Learning Transitions in Higher Education

D. Scott, G. Hughes, P. Burke, C. Evans, D. Watson, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137322128
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book draws on a study of student transitions in higher education institutions to both unpack the concept of a learning transition and develop pedagogic strategies to enable learners to develop their learning careers. This book provides an original perspective on teaching and learning in higher education.

1

Introduction

The concept of a learning transition is increasingly being used in higher education to identify key stages such as the first-year undergraduate experience and progression from undergraduate to postgraduate study. This book focuses on such transitions and suggests, firstly, that the notion of a transition is under-theorised and, secondly, that movements between these stages are complex and entwined with a range of other transitions. Current learning, teaching and assessment approaches do not take into account the range of student experiences of transitions and tend to focus on the here and now. In this book, we draw on a study of student transitions that we conducted both to unpack the concept of transition and to develop pedagogic strategies to enable learners to progress their learning careers. Furthermore, we focus on issues that are now central to the concerns of higher education researchers and policy-makers, those of teaching, learning and assessment. These are not fully understood, with the result that inadequate and inappropriate models are used in research accounts and policy forums.

We suggest here that student experiences need to be understood in context, and not through disconnected and decontextualised technologies, such as the various types of student satisfaction surveys currently in use. We set out to theorise the practice of student learning transitions in real-life settings and as episodes in their learning and assessment careers. In doing this, we examined five teaching and learning modes related to learning transitions: identity transformations, academic literacy practices, transformational pedagogies, assessments for learning and feedback mechanisms. This allowed us to develop new and alternative teaching and learning approaches for facilitating student transitions at this level.

We focused then on the experiences of postgraduate students at Master’s level in a range of institutions and settings. At the outset we identified four groups of students, mindful all the time that the boundaries we set between each of these groups, and the subsequent attributions we gave to these groups, were in the first place approximations to how they constructed their lives and, secondly, became increasingly problematic as we learnt more and developed richer theories about transitional processes. These four groups were: a group of students with undergraduate degrees from a range of pure disciplines undertaking a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE) programme in preparation for a professional career; a group of full-time international students studying on a variety of Master’s programmes who had not had previous residence in the United Kingdom; a group of part-time home students in full-time work who were enrolled on the first year of a Master’s programme at a British university; and a group of students from non-standard backgrounds either full- or part-time, and therefore in either their study year or their first study year across the range of courses on a Master’s programme at a British university (see Annex One for a full account of how we organised our study). Our contention is that learning transitions at this level have commonalities with other levels, such as research student postgraduate transitions and undergraduate transitions, though we have to be careful to take account of the specific circumstances in which those transitions play out in practice. We address in the final chapter issues of commonality and difference between the different types of learning transitions.

The book offers an account of a specific form of pedagogy (and therefore of learning), which we are calling transformational and participatory. The origins of this are twofold: the rich data we collected allowed us to make judgements about the viability, effectiveness and efficacy of different types of teaching and learning approaches; and philosophical deliberations about these matters reinforced this analysis. This transformational pedagogy takes account of, and indeed emerges from, understandings of the various contingencies of the postgraduate setting, that is, the heterogeneity of the student body, the need to accommodate the different purposes of postgraduate study, appropriate theories of learning (which also include ipsative and feed-forward assessment approaches), learning and assessment careers, and fundamentally, that pedagogic relations have to be understood in terms of learning transitions. For example, higher education pedagogy is now set within a bureaucratic frame of reference and this has serious implications for how teaching and learning is and can be conceived and more importantly practised. In other words, it may not be possible to develop a transformational and participatory approach to teaching and learning without in the first place developing an understanding of all the salient factors in the setting, including transition processes. As a result, we developed a teaching and learning theory which is inclusive, responsive to the full range of factors in the environment, and also responsive to the role learning plays in the life-course.

