Tracing pedagogic frailty in arts and humanities education: An autoethnographic perspective

Abstract

This paper offers an approach to support the development of reflective teaching practice among university academics that can be used to promote dialogue about quality enhancement and the student experience. Pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching within universities by helping to maintain a simultaneous focus on key areas that are thought to impede development of pedagogy. These areas and the links that have been proposed to connect them are interrogated here through the dialogic analysis of a framed autoethnographic narrative produced by a community ‘insider’ who has considerable experience of teaching within the arts and humanities. This person-centred methodology acknowledges the subjective nature of teaching and gives voice to important stories that otherwise might not be heard formally, and allows an academic to rehearse this voice individually before comparing it with others in the institution.

Keywords

Autoethnography concept mapping pedagogy personalised narrative self-reflection teaching

Introduction

‘reflective practice is one significant way that teachers attain the hallmarks of a profession, acquiring more specialised knowledge, gaining greater insights about responsible practice, learning to function as a decision-maker and earning more prestige in the larger community.’ (Jalongo and Isenberg, 1995: 129)

The energy expended by universities to enhance the quality of teaching received by their students may be used more efficiently if it is channelled through a common framework. Where there is no unifying concept to integrate these efforts the resulting piecemeal consideration of teaching elements (such as classroom practice, assessment techniques, technology-enhanced learning and feedback, for example) fails to bring related components into simultaneous focus with the result that teaching development lacks focus. In an attempt to address this problem this paper interrogates the emerging concept of pedagogic frailty (Kinchin, 2015, 2016) as an integrative term to articulate a complex situation. The nature of frailty is traced here through a community insider’s autoethnographic narrative. This narrative is developed in response to reflection on a set of five concept maps constructed within a dialogic interview to correspond to the five dimensions of pedagogic frailty. Once the autoethnographic subject has clarified his thoughts using the method described, he will be in a position to explore areas of potential frailty (i.e. where his views are in conflict with the dominant views held by others within his institution).

Pedagogic frailty

Concepts from other disciplinary areas can sometimes be helpful in making useful analogies in educational research. Within the clinical research literature, ‘frailty’ is considered to develop as a consequence of a decline in a range of factors which collectively results in an increased vulnerability to sudden adverse actions triggered by relatively minor events (Clegg and Young, 2011). Various indicators of frailty have been identified and include the inability to integrate responses to change in the face of stress (Rockwood et al., 1994); the loss of adaptive capacity due to a loss of complexity (Lipsitz, 2002); the wear and tear that results over time by repeated efforts to adapt to change (Seeman et al., 2002); the sense of fatigue when change is implemented without consultation (MacIntosh et al., 2010). These issues offer considerable resonance with the pressures felt by academics teaching at university. In the context of higher education teaching, one might observe pedagogic frailty (Kinchin, 2015, 2016) when colleagues find the cumulative pressures of academia eventually inhibiting their capacity to change practice in response to an evolving teaching environment, leading them to adopt what they might consider a ‘safe' and sustainable pedagogic approach (Canning, 2007). Pedagogic frailty may contribute to recently observed occurrences of the arrested professional development of some university teachers, in which they have been described as experienced non-experts (Brody and Hadar, 2015; Van Waes et al., 2015).

Conservative approaches to teacher development can lead to a convergence on traditional views of teaching in which the transmission of content is seen to dominate and teaching is structured as a procedural chain of practice (Kinchin et al., 2008). This is particularly the case in high-ranking institutions, where prestige is given to established practices and traditions to the extent that ‘universities hang on to past practices to the point of imperilling their futures’ (Christensen, 2011: xxii). In their report on the stratification of pedagogy across UK universities, Stevenson et al. (2014: 39) conclude that the overall picture is a complex one, ‘with institutions striving to distinguish themselves as distinct while at times, homogenising their approaches to teaching excellence, pedagogic practices and the overall student experience.’ Within such an environment the routinization of expertise to increase efficiency of teaching shapes the dominant discourse at the expense of innovation and to the extent that colleagues may find the idea of the ‘scholarship of teaching’ to feel like an unhelpful distraction from their daily work (e.g. Boshier, 2009).

Based on interviews with academics, and on dialogues with participants on academic development programmes at the authors’ institution, a tentative model of the relationships between the dimensions of pedagogic frailty has been proposed by Kinchin (2015, 2016) (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

An outline model of the related dimensions of pedagogic frailty (after Kinchin, 2015).

