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The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 1
Ontology, identity formation and lifelong learning outcomes Theorising the relationship between discipline-based research and teaching Melanie Walker
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 2
Contents
Executive summary p3
Background, context and literature p5
Discussion p16
(i) Conceptual work p16
(I) Contextual conditions p16
(II) What is education? p19
(III) Education through research? p21
(IV) Capabilities p26
(ii) Empirical application p32
(I) Lecturer conceptions of research in relation to pedagogical
approaches p34
(II) Student voices p41
(III) Theme one: epistemological knowing p42
(IV) Theme two: ontological being p46
(V) Quality in teaching and pedagogy p52
Results p55
Recommendations p56
Acknowledgements p57
References p58
Appendix p66
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Executive summary
The overarching research question in this project was to ask how ought
engagement with research form students’ capabilities and enhance
multidimensional learning experiences for intelligent action, social
responsibility and agency to choose and plan a good life. The project aim
flowing from this was to theorise how undergraduates ought to be positively
transformed as persons by their learning experiences and knowledge
acquisition in discipline-based, research-rich teaching. Furthermore, it sought
to problematise the research element in the nexus where this is
unproblematically assumed to be inherently of value. The research was
primarily conceptual, exploring how the capability approach might expand
debates about the research/teaching nexus in the disciplines in new directions
that pay attention to the normative purposes of higher education, frameworks
of equality and social justice, and both epistemology and an ontological turn in
higher education. Theoretical resources drawn from development economics
and philosophy were illuminating. The project included the collection of a
small amount of illustrative qualitative data using semi-structured interviews
with nine lecturers and 21 students in three departments (History, Politics, and
Animal and Plant Sciences) in one research-intensive university. This
empirical data was then analysed for evidence of (i) capability formation; (ii)
acquisition of knowledge and learning through research-enhanced
pedagogies; and (iii) pedagogical and institutional conditions of quality in
relation to the research/teaching nexus.
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The results include an account of theoretical development and of the analysis
of data. Together these indicate that research-enhanced pedagogies can
contribute substantially to students’ capability formation and their identities as
responsible, confident and critical agents. However, such effects are most
pronounced where lecturers are not only research-active themselves, but also
committed to students as persons as well as learners, and to enabling
pedagogies, supported by departmental conditions that recognise the
importance of teaching to student experiences.
The key recommendations from this project are that: (i) the research/teaching
nexus needs to be embedded in public debates about the normative purposes
of higher education; (ii) the concept of ‘research-enhanced pedagogies’ is
helpful but needs to pay attention to what is understood by ‘research’,
‘enhanced’ and ‘pedagogies’, and to what it means to be ‘educated’ through
research; (iii) ‘enhancing’ learning in the disciplines through research ought to
integrate the formation both of students’ epistemological and ontological
capabilities; and (iv) if both the research and teaching elements in the
research/teaching nexus do not inflect towards a more equal and just student
experience on the one hand, and a concern with the moral urgencies of our
society on the other, we might need to raise questions about what the point is
of so much concern with this nexus.
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Ontology, identity formation and lifelong learning outcomes: theorising the
relationship between discipline-based research and teaching
MELANIE WALKER
Background: context and literature
This project emerged from and built on earlier work exploring the purposes of
higher education, higher education professionalism, and pedagogies (Walker,
2001, 2004, 2006). It sought to further interrogate the capability approach,
well-being and agency formation (Sen, 1992, 1999; Nussbaum, 2000) to
generate a rich, multidimensional capability-based perspective of individual
student learning for choosing and having a ‘good life’. It therefore theorised
how undergraduate students ought to be positively transformed as persons by
their learning experiences and knowledge acquisition in discipline-based,
research-rich teaching. This is seen to be pertinent in the light of increasing
numbers of universities nationally and internationally claiming to be both doing
research-led teaching, and also identifying teaching and learning outcomes
beyond knowledge and skill acquisition to include such attributes as ‘lifelong
learning’ and ‘global citizenship’. Such goals extend considerations of student
learning into arenas of identity formation, agency and social responsibility.
These are arguably important for higher education in an era of global conflict,
poverty and urgent environmental issues, but also important for the
navigational capability and future lives of students.
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To take just two illustrative examples from research-intensive universities, the
first a UK university, which has as its mission “to discover and understand”
and states: “Our University works to improve the world by seeking to
understand it.” It aims to “offer academic programmes that change our
students' lives for the better, equipping graduates to make a difference in their
chosen field, profession or career and achieve personal fulfillment”. The
second university, in Australia, in its Teaching and Learning Enhancement
Plan of 2003 to 2007, under Goal 1, Research-based teaching and learning,
committed itself to: “develop research-based attributes in graduates which
encourage creativity and independence, critical thinking, effective
communication and ethical and social sensitivity”. Similar claims can be found
on other UK and international university websites. Fine and important as these
aspirations are, outside of an explication of the normative purposes of
universities, we are left asking: critical thinking, creativity, and so on, for what,
for whom and why? Nor can we assume that research is inherently
contributing to the common or human good. As Becher (1989) notes, “the
outcome of research must be rated as a mixed blessing to humanity” (p132).
