Abstract
This book draws on more than a decade of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of University Teaching’s inspirational Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) – providing programs for individual academics, scholarly societies and colleges of different kinds to come together in teams to develop, promote and roll out Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
This book nevertheless troubles me, despite being someone who has from the late 1990s worked with and looked to Carnegie Fellows, used these authors’ seminal books (e.g. Hutchings’ Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and Huber’s Balancing Acts: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers) and attended most of the groundbreaking US SoTL conferences. It was the challenge of reading this from a UK perspective that made me take stock of where, how and if we in the UK can respond.
To a US audience, SoTL’s battle appeared as one against the pre-eminence of disciplinary research over teaching in academic reward, validation and recognition systems. For today’s academics in the UK, however, the battle is for integrity, in several senses: staying true to the academic vocation of professing, literally, one’s discipline. Such a battle needs academic autonomy, not in the denuded sense of ‘being free to teach anything in any way one fancies’, but being able to create, control and integrate teaching, research, outreach and institutional roles. The Carnegie Foundation’s Fellows in the late 1990s were indifferently passionate about their discipline’s knowledge-making transformatory potential in both teaching and research activities; similar was the approach of those prominent discipline academics who set up the UK Learning and Teaching Subject Centres.
SoTL transferred to a UK with a centralised HE governance that for reasons of finance and control was concerned firstly to separate teaching and research institutions as having different remits, and secondly to separate academics’ functions as teachers and researchers. Both separations threatened academics’ integrity; we needed Carnegie’s wholeness of vision. CASTL was well placed to speak to academics who were equally passionate about their discipline and their teaching, rather than seeking to create a parallel silo and career track. CASTL teams united research intensive with ‘teaching’ institutions to work together, bringing leading discipline thinkers into discussion of all their discipline’s transformational processes. This involvement of research intensive universities (formerly known in Carnegie’s Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as R1’s) was particularly salutary in the UK as our Russell Group of top universities are particularly resistant to inquiring into their own teaching!
But as SoTL grew from its late 1990s development in seminal Carnegie publications, it became a little evangelical: a new sheep-from-goats dividing movement for those who had seen the light, the importance of the scholarly study of teaching and were keen to share their enlightenment. Rather than unifying the academics’ problematically plural roles, it seemed more concerned to hive off teaching in order to promote it as a validly scholarly activity, separate and separable from the other scholarships.
The whole thrust of this ‘immature’ US SoTL appeared, in countries like the UK, Scandinavia and Australia with long traditions of research into student learning, to be doubly divisive as well as narrowly appropriating. In its emphasis on a scholarship of teaching and learning with not just equal but similar validity and esteem to ‘research’, it ran the danger of excluding our well-respected student learning research and research traditions and outlets (never on SoTL reading lists). And conversely, in seeing itself as a new and distinctive scholarship, it equally seemed to cut itself off from our important communities of action researchers; originating several decades ago in Healthcare and Social Work but rapidly extended to all reflective practitioners, action research has since the late 1990s enabled individuals to examine and share their own practice, using appropriate methodology and dissemination channels.
This seemed to be creating a double silo: from on the one hand our specialist Education research into student learning and Higher Education, and on the other from the tradition of academics as reflective practitioners of their own discipline. This was problematic in two ways. The involvement of discipline academics in the development of their disciplines’ curricula, knowledge making and student engagement and achievement was seemingly side lined by a SoTL literature that was more general and less theoretical than their own, and yes was burdensome (Kreber, 2002). And at the same time, the development of discipline academics as reflective practitioners taking responsibility for and unifying their disciplines’ teaching and epistemology was seemingly diminished by the expertise of scholars of T and L.
Reading this book as a CASTL UK team leader was thought provoking. When we in the Humanities Higher Education Research Group started this journal in 1999, we linked many humanities scholars in CASTL’s national fellowship program, chosen as those transforming their discipline by exploring innovation in disciplinary knowledge- and meaning-making processes, with similar innovators in the UK. So we in AHHE’s UK editorial team resisted such initiatives as the UK Arts and Humanities Research Funding Council’s Knowledge Transfer scheme, with its implication that research uniquely creates knowledge to be transferred in and to teaching. We resisted, likewise, ‘research-led teaching’. (I impishly asked the Director of the Funding Council what he was going to do about ‘teaching-led research’ – which I glossed as innovation in disciplinary knowledge-, meaning- and value-making coming from the classroom. He said he needed notice of the question, but after many requests I published only my question in an AHHE Editorial (Parker, 2007; and see Huber, 2006).)