Autoethnography

Autoethnography exhibits additional characteristics that distinguish it from other kinds of personal writing. In particular it offers personal commentary/critique on cultural practices; it embraces vulnerability with purpose and it attempts to create a reciprocal relationship with audiences in order to compel a response (Jones et al., 2013). These characteristics are exhibited within this work and reflect the underlying aim of supporting academic development. Acosta et al. (2015) have drawn from analytic (Anderson, 2006) and collaborative (Chang et al., 2013) autoethnography in order to maximise rigour and trustworthiness of studies. The work presented here fits with this framework. It exhibits the three characteristics of analytical autoethnography listed by Anderson (2006) to maximise methodological transparency. That the autoethnographer is a full member of the research setting; appears as a co-author of the published text; and is committed to an analytical research agenda. Additionally, collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2013) supports a dialogic, interactive process in which the researcher discusses and interrogates findings as a form of triangulation. Acosta et al. (2015: 4) therefore define their framework for collaborative and analytic autoethnography (CAAE) as a form of enquiry where,

‘practitioner-researchers investigate the contextualised self and Other via personalised narratives, self-reflection, and dialogic discussions; and connect their new knowledge to socio-economic, cultural, and political determinants of individual and group beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours.’

The single case study

The single case study is an established method with precedents in the pedagogical literature (see for example Cribb and Gewirtz, 2006; Sembi, 2012). Its strength is to offer the intensive study of one individual. The richness of the data produced can be a valuable tool for the ‘bottom up’ generation of research questions and identifying previously unnoticed phenomena of potential importance, which can otherwise be lost within inter-individual variance (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

An overview of the single-case study approach.

Method

As a tool to frame the autoethnographic narrative, an introductory concept map-mediated interview was used here to encourage the interviewee to focus on the elements of pedagogic frailty. The concept map-mediated interview (as detailed by Kandiko Howson and Kinchin, 2014) emphasises the links between the ideas discussed. The standard interview set-up requires the interviewer to present questions to the interviewee in order to gain access to the interviewee’s individual insights and personal perspective. This is achieved by engaging in dialogue (verbal or textual) that is by its very nature linear in structure. Within that linear narrative, it is then up to the researcher-interviewer to determine the underlying conceptual structure within that dialogue and to construct an interpretation of the interviewee’s understanding.

The dynamics within the concept map-mediated interview are rather different. Here the interviewee exposes his/her knowledge structure during the interview through the construction of the concept map that emerges within the dialogue between the interviewer and interviewee. Previous studies have shown concept mapping (Novak, 2010) to be the ideal tool to make learning visible and to externalise the relationship between public and personal perspectives on learning in higher education (Hay et al., 2008; Kandiko et al., 2013). The interviewer’s role is then to prompt the interviewee with questions to encourage him/her to interrogate his/her own knowledge structure as it emerges on the page in order to maximise the map’s explanatory power (Kinchin, 2016). The interviewer no longer has to impose a structure on the linear narrative, but rather interpret the structure that has emerged from the dialogue (Kinchin et al., 2010). This process makes it less likely that the interviewer will impose an inappropriate knowledge structure based on his/her prior conceptions, whilst the dialogue between the interviewer and interviewee helps to ensure that the structural grammar of the resulting maps is consistent so that later comparison may be possible.

The interview dialogue results in a set of five concept maps corresponding to the five dimensions of pedagogic frailty, which then form the main artefacts for analysis. Whilst no restrictions were verbalised to the interviewee in terms of the number of concepts to be included, the process used 38 x 50 mm self-stick notelets to act as the nodes on which the concept labels were written, and these were affixed to a sheet of A3 paper, so that once the sheet was becoming full, the interviewee tends to stop adding new ideas. This provides a helpful mechanism to regulate the size of the resulting maps, which in turn helps the interviewee to concentrate on the key ideas they want to present in the available space. The ability to be concise within a concept map is regarded as one of the criteria for excellence (Caňas et al., 2015). Once the interviewee is happy that the resulting map gives a fair representation of their perspective, it is digitised by the interviewer and returned to the interviewee who is then invited to make any amendments. The set of maps provides a helpful external arena to stimulate the writing of the narrative that is then interrogated by the researcher/interviewer in order to tease out emergent themes, in dialogue with the interviewee and with reference to the appropriate research literature. Archer (2008: 400) has commented on how ‘writing about academia is inherently challenging, particularly for those “on the inside”’, and for some interviewees, the construction of certain parts of a concept map that focuses on their professional experience can prove to be an emotional experience as they recall the ups and downs of their career.