The primary goal of the project, therefore, evolved into a theoretical and
conceptual exploration of the normative purposes of higher education and
how these are or might be taken up in relation to the research/teaching nexus.
The qualitative empirical data collected were illustrative, rather than
comprehensive.
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By foregrounding the quality of undergraduate student learning outcomes, and
raising questions about what constitutes quality in learning through ‘research-
enhanced pedagogies’ (Brew, 2006, p53), the project explored how
academics in different discipline areas conceptualise, understand and develop
pedagogically the relationships between discipline-based research and
teaching. How engagement with research ought to enhance multidimensional
student learning experiences for intelligent action, social responsibility and
agency to choose and plan a good life, constituted an underlying question for
the research. Key objectives, therefore, were to conceptualise the relationship
between discipline-based research and teaching as one of ontology, identity
formation, agency and lifelong learning in order to generate a new
understanding of what research might bring to teaching and quality in
undergraduate student learning. There is the related need to consider the
research/teaching nexus with regard to what Barnett (2005a, 2007) and
Dall’Alba and Barnacle (2007) have all described as the need for an
ontological turn – becoming and being, and not just knowing – in evaluating
the quality of university teaching. Dall’Alba and Barnacle explain:
… knowing is always situated within a personal, social, historical and
cultural setting, and thus transforms the merely intellectual to something
inhabited and enacted: a way of thinking, making and acting. Indeed, a
way of being. (2007, p682)
It points, they argue, to both the educative and the social functions of higher
education and to higher education interrogating whether the ‘ways of being’
promoted by teaching, learning and research foster the kinds of desirable
outcomes and goals noted earlier.
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Much of the literature on the relationship between research and teaching
focuses on whether or not researchers make better teachers (for example,
Jenkins et al., 2003; McLean and Barker, 2004). In some cases, the idea of
learning is presented as the pivot between research and teaching. However,
there is still a significant gap in the problematisation of the purposes and
values that underpin the research/teaching nexus, and the kind of learning
outcomes that are seen to be desirable. Pedagogy is also too often
conceptualised as a matter of ‘teaching’ or epistemology; yet it involves the
teachers’ interpersonal competencies and human relationships, and thus
should refer to the moral and ethical aspects of a teacher’s work with learners
(Davis, 2004). There are weak connections between learning and identity,
and little connection between research on the relationship between research
and teaching, and an emerging literature in higher education that explores
learning as identity formation, and as human capability and agency
development (Walker, 2006). Furthermore, there is in general a gap in the
espoused relationship between research and teaching and both the educative
and social functions of higher education. Yet as Boyer (1987, p283) argued in
his report on the undergraduate experience in North American universities,
higher learning involves more than competence. He called for greater
attention to the moral and civic purposes of higher education, saying that we
need to ask for what ends competence is acquired. Similarly, Kreber (2005)
calls for a critical scholarship of teaching and teaching practices aimed at the
emancipation and empowerment of students. Without both a critical function
and a research function, and strategies to link these through teaching and
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learning, we might argue that the university loses both its own capacity for
self-critique and its ability to provide students with the capabilities for a vibrant
social and political life (Aronowitz, 2000).
More promising as a theoretical approach is the conceptualisation of self-
authorship by Baxter Magolda (2001). Her rich longitudinal study of the
lifelong impact of higher education generates narratives for ‘transforming’
higher education to promote ‘self-development’. Her conditions for promoting
self-authorship are that: knowledge is complex and socially constructed; self is
central to knowledge construction; and authority and expertise ought to be
shared in the mutual construction of knowledge among peers. It may be that
these assumptions lead naturally to particular normative assumptions about
higher education, and her emphasis on the need for attention to how students
are enabled to develop a sense of self is welcome. However, while her work
constitutes a rich resource, it is insufficiently robust to challenge the
contemporary direction of higher education; self-authorship could arguably be
comfortably accommodated alongside markets in higher education.
The idea, therefore, was to expand the existing literature on the
research/teaching nexus (see Barnett, 2005b; Brew, 2006; Centre for Higher
Education Quality, 2003; Healey, 2005; Jenkins et al., 2003; Jenkins et al.,
2007; Jenkins and Healey, 2006; Mclean and Barker, 2004; Zamorski, 2000)
in a new direction rather than simply to add to it within existing and often well-
rehearsed parameters. As Trowler and Wareham (2007) usefully point out in
their literature review on enhancing the research/teaching nexus, “much of the
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literature is conceptually and theoretically underpowered” (p22). Nor is it
sufficient just to point to the variety of ways in which research, teaching and
learning might be productively linked (see Baldwin, 2005; Brew, 2006; Jenkins
and Healey, 2006). In a recent plenary address, Brighouse (2007) made the
important question explicit – we need, he argued a new normative account of
higher education, one that asks: “Whose interests is higher education
serving?” Similarly, Tisdell (2001) in advocating an ‘engaged pedagogy’ that
promotes social justice, argues that “higher education has a responsibility to
do its part in teaching for social change” (p162). Moreover, it is timely to raise
this question in the light of fine rhetorical statements that proliferate
internationally regarding university mission commitments to research-led
teaching. Coate et al. (2001) conclude their review of relationships between
research and teaching in higher education by suggesting that the way forward
might be to expend less effort on trying to establish that research enhances
teaching (or vice versa) “and more on understanding the ways in which
different relationships between research and teaching are shaped” (p173).