The discourse of teaching and learning

Writing about teaching and learning in the modern academy can be something of a hit and miss affair. On one end of the scale are all the initiatives to improve the student experience (especially in a context of increasing awareness about personal cost and investment): the drive to have higher education teachers professionally qualified (as in the United Kingdom’s adoption through the Higher Education Academy of professional standards; cf. HEA, 2011); the efflorescence of teaching awards at institutional and at national level; the development of specialist teaching and learning units; the assignment of responsibility for teaching matters to senior staff at university, faculty and departmental level; the ubiquity of annual teaching and learning conferences; the emergence of specialist journals; the adoption of feedback and student satisfaction surveys; and the political drive for accountability for quality and intensity of teaching inputs and so on (see Bamber et al., 2009 for an overview). On the other end of the scale there is the growing, almost defeatist, claim that careers, institutional reputations, and above all success in access to competitive funding are all that counts; that, in the case of the United Kingdom, the periodic audits of research volume, quality, impact and environment are (in the words of a former government chief adviser) ‘the only game in town’ (Watson, 2011b: 23).

There is an irony here, in that as Steve Fuller and others have argued, both the historical origins and much of the modern development of the university have had, as a priority, instruction, education more widely, and the professional development of students. Research has been a means to an end more frequently than the reverse. In Basbøll and Fuller’s (2008: 45) words:

I believe that the university is a social technology for manufacturing knowledge as a public good. This goal is most clearly realized the more that research – which is always in the first instance novel and hence esoteric – is translated into teaching, and hence made available to people who had nothing to do with its original production and are likely to take that knowledge in directions other than those intended, or even desired, by the original researchers. This feat of epistemic justice is most obviously performed in the construction of curricular materials like course outlines, textbooks and other pedagogical devices.

Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has developed the powerful concept of the signature pedagogy to examine how the professions look at the ‘challenge of teaching people to understand, to act, and to be integrated into a complex way of knowing, doing and being’ (Shulman and Shulman, 2005: 231). He cites examples such as the clinical ward round, the law school case conference, the engineering project, the priestly apprenticeship and so on. This can, we believe, be expanded to cover the primary goals of whole higher education institutions in differing eras and contexts. Broadly, seven major pedagogical styles and techniques can be identified. They flex and overlap between each other.

The first is dogmatic instruction. This is fundamentally organised around a holy book or books and the associated commentary and exegesis. The modal inspiration is perhaps the educational parts of the sixth-century Rule of St Benedict, based as it is on humility and unhesitating obedience. The curriculum is holy reading and prayer, and during Lent each monk ‘is to receive a book from the Library, and is to read the whole of it straight through’ (Fry, 1982: 28–9, 70). Later on such discipline could be adapted as a style for secular purposes, as in Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy, or even some curricula developed in the wake of claims made by scholarly prophets or leaders. Most contemporary institutions with a religious dogmatic intent (e.g. the madrassahs of the sub-continent) are, however, now regarded as outside the family of higher education.

The second style was also present at the creation of the modern university and points to members of an expert group or profession (whether or not they act as Adam Smith’s ‘conspiracy against the public’). In the modern era this leads to expert credentialism, as in a licence to practice or to charge for services. The contemporary guardians of this arena are generally outside the academy, in the Professional and Statutory bodies (see e.g. The Framework of European Standards for Degrees in Nursing). A familiar teaching tool here is the use of case studies or simulations of decision-making or action in the real world.

Meanwhile, as an essential part of the liberal, emancipatory, theory of higher education, a pedagogical style develops which could be called individual self-discovery. The goal here is for the individual learner to achieve an independent point of view, and a personal voice. Ron Barnett captures the letting go, or the leap, that this implies, in his A Will to Learn: ‘The pedagogical challenge [emphasis in the original] lies in the student’s will being so formed that she wills herself to go forward into those spaces which may challenge her being itself’ (Barnett, 2007: 155). For a long time the key here lay in a close personal reading of the classics (religious and secular), of great books in general, and the construction of both canons of literature and idiosyncratic interdisciplinary collections of study like Oxford University’s Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) course, soon to be challenged as an ensemble by the new Blavatnik School of Government’s Master’s degree in Public Policy. In the United States the inspirational equivalent is the Harvard University core; a pattern of requirements that has been constantly tinkered with and overhauled in the modern era (Watson, 2007: 142–4).