The importance of the maps is to represent the dynamic situation occupied by the academic rather than offering a static list of attributes where interactions are not indicated. An individual map is, in isolation, unlikely to offer any magic solutions to issues attributed to pedagogic frailty, so much as to provide a springboard for stimulating dialogue so that different perspectives can be identified, explored and understood. This paper therefore focuses on the method of revealing and interrogating an individual perspective as this is the essential precursor to such dialogue. The narrative excerpts that follow (indented text) are framed by the participant’s concept maps of each dimension of the overall model (Figure 1).

Ethical considerations

No other parties were directly involved in the research outlined in this paper. However, we acknowledge that autoethnography still has the potential to raise ethical concerns (e.g. Tolich, 2010). Chang (2008: 68) has commented that protecting the privacy of others, who may appear as ‘background characters’ within an autoethnography may be difficult. This is because the identity of the autoethnographer cannot be bracketed out from the research (Holt, 2003). We have, therefore, made every effort to avoid comments that could lead to the identification of ‘others’ within the narrative.

The personal journey

Biographical context

The autoethnographic subject is an experienced higher education practitioner, currently employed as a Senior Lecturer at a leading university in South-East England. A humanities-oriented researcher working primarily in the areas of historical and critical musicology, he has recently completed a three-year School-level tenure as Director of Learning and Teaching, providing strategic leadership across 10 different arts disciplines. His professional activity has led him to be awarded a National Teaching Fellowship (2013) as well as Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) (2015). He holds postgraduate degrees in both music and education, and has published pedagogic research addressing themes of teaching in the arts and humanities (e.g. Wiley, 2015). His inclusion in this study is made on the basis of acknowledged excellence in learning and teaching as well as his familiarity with autoethnographic approaches from previous research. This includes reflective writing on his professional development in relation to programme leadership (Wiley, 2014), which, although not explicitly framed as autoethnography, was conceptually similar. He has also utilised autoethnographic methods in several current research projects (e.g. Wiley, in preparation; Wiley and Franklin, 2017). The interviewee’s prior experience with self-reflective approaches in the scholarship of teaching and learning may account for the level of detail and linkage in the pedagogical maps created for this study, relative to those formulated during analogous projects conducted by the same interviewer (e.g. Kinchin and Cabot, 2016; Kinchin et al., 2016).

Regulative vs. instructional discourse

The level of detail of the concept maps prompted extensive reflection by the interviewee in formulating his autoethnographic narrative, a representative cross-section of which is quoted in the following sections by way of supporting discussion of the concept maps. Autoethnographic enquiry necessarily centres on one informant alone, by way of illustrating his or her relationship to a larger social or cultural setting (Chang, 2008; Etherington, 2004). The interviewee’s reflection prompted by the regulative discourse map in Figure 3 evidences the extent of the plurality that may nonetheless be encapsulated, even when considering a single degree programme:

Figure 3.

Concept map of regulative vs. instructional discourse.

One general-purpose undergraduate music programme on which I worked at a previous institution was designed such that the first year contained introductory teaching in each of the constituent areas represented by optional modules in later years of the programme. Its purpose was to bring every student up to the same level of baseline knowledge to enable them to choose their own path through their second and third years. However, it did give the programme the sense that its opening year was little more than a ‘taster’ for these different subject areas and that it was unimportant for students to seek to attain good grades, or even to engage with the teaching if they were not interested in pursuing the associated optional modules.

This narrative sheds light on the assumptions underpinning the concept map, since many broad-spectrum arts and humanities degrees will correspondingly attract students with a range of different interests and strengths. The interviewee’s home discipline, music, may encompass fields that are academic (historical musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music and film music studies), creative (performance, composition, creative practice), or applied (music technology, music business, music therapy). This landscape has become increasingly fragmented in recent years given, for instance, the proliferation of specialist programmes in popular music offered by UK higher education providers since the year 2000, which themselves embody significant diversity of approach (Cloonan and Hulstedt, 2012). Such situations present pedagogical challenges in terms of catering to the variation within a student cohort that represents multiple educational backgrounds, disciplinary preoccupations and cultural contexts. Given that class sizes for more specialised fields of study are sometimes not sufficiently large for the development of parallel streams to be resource-efficient, students with extensive background knowledge of a particular topic may find themselves being taught alongside those with little prior experience. The extent of student diversity may therefore create difficulties for the lecturer in addressing the needs of all learners as individuals, while keeping every member of the class engaged. As the interviewee further reflected:

One of my interdisciplinary modules in music and popular culture attracts class sizes of 25–40 students, comparatively large for its disciplinary and institutional setting. Since there are no prerequisites for enrolment on the module, typically some of these students will already be extremely well-versed in the subject in advance of the teaching, while others have little background in the area. This presents me with a challenge in judging how to pitch the classes in order to ensure that the more informed students are adding to their existing knowledge base without alienating those students to whom the basics of the subject still need to be delivered. The widely divergent levels of background knowledge substantially affected the teaching during one iteration of the module, but, in a previous presentation at a different institution just two years previously, did not emerge as a problem at all. This makes it impossible for me to predict, and plan for, the difficulties potentially posed to this teaching.

The autoethnographer indicates a number of factors with implications for pedagogic frailty that might arise from the diversity of the student cohort, which ultimately has its roots in the inclusivity agenda that has become a renewed institutional priority across the sector in recent years. While Morgan (2013: 252) has concluded that ‘if we design and manage our higher education institutions to be inclusive then we could actually find ourselves […] being in a position where “one broad approach” does effectively support all our students’, it would appear that, at least in terms of curriculum design of general-purpose undergraduate degrees, the arts and humanities have already been exploring solutions to these same issues for some time.

Relating pedagogy with discipline

The interviewee’s reflection upon the concept map in Figure 4 reveals that he found it the hardest of the five to formulate, which may go some way to explaining why it is the least detailed. One of the reasons why the themes of the pedagogy and discipline map may have presented a challenge concerns the extent to which higher education teaching makes consideration of specific pedagogical approaches to begin with. Kezar (2000: 449) has concluded, on the basis of data collected from some 100 staff from higher education institutions, that ‘There was general agreement among researchers and practitioners that higher education literature is not as significant or useful as it could or should be’. The matter may be particularly pronounced in the arts and humanities, which would not appear to have developed the same strong pedagogical traditions as are found in the sciences, where influential instructional models such as Peer Instruction (Mazur, 1997) are widely practised. However, this point alone does not fully account for the interviewee’s difficulty in addressing this dimension of pedagogic frailty, since he has explicitly drawn upon the scholarship of teaching and learning in his own academic practice (e.g. Wiley, 2015).

Figure 4.

Concept map of pedagogy and discipline.

Another reason why the pedagogy and discipline map may have proved problematic to construct relates to the tension inherent in many arts and humanities subjects between theory and practice, which tend to sit uneasily alongside one another within a degree programme. Kinchin (2017: 8) quotes the testimony of a performing arts academic, which is emblematic of this point: ‘I am teaching students to be actors, so why would I want to get them to write an essay about it[?]’. The issue at the heart of this line of enquiry concerns authenticity of assessment, in the sense explored by Ashford-Rowe et al. (2014: 207) of being ‘considered pertinent to a real workplace environment’. This accounts for the framing of the concept map around the headline theme of authenticity, echoed in the interviewee’s narrative:

My own academic practice alone has been sufficient to indicate to me that some assessments used in the arts and humanities will be extremely authentic, for instance, practice-based or industry-led assessments, vocational placements, performance and creative practice, and certain types of oral presentations; but that others, also regularly encountered, will be somewhat inauthentic, such as writing an academic essay on an aspect of the industry the student aspires to enter, or providing a commentary or reflective narrative on a work of art that he or she has created.

Here the interviewee sheds light on the reasons for the variability in the authenticity of assessments in the arts and humanities identified in the concept map. He continued by noting that, while some students will enter a profession that draws directly on the subject-specific training acquired during their degree, others will not. The range of graduate destinations is particularly rich in the non-vocational humanities subjects (Allan, 2006), to which the concept of authenticity may be less applicable. But even within more vocationally oriented training within the arts it would not be uncommon, for example, for students who specialised as performers ultimately to find employment as teachers or directors instead. In this respect, and mindful of Ashford-Rowe et al.’s (2014) eight-point critical framework, the same assessments may simultaneously be authentic and inauthentic with respect to different graduate destinations, and it may be impossible to make this determination at the time of examination as the students’ post-university employment will not be definitively known.