However, if such an exploration is not grounded in a simultaneous and critical
review of the normative purposes of higher education (and universities in
particular) it may be limited in what it has to say. This is further complicated by
the stratification and diversification of higher education in the UK, such that
student exposure to research and research-active teachers will vary and may
reinscribe inequality effects (Archer, 2007).
This project addresses Trowler and Wareham’s (2007) critique by developing
a new theoretical and conceptual approach to the research/teaching nexus
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drawing on ideas from development economics and philosophy. The study is
aligned with Mclean and Barker’s (2004) project, which considered student
progress in undergraduate degrees, drawing on a case study from History to
argue that the research/teaching nexus is in need of re-engineering. While
they concede what is now largely accepted (Hattie and Marsh, 1996; Coate et
al., 2001), that there is no necessary or conclusive relationship between
lecturers being research-active in a discipline and the quality of teaching and
student learning, they nonetheless do suggest that lecturer engagement in
research is a “strong condition” (p416) for pursuing goals beyond a
mechanised and routinised general skills development model of educational
progress at university. They argue that even in the case of increasingly
popular notions of an enquiry-led curriculum, “it would need to be made
explicit how links between research and teaching result in critical, autonomous
and committed students” (p417). On balance, they argue for resisting the
separation of research and teaching as reinforcing stratification among
different kinds of higher education institutions and exacerbating inequalities.
At issue is the challenge of promoting a synergistic relationship between
teaching and research, because the normative purposes of universities are
best served by holding these activities together, rather than driving them
apart.
In her recent book, Brew (2006) does go some way towards to addressing the
broader purposes of higher education in so far as she considers the
relationship between research and teaching as integral to developing a ‘new’
higher education grounded in a pluralistic and ‘inclusive’ approach to
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understanding the research/teaching relationship. Such a higher education,
argues Brew, would be enquiry-based and essential for unpredictable futures
and tackling “some of the world’s big problems” (pxiv), such as world poverty.
However, Brew relies heavily on an enquiry-based education to do this, as if
enquiry in and of itself will generate such commitments and concerns. Yet the
risk is that a philosophy of critical enquiry might as easily be one that
promotes individualism and market values, as the values and attitudes of
numerous highly educated graduates remind us. To be fair, Brew does
acknowledge in passing that teaching includes inculcating “attitudes of mind”
(p133) such as “showing concern and respect”. She supports “inclusive
scholarly knowledge-building communities” of students and academics in
partnership “in the challenging process of coming to understand the world
through systematic investigation and collaborative decision-making in the light
of evidence” (pp3-4). These are laudable aims for higher education; however,
they do not take us far enough if we do not at the same time articulate a
broader set of normative purposes about what coming to understand the world
is for and whose interests such understanding ought to serve. The skills of
enquiry could as easily lead to technicist forms of higher education and
change. There is no necessary link in this to a critical university, having its
own capacity for self-critique (Aronowitz, 2000).
Brew’s ideas are reformist rather than transformative, and it may be that this is
a more pragmatic and feasible programme for higher education in
contemporary times. However, it may also represent a missed opportunity,
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such as that proposed by Kemmis when he argues for forms of education that
will encourage:
a revisionary self understanding of those we educate, so that they can
take responsibility for themselves, not just as recipients of the education
or schooling we gave them, but as free and equal subjects capable of
speech and action. And this can only be achieved if it is an equal part of
the role of education to demonstrate how they can be good citizens –
citizens who will participate in and exercise the citizen’s duty to sustain
the political life of just and good societies, in which freedoms of thought,
speech and association are guaranteed, and in which there is a
genuine enacted, shared commitment to the good of humankind. (2006,
p467)
Such a transformative discourse is arguably missing from much of the work on
the research/teaching nexus. In the light of this, Barnett’s argument that the
debate about the relationship between research and teaching is “already
becoming tired, if not tiresome” (2005b, p1) resonates. Certainly the terrain
feels well travelled. Barnett, rather more robustly than Brew’s call to move
beyond the research and teaching divide, therefore argues for “reshaping the
university”.
Brew, however, does raise a helpful question: “What aspects of higher
education are brought into focus when we think of research-enhanced
pedagogies, as opposed, for example, to any other kinds of innovation in
university teaching?” (p53). This question has proved useful for thinking
about the empirical data analysis in this project, when it is linked also to
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Luke's (2006, p5) key question, “what pedagogies are for human being?” and
further framed by Barnett’s (2007, p153) deeply educative call for a student “to
stand differently in the world”.
