Abstract
Few would argue that when many of our current senior staff began their academic careers teaching and learning were words more readily associated with high schools than universities. Academic practice focused on research. Lecturing was an occupational obligation, often done poorly and definitely not rewarded beyond what could be realized through personal satisfaction. When Ernest Boyer first identified the scholarship of teaching in his 1990 report Scholarship Reconsidered, he advocated a broader definition of academic work, and with it a new direction for the academy as a whole. Boyer argued that teaching should be pursued as a scholarly activity of equal importance with research and it should use the same models and criteria to achieve and recognize excellence. Twenty years later it is timely that Pat Hutchings, Mary Taylor Huber and Anthony Ciccone explore what has happened in those intervening years in response to Boyer’s challenge. To what extent have we collectively embraced Boyer’s position? How has the academy supported that direction and how has the academic enterprise changed as a result? More importantly perhaps, what is left to be done?
In their book The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered, Hutchings, Huber and Ciccone trace the changes that have occurred in the academy that realize Boyer’s objectives, including a growing grass-roots interest in student learning and the impact of national initiatives such as the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Although much has been achieved, it is not enough that individuals or small groups have refined their own practices. Rather, the genuine purposeful engagement of academic institutions with the scholarship of teaching is necessary to ensure that the importance of teaching and learning is recognized and those who practise it well are rewarded. Hutchings, Huber and Ciccone see ongoing improvement as possible only if teaching and learning become ‘better integrated into the fabric of campus life’ (2011: xix). They conclude with eight recommendations to take the academy forward to realize effective integration.
Although scholars in the United States dominate the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), it is still an international movement. The issue of institutional engagement is equally as important in Australia as elsewhere. How relevant are the recommendations of The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered to the Australian context?
There is much that has happened in the Australian university sector over the last 20 or 30 years that underpins institutional support for Boyer’s interpretation of the academic enterprise. The market-driven approach to higher education, represented best by the reintroduction of fees after the halcyon Whitlam era of free tertiary education, has meant that students are in a strong position to demand good teaching. As the Australian university sector developed a higher global profile and as more providers entered the higher education market, the Commonwealth Government demanded greater accountability. After structural reorganization in the 1980s came quality assurance audits in the early 1990s. The improvement of teaching practice in universities which, after all, is the essential message of Boyer’s scholarship of teaching, became incorporated into the quality assurance process first institutionalized in Australian University Quality Agency in 2000 followed by Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency in 2011. The regulatory framework combined with the impact of a consumer-based student market has meant that all tertiary education providers must elevate teaching and learning to higher prominence.
The thrust of Hutchings, Huber and Ciccone’s work is to look at the ways in which the university as an institution has incorporated the SoTL into the operation of campus activities. Certainly, this has happened in Australia. New staff are inducted into teaching practice with access to graduate courses in teaching and learning, professional development is supported by specialized teaching and learning centres, teaching evaluation is part of the normal cycle of university-wide quality assurance processes, promotion systems have changed to allow staff to access the promotion ladder through excellence in teaching as much as through excellence in research, and Faculty positions have been created such as the Associate Deans (Teaching and Learning) to prioritize teaching and learning at the middle management level. Moreover, it is now rare to find staff not prepared to access assistance to improve their teaching or to take teaching evaluations seriously.
In Australia one of the main drivers raising the profile of teaching and learning in universities was the creation of the Carrick Institute which became the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC). Although hastily abolished in an attempt to redistribute government money to pay for crippling natural disasters in 2010 and 2011, the decision was revisited in response to much public protest. As a result of a review undertaken by British consultant Alison Johns, the new Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) opened in November 2011. Government support for sector-wide initiatives channelled through the ALTC and subsequently the OLT not only contributed a huge injection of funds into teaching and learning research, but prioritized teaching and learning in a way not previously seen.
Perhaps one of the most important products of the ALTC/OLT initiatives was the encouragement of a culture of collaboration within the university sector. In a highly competitive funding environment and one in which university reputations are jealously guarded, such collaboration needed outside encouragement to occur. The ALTC/OLT not only funded projects with sector-wide implications, but insisted on the dissemination of results and the construction of networks to support further collaborative ventures. The support given by ALTC/OLT to the collaborative implications of sector-wide teaching and learning reform has undeniably hastened and increased the impact. We now enjoy a much more co-operative culture within and across Australian universities.
