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 studentsâ 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 âTeaching Excellence Frameworkâ1 (TEF) and the now annual collection by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) of data on each institutionâs 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.
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 âsocial-scientificâ 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 âvalidityâ. As Stierer notes, academic colleagues can find entering the âstrange landâ of higher education studies extremely challenging (2008: 35). Indeed, MacDonald-Ross goes further, stating that â[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 quartersâ (2005: 17).
We fundamentally believe that the process of âenhancementâ 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 âresearchâ 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 âresearchâ, to avoid unnecessary comparison with established understandings of disciplinary research. Similarly, we have decided against using the augmented terminology of âpractitionerâ research (see e.g. Flynn & McDermott, 2016; Foreman-Peck & Winch, 2010) or âactionâ 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 âpracticeâ and identifying them as âpractitionersâ 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 âprofessionsâ 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 âpractitionerâ and âactionâ 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 UKâs Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014,3 which defined such activities as being ânon-returnableâ:
- Impacts on research or the advancement of academic knowledge within the higher education sector (whether in the UK or internationally) are excluded;
- Impacts on students, teaching or other activities within the submitting HEI [Higher Education Institution] are excluded;
- 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 âScholarship of Teaching and Learningâ (or SoTL â 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: 13â14)
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...