It may also be that the best we can do under contemporary conditions of
market fundamentalism is to advocate a method of enquiry-based learning for
life in an enquiring society that we might hope to bring about in the future – a
Deweyian method of democratic fallible enquiry (Putnam, 2007) that aims to
expand a democratic ethos in teaching and learning – as the most useful
common experience higher education might offer its graduates. However, to
say this is not to eschew transformative purposes for higher education, or to
accept the divorce of the research/teaching nexus from broader ends.
Therefore, I explore in the conceptual work of this research project the
important idea of thinking about what it means then to be educated (rather
than ‘skilled’ or ‘trained’) through research (Simons, 2006), and what
theoretical frameworks might offer new perspectives on evaluating educative
processes and normative purposes.
This then leads me to the overarching research question and the project aims
and objectives:
Research question
How do research-enhanced pedagogies contribute to forming each student’s
capabilities and enhance multidimensional learning experiences for intelligent
action, social responsibility and agency to choose and plan a good life?
Project aim
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To theorise how undergraduate students ought to be positively transformed as
persons by their learning experiences and knowledge acquisition in discipline-
based, research-rich teaching.
Project objectives
1. To conceptualise the relationship between discipline-based research and
teaching as one of ontology, identity formation, agency and lifelong
learning in order to generate a new understanding of what research might
bring to teaching and undergraduate student learning outcomes.
2. To analyse secondary literatures and relevant websites on research and
teaching relationships in higher education.
3. To consider student descriptions of their learning of a subject through
research-rich teaching.
4. To understand how selected lecturers engaged in research-rich teaching in
different disciplines, and how they conceptualise, develop and implement
the relationship between their research and teaching through curriculum
design and pedagogical approaches to foster expanded student learning
outcomes.
5. To generate a multidimensional capability-based perspective on
undergraduate learning outcomes, such as lifelong learning and global
citizenship, through research-rich teaching.
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Discussion
(i) Conceptual work
This project sought to locate the research/teaching nexus as one in which
pedagogical processes, student experiences and learning achievements are a
matter both of individual and human development (Fukudo-Parr and Kumar,
2003); in short, to locate the nexus within the debates about the normative
purposes of higher education. Bruner (1996) reminds us that education is
always political, and that it develops skills, knowledge and ways of thinking,
feeling and speaking that graduates may ‘trade’ for ‘distinction’ in the markets
of society (economic, social, political).
(I) Contextual conditions
The research/teaching nexus is located within the life of higher education;
higher education is located within society and social change. What are the
contemporary conditions that enable or construct barriers to a
research/teaching nexus that inflects towards a culture of enquiry that is
genuinely educational? Central among these current conditions is that of
market fundamentalism – the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in
itself and a guide for all human action, including in education (Harvey, 2005).
In contemporary times, higher education has risen to the top of national policy
agendas for its central role in producing graduates to drive and service
knowledge economies (Kwiek, 2002). Neoliberal discourse normalises the
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 17
idea that higher education problems are best addressed by the market;
economic rationality, and corporate practices and values are now promoted
for the public sector. In higher education this means cost efficiency,
standardised testing and marketable skills for student-customers. Concerns
about human capital and employability skills and attributes have dislodged
other higher education purposes and outcomes in relation to the intrinsic
goods of learning and democratic citizenship. The currently popular notion of
‘inquiry learning’ in higher education teaching and learning in England ought
not to be assumed to be good in and of itself, but in relation to the contested
purposes of higher education and the formation of student identities and
futures.
Dominant human capital theory views education as merely instrumental – an
investment to improve productivity and the level and distribution of individual
earnings. This is exemplified in the recent UK White Paper on Higher
Education (2003), which is replete with economic discourse such as: valuing
economic well-being, skilling the nation, powering the economy, becoming
competitive, stimulating innovation, supporting productivity, benefiting society
and avoiding the unacceptable risk of economic decline (p10). The origin of
the idea of human capital goes back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
(Little, 2003) and the idea that investment in physical capital (machines) might
have a parallel in investment in the productive capacity of human beings
(human capital) through education. The idea of investment in education for
economic growth was revived by economists Theodore Schultz and Howard
Becker in the early 1960s as a way to explain the puzzle of economic growth
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 18
that could not be accounted for by increases in physical capital.
Foreshadowing notions of a ‘knowledge economy’, attempts began from the
1960s to measure the economic costs and benefits of education as
investments in human capital, measuring the returns to education and
applying cost-benefit analysis to decisions about education expenditure in the
same way as rates of return are used to analyse the profitability of investment
in conventional physical capital (Little, 2003).
The assumption is that economic growth and development mean the same
thing, and that both equal well-being. Yet the burgeoning evidence from
economists is that doubling GDP in over 30 years in Britain has not made
people any happier (Gaspar, 2004). Nor does human capital theory explain
why people make decisions to invest in education, or more education, or
indeed to gainsay such investment (Little, 2003). Human capital cannot, as
Robeyns (2006) explains, account for any non-economic goods from
education, such as someone wanting to learn poetry for its own sake.