Also of great importance in furthering the institutional support for teaching and learning is the awards programme sponsored by the ALTC/OLT. The availability of prestigious teaching awards and citations, all enhanced with an attractive and useful cash payment, have encouraged teaching staff to seek recognition for their work. The application process demands a reflective approach to teaching practice and evidence of innovation but also, the very existence of these awards has created a broader culture of recognition within universities. It was always difficult to prove excellence in teaching, but now with better metrics available through course monitoring and teaching evaluations as well as an established national culture of recognition, it is much easier for staff to demonstrate their success. In turn, this means that many staff now actively pursue identifiable teaching success as a prime goal in their academic career. This can only benefit teaching and learning as a whole.
Although Hutchings, Huber and Ciccone make eight recommendations I want to comment on four that I think have great weight in the Australian context. Their second recommendation is to ‘support a wide range of opportunities to cultivate the skills and habits of inquiry into teaching and learning’. We need to recognize that staff approach SoTL from different levels of competence and directions of personal interest. Some academics engage with enthusiastic endorsement and others are dismissive. For some staff SoTL is already a very profitable research path. For others SoTL will only ever offer a repository to dip into when seeking support for teaching ideas, or a context to assist them to document their teaching practice. Each different response has its own legitimacy. It is essential that universities offer a range of support structures and activities to reach individuals and groups where they currently sit along that spectrum in order to move the university culture forward as a whole.
Hutchings, Huber and Ciccone’s fifth recommendation asks us to ‘work purposefully to bring faculty roles and rewards into alignment with a view of teaching as scholarly work’. Although many universities now work with a range of compulsory teaching evaluation metrics which allows management to look carefully at how the university is tracking in the teaching stakes, one area that has not received as much attention is the issue of peer review. Peer review in many universities is undertaken for the purposes of gaining evidence on teaching quality for promotion but is not recognized as an activity for formative feedback in the normal process of treating teaching as an ongoing activity open to improvement. Although the ALTC sponsored projects on peer review this area is yet to be widely embraced. Instead universities still rely on student complaints to identify poor teaching, rather than seeing peer review as a support mechanism to improve teaching practice across the board.
The eighth recommendation points to the internationalization of SoTL. As a field, SoTL is very much driven by activity within North America and the United Kingdom. It is vital that more staff in the Australian tertiary sector tap into the huge knowledge base that currently exists internationally and, more importantly, join in. The SoTL community arguably contains the most generous of researchers. Collaboration, co-operation and learning through conversation are inherent to the ideal of spreading information about best practice. For Australian universities to benefit from the advances in this field international connections should be seriously sought and cultivated. The ALTC/OLT has promoted national conversation and the next logical step is to take this direction further still. This is especially important as we see a lot more international teaching collaborations developing with joint degree programs, more frequent student and staff exchange and the growth in cross-institutional enrolment.
The last recommendation I want to comment upon is: ‘Develop a plan and time line for integrating the SoTL into campus culture, and monitor progress’. The managerial revolution that overtook universities in the 1980s has focused very much on strategic planning at the macro level. Although the university might operate with a teaching and learning plan, there is little likelihood that this will also include a plan for the implementation of the integration of teaching as scholarship. Rather, SoTL will remain scattered across various activities, represented in a number of places and practised by individuals or small groups, and unlikely to be represented by a concerted university-wide commitment. Here we reach the crux of the matter. If we are to see the meaningful integration of SoTL into the fabric of university life, then there needs to be a concerted effort to do so represented in a university-wide teaching and learning strategic plan. Only then will the institution demonstrate real commitment to this direction.
Hutchings, Huber and Ciccone have given us a valuable addition to Boyer’s original proposal. It is not enough to advocate the scholarship of teaching at the individual level, but rather it is now necessary to look carefully at pursuing an institutional-wide approach and to make real the ideals of collaboration and co-operation in teaching and learning.