academics from all disciplines need to draw on social scientific approaches and paradigms when researching or evaluating their learning and teaching practice.

Many of you, as practising academics in higher education, will have been engaging with research in your respective disciplines for a number of years. Some of you will be seasoned researchers with a clear understanding of the academic processes of peer-review, publication and the sharing of results and data to inform disciplinary developments. You will also be familiar with the acknowledged approaches to evidence gathering and analysis within your disciplines. As experienced academics ourselves with backgrounds in different disciplines, we are aware that developing new or additional research skills may not always be practicable or indeed desirable. This may be because many of the approaches, methods, settings and forms of language usually drawn upon in pedagogic ‘research’ are far removed from your current research expectations, practices and understandings (an issue explored further in Chapter 2; see also Keeran & Levine-Clark, 2014, and Poole, 2013, for a discussion of disciplinary differences in research approach). It may simply be because you are so busy in your current role, that developing expertise in different ways of working is not high up on your agenda. As such, the central thrust of our argument in this text is that your own disciplinary research approaches can provide a valid and useful starting point for enquiring into aspects of your own teaching and learning activities with a view to enhancing this practice.

It is also worth noting that within this text we have opted, where possible, not to use terminology that can be misconstrued or invite unhelpful comparisons. In academic circles we can sometimes be so keen to debate our relative understandings of language and associated phenomena, that we can be in danger of losing sight of why they were introduced in the first place. As such, we have chosen not to refer to your enhancement activities as ‘research’, to avoid unnecessary comparison with established understandings of disciplinary research. Similarly, we have decided against using the augmented terminology of ‘practitioner’ research (see e.g. Flynn & McDermott, 2016; Foreman-Peck & Winch, 2010) or ‘action’ research (see e.g. Altrichter et al., 2008; Koshy, 2010; Koshy et al., 2011); both terms that are widely used in a number of professions for small-scale and applied forms of enquiry within the work-setting. This decision is based on our experience that speaking to colleagues about their ‘practice’ and identifying them as ‘practitioners’ can sometimes lead to confusion and, in some cases, irritation and rejection of this label outright. The term is often more acceptable if your professional identity and role have an academic overlap, such as those who are clinically qualified, those who work in the ‘professions’ or those who are expert practitioners in the creative industries. However, we recognise that for many of you these identities may be viewed as relatively discrete aspects of your working life.

Further, both ‘practitioner’ and ‘action’ research can be viewed as being variations that are so localised and often small-scale in nature that they are considered to be of less value. This was interestingly reflected in the guidance published to those who engaged with the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014,³ which defined such activities as being ‘non-returnable’:

3 The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the UK’s six-yearly national evaluation process, designed to assess the quality of research in UK HE and builds on the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) last completed in 2008. The next REF is due to take place in 2021.

1. Impacts on research or the advancement of academic knowledge within the higher education sector (whether in the UK or internationally) are excluded;
2. Impacts on students, teaching or other activities within the submitting HEI [Higher Education Institution] are excluded;
3. Other impacts within the higher education sector, including on teaching or students, are included where they extend significantly beyond the submitting HEI (REF, 2011: para. 143, emphasis added).

In seeking other ways of describing and conceptualising the kind of activities and approaches we are advocating in this text, we have also considered using a term whose use has grown over the last two decades, predominantly in the United States (US). The ‘Scholarship of Teaching and Learning’ (or SoTL – pronounced so-tle) comprises activity which focuses on evidence-based improvements to learning and teaching, often from a disciplinary starting point:

the mechanism through which the profession of teaching itself advances, through which teaching can be something other than a seat-of-the-pants operation, with each of us out there making it up as we go. (Hutchings & Shulman, 1999: 13–14)

However, despite the usefulness of the debates and insights from this established area of work, discussed in more detail later in the chapter, using the term scholarship in the UK creates a particular challenge in that the 2014 REF exercise defined scholarship narrowly as:

the creation, development and maintenance of the intellectual infrastructure of subjects and disciplines, in forms such as dictionaries, scholarly editions, catalogues and contributions to major research databases. (REF, 2011: 71)

With this definition so prominent in certain academic circles within the UK, to use the term schol...