Research-teaching nexus

The dichotomy at the heart of the concept map in Figure 5, between research on the left and teaching on the right, is indicative of the current state of the national sector, though the autoethnographer’s view is not one that is necessarily shared with his colleagues whose involvement with research may be lesser or greater than his own. Notwithstanding the focus embedded in the UK Professional Standards Framework on cultivating an ‘integrated approach to academic practice’ (HEA, 2011), and more recently the emphasis placed in the Stern Review on ‘strengthen[ing] the vital relationship between teaching and research in HEIs’ (Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), 2016: 31), the two activities are typically positioned as oppositional to the extent that many academics are specifically contracted in either a research-led or teaching-only capacity. (Teaching-track staff may be employed on the basis of industry, professional, or enterprise-level experience rather than research profile, but this is far from the only reason for an academic to be identified as non-research-active.) Generally speaking, research tends to be prioritised above teaching; the 2016 White Paper, for instance, noted that ‘For too long, teaching has been the poor cousin of research’ (Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS), 2016: 12). In connection with this point, the interviewee recalled the following anecdote:

At a previous institution, one colleague found that he simply could not continue to deliver his high level of teaching quality as well as pursue research likely to be assessed at 4* or 3* in the upcoming REF exercise. He felt as though he was effectively being put in a position in which he had to choose between the two. He discussed the matter with his line manager who advised him that if this was indeed the case, then he should concentrate on his research at the expense of his teaching.

Figure 5.

Concept map of research-teaching nexus.

There may be short-term implications for an academic were they to neglect their teaching, both in terms of their immediate career prospects and potentially also the standing of the associated programme in the national league tables. Nonetheless, and despite the wealth of possibilities that exist for integrating research and teaching in the arts and humanities (e.g. Wiley, in preparation), there are a range of factors that have led to teaching being regarded as the lesser of the two activities, as well as demotivating for staff. As the concept map indicates, research tends to be prioritised above teaching for the purposes of rewards and recognition at all levels; this is illustrated by one proposal at the heart of the White Paper, the identified need for the introduction of a national Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) exercise as a counterpart to the already established Research Excellence Framework (REF) (BIS, 2016). Teaching also comes with an associated administrative burden that can take an academic’s time and attention away from research, which, together with the emphasis presently placed on measures of teaching quality and student satisfaction both institutionally and nationally (e.g. Murray and Smith, 2013), exacerbates existing tensions between them. The interviewee also noted that in the arts and humanities,

teaching may be driven by the interests and needs of the programme rather than by an individual’s research specialisms, to which there may be little direct connection […] given the comparatively small core programme teams, teaching may be assigned to non-specialists merely to plug gaps in provision, such that academics are called upon to deliver teaching in areas quite far removed from their research and in which they may therefore have little interest.

This reflection points towards the greater potential for teaching to be a demotivating activity specifically within these subject areas, particularly since funding opportunities that would enable academics to devote their time to the pursuit of research are considerably less plentiful than in the Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM) disciplines, Situations of this nature, which are quite contrary to the expectations of high quality teaching by acknowledged experts implicit in an era of substantially increased UK university tuition fees, might lead to the routine behaviour and disconnectedness with teaching networks that can result in the aforementioned arrested professional development (Van Waes et al., 2015: 811).

Locus of control

The concept map in Figure 6 illustrates the centrality to the locus of control of the frameworks that regulate the quality of academic provision and safeguard academic standards. However, given their institution-wide, one-size-fits-all nature, university regulations inevitably present certain restrictions that can inhibit pedagogy within the arts and humanities. The interviewee offered the following anecdote by way of example:

One undergraduate arts programme designed for creative practitioners, on which I recently taught, was assessed via a series of portfolio outputs and coursework submissions. It sat awkwardly within an institutional framework in which the last four weeks of each 15-week semester were reserved for examinations, which effectively meant that students on the programme had to complete their lecture series as well as all their assessment submissions within just 22 weeks of the calendar year (i.e. the first 11 weeks of the two semesters). This schedule posed a threat to pedagogy since the programme was unable to use the last four weeks of each semester for assessments. Its staff therefore had to create structures within which it was feasible for students to prepare their end-of-module assessments concurrently with their final weeks of teaching without overburdening themselves, and in which information crucial to completing these assessments had already been delivered earlier in the module. The teaching and assessment these staff developed would have been quite different had their schedules not been so restricted by university regulations.

Figure 6.

Concept map of locus of control.

