Effective Learning and Teaching in Social Policy and Social Work

Hilary Burgess, Imogen Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134311743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Written to meet the needs of teachers, lecturers, tutors and trainers, this is the essential guide to understanding the key issues in learning and teaching in social policy and social work - as well as related areas such as early childhood studies, youth and community work and probation studies.
The field of social care is constantly changing, and this book acts an accessible introduction to all the core concerns that will be critical to teaching professionals working in the field today. Key areas covered include curriculum planning, design and delivery of teaching, assessment, promoting inclusion, e-learning and interprofessional practice. This book also aims to provide an international perspective, outlining innovative best practice from around the world.
Written for undergraduate and postgraduate level teaching, less experienced teachers looking for authoritative, expert guidance will find this title indispensable, as will more experienced professionals seeking material for reflection.

1
Dancing on a moving carpet: the changing context

Pat Young and Hilary Burgess

Introduction

There is little doubt that the carpet under our feet is moving, as diverse and complex changes impact on the professional practice of academics who teach in higher education. Changing discipline requirements follow changing institutional policy or faculty configuration, compounded by changing government policy in higher education. For academics, who must continue to teach and to research, the experience could be likened to dancing on a moving carpet. The changes bring increased need for collaboration with a wider range of colleagues, and the challenge of mastering new dance steps includes co-ordinating those steps with new and unfamiliar partners. In this chapter we examine the nature of the moving carpet, with an analysis of key aspects of developments in higher education for lecturers in social policy and social work. Recognizing that change in the environment in which we work means modifying practice, the chapter offers an overview of new thinking about teaching as a form of professional practice and, in conclusion, suggests a model for self-management of change.

Conceptualizing change in higher education

There exists a growing armoury of descriptive and explanatory concepts for making sense of the changes in higher education. Hargeaves, for example, locates his understanding of developments affecting schoolteachers in the context of ‘a powerful and dynamic struggle between two immense social forces: those of modernity and postmodernity’ (Hargeaves, 1994: 8). Others have used the concepts of ‘Fordism’ and ‘post-Fordism’ as ways of making sense of changes in higher education (Rustin, 1994). This model begins with an analogy with changes in consumption and production of motor cars, typifiedby the contrast between the mass consumption of identical products created by the mass production systems pioneered by the Ford motor company, and more recent developments of flexible production and differentiated and segmented consumption. The distinction between an elite and a mass system (Trow, 1992) has achieved wide currency as a means of summarizing a range of developments in higher education. Adopting these terms, Jackson writes of the current friction between a mass system and traditional elite values (Jackson, 1997). We begin by analysing this friction and offering means of reconciliationthrough developing professional practice, bringing teaching practice more in line with the needs of a mass system, under pressure from various sources. Five areas of significant change impacting on lecturers are discussed to set the scene.

Changes in higher education – students

Most obviously, student numbers have increased. In 1965–6, 400,000 students were engaged in higher education; by 2001–2 the numbers had swelled to more than one million (statistics from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), reported in the Times Higher Education Supplement, 2002). The widening participation agenda has sought to challenge the traditional bias of higher education in favour of privileged groups. Social policy and social work are both subjects that have successfully attracted students from a wide range of backgrounds, both socially and educationally, with diverse needs.

The introduction of means-tested tuition fees in 1997 and the substitution of a system of loans for grants, together with widening participation, has changed and diversified students’ life-styles. Most students in higher education now combine work with study, in some cases working almost full-time. Shorrock (2002) quotes a survey which found that 40 per cent of students in employment are working between 12.5 and 20 hours a week and concludes that ‘having a job and studying is now considered to be part of the normal experience of higher education’ (Shorrock, 2002: 53). Many students of social work and social policy also have family responsibilities. The proposed introductionof student loans, combined with ‘top-up fees’ for universities in England may further impact on the study/work balance for students (Department for Education and Skills, 2003).

Alongside changes in the wider society, and in the funding of education, attitudes have changed. Students tend to be more instrumental in their attitudeto study, prioritizing assessed work that counts towards their final degree classification and keeping a sharp eye on the employment market. Kneale (1997: 119) talks of the rise of the ‘strategic student’ and suggests that staff recognize that not all students in the expanded higher education system are primarily academic and committed to all their modules. The spread of consumerism into public services documented by social policy writers (for example Clarke, 1998) has led to increased awareness within higher education of students as ‘customers’, seeking ‘value’ for their own, or their parents’, monies.

Changes in higher education – resourcing

The expansion of higher education has taken place in a time of cost constraints in public spending as a whole, and the unit funding of students has dropped from £7,500 in 1989–90 to less than £5,000 in 2003–4 (HESA statistics, Times Higher Education Supplement, 2002). The White Paper The Future of Higher Education (Department for Education and Skills, 2003) reports a 36 per cent drop in funding per student between 1989 and 1997 (paragraph 1.31), with the decline in unit funding only reversed in 2000–1. In most programmes, lower unit funding has increased the ratio of students to staff ( Jackson, 1997). The impact of this financial squeeze has been felt in terms of resources for students (buildings, libraries, technology), but most significantly in terms of staff stress (Association of University Teachers, 2003).

