Changing Pedagogical Spaces in Higher Education

Diversity, inequalities and misrecognition

Penny Jane Burke, Gill Crozier, Lauren Misiaszek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317407867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Higher education is in a current state of flux and uncertainty, with profound changes being shaped largely by the imperatives of global neoliberalism. Changing Pedagogical Spaces in Higher Education forms a unique addition to the literature and includes significant practical pointers in developing pedagogical strategies, interventions and practices that seek to address the complexities of identity formations, difference, inequality and misrecognition.

Drawing on research studies based across California, England, Italy, Portugal and Spain, this book analyses complex pedagogical re/formations across competing discourses of gender, diversity, equity, global neoliberalism and transformation, and aims:

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• to critique and reconceptualise widening participation practices in higher education

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• to consider the complex intersections between difference, equity, global neoliberalism and transformation

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• to analyse the intersections of identity formations, social inequalities and pedagogical practices

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• to contribute to broader widening participation policy agendas

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• to develop an analysis of gendered experiences, intersected by race and class, of higher education practices and relations.

Changing Pedagogical Spaces in Higher Education will speak to those concerned with how theory relates to everyday practices and development of teaching in higher education and those who are interested in theorising about pedagogies, identities and inequalities in higher education. Engaging readers in a dialogue of the relationship between theory and practice, this thought-provoking and challenging text will be of particular interest to researchers, academic developers and policy-makers in the field of higher education studies.

Chapter 1
Higher education, difference, diversity and inequality

This chapter presents the international context of higher education (HE), considering difference, diversity and inequality in relation to pedagogical questions and concerns. Interrogating the hegemony of neo-liberal discourses, we consider the ways global forces are profoundly reshaping the policy and practice of teaching in HE across different international contexts. Higher education reforms are often justified in relation to the drive for ‘excellence’ for all students but largely ignore deeply embedded and complex histories of misrecognition, creating new forms of inequality, stratification and exclusion. Gendered, classed and racialised subjectivities and epistemologies, as well as other intersecting inequalities, are made unspeakable through technologies of performativity, regulation and ‘datafication’ (Sellar, 2013) yet are deeply felt through lived experiences of misrecognition. The increasing emphasis of higher education policy on the economic realm drives the rationalities underpinning policy discourses of widening participation and equity, with universities expected to contribute to business, innovation and industry, moving increasingly to the logics of the market. In such frameworks, universities are positioned as competing in the global market of higher education for ‘world class’ students, staff and resources, based on the ‘quality’ of their institutional profile in relation to research and teaching.

Providing an overview of policy, research and literature in the international field, this chapter aims to shed light on the complex operations of inequality in and through higher education and to explain the significance of a focus on pedagogies for developing a richer understanding of inclusion and exclusion. Although we are critical of a homogenising and monolithic analysis of neoliberalism, we argue that neo-liberalism is a key force in relation to the politics of higher education reform in the contemporary landscape. We understand neoliberalism as a political and hegemonic discourse that has gained increasing momentum since the 1980s, placing significant confidence in markets as a way to restructure the public sector, including higher education. The logics of neo-liberalism have increasingly led to the substitution of public funding with private individual fees across multiple national contexts. This has also included greater moves towards deregulation, and strong austerity measures to significantly reduce public spending with significant shifts towards the privatisation of the public sphere. New public management is a feature of neo-liberalism and the ‘age of performativity’ (Ball, 2003). This has led to a dramatic proliferation of new data infrastructures and new accountabilities in the governance of education systems (Sellar, 2013). However, we also argue that neo-liberalism is not the only force at play in understanding the landscape of higher education, and complex pedagogical relations within it. We must understand neo-liberalism as an intersecting political force with other powerful dynamics including, but not exclusively, neocolonialism, institutional racism and contemporary forms of patriarchy.