As SoTL became powerful in the US, in its desire for validity and acknowledgment, it seemed to move away from its roots in enabling individual teachers to improve their practice, towards creating what was in effect a discipline of its own, with strict Social Science research methodology, pre- and post-testing, control groups, etc. and a scholarly literature that requires mastery. Like, but not overlapping with, the UK’s highly respected student learning and teaching research, this tended to specialist and generic rather than discipline-based expertise. We were apparently offered a new and separate educational discipline, with recognised scholars of teaching and learning and SoTL-embedded structures – Institutes, advocates, Faculty Learning Communities, etc. – rooted neither in specialist Educational research nor in discipline teachers’ own practice. Thus SoTL tended to increase rather than bridge the research-teaching divide, seemingly excluding discipline academics from the study of their own teaching unless they were free to, in effect, become expert in a completely different domain. (It was in this context that this journal was founded, specifically to provide a forum for Arts and Humanities academics to publish their disciplinary research in their own discipline’s teaching, learning and meaning- and value-making practices.)
As the institutionalisation of the SoTL movement progressed, with ISSOTL, conferences and journals, so did its reputation as a church demanding of its adherents proficiency in a generic and separate expertise. (Carolin Kreber, 2002, importantly pointed to the sheer demands of SoTL over and above the demands of being a scrupulously attentive and informed teacher and academic.) CASTL, however, extended internationally in 2005, seemed from the UK to be keeping SoTL ‘true’, standing as it did for thoughtful inclusiveness and plurality of approaches, weaving them to a common purpose. Carnegie’s emphasis on fostering disciplinary college teaching as well as the Foundation’s general stature in the higher education community built over a century of well-regarded reports and programs, helped to counteract such institutional, methodological and disciplinary ‘schisms’. This had the effect of countering the development of a ‘SoTL’ silo: the seminal international society for History, HistorySOTL for example, furthers and values History’s particular teaching, learning and inquiry. Such inquiry may embrace quantitative Social Science methods but may equally bring insights to SoTL from illuminative case studies, from ethnography, from comparative cultural studies, from ‘what if’ counterfactual and other forms of writing history.
The UK’s answer to the bringing together of teaching and research was the network of Learning and Teaching Subject Centres, new HE Academy supported groups headed by well-respected academics eminent in disciplinary research, tasked and funded to promote the development of discipline-specific teaching. Enabling academics to examine disciplinary agendas and investigate knowledge-making practices at the curriculum and assessment level, they created disciplinary teaching and learning communities, with newsletters, meetings and other developmental opportunities.
In some ways, they had a similar effect to CASTL, breaking down the elite/other and teaching/research divides by drawing together discipline academics concerned with innovation in their field and challenging them to foster teaching. Successful Subject Centres attracted top discipline academics to develop their discipline as taught and learned in all kinds of higher and further education institutions. They were essentially practising what SoTL was preaching; it is not surprising that the first ISSOTL special interest group – History – was spearheaded by the directors of the UK History Subject Centre.
Aah, the Golden Age …
But by the time that SoTL became truly international, extending CASTL and SoTL conferences outside the US and establishing the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and, in 2012, the international journal for Teaching and Learning Inquiry, there had been a rapid change of scene in the UK. Or, more centrally, a change of structure, which meant that SoTL presented a major problem for us in the UK in terms of the subject of this book: SoTL’s institutional program, to embed not teaching and learning but scholarship of teaching and learning, in Higher Education. For the UK’s recent history has been peculiarly denuding for academics, based as they always have been in a subject discipline and responsible for that discipline’s knowledge making, both in the research lab and institute and in the university classroom. SoTL siloing of teaching and learning away from that unifying disciplinary identity is threatening. For since the closing of those precious and much missed Subject Centres, academics in the UK have lost their home for disciplinary communities of practice and the project to develop discipline-specific pedagogy.