Changes in higher education – accountability

Greater numbers of students and higher levels of public expenditure on universities, together with the increased significance attached to higher education, have brought greater pressures for external control and intervention in the work of academics. The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) describes the increase in external regulation in the following quotation:

When the HE [higher education] system was small and largely uniform, and made a relatively small claim on public funds, reliance upon implicit, shared assumptions and informal networks and procedures (for quality assurance)may have been possible, and sufficient. But with the rapid expansion of numbers of students and institutions, the associated broadening of the purposes of HE, and the considerable increase in the amount of public money required, more methodical approaches have had to be employed.

(QAA, 1998, quoted in Becher and Trowler, 2001: 6)

The methodology employed by the QAA on behalf of the Higher Education Funding Councils from 1997 had a strong emphasis on subject review (with a 24-point rating scale) and was criticized as heavy handed (see for example Times Higher Education Supplement, 22 September 2000). From 2003, the system in

England and Northern Ireland moved to one focused primarily on institutional audit, incorporating five discipline trails. In Scotland the focus is more on quality enhancement within institutions, with no discipline review. Henkel (2000) offers an overview of these issues.

Some sources write of a move to ‘professionalize’ the activity of teaching (Huber, 1999; Light and Cox, 2001). Aspects of the professionalization of higher education teaching include training for newly appointed staff, the creation of educational development units in most universities, and the establishmentof the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (ILTHE) and the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) subject centres, which are incorporated into the new Higher Education Academy.

The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and the linking of funding to research outputs has intensified pressures for all staff to be research-active and to publish extensively. Many staff with backgrounds in practice rather than research, and those in post-1992 universities with high teaching loads, have struggled to meet the demands of the research agenda. Cuthbert (2002: 36, citing McNay, 1997) suggests that the RAE has significantly changed the behaviour of ‘institutions, faculties, schools, departments and individual academics’. The RAE is also thought to have impeded pedagogic research and scholarship (Yorke, 2003), which has not been valued on a par with discipline-based research by the panels. Further uncertainty lies ahead with the Roberts Review (suggesting research funding be concentrated in a small numbers of universities), and potential changes to the RAE itself.

Greater governmental demands for accountability and the spread of manage-rialism across the public sector have increased the administrative burden on academic staff. Quality assurance procedures have multiplied demands for paperwork and attendance at committees. The QAA has also introduced benchmarking statements for each discipline, codes of practice for ten areas, and programme specifications and progress files; while these may play an important role in quality provision, the time spent on formal procedures has been increased.

Changes in higher education – the nature of knowledge

Knowledge development and dissemination in all fields has increased. Thompson (1997) suggests that as new knowledge is acquired at a greater rate, it also more quickly becomes obsolete, an issue that may be more acute in social policy and social work than in most other subjects. The New Right in the 1970s and 1980s, and New Labour in the 1990s and into the new millennium,brought radical and wide-ranging policy changes in all aspects of social welfare and service configuration and organization. The boundaries between the public and private have become porous, extending the complex knowledgebases of social policy and social work from a primary focus on state welfare to an inclusion of a greater range of informal and non-statutory agencies.Devolution of power to the four countries of the UK, and to local agencies of governance, as well as the growing influence of globalization have further challenged lecturers in social policy and social work to keep abreast of theoretical and empirical developments in their subjects. Since both subjects also draw on other disciplines – economics, politics, sociology, law, psychology – the potential knowledge is exhilarating or daunting, depending on your perspective. Increased complexity in interprofessional education and the involvement of service users in teaching and research further increase the boundaries of underpinning knowledge.

Not only has there been acceleration in the rate of growth of knowledge, but also change in access to knowledge. The technical advances that brought computers to most academics’ desks have enabled speedy and global access to rapidly growing quantities of information. Democratized access to knowledge challenges traditional power relations. Students as well as lecturers can access, and indeed create and disseminate information. As well as keeping up to date with subject content and incorporating skills development into the curriculum, lecturers are under pressure to learn and adopt educational applications of new technology, for example the virtual learning environments (VLEs) currently being introduced in many universities.

Changes in higher education – delivery modes

With expanded numbers of increasingly diverse students, and the opportunitiesoffered by new forms of technology, higher education is no longer limited to those able to study full-time within the walls of the university. Recent decades have seen increasing diversity in delivery modes of higher education ( Jackson, 1997), with an increase in part-time provision, forms of open learning using new technology (Candy 1997) and employment-based modes of study (Thompson, 1997). Becher and Trowler (2001: 3) refer to the ‘borderless’ nature of institutions as new ‘knowledge media’ enable universitiesto deliver distance teaching to large numbers of students across the globe. New developments such as the NHSU, which provides training and education for staff within the National Health Service, further challenge traditional conceptions of a university and of higher education.