Nonetheless, the effect of human capital theory for higher education has been
to ascribe the primary value of higher education to the extent that investment
in individual students gives rise to increased economic productivity, higher
earnings and augmented national wealth (Tight, 1996).
Under contemporary conditions of globalisation and new knowledge
economies (Delanty, 2001; Mclean, 2006; Peters, 2004), it is ideas from
neoliberalism that have come to dominate discourses and practices in higher
education; education discourse has been distorted for economic ends. Such
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ideas normalise the domination of economic growth models and metaphors,
comparative national income and the importance of what can be measured,
predicted and quantified. They normalise the claim that problems are best
addressed by the market, and economic rationality and corporate practices
and values are promoted for public universities – cost efficiency, quantifiable
input-output measures and marketable skills. Human capital outcomes have
become the rationale for education; investment in human capital through
formal education is argued to yield a rate of economic return (Becker, 1993;
Sen, 2003). If a university education makes someone a better producer, able
to both earn more and contribute more to national income, then higher
education is deemed to be successful. Currently in the UK this human capital
direction is very explicit – universities are key drivers of a marketised
knowledge economy and the development of human capital for economic
productivity, and are therefore not to be left to their own devices (DfES, 2003).
(II) What is ‘education’?
We need therefore to be both clear and assertive about what we understand
by ‘education’ in universities. Following Maxine Greene, I take education in
universities normatively to involve something like:
engaging live human beings in activities of meaning-making, dialogue
and reflective understanding of a variety of texts, including the texts of
their social realities. Growing, becoming different, becoming informed
and articulate. (1992, p285)
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Elsewhere Greene writes that education, “signifies an initiation into new ways
of seeing, hearing, feeling, moving. It signifies the nurture of a special kind of
reflectiveness and expressiveness, a reaching out for meanings, a learning to
learn” (2001, p7). “We are”, writes Greene, “interested in openings, in
unexplored possibilities, not in the predictable or the quantifiable” (2001, p7).
Education in universities, moreover, needs to respond to Bruner’s (2005)
challenge to think ahead about how to educate for a changing world. As
Bruner (2005, p1) explains it, the task is to educate for “the struggle between
the conventional and possible in the way we view the world”. In different ways,
Greene and Bruner emphasise intersubjectivity and social interaction. Bruner
(2005, p1) explains that human beings are “the most fanciful and searching of
species, as well as the most quarrelsome and unpredictable. We like
disagreement”; it is important that education takes into account the “import of
sharing notions of how things work. We depend on each other to have
common views”. Similarly, Barnett (1997) argues that in universities we ought
to educate for a critical consciousness by enabling pedagogical spaces in
which students experience the “challenge of open and critical inquiry …
testing their ideas in the critical company of others” (p110). More recently,
Barnett (2007) has argued for the significance of the formation of “the critical
spirit” (p153), that is not just developing a critical view of knowledge, but being
capable of being “other than that which one is” (p153). Education in
universities must then involve both epistemological access to knowledge and
ontology, ways of being and becoming. The research/teaching nexus ought,
then, to be located in the context of: what and who it is that students become
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 21
and are able to do; what higher education is; what it means to be educated;
and the integration of epistemology and ontology.
More interesting, then, is Barnett’s (2005a, p94) argument that not only is
research challenged by an uncertain and ‘supercomplex’ world, but teaching
too needs to be oriented to “the production of human capacities – qualities
and dispositions”. Teaching needs to take “an ontological turn” from
knowledge to being, in which teachers take account of students “as human
beings as distinct from knowing beings”, so that students have the possibility
opened up to “come into a new mode of being” (Barnett, 2007, p1). Ontology,
he suggests, trumps but does not displace epistemology. Both knowing and
being ought to be taken into account in university teaching. A world of
uncertainty and change, as Barnett argues, not only poses curriculum
challenges of knowing and of right action, but also crucially challenges us as
beings in the world. How do I understand myself? How do I orient myself?
How do I stand in relation to the world? Similarly, Smeyers and Hogan (2005,
p115) call attention to “what we become as human beings as a consequence
of what we experience as learners”. If the research/teaching nexus fails to
address just these kinds of questions we might want to ask what the point of
the debate is.
(III) Education through research?
The current concern with the link between research and teaching is part of the
economic drive in that research competencies are seen to enhance
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employability in a knowledge economy by developing higher order
competencies (Simons, 2006). As Simons (2006) explains, in the European
context the starting point for policy is not the older Humboldtian perspective of
the edifying potential of academic enquiry, but the economic demands of
society. The policy aim is then to implement learning environments that
“make the mind-sets that are typical of the research activity salient in the
learning process” (Commission of the European Communities, 2002, p40,
quoted in Simons, 2006, p40). Research is then reframed as yet another
teaching ‘method’. However, to reframe education through research in this
way as a set of competencies to be achieved is, argues Simons, to diminish
scholarship and the pursuit or duty of truth.