In this chapter, we will trace the trans/formation of higher education policy across different international contexts, and the ways this is crystallised through particular discourses of ‘excellence’, ‘choice’, and ‘social mobility’. We will consider the particular implications of this for changing pedagogical logics and the ways this imposes particular regimes of truth on teaching and learning. Our underpinning concern is the impact of such transformations on questions of equity and social justice in higher education, with a focus on themes of difference, diversities and inequality.

The global market of higher education

We must understand that the move towards a global market of higher education is itself intimately bound up with complex international social inequalities, injustices and oppressions. Higher education is an institution constituted through its relationality with other social institutions and organisations with multiple and often contradictory political forces and impulses, and of course wider social, cultural and economic inequalities. Naidoo explains that ‘the creation of a global market in HE is of course a rigged market which is twisted with strong protectionism to create an unequal playing field’ (Naidoo, 2015) but she also points out that:

The blame for pervasive poverty, growing unemployment and social unrest is laid at the door of HE rather than seen as an outcome of policies related to predatory capitalism. HE plays a part here but it would be a grave error to believe that HE in isolation can contribute to global wellbeing. It is therefore very important to link HE to wider development and global wellbeing strategies.

(Naidoo, 2015)

The creation of a global market of higher education means that a smaller group of influential players are shaping the direction higher education takes, although of course this takes shape in different ways across different national, regional and local contexts. There are multiple contestations, interests, agendas and impulses at play across and within the field of higher education and yet there are specific patterns of influence, power and transformation that can be traced internationally. Hotson (2012) provides a detailed and provocative analysis of the influence of large, transnational corporations who he argues are now manoeuvring their economic power, networks and resources to reform higher education policy in the interests purely of business and profit. Presenting an analysis of the particular influence of the World Economic Forum (WEF), he argues that neo-liberalism is a smoke screen that conceals from view the power and immense influence of global organisations. He argues that the changes to higher education policy witnessed in localised national contexts are patterns that can be identified across the world. These include: withdrawal of public funding and its substitution with private student fees; viewing universities as service providers and students as consumers; commodification of education; vocationalisation with a strong emphasis on training; exponential growth of the for-profit sector; corporatisation; decline of academic governance; growing casualisation of staff; the commercialisation of research; increasing managerialism; and the move for higher education programmes (teaching and research) to meet the needs of business and industry.

Hotson (2012) claims that we are in the midst of a global higher education crisis and warns that what is driving these changes is not simply a neo-liberal ideology, although this plays a key role; rather it is the imposing demands that large, transnational corporations place on governments with the ultimate goal of maximising profits that also drives policy. He identifies a number of anomalies in higher education policy that lead him to question why such reforms are being made. He gives the examples of the apparent commitment to increasing student choice whilst reducing the range of degree programmes being offered and the fact that despite higher education being key to national competitive advantage, for which an economic rationale would then support public investment, the government is drastically reducing investment in higher education. Anomalies such as these might be explained by understanding that the economy is now a global force, leading to public reform being shaped by external forces. He traces such external forces to the WEF, whose membership is constituted of large, transnational corporations who each generate about five billion US dollars annually. Hotson suggests that decisions about national higher education policy reforms are increasingly being driven by the objectives of external organisations such as the WEF, of which universities are becoming increasingly subordinate. In this way, higher education is no longer being underpinned by academic judgments, principles and values (although these of course are not themselves homogenous but are contested), but by the needs of business to maximise financial advantage.

Hotson’s analysis is sobering; however our position is that although we need to keep sight of such an analysis and reveal how such global economic forces are reframing pedagogical spaces, experiences and practices, we argue that there are multiple political forces at play, and there remain spaces where academic-oriented and pedagogically driven values and perspectives are in force, albeit through contradictory and contested processes. Paul Ashwin argues powerfully that:

The danger of the increase in global information about higher education is that the individual, durable and stable elements of higher education that can be easily measured are given a greater value than those that are collective, complex, changing and country-specific. As higher education researchers, we need to engage with such tensions critically, constructively, collectively and courageously. Critically because we need to challenge the tendency to value only what is measurable and carefully identify the ways in which different simplifications, including our own, offer a partial picture of the world’s complexity. Constructively because we need to respect and take seriously the concerns of those both inside and outside of higher education research with whom we may strongly disagree. In doing so, we need to offer alternative ways of addressing these concerns rather than simply dismissing them through critique. Collectively because we need to recognise and emphasise that the value of higher education research comes from the communal bodies of knowledge that it produces rather than individual researchers or projects. Courageously because our contribution to higher education research is always in the process of becoming. This means that our successes and failures are temporary and, as a community, we need to continually work to show the value of what higher education research can offer. This requires us not to underestimate the challenges involved in offering all students a transformative higher education experience but also not to forget the possibilities offered by the power of higher education to transform students’ understanding of the world and their position within it.

(Ashwin, 2015)

Ashwin’s argument has important implications for pedagogies in higher education, resonant of Freire’s concepts of the inédito viável (which will be further explored in Chapters three and eight) and of reading the world. Against the pernicious forces of global capitalism, neo-liberalism and the demands of transnational corporations, we must create spaces of refusal in which broader meaning is collectively reconstructed about the world and our contextualised orientations to it. Robert Rhoads and Katalin Szelenyi eloquently argue that universities are:

One of the few remaining spaces in which unchecked global capitalism (neoliberalism) and the kind of citizenry it advances may still be challenged. We need academics, students and graduates of universities who possess the dispositions and skills to resist the present movement towards corporate-driven self-interest and who see themselves as part of the struggle for a broader, more globally responsive citizenship. As Bakan astutely noted, we are headed down a pathological path toward our own destruction. What we need more than ever is not the elimination of the public sphere but its strengthening.

(Rhoads and Szelenyi, 2011, p. 28)

However, part of this process of creating pedagogical spaces of refusal is to analyse and uncover the hegemonic discourses at play that are weakening such processes. A key discourse that is contributing to the forces that place the economy and profit-making as the central aim of higher education is the hegemonic discourse of ‘excellence’.

Reshaping higher education through ‘excellence’

The recent publication of the United Kingdom’s Green Paper entitled Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice (BIS, 2015) is indicative of the hegemony that ‘excellence’ has gained across the international field of higher education. The Green Paper, published by the UK’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, arguably cements a marketised system of higher education, engraining those concepts emerging from a neo-liberal imagination. The Green Paper aims to create a framework in which teaching in higher education might be ‘improved’ through evaluating teaching through comparative methods across the UK. The Green Paper intends this to lead to better-informed student-consumers of the research and teaching ‘quality’ of individual higher education institutions; providing greater transparency to student-consumers as the main funding source to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs); enabling student-consumers to evaluate what they are paying for; providing a system by which potential employees (graduates) can be assessed by employers on the basis of the quality of the institution from which the qualification was attained. As well as this, it is seen to empower taxpayers, who continue to provide at least partial funding for HE in England and Wales, to assess the benefits generated though HE.

Concerns about diversity and equity are articulated in the Green Paper as a way of ensuring that all those with the prerequisite potential and talent can enter the marketplace of HE, and thus to ‘encourage excellent teaching for all students’. The aims of the Green Paper are embedded in a range of assumptions that are produced through the particular logics of marketisation, evidence-based policy and practice, meritocracy and human capital theory. The overarching framework is economic rationalism: widening access is a way of ‘empowering’ the student-‘consumer’ to become the neo-liberal aspirational socially mobile choice-making subject. The Green Paper sets this out explicitly in describing the creation of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF):

Prospective students will be able to use the TEF results to help inform their decisions about which institution to attend, and employers can consider it in their recruitment. The TEF will increase students’ understanding of what they are getting for their money and improve the value they derive from their investment, protecting the interest of the taxpayer who supports the system through provision of student loans. It should also provide better signalling for employers as to which providers they can trust to produce highly skilled graduates.

