The Research/Teaching Relation: A View from the Edge (original) (raw)
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Unpicking the links between research and teaching in Higher Education
2009
In recent years, numerous studies have discussed, examined and explored the links between research and teaching in Higher Education. These studies have given rise to anumber of concepts, such as the research-teaching nexus and research-informed teaching, but the relationships that these concepts have to one another, and to the wider research-teaching debate, is not well-understood by a significant number of academics. Here, eachof these concepts, and their relationship to one another, is briefly examined. This leads to a redefinition of research-informed teaching that acknowledges input from academic programme research, as well as pedagogic research and the scholarship of learning andteaching. This broader definition also gives rise to the notion of a research content continuum along which teaching may be placed according to its research content. Finally,an overarching context is proposed that provides a framework within which these variousconcepts may be viewed and understood, and which is referred to here as the research-teaching complex. It is hoped that this framework will aid development in this area and stimulate further discussion and debate.
Reshaping understandings, practices and policies to enhance the links between teaching and research
" … universities should treat learning as not yet wholly solved problems and hence always in research mode. " (Humboldt, 1810 translated 1970, quoted by Elton, 2005, 110) THE CHANGING INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT OF HIGHER EDUCATION The 'marketization' of universities needs to be seen in the context of major changes in international higher education. The expansion of higher education has led to a questioning of the traditional Humboldtian conception of the university as an institution where teaching and research are interrelated. Related developments include the problem of meeting the costs of this expansion, and in many national systems the concentration of research funding in a limited number of high level research focussed universities. Such developments question the long prevailing view that effective teaching needs to be underpinned by an institutional environment where most staff are involved in research. For example, in 2000 Howard Newby, then President of Universities UK, and soon to be Chief Executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), spoke at an early meeting organised by Roger Brown of what became the Research and Teaching Forum. The report of the meeting states: … the effect of massification (is) requiring HE to move away from a position as part of the publicly funded service economy to make an important contribution to the 'productive economy'. … Even the notion of the university is caught up in this change … in particular to the links between teaching and research. As such it will require greater clarity about the benefits the link brings. … In the context of the UK, Newby contended that … the expansion towards a mass system meant that funds are no longer adequate to support the increased population of staff to be involved in both research and teaching (Southampton Institute, 2000, p.7, emphasis added). We explore in this chapter the role played by what became known as the 'Research and Teaching Forum' – which we use as an umbrella term that refers to the series of initiatives Roger Brown initiated and led between 1998 and 2009. Here we focus on the impact of disciplinary research on teaching. We were both centrally involved in the Forum during that decade as Steering Group members and as participants in its events. A related discussion of the Forum is given by D'Andrea in her chapter.
Research on Humanities and Social Science, 2022
Conceptualising the research-teaching nexus within the context of the scholarship of teaching and learning is really intriguing. This is attributed to the different notions held by several scholars and stakeholders within the higher educational landscape. Though, previous studies have attempted to espouse how several stakeholders have thought about the link between research and teaching, however, these attempts have not materialised. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to espouse how lecturers conceptualise the research-teaching nexus, especially, within the context of the scholarship of teaching and learning and to further establish whether their conceptualisation differ across their ranks. Using the descriptive cross-sectional survey design, and through a questionnaire, 732 lecturers were selected using the stratified proportionate technique to respond to the survey. In order to ensure the construct validity of the self-developed questionnaire, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was conducted. An oblique, specifically, promax rotation was used, where the eigenvalue-greater-thanone rule was used to determine an appropriate number of factors to retain. In terms of data analysis, after a thorough check, the closed-ended questionnaire items were analysed statistically using descriptive statistics (i.e. frequency counts, percentages, means, and standard deviations) and inferential statistics (MANOVA) was also used to examine the statistical effects and differences between lecturers' rank and their conceptualisation. It emanated from the study that lecturers conceptualise the research-teaching nexus as knowledge currency, as well as, scholarship and curriculum orientations. And that a statistically significant difference existed between the levels of lecturers' rank and their conceptualisation of the link between research and teaching. It was therefore, concluded that several stakeholders and scholars have different connotations and representations of the researchteaching nexus, especially, within the context of the research-teaching nexus. It is therefore, recommended that University authorities should encourage their faculty to embrace and apply research-based teaching in their teaching and learning expedition. Lecturers must also ensure that pedagogical practices must be thoroughly prepared, constantly reviewed, and explicitly linked to the topic they teach by way of promoting scholarship at the highest level.