In this context of competing demands and intensified pressures, lecturers may understandably be reluctant to radically overhaul teaching. However, strugglingwith approaches to teaching and learning developed for a very different context may be a more, rather than a less, stressful option. In the following section we consider how professional practice in higher education is changing in line with the developments examined above.

Changes in learning and teaching

This section examines key themes in developments in teaching and learning. We suggest these can offer a way of making sense of the turbulent times in which we teach, and contribute towards a framework for improving professionalpractice which can enable lecturers to swim with, rather than struggle against, the currents of change.

From didactic to active learning

Active learning seeks to encourage all students to employ the learning strategiesof successful students. To explain this, Biggs (1999) employs a device for illustrating a key distinction between more and less academically successful students. Within the current student population, Biggs suggests that lecturers will encounter ‘Susan’ and ‘Robert’. ‘Susan’ is ‘academically committed’ and learns in an ‘academic way’ (Biggs, 1999: 3). ‘Robert’, on the other hand, is ‘less committed’, ‘possibly not as bright’ and has a ‘less developed background of relevant knowledge’.

The central justification for Biggs’ approach to teaching is that Susan ‘spontaneously’uses active learning, in the form of higher-order cognitive processes such as relating and theorizing, in teaching situations towards the ‘passive’ end of the teaching method continuum, such as lectures. Robert, however, does not. Biggs suggest that the large gap between Susan’s and Robert’s levels of engagement is significantly reduced by active methods such as problem-based learning, in which higher-order cognitive activities are not optional, but required.

Active learning also fits with the direction of social change in other aspects of society. In the media, the traditional roles of presenter and audience are being challenged with increasingly varied forms of participation. In other aspects of social life, rigid divisions in which less powerful members are discouraged from holding and expressing opinions are dissolving. Technological developments and the global re-location of industry mean that there is less demand for silent workers to carry out repetitive tasks in factories, and more need for social skills in service industries, where individual initiative and creative teamwork are needed for flexibility and innovation. In the public sector, active learning is reflected in the rise of the consumer and user participation.

From subject content to transferable skills

Current thinking in the educational literature displaces discipline or subject content from the centre stage and asserts the primacy of various kinds of ‘transferable’skills. This theme is particularly relevant for social policy, since in social work education, skills development has always had a central place. The increase in the speed of change in knowledge makes it impractical to teach everything, and more important to develop skills for learning (Biggs, 1999). A shift of emphasis from content to skills can liberate lecturers from an obsessive and self-defeating chase for the holy grail of comprehensive and up-to- date subject knowledge.

From subject expert to reflective practitioner

Where previously an academic could rest on his or her reputation in research and publishing in the discipline, awareness of pedagogic issues and the ability to reflect on teaching practice is advocated for the contemporary lecturer. Changing times are best met with flexibility and adaptability, built on a secure framework of well-thought-out core values. This allows the maintenance of a sense of personal integrity with a willingness to make changes that are congruent with the environment and the needs of others.

The conception of students as customers of the university gives students a right to ask questions about their education, and lecturers a responsibility to answer. It is also the case that lecturers wishing to make changes to teaching, particularly in the direction of active learning, will need to engage in changing the culture of education in which students expect to be ‘taught’. The lecturer needs to be able to articulate the reasoning behind the new approach to learning and teaching. Reflective practice is also crucial in terms of the move towards increased collaboration discussed below. The productive sharing of practice requires professional discourse. Expressions such as ‘that seminar didn’t work’ or ‘that lecture went badly’ are limited in explanatory power and poor tools for improving practice. Strategies for peer observation of teaching may be an important first step in this.

From individualism to collaboration

In all areas of work, there is currently an emphasis on teamwork, and an awareness of the limitations of thinking in purely individual terms and the benefits of drawing on wider communities of practice (Wenger 1998). Light and Cox (2001) draw on Bennett’s (1998) distinction between an ‘autonomous’ and a ‘relational’ model of academic being (quoted in Light and Cox, 2001: 39). The first model is one of ‘i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the editors and specialist contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: Dancing on a moving carpet: the changing context
• 2: Designing the curriculum: complexity, coherence and innovation
• 3: Participation in social policy and social work learning
• 4: Promoting equality and inclusion
• 5: Students learning to learn
• 6: Promoting interactive learning and teaching
• 7: Walking the assessment tightrope
• 8: Towards eLearning: opportunities and challenges
• 9: eveloping learning beyond the campus: increasing vocationalism and declining pedagogy?
• 10: Interprofessional education
• 11: Continuing professional development and education
• 12: Globalization: implications for learning and teaching
• 13: International perspectives
• 14: Developing the university as a learning organization
• Bibliography