For these reasons, the book should be read by every Pro Vice Chancellor, Dean for Teaching and Learning, and administrator in charge of academic development and Teaching Quality assessment in the UK. It is particularly timely in that the latest ‘tsunamis’ affecting UK universities – knowledge making and teaching escaping the university in forms such as crowd sourcing and MOOCs; recent governmental initiatives: Research Evaluation Framework (REF), teaching-only contracts, self-finance for non-STEM courses – all spotlight the need for thoughtful attention to good (or, sadly, ‘effective’) teaching and the valuing, improving and rewarding of ALL quality scholarly activities outside the REF.
Since 2000, the UK has seen waves of central and political initiatives designed to discriminate teaching from research institutions – with varying results. The Teaching Quality Assessment exercise, which for the first time opened up university teaching to peer scrutiny, was quickly replaced by a linked Quality Assurance and funding system aimed at dividing universities into teaching and research institutions. Offering institutions the chance to ‘bid’ separately for teaching and research status and money was expected to produce a dual league table of research and teaching institutions, which failed because ‘teaching’ institutions immediately arranged research leave for their expert teachers and ‘research’ institutions paid new attention to teaching… But the situation is further complicated by the ‘post 92’ universities having the energy and vision to revitalise curricula and develop new fields of study; while ‘Loxbridge’ (London, Oxford and Cambridge universities) have the ‘Meisterlehre’ tradition of field-leading academics (who in the US would generally ‘teach’ only postgraduates and research stars) conducting individual and small group undergraduate tuition. The ‘Meister’ however are very resistant to the suggestion that they could in fact be taught to teach, to the notion of Masters of SoTL with separate expertise.
In the command and control culture of UK HE (where academic-related rather than academic staff have taken over all aspects of Quality Enhancement and Quality Assurance: a feature, it seems from this issue’s Editorial, common to UK and Australian HE), this book’s agenda – to embed SoTL in institutional structures – has to be carefully promoted, since disciplinary academics are being excluded, as ‘amateurs’ or at best ‘expert academic practitioners’, in favour of ‘experts in academic practice’. So, rather than the US experience of ‘a buzzing hive of initiatives to improve the learning experience for college students, to increase their rate of completion, and to raise their level of achievement’, as this book’s inspiring Prologue has it, we have, rather, a new professionalism replacing the vocation of professing.
In 2010, the UK HE Academy, for political and financial reasons, shut down the Subject Centres and centred itself on a mission to be a professional association for university teachers, along the lines of powerful, regulatory and accrediting bodies like the British Medical Association and the Law Society. The professionalization of university teaching involved, for the first time, a process of accreditation to the HE Academy and/or a postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in HE. While Carolin Kreber was raising the question of how heavy a demand was that of SoTL expertise, the systems were being put in place to bypass ‘scholarship’ altogether and divide academic roles into constituent and manageable [sic] tasks. Unlike the SoTL developed out of the Carnegie, inclusive, transformative, integrative – which emphasises teachers’ autonomy, advocating a broad set of practices that engage teachers in looking closely and critically at student learning for the purpose of improving their own courses and programs. It is perhaps best understood as an approach that marries scholarly inquiry to any of the intellectual tasks that comprise the work of teaching – there has been a fast developing command and control audit and performance management culture in the UK, as elsewhere in European and Australian universities; pursuing the same divide-and-rule policy (dividing teaching from research, teachers from researchers) that had earlier failed.
All that said, January 2014 will mark a new phase for UK academics, and senior university Deans and Pro Vice Chancellors would do well to have this book for their Christmas reading in preparation. The UK's latest Research Evaluation exercise, which has had every academic's research output scrutinised, runs to the end of 2013. Many lecturers' research publications will not be entered because they are deemed not sufficiently impactful or not of sufficient quality or not to fit the selected university research themes to be presented. That will bring into sudden prominence the ‘performance management question': what aspects of academics' various roles and responsibilities should now be managed and assessed in the quarterly or monthly review, now the spotlight of research publication has been turned off?
Now is the time in the UK to look with fresh eyes at all the scholarships that come into and flow from university teaching: engagement, integration, a more holistic and productive inquiry and teaching and learning. This book is about embedding culture change, and UK universities need it.