A persuasive example of the potential capture and narrowing of the value of
the research/teaching nexus for student learning achievements is that of the
current importance given to students’ ‘communication skills’ (and we might
include communication as a research skill). To become better communicators
is seen to empower students to take control of their futures. Cameron
explains:
But what is called ‘empowerment’ in the discourse … has little to do
with liberating people from existing constraints on their agency and
freedom. In many cases it has more to do with teaching them to
discipline themselves so that they can operate more easily within those
constraints: become more flexible, more team-oriented, better at
resolving the conflicts and controlling the emotions that disrupt business
as usual. (2000, p179)
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Rather, what is needed she argues, are forensic or rhetorical skills – the ability
to argue, to challenge and to persuade. To bring this back to the
research/teaching nexus would be to argue that we ought to judge the value
of the link not in relation to narrowly conceptualised skills (research or
otherwise) such as ‘communication’, but with regard to deeper capabilities. As
Simons (2006, p43) asks, is there is still “an academic duty or a normative
orientation in research that allows for a reflection upon ‘education through
research’ that is different from the reflection inaugurated by the needs of the
knowledge society and the operationalisation of research as a ‘teaching
method?’”.
Turning to a more specific pedagogical issue, ‘critical thinking’ is arguably the
core capability that higher education claims to develop in all its students.
Papestephanou and Angeli (2007) point to two different discourses that shape
critical thinking. On the one hand there is the skills paradigm (found in
discourses and practices of key skills, generic skills, transferable skills and
graduate attributes) embedded in Habermasian purposive rationality,
technicism and instrumentality, which is “relevant to the roles of the customer
of the state and consumer of services and goods, and not to the active
participant in the possible transformation of the public sphere” (p609). Under
neoliberalism, the dominant policy (and to some extent the pedagogical
vocabulary) emphasises skills, performativity and outcomes, and purposive
rationality (instrumental and strategic), which domesticates critique. The idea
is to optimise outcomes, in the case of UK higher education human capital
outcomes, but these are not open to critique: “the skills perspective identifies
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uncritically with the criteriology of the sociopolitical system since it focuses so
much on successful performance” (pp605-6).
According to Critical Theory, Papestephanou and Angeli write, purposive
rationality “leads ultimately to an uncritical and complacent proclamation of
performativity as a universal and a historical value”, glorifying “effectiveness,
outcomes and performance” (p607). Ends and meaningfulness are not
questioned, nor goals revised; what matters is success in the task at hand. In
this way higher education, and its fundamental claim to foster critical thinking,
is captured by the neoliberal project, while ironically seeming still to serve its
own values and purposes to develop ‘higher order thinking’. Papestephanou
and Angeli further argue that “there is a surplus of critical thinking that cannot
be canalized in the skill talk” (p618). They employ Habermas’s concept of
communicative rationality, which is oriented to human potential and actions for
mutual understanding, formative dialogue, self-analysis and transformation of
ends. They explain:
The implication of this primacy of communicative rationality for our topic
is that goals are not there simply to be achieved or approximated, but
first and foremost to be checked in introspection, but more appropriately
in deliberation. Critical thinking and teaching cannot be solely
concerned with the achievement of goals, but with the ability to think
over and argue for or against their meaningfulness or moral pertinence.
(2007, p609)
The crucial missing dimension, they argue, is the role of goal revision; that is,
being able to critique the task and its ends. A communicative rationality view
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of critical thinking would argue that, “a critical thinker cannot just be one who
carries out an action successfully, but chiefly one who considers and, when
necessary, questions the appropriateness or moral relevance of the action”
(Papestephanou and Angeli, 2007, p608).
The argument developed both by Papesthephanou and Angeli, and explicitly
in relation to the research/teaching nexus by Simons (2006, p47), is that
translating education through research into competencies, “tends to forget that
the edifying potential of research is always something that cannot (yet) be
mastered as a set of technical competencies”. It is more than instrumental or
purposive rationality. While it is not inherently a problem, of course, that
employers want graduates with the skills to undertake research (Jenkins and
Zetter, 2003), we need to understand this critically and understand why this
has rapidly risen up the agenda as a policy concern in the UK. The question is
not so much what is the link between research and teaching, or research and
good teaching, but rather what educational work – beyond skills – can and
does research do?
This means also attention to pedagogy in framing a ‘research-enhanced
pedagogy’ and what we understand this to mean. It ought to describe
practices that are rather more than ‘teaching’, and not quite the same as thin
marketised versions of ‘teaching and learning’. Instead, pedagogy means a
method of teaching only in the widest sense; that is, it extends beyond the role
of the lecturer or teacher. It involves not only who teaches, but also who is
taught (and, of course, is interwoven with what is taught – the curriculum), and
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the contextual conditions and power relations under which such teaching and
learning takes place. Davis (2004) helpfully traces an etymology of
‘pedagogy’, which combines notions of didactics with pedagogy. He explains:
Didactics is roughly synonymous with instructional techniques or
methods, but is also used to refer to the teacher’s command of the
subject matter knowledge, ability to interpret student responses, and
other personal competencies. In complement, pedagogy, is more a
reference to the teacher’s interpersonal competencies, and is thus used
to refer to the moral and ethical – as opposed to the technical – aspects
of the teacher’s work with learners. (2004, pp143-4)
Pedagogy incorporates an ethical responsibility to learners in an interactive
and relational space between lecturers and students and students and
students, where knowledge is mediated, where power circulates, and social
and institutional structures penetrate. A research-enhanced pedagogy would
have such features or it is arguably not pedagogy but a teaching ‘method’, as
Simons (2006) argues. Thus the research/teaching nexus needs to be
conceptualised as a ‘thick’ pedagogical, and hence ethical, relationship.