The research-teaching nexus revisited
Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Perspectives from UCL, 2018
Universities have a dual role: they are the key locations for research as well as higher education. These are obviously complementary in that students are learning in the environment where the latest discoveries are being made or discussed. However, the two make very different demands on staff attention, particularly since 1986 when the UK government linked funding directly with research outputs through the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (as it is currently known). This effectively made teaching the lesser sibling of the two, and education suffered as a result. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that a successful researcher will make a successful teacher and vice versa, even though academia is full of people who do manage both. Gourlay and Oliver provide an overview of how this ‘nexus’ of research and teaching has been positioned in recent years, and the various ways that people have attempted to think through the relationship between the two. One result of these discussions and experimentation, as they explain, has been a significant expansion in what we understand ‘education’ (and particularly ‘higher’ education) to be. Versions of ‘research-based education’ have been somewhere in the conversation for centuries, even if it has proven harder to implement than one might have thought.
Teaching and Research: A Vulnerable Linkage?
Teaching and Research in Contemporary Higher Education, 2013
The comparative project "The Changing Academic Profession (CAP)" brought together almost 100 scholars from various countries of the world. They collaborated for many years, even though their conceptual frameworks, methodological approaches and working styles were based on a bewilderingly wide range of disciplinary and paradigmatic biases as well as cultural backgrounds. This is eye-opening and creative in many respects. But it poses a considerable challenge to the editors of a book who seek to present a collection of parallel papers neatly following the same format and overarching framework. The readers of the chapters of this book will discover manifold findings and interpretations. But they will not fi nd a well-structured set of major results. It becomes the task of this fi nal chapter to offer a selection of a few issues that stand out amongst these notions and observations. 21.2 In Favour of a Linkage but Not a Balance The international comparative survey on the academic profession clearly suggests that the credo of the academic profession that is generally viewed to be indicative for the modern university has remained alive for about two centuries: Three quarters
Higher …, 2008
Background Aims Research design Institutional and departmental case studies Summary conclusions Further recommendations Main report The research and policy contexts Academics' experiences and perceptions of research and teaching: previous studies Academics' experiences and perceptions of research and teaching: disciplinary variations Academics' experiences and perceptions of research and teaching: departmental and institutional variations Academics' experiences and perceptions of research and teaching: a conceptual framework Research design and methodology Aims of the project Research design Ethical issues and procedures Case study institution 1: Blueshore University
Teaching academics in higher education: resisting teaching at the expense of research
The Australian Educational Researcher
The experiences of academics caught up in the rise of teaching academic (TA) (teaching-only) roles in Australia, the UK, the USA, and Canada, are not well documented in the literature. This paper describes a recent university restructure that resulted in a significant increase in teaching-only positions being created. Despite the claims by the university that teaching-only roles demonstrate excellence and innovation in teaching, the actual experiences of TA in the last few years have highlighted a common finding of "the perceived low value of the TA role and confusion about what the role entails" (Bennett et al., 75:271-286, 2018, p. 271). We use a more local conception of regime of truth as a tool (Gore, 1993) for reflecting on possibilities for resistance and re-imagining how we might think about ourselves beyond 'second tier'. By understanding that a reconceptualisation of ourselves is simultaneously within a given regime but also outside of it, allowing for reading the regime and thinking about the production of that regime in ways that open up possibilities for creating a space for talking and sharing both research and teaching, which is also within the 'cultural web' of the university.