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Rethinking Quality and Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Abstract
Quality' and 'excellence' are omnipresent terms permeating all areas of higher education, particularly in the context of teaching and learning. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has further intensified debates about conceptions of quality and excellence, particularly regarding universities' ability to adapt from face-to-face teaching to virtual provision and to respond to the growing mental health needs of its students. In this chapter, we draw on evidence from three distinct projects undertaken in one university in England, each involving academic staff and students co-researching and collaborating on areas of curriculum, pedagogy and mental health. What links these projects is our participatory approach to rethinking notions of quality and excellence in practitioner education, which empowers students and staff to work collaboratively to improve the quality of teaching and learning experiences.
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Although many researchers agree that teaching is complex and contextually situated, dominant conceptions of teacher learning, and the enactment of such learning in practice, tend to be linear and reductionist. Because simplistic conceptualisations of teaching activity have far-reaching impact on teachers, students, and school systems, generating a complex theory of teacher learning-practice is nothing short of an ethical imperative. To tackle this task, we draw from an emerging body of teacher education scholarship that we consider the beginning of a ‘complex turn’. Drawing on this literature, we distill a set of conceptual shifts that, together, offer a set of theoretical tools to (re)think the processes of, and connections between, teacher learning-practice in ways that better account for the dynamic, multiplicitous, ever-shifting nature of these activities.
Research policy observers are increasingly concerned about the potential impact of current academic working conditions on mental health, particularly in PhD students. The aim of the current study is threefold. First, we assess the prevalence of mental health problems in a representative sample of PhD students in Flanders, Belgium (N = 3659). Second, we compare PhD students to three other samples: (1) highly educated in the general population (N = 769); (2) highly educated employees (N = 592); and (3) higher education students (N = 333). Third, we assess those organizational factors relating to the role of PhD students that predict mental health status. Results based on 12 mental health symptoms (GHQ-12) showed that 32% of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a common psychiatric disorder, especially depression. This estimate was significantly higher than those obtained in the comparison groups. Organizational policies were significantly associated with the prevalence of mental health problems. Especially work-family interface, job demands and job control, the supervisor’s leadership style, team decision-making culture, and perception of a career outside academia are linked to mental health problems.
Drawing on case studies of 27 working‐class students across four UK higher education institutions, this article attempts to develop a multilayered, sociological understanding of student identities that draws together social and academic aspects. Working with a concept of student identity that combines the more specific notion of learner identity with more general understandings of how students are positioned in relation to their discipline, their peer group and the wider university, the article examines the influence of widely differing academic places and spaces on student identities. Differences between institutions are conceptualised in terms of institutional habitus, and the article explores how the four different institutional habituses result in a range of experiences of fitting in and standing out in higher education. For some this involves combining a sense of belonging in both middle‐class higher education and working‐class homes, while others only partially absorb a sense of themselves as students.
In this paper we ‘plug in’ ideas from post-qualitative thinking to read empirical material from Erasmus+ project, Open School Doors, and mobilise new ways of conceptualising teachers’ work with newly arrived families. Driven by commitments to inclusion and social justice teacher participants described tacit, in-the-moment, knowledge-making, that felt contingent and risky, as they sought to respond to encounters with families that demanded compassionate action but pushed them beyond the threshold of professional certainty and the would-be neutralities of ‘professional’ identities. We understand these affective responses to the work of teaching as ‘abductive’ moments of breakdown, rupture and estrangement, that draw attention to the always already becoming nature of professional practice. We put to work the concepts of entanglement, assemblage and rhizomes to make use of ‘abductive’ moments as productive opportunities for exploration of teachers’ messy, implicated, intra-relatedness to their practice worlds and to imagine models of professional learning that promote connection and knowledge-in-the-making as ethical, ‘response-able’ post/rhizo-professional alternative to linear forms of professional learning. Our discussion is embedded in a specific context but has important broader implications for the design of teacher education as preparation for complex anticipated working lives.
For blended and fully online learning environments, the appropriate device usage and application, as well as students’ perceived comfort with technology, may influence their success within the e-Learning setting. Additionally, institutional awareness of student technology needs—including student support needs as they relate to accessible technology—is essential to create an inclusive and supportive learning environment. Despite the growing number of students requiring accommodations for academic success, such as accessible technology within the coursework, there is limited research exploring technology use and student perceptions of accessible technology needs for post-traditional learners enrolled in the e-Learning course environment. Surveying post-traditional students enrolled in blended and online coursework, this study investigated device usage and perceptions of technology use, accessibility, and support within e-Learning-based learning environments.