(IV) Capabilities
To now further develop the principled basis of my argument, I turned to the
concepts of human development, well-being and dignity (Sen, 1992, 1999,
2003; Nussbaum, 1997, 2000, 2002) from outside education to argue for and
insert the language of human capabilities into the space of research and
teaching. It complements calls for an ontological turn in teaching – what we
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become as human beings as a result of what we learn and experience as
learners (Barnett, 2005a, 2007; Dall’Alba and Barnacle, 2007). This includes
how we come to understand and judge ourselves in some ways rather than
others; how we come to understand and judge others and their significance;
and how we come to understand and judge the merits of our own learning.
Such learning is reflexive and lifelong, rather than adaptive. It is to ask: in
what ways are students transformed as persons by their engagement with
research and knowledge, mediated pedagogically by their teachers?
Having education is important for development economist Amartya Sen (1999,
2003) because it affects the development and expansion of other capabilities,
or human freedoms. Sen argues that, “the ability to exercise freedom may, to
a considerable extent, be directly dependent on the education we have
received, and thus the development of the educational sector may have a
foundational connection with the capability-based approach” (2003, p12). He
elaborates both intrinsic and instrumental dimensions to education. Having
education is then a valuable achievement in itself; but education is also
instrumental. Education helps a person to do many other things that are also
valuable, such as getting a job; it enhances freedom to achieve a range of
valued functionings that may follow from earning an income. However, in the
capability approach, a human capital basis for education is useful, but limited.
Sen (2003) does not reject human capital outright; indeed he sees synergies
in so far as human capital and the capability approach are both concerned
with the role, agency and abilities of human beings. However, a focus on
economic growth, Sen argues, does not tell us why economic growth is
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important or what wealth is for. Thus education ought not to focus only on
human capital and the ‘usefulness’ of human beings to the exclusion of
valuable non-economic ends and more expansive understandings of what is
valuable in human lives. The direction of education policy in the UK would
therefore be problematic for Sen, as would a research/teaching nexus in
which valuable lives were not debated.
Capabilities for Sen (1992, 1999) comprise the real and actual opportunities,
that is substantive freedoms, that people have to do and be what they value
being and doing. Capability “reflects a person’s freedom to choose between
different ways of living” (Sen, 2003a, p5). Development then consists in
expanding the capability set from which each student makes life and career
choices, through “the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave
people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned
agency” (Sen, 1999, pxii). Valuable beings and doings, or ‘functionings’, are
constitutive of human well-being; a capability is a potential functioning.
Functionings might include taking part in discussions with peers, thinking
critically about society, being knowledgeable, having an ethical disposition,
having good friendships, being able to understand a plurality of perspectives
on an issue and so on. Educational development in such terms means the
widening of human capability:
The capability set represents a person’s freedom to achieve various
functioning combinations. If freedom is intrinsically important, then the
alternative combinations available for choice are all relevant for judging
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a person’s advantage, even though he or she will eventually choose
only an alternative. (Sen, 2003, p8)
Such choosing from among genuine alternatives is itself “a valuable
feature of a person’s life” (Sen, 2003, p8). The focus is on what matters to
people, on “the central and important things in life that people can actually
do and be … [and] each person’s real freedom to formulate and pursue
their own objectives” (Burchardt and Vizard, 2006, p7). Various
capabilities might constitute an individual’s capability set, and such
valuable capabilities might be formed through research-enhanced
pedagogies (for example, the capability of critical thinking, or the capability
of imagination, or the capability of voice). However, it is important to
understand that capabilities do not mean skills or internal capacities. This
shifts the focus to individual success or failure, whereas the capability
approach points to the social arrangements – for example, pedagogical
conditions or normative purposes of universities – that enable or diminish
capability formation
Martha Nussbaum (2000) has developed the idea of ‘capabilities’, deepening
the philosophical basis of Sen’s approach. In her view: “Education is a key to
all human capabilities” (2006, p322). In higher education, she advocates an
education that develops each person’s capacity “to be fully human” (2002,
p290). Following Seneca, this means someone who is: “self-aware, self-
governing, and capable of recognising and respecting the humanity of all our
fellow human beings, no matter where they are born, no matter what social
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class they inhabit, no matter what their gender or ethnic origin” (2002, p290).