The interviewee’s narrative points to the problems that can emerge within the arts and humanities when policy is formulated primarily on the basis of the needs of larger disciplines with larger cohorts, such as the science and business disciplines. For example, the previously mentioned White Paper (BIS, 2016) makes repeated allusion to STEM subjects but none at all to the arts or humanities; while the election manifesto of the current government referred exclusively to support for science in its pledge to maintain the academic excellence of UK universities (Conservatives, 2015: 35). Another major consideration for institutional policy development concerns compliance with the mandates of the Professional, Statutory and Regulatory Body (PSRB)s that provide professional accreditation for degrees in key disciplines; while many areas of the arts and humanities do not have PSRBs to begin with, they are nonetheless required to adhere to the same loci of control by association. Typically, university business is constructed around a traditional pedagogical model in which a series of lectures culminates in written examinations, with little room for departure from this pattern and hence only limited scope for innovation in teaching or assessment. This is a format alien to many arts and humanities subjects, which may emphasise continuous student learning across spans of teaching uninterrupted by formal examination periods, using a range of modes of assessment including coursework essays, portfolio-based creative practice, and public performance. The interviewee recollected that colleagues in the arts and humanities have not infrequently invoked comparisons to fitting square pegs into round holes when discussing this scenario, and offered a second anecdote exemplifying the pedagogical problems created by institutional adherence to a single structure:

One performing arts conservatoire at which I have recently worked mounts biannual public theatrical productions as an integral part of its programmes. However, it is bound by institutional regulations to deliver modules within set teaching periods, meaning that rehearsal and performance schedules are entirely determined by semester dates. Further complications arise in that the winter and spring vacations divide the semester artificially and give rise to stretches of several weeks in which rehearsals may not take place under the regulations, creating major problems for student learning as well as compromising the authenticity of the assessment since this hiatus considerably disrupts the rehearsal process. The spring vacation also falls in a different place each year relative to the semester in which it appears, which further problematises the matter in that every academic year therefore contains a different number of weeks available for rehearsal before and after the vacation.

These narratives yield a greater sense of the tensions underpinning the concept map. While fundamental to quality assurance, institutional regulations – and the national loci of control that give rise to them – can at the same time present obstacles to pedagogy, innovation, and authenticity specifically within arts and humanities disciplines.

Pedagogic frailty

The prominence of the theme of sustainability within the overarching pedagogic frailty concept map (Figure 7) signals the comparatively fragile position of the arts and humanities within the higher education sector. Its subject areas are typically much smaller than for the STEM and business disciplines, and in many cases, resource-heavy teaching may dictate a relatively modest upper limit for student recruitment. One important consequence of the smaller subject teams in the arts and humanities is that staff may therefore be required to undertake a variety of roles, which, as noted above with respect to teaching, may not always align well with their prior experience or specialisms. Research-led academic appointments, while inevitably made primarily on the strength of a candidate’s research profile and associated qualifications, would normally require the post-holder to undertake substantial teaching and administration duties as well. As the concept map identifies, this situation not uncommonly leads staff new to academia to arrive with a level of expertise in research that will not be matched in matters such as pedagogy, change management, or regulatory discourses. Pursuit of this line of enquiry led the interviewee to offer this reflection in relation to his own career trajectory:

One senior professorial colleague who mentored me at the very start of my full-time career in higher education observed that there seemed to be a generation of academic staff emerging who did not adequately understand institutional frameworks and how they operate. He suggested that I should endeavour proactively to educate myself in this area, sooner rather than later, to support my teaching activity. At the time I was frustrated at having to divert attention away from my research to immerse myself in institutional processes and practices, but I have been indebted to this advice in my subsequent career. In the years since it has become increasingly apparent to me that some staff, ranging from those new to academia to more senior appointments, lack the skills to engage with the regulatory frameworks encountered in Programme Boards, Boards of Examiners, and Validation Panels.

Figure 7.

Concept map of the overarching concept of pedagogic frailty.

In an attempt to bridge this skills gap, new appointees at many UK higher education institutions are often encouraged (if not required) to undertake an in-house, HEA-accredited teaching qualification if they do not already hold one. However, recent studies have revealed that such teaching development programmes, while positive, may have a variable, limited, or indistinct impact upon participants’ academic practice (e.g. Hanbury et al., 2008; Parsons et al., 2012; Stes et al., 2010). Pedagogic frailty is the likely consequence of academics being expected to fulfil roles in which it is implicitly assumed that they will already be well-versed in teaching and its associated institutional frameworks, when the reality is that they may not automatically possess such detailed knowledge and may be unable to acquire it without years of proactive skills development while in post.