The Socratic method and the fetishisation of the tutorial method play their part regularly (cf. Palfreyman, 2008). Oxford University, which has built a promotional strategy around one-to-one (or at least very small group) teaching, directed by senior scholars, finds it hard to acknowledge that this is by no means uniformly delivered to undergraduates. Meanwhile, historically, it is equally unpalatable to have to acknowledge that the modern system began as a form of cramming (by private tutors, usually away from the College) to allow ill-educated middle- and upper-class students to pass examinations, including those set for the Indian Civil Service. To be irresponsibly anachronistic, at its point of modern re-invention it was a species of ‘dumbing down’ (Harvie, 1976: 54–9). What really seems to count for students in this pedagogical context is personal feedback on written and other work, especially in the context of formative assessment. This is something around which the Open University has structured both its teacher-training and its learning strategy, even though the communication is technologically mediated, and there are significant differences between it and Oxford. It may also partly explain why the Open University does so well on key aspects of student satisfaction recorded in the United Kingdom’s National Student Survey (NSS).

A more programmatic form of external engagement reaches its height in the North American enthusiasm for service learning, or using the resources of the surrounding community for learning scenarios (cf. McIlrath and MacLabhrainn, 2007: 65–82, 103–70). At one end of the spectrum lies volunteering (whether or not from an expert base), as well as for course credit; at the other lies the educational goal of deep but temporary immersion in the dilemmas of particular groups in civil society.

Service-learning can, however, be less structured than another longstanding approach: Deweyite learning by doing. The Practicum has a long and honourable tradition in professional higher education in particular, often involving supervised but live practice, and sometimes overlapping with periods of probationary service, after graduation but before full qualification. Sandwich courses, with periods in industry, or what is called in the United States cooperative learning, play a distinctive part here. Each of these so far incorporates a mix of methods of inquiry, which can often be elevated to the level of research apprenticeship, whether in the care techniques of the sciences, social sciences or arts and humanities.

Finally, for many, especially in the modern world, graduation is not the sole target, or the final outcome. Post-compulsory education and training has become a much more flexible and messy affair, achieving its goals for many through complex patterns of life-long learning. Here, qualifications and part-qualifications need not be sequential or connected, in subject or level. They can be chosen, or prescribed for tactical, strategic or entirely serendipitous reasons (Schuller and Watson, 2009).

It should be noted that these pedagogical interventions (i.e. dogmatic instruction, expert credentialism, self-discovery, service learning, the practicum, research apprenticeship and life-long learning), as well as their curricular content, do not map directly onto the developing array of instructional environments and teaching techniques. This is especially true of the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). It has been noted above that the tutorial can just as easily be conducted down a line and asynchronously as from an arm chair and face-to-face. What began as basically the use of new technologies (like correspondence and broadcast) to attract new types of students (particularly, heroic, later in life, second-chancers) shifted to become a mainstream mode of delivery for established and conventional universities. Thus, for example, the British Open University has moved its basic platform from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to the Internet-based iTunes (Watson et al., 2011: 171–2); the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has evolved its simple publication of course material online to a sophisticated programme of custom-designed and assessment-friendly materials (see MIT OpenCourseWare); and institutions across the reputational range are lining up to join the Coursera Network. The latter now claims over one million registrations (although the organisers acknowledge that many of these will simply be browsing), followed by its rival Udacity (home of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs) at nearly three-quarters of a million (Young, 2012).