To do feminism and to be a feminist in higher education is to repeat oneself: to insist on gender equality as more than institutional incorporation and diversity auditing, to insert oneself into and against neoliberal measures, and to argue for nuanced intersectional feminist analysis and action. This book returns to established feminist strategies for taking up academic space, re-thinking how feminists inhabit the university and pushing back against institutional failures. The authors assert the academic career course as fundamental to understanding how feminist educational journeys, collaborations and cares, and ways of knowing stretch across and reconstitute academic hierarchies, collectivising and politicising feminist career successes and failures. By prioritising interruptions, the book navigates through feminist methods of researcher reflexivity, autoethnography and collective biography. In doing so, we move from feminist identity to feminist practice and repeat the potential of queer feminist interruptions to the university and ourselves.
Excellence in higher education teaching has become a policy priority of governments worldwide in recent years. In the United Kingdom, for example, the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework in 2016 heralded an unprecedented focus on the quality of teaching. Set against the backdrop of such policy developments and wider global interest in teaching in the higher education sector, this paper discusses the conceptualisation and implementation of an innovative approach to observing teaching and learning as part of a faculty professional development project in an English university. It examines the attitudes, perceptions and experiences of academic staff involved. In reconceptualising and reconfiguring the application of observation as a method by removing it from an assessment domain, the paper argues that this approach has uncovered new opportunities for using observation as a tool of educational inquiry for professional development purposes. This has led to the transformation of observation into a catalyst for developing collegial understanding of what constitutes effective teaching and learning in higher education, as well as providing a collaborative forum for staff to reflect on and share ideas for improving their practice.
Attempts to measure the quality of teaching and learning have resulted in an overreliance on quantitative performance data and the normalisation of a set of reductionist practices in England’s further education sector in recent years. Focusing on lesson observation as an illustrative example and drawing on data from a national study, this article examines the application of observation and its impact on further education teachers’ practice. In viewing lesson observation through a complexity theory lens and contextualising it against the wider neoliberal backdrop of the marketisation of education, we seek to critique the inadequacies of current reductionist approaches to teacher evaluation, whilst simultaneously opening up a debate regarding the consequences of seeing classrooms as complex adaptive systems. In focusing on performative models of lesson observation in particular, the article exposes what we perceive as some of the epistemological and methodological shortcomings of neoliberalism in practice, but also offers an alternative way forward in dealing with the contested practice of evaluating the quality of teaching and learning. © 2016 International Professional Development Association (IPDA)
Over the past three decades I have been dealing with a number of “simple” questions. I have been deeply concerned about the relationship between culture and power; about the relationship among the economic, political, and cultural spheres (see Apple and Weis, 1983); about the multiple and contradictory dynamics of power and social movements that make education such a site of conflict and struggle; and about what all this means for educational work. In essence, I have been trying to answer a question that was put so clearly in the United States by radical educator George Counts (1932) when he asked, “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?”
Adult undergraduate student identities at research extensive universities were uniquely coconstructed, shaped by this selective and competitive youth-oriented cultural context. Drawing upon social constructivist theory, this study explored this coconstruction through positional and relational adult student identities. Positional identities were coconstructed through negotiating academic acceptance in meeting demanding academic challenges and through facing otherness as a mature adult. These adults also viewed their positional identity based in an evolving sense of agency to academically succeed through goal oriented efforts, as well as through their adult maturity and life experiences. These adults articulated relational identities predominantly based in faculty’s tacit or explicit academic acceptance of them in one of four types of relationships. This study suggests that the adult undergraduate student identity is multi-layered, multi-sourced, evolving, and at times, paradoxical in beliefs of self, position, relationships, and learning contexts within the research extensive university setting.
Recent policy shifts in higher education impact on the diversity of student experiences, one such trend is an increase in the number of students staying in their parental home for the duration of their studies. This has implications for students’ experiences of university life, particularly non-academic aspects. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice and habitus, this papers explores how young people go about fitting in to ‘being a student’, and how predispositions to university life influence these practices. Residential status emerges as a key demarcating factor in how successfully students feel they adapt to being at university. Though related to class, this cannot be explained solely by the socio-economic background of students living at home, but rather reflects both practical problems faced by these students as well as difficulties in incorporating a student habitus while living at home.
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