(BIS, 2015, pp. 12–13)

Although the framework places student choice as a central theme, it does so through the metaphor of education as a set of products that student-consumers choose in relation to their individual assessment of the quality of that product (Reay, David and Ball, 2005). There is no sense of how the ‘quality’ will develop equitable frameworks to support student participation and educational outcomes, nor any space for considering the meaning of ‘quality’ beyond economic rationalism – becoming an employable, resilient consumer-worker who has the capacity to be continuously flexible in the wider context of turbulent economic and employment conditions. In fact, this focus on external indicators to measure teaching quality may reduce equity initiatives because these will not take into account that students do not pick up ‘learning gains’ as neutral subjects; social and cultural advantages differ in and within student populations across and within different universities. This means some universities may appear to have better ‘teaching quality’ through an excellence framework, but may in fact just be reproducing disparities in terms of student populations and equity (Tatlow and Phoenix, 2015).

The discourse of ‘excellence’ has increasingly gained traction over the past fifteen years or so, underpinned by new public management. This has led to increasing attention to external accountability, organisation of quality, and efficiency of resource use in HE with large-scale policy movements such as the Bologna Process epitomising this shift (Froumin and Lisyuktin, 2015). The Bologna Process might be seen as part of an attempt to create a consumer market of higher education that is global in scope (Ramirez and Tiplic, 2014). Transnational and global agents of globalisation, such as the European Commission (EC), the OECD, the World Bank and UNESCO have determined such shifts, with an increased focus on economic growth and innovation as a normative discourse around education policy (Lingard, Rawolle and Taylor, 2005). Teaching is seen as valuable largely in terms of ‘developing graduate skills and competences necessary for a career in a globalised knowledge-based society’ (Sin, 2015, p. 333). ‘Excellence’ relates primarily to market-driven competitiveness, not intrinsic value from the institution.

Under a logic of utilitarianism, performance and efficiency teaching and learning is exhorted to align to market needs and to develop employability and entrepreneurship.

(Sin, 2015, p. 328)

Excellence-driven policies then are about competitiveness in a global HE market. The focus on excellence at a global level has reshaped HE systems internationally, with effects such as stimulating new competition, changing financing patterns, and promoting the ‘Research University’ as the most desirable model, which has had profound effects on teaching and those institutions that are positioned as ‘teaching-intensive’. This is exacerbated by institutional success in widening participation as students from under-represented groups are seen to signify a lower standard, largely because those students often enter HE through nontraditional routes and qualifications, often assumed to be inferior to traditional entry qualifications.

‘Excellence’ is increasingly interconnected with discourses of ‘diversity’, couched in a neo-liberal logic that foregrounds the market as the key architectural device to create contemporary higher education spaces. However, the meaning of teaching ‘excellence’ is often left abstracted and obscured, as the following quote from the Green Paper shows:

There is no one broadly accepted definition of ‘teaching excellence’. In practice it has many interpretations and there are likely to be different ways of measuring it. The Government does not intend to stifle innovation in the sector or restrict institutions’ freedom to choose what is in the best interests of their students. But we do think there is a need to provide greater clarity about what we are looking for and how we intend to measure it in relation to the TEF [Teaching Excellence Framework]. Our thinking has been informed by the following principles:

• excellence must incorporate and reflect the diversity of the sector, disciplines and missions – not all students will achieve their best within the same model of teaching;
• excellence is the sum of many factors – focussing on metrics gives an overview, but not the whole picture;
• perceptions of excellence vary between students, institutions and employers;
• excellence is not something achieved easily or without focus, time...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Higher education, difference, diversity and inequality
• 2 Reconceptualising pedagogies and reimagining difference
• 3 Pedagogical methodology
• 4 Diversity, difference, inequalities and pedagogical experiences
• 5 Pedagogical identity formations: student perspectives
• 6 Gendered formations in pedagogical relations and spaces
• 7 Pedagogies of difference: ‘race’, ethnicity and social class in higher education
• 8 Theorising the early career experience: towards collective engaged pedagogies
• Conclusion: Changing pedagogical spaces: reclaiming transformation
• Appendix one: Formations of gender and higher education pedagogies (GaP)
• Appendix two: Fulbright
• Appendix three: Table of student information (GaP project)
• References
• Index