The concept map also illustrates the challenges associated with the comparatively small student numbers in many arts and humanities subjects. Cohort size may place an added weight not just on the activities of marketing, recruitment, and conversion, but also on the general attractiveness of a programme, its accessibility to a wide pool of applicants, and its capacity to support students effectively in their transition into higher education. Contemplation of the latter issue in particular prompted the interviewee to the following recollection:

One arts degree on which I worked at a previous university implemented a major redesign in response to a central directive arising from an institutional Review of Undergraduate Education, ‘To ensure that all our undergraduate programmes support the development of basic skills within the first year of the curriculum’, in an attempt better to manage the transition from school to university. In consequence, the first year of the revised programme was centred round the delivery of skills, at the expense of the context that would have enabled students to put those skills into meaningful practice in their degree studies – thereby compromising the pedagogy underpinning the entire curriculum.

This anecdote speaks to a variety of challenges distinctive to the arts and humanities, encapsulated by the concept map, which have already been raised above: the less privileged status that its constituent subjects are accorded nationally and institutionally; the limited institutional understanding of the needs of all programmes given the richness of the overall degree portfolio; the complexity created by smaller programmes being necessarily broad in scope to appeal to a wide market; and the need continually to establish disciplinary relevance, which is of heightened significance given the relative dearth of PSRBs and the lack of a clear graduate destination for non-vocational degrees.

Conclusions

Autoethnography transcends mere autobiography (Belbase et al., 2008): it constitutes a key method for reflective professional practice (Austin and Hickey, 2007) as well as a contribution to the body of scholarly discourse (Acosta et al., 2015). In developing an autoethnographic narrative, this study has required the interviewee to lay out aspects of his life experience in as succinct a way as possible in order to address the different dimensions of pedagogic frailty through a series of concept maps and reflections. His original intentions with respect to this narrative were to revert to fictionalised prose so as to avoid implicating other individuals. However, he quickly abandoned this approach on the grounds that, while fictionalised or anonymised narrative is a recognised method in social science research, it felt counterintuitive to move away from the truth in an attempt to tell that truth. The interviewee may indeed have expressed certain concepts differently had the autoethnographic process not been modelled for public discussion, which inhibits the potential for confidential reflection (Chang, 2008; Holt, 2003), particularly since identification as a co-author precludes anonymity. That may account for the quite abstract vein in which some of the reflective narrative is cast, as well as the use of anecdotes that are largely historical in that most relate to periods in the autoethnographer’s career prior to his current post.

The interviewer’s input was a crucial part of the process, identifying themes to act as prompts for the concept maps as well as helping to draw connections between them that the interviewee had not specifically recognised, without overly constraining or conditioning the content. For example, while the interviewee had expected that (institutional) regulation would likely provide the focus of the locus of control map, he did not anticipate that authenticity would emerge as the unifying theme for the pedagogy and discipline map. Nonetheless, the concept maps that resulted from the interview were evidently an accurate reflection of the interviewee’s ideas in relation to pedagogic frailty, since he wanted to change very little when given the opportunity to revise them. That points towards the effectiveness of the autoethnographic approach and the robustness of the map-mediated interview process.

This exercise has highlighted that the context for the arts and humanities in higher education is strikingly varied, in terms of the sheer breadth of disciplines it encompasses as well as within a single subject. Hence the regulative discourse map was constructed around the theme of diversity, as seen both across the whole map and within thematic clusters such as assessment, prior knowledge and qualifications. The concept of variability likewise figured prominently in the pedagogy and discipline and research-teaching nexus maps, the latter indicating that that research and teaching may be closely allied activities in certain circumstances but quite disconnected in others. However, notwithstanding the extent of the diversity encapsulated in this framed autoethnography, there may be much common ground to be explored in arts and humanities higher education teaching. In a previous study by the lead author, comparative analysis of concept maps formulated in interviews with five academics from different disciplines across a single UK university revealed a degree of underlying consistency that transcended the significant variation between individual maps (Kinchin et al., 2016: 16).