Another profound influence is the developing relationships between students of various types and those who are responsible for designing their academic and professional experience. Alongside the horizontal, or synchronic, tensions and dilemmas raised by external and internal pressures, universities also face a vertical, or diachronic, challenge arising from the relations between the generations. This is the theme of Heller and D’Ambrosio’s Generational Shockwaves (2008). Here on one level, ‘the faculty sometimes lags behind their students in technological prowess’ (ibid.: 4); on another, technologically adept faculty can be frustrated by how superficial and easily satisfied their charges can be. It is surprising how rare an exercise this juxtaposition of the lived worlds of the teachers and the taught is in the conventional higher educational literature. Not very long ago this was a major concern of those working with undergraduates; now it is a significant factor in postgraduate education, including several of the cases probed in the subsequent chapters.

Learning transitions: Conspectus

The structure of the book is as follows. In Chapter 2, we focus on the four groups of students that are our principal concern and begin the process of making sense of these categorisations. They are, however, imposed attributions; they are expressions of commonalities and differences between students, but undeveloped accounts of how those students actually structure their lives. Furthermore, they are embryonic attempts at trying to understand commonalities and differences and are therefore superseded in the book by, we hope, richer and deeper understandings of these different transitional groups.

Chapter 3 focuses on those transitions which are relevant to postgraduate study and their characteristics. These characteristics include the following: the transition’s structure/agency relations; its compliance capacity in relation to formal rules, regulations and norms; movement through time; the extent of its cultural embeddedness; the transition’s pathologising capacity; its position in the life-course; its focus; how knowledge is constructed during the transition; and how the transition relates to some end-point. We also focus in this chapter on transitions as they relate to moments in the development of the reason-giving capacity of the learner.

It is widely agreed in the literature that life-long learning is not a sequence of learning events from cradle to grave; that the social context in which learning takes place is significant; and that learning is not just a cognitive process but is socially mediated. A longitudinal perspective on learning which incorporates past as well as present learning experiences and contexts is needed and we use the notion of learning career to capture this. The relationship between being a learner and other aspects of a learner’s past and present life in a learning career is complex and cannot be understood without consideration of the way the learner constructs their identity and how this changes over time. It might appear that within a learning career, the concept of a clear transition, or stage, becomes redundant. Yet, key transitional stages have been identified. The danger here is viewing these stages as discrete and separate. Viewing such transitions from within a learning career means that we can argue that they are not discrete or uniformly experienced, but fluid and variable. Embarking on postgraduate studies can be viewed as a key transitional part of a longitudinal learning career in which particular intellectual, social and emotional challenges are likely to arise. This is the central theme of Chapter 4.

In Chapter 5, we examine the important idea of identity formation, which assumes a particular shape in relation to transitional activities. Students are positioned within: official rules and arrangements of resources; stories, narratives, arguments and chronologies; structures of agency; and discursive structures, all of which has implications for particular transitions. The student is placed within these arrangements (which are not static but changing) and has to find their way through them. And within the appropriation of these rules and many others is a notion of identity as a student. This never imposes in any absolute sense on the student; however, the person who actively seeks an identity as a student works to these rules and arrangements of resources. In doing this, the student brings to the process previous identities, knowledge constructs, skills, dispositions and so on, and thus the process of identity formation we are referring to here is an overlay.

In Chapter 6, we examine notions of academic literacy, and practices of writing. Particular constructions of academic knowledge regulate what can be claimed and who can claim certain meanings in their writing. Knowledge that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Mary Stiasny
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Four Transitions
• 3. Transitions – Attributes, Essences and Distinctions
• 4. Learning Careers
• 5. Identities, Pathologies and Power Relations
• 6. Widening Participation and Academic Literary Practices
• 7. Assessment Careers
• 8. Feedback and Feed-Forward Strategies
• 9. Participatory and Transformative Learning Pedagogies
• 10. Pedagogies for Transitions
• Annex One: Methodologies and Research Approaches
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index