Were a similar exercise to be undertaken by academics elsewhere in the arts and humanities, the themes given prominence within their maps might not be the same as those presented above and the links drawn between them might also be different, but it is likely that many analogous concerns would be represented. For instance, the research-teaching nexus map identifies that research is often an individual activity whereas teaching fundamentally involves working as part of a larger programme team. This would appear to provide a faithful reflection of the situation in the higher education sector across many of the traditional research-oriented arts and humanities disciplines. Whilst the individual that is the focus of this case study displays overlap with a ‘classical’ view of the tensions across the research-teaching nexus (Figure 5), the crucial issue that relates to pedagogic frailty is that many of his colleagues within the same faculty may hold contrasting or contradictory views where research and teaching are seen to function in complete harmony, or where (in some instances) research is not seen as relevant at all – the nexus being viewed to operate between teaching and professional practice rather than between teaching and research. It is at this level of resolution that frailty may be seen to operate in the system where there is a lack of overlap in the views of members of the same faculty. This case study, therefore, represents an essential first step by revealing an individual perspective, before it can be related to others. Critical interrogation of the discrepancies between different individuals’ concept maps, over and above this shared middle ground, would enable an enhanced understanding of the competing pressures felt by different academic colleagues (Wiley and Franklin, 2017). The exploration of individual profiles, such as the one illustrated here, provides a starting point for structured dialogue to explore frailty as it is experienced at the personal, micro-level of the individual teacher (e.g. Stevenson et al., 2017; Winstone, 2017) and at the macro-levels of quality enhancement (e.g. Land, 2017) or academic leadership (e.g. Jones, 2017).

Within this academic’s profile, as viewed across the five concept maps in Figures 3 to 7 and the accompanying narrative, there are a number of clear areas that are worth him exploring in dialogue with his colleagues in an attempt to develop a more explicitly aligned set of underpinning values (Barnes, 2014) and hence a more resilient approach to academic practice in which different dimensions of the pedagogic frailty framework are more closely connected. The assumptions concerning the diversity of students (Figure 3) and the diversity of assessments with which they are evaluated (Figure 4) offer an opportunity to integrate elements of two dimensions on the left-hand side of the model (Figure 1), whilst issues of self-sufficiency and ownership (highlighted in Figure 6) may impact upon the disarticulation of teaching and research (indicated in Figure 5). This is all coloured by the overarching feeling that the sustainability of arts and humanities teaching is not a national priority (Figure 7).

The authors see no reason why the autoethnographic framework advocated in this article would not yield an appropriate means to explore an individual’s preoccupations and pedagogic profile at all career stages – indeed, the personal view may shift during an individual’s career as the professional environment evolves or as his/her job role changes (Lygo-Baker, 2017). Reflective practice (e.g. Jalongo and Isenberg, 1995; Schön, 1983, 1987) has been a recognised means of professional development in higher education for decades and in certain respects, pedagogic frailty merely offers an updated and more codified version of approaches that are already deeply entrenched. While the subject of this study is a mid-career researcher, autoethnographic enquiry would seem particularly well suited to academics at the outset of their career given its potential for contemplation of the construction and maintenance of professional identity (Austin and Hickey, 2007; Shreeve, 2009). It might usefully be embedded within the standard processes of induction as well as annual appraisal and probation, where it would serve the additional function of contributing to institutional networking and to the establishment of productive working relationships with colleagues. At any career level, such enquiry would require a senior mentor to function as trusted interviewer in what would, for the reasons previously stated, inevitably constitute a private process.

More widespread introduction of pedagogic frailty as part of an institutional programme of continual professional development would necessitate the provision of exemplars by way of guidance on completion of the processes of mediated concept mapping, for the benefit of interviewer and interviewee alike. This need for exemplars will be felt most keenly beyond the contexts of the social sciences and health sciences, with which autoethnography is more readily associated (e.g. Acosta et al., 2015; Austin and Hickey, 2007). Conversely, such approaches would seem ideally suited to academics from arts and humanities disciplines, who are already well acquainted with narrative styles of writing as well as with scholarly epistemologies that may hinge on subjective interpretation rather than tangible scientific data. This article therefore seeks to fulfil the function of providing a model for subsequent autoethnographic enquiry in arts and humanities higher education, as well as a methodological comparator against which future studies may be evaluated. In the hope that others may follow, it breaks new disciplinary ground in laying solid foundations for critical self-reflection as professional development, offering a means by which to identify key factors that may impede an individual’s effective pedagogical practice.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Ian M Kinchin is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Surrey. He is engaged in the professional development of academic staff, whilst undertaking research into university pedagogy and the application of Novakian concept mapping. Ian is the editor of the Journal of Biological Education, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE). He supports Plymouth Argyle and is a Bruce Springsteen fan.

Christopher Wiley is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Learning & Teaching in the Department of Music & Media at the University of Surrey. His teaching encompasses Western classical music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, popular music studies, and musical theatre, and he has acted as a supervisor at all levels from undergraduate dissertations to doctoral research. Internationally recognised for his research in musicology, he has more recently pursued pedagogic research on electronic voting systems, student evaluation of teaching, and autoethnography. He is a National Teaching Fellow and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

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