She (1997) defends a Socratic view of education, which places the examined
life at its centre, Aristotle’s notion of reflective citizenship, and the Stoic view
of education as that which frees us from habit and custom to function with
sensitivity and awareness in the world. She therefore advocates three core
capabilities for the ‘cultivation of humanity’: critical self-examination, the ideal
of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination. More
recently, she has written more explicitly about education and democratic
citizenship (2006a), and linked capabilities and quality education. Her three-
part model to develop young people’s (especially girls and young women)
capabilities through education is substantially similar to that outlined in
Cultivating Humanity: critical thinking, world citizenship, and imaginative
understanding. Nussbaum therefore declares that: “People who have never
learned to use reason and imagination to enter a broader world of cultures,
groups and ideas are impoverished personally and politically, however
successful their vocational preparation” (2002, p297).
Sen and Nussbaum have a shared and deep concern with equality, and
indeed Sen’s formulation of the capability approach was in response to what
he saw as inadequate approaches to evaluating inequality. The capability
approach, then, directs us to evaluate capability formation as a matter also of
equality in higher education. If some students are better able to develop
valuable capabilities than others, we need to investigate. If the
research/teaching nexus is particularly valuable for developing capabilities
such as those Nussbaum (1997) argues are core to liberal higher education,
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then we need to think well about the implications for a stratified higher
education system and for policy. We might then argue that research-
enhanced pedagogies ought to be evaluated with regard to whether the
substantive freedoms that students have are expanded so that they are able
to become and to be strong evaluators, having the capabilities to make well-
reasoned, critical and reflective choices about what makes life good for them
in an uncertain world.
Finally, Taylor’s (1985) concept of ‘strong evaluation’ is helpful for aligning
human development and capability, the purposes of higher education and
individual learning. Taylor argues that humans are self-interpreting beings
and that strong evaluations are a necessary element of self-understandings.
He means by strong evaluation, “that a background of distinctions between
things which are recognised as of categoric or unconditioned or higher
importance or worth, and things which lack this or are of lesser value” (1985,
p3). To be a strong evaluator is to evaluate some ethical values or ideals or
goods to be more important than others. These self-understandings constitute
who we are. To develop students’ capability as strong evaluators is to develop
them as subjects able to reflect on and to be able to re-examine their valued
ends, when challenged to do so. They reflect on what is of more or less
ethical significance in the narrative interpretation of their lives. Sen (1992,
1999) and Nussbaum’s (2000) overlapping conceptualisations of capability
forms the bridge between a research/teaching nexus, pedagogy and students’
formation as ‘strong evaluators’, because at the heart of the capability
approach is the idea that each person is able to develop their understanding
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of ‘valued beings and doings’, and that through education individuals might
explore their own conceptions of what it is they have reason to value. This
suggests a transformative discourse rather than the more reformist question
as to how a culture of enquiry is fostered or how enquiry learning or active
learning might be developed. Quality in student learning would require
integrating learning the subject and developing reflexive judgement about
what makes life good for that person; that is, their well-being. Crucially, each
and every student would matter in the capability approach’s concern for the
moral worth of each person.
(ii) Empirical application
I now turn to an empirical operationalisation of these principled ideas about
evaluating research-enhanced pedagogies with regard to the formation of the
capability to become and be a ‘strong evaluator’, within a specific context of a
rebalancing of the purposes of university education.
A method of semi-structured qualitative interviews was used. A schedule of
questions and ‘probes’ was developed to explore lecturer and student
conceptions of research, and lecturer approaches to teaching and student
learning in relation to three core higher education purposes and outcomes:
having economic opportunities, becoming democratic citizens and having
personal fulfillment (see Appendices A and B). In total, 21 final-year
undergraduate students and nine research-active lecturers were interviewed
from three departments in the period from February to April 2007.
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Healey and Jenkins (2006) suggest a number of approaches for linking
research and teaching in the undergraduate curriculum, not all of which are
included in my own investigation: course content is informed by faculty
research; students learn about research methods; faculty use teaching
methods that adopt a research-based approach (e.g. enquiry learning,
problem-based learning, community service learning); student undertake their
own research projects, individually or in teams; students assist faculty with
their research projects; students gain experience of applied
research/consultancy through work-based placements; faculty undertake
pedagogic research, which benefits the quality of their teaching; students are
introduced to the research of faculty during recruitment, orientation or through
‘Teaching and Research Awareness’ events.
The research/teaching nexus, as it emerged in this project, is understood to
mean a lecturer who is producing original knowledge through research in his
or her discipline, and whose curriculum and pedagogy is shaped by his or her
own research activity, what counts as knowledge, how knowledge is produced
and what research skills are needed to do research. Students encountered
research in the disciplines in different ways: a curriculum based on the
lecturer’s own area of expertise; transmission of research knowledge in
lectures; reading papers written by the lecturer; going to a seminar given by
their lecturer; enquiry learning of research skills; and undertaking their own
research project, sometimes in the lecturer’s field of expertise, sometimes in a
related area. Such encounters with research were shaped by the level of
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learning, whether in the first, second or third year of an undergraduate degree.
In all the interviews, the emphasis tended to be on final-year experiences
where direct engagement with research was more developed than in the first
or second year.
(I) Lecturer conceptions of research in relation to pedagogical
approaches
Although not a key focus of this research, it was helpful to establish how
lecturers understood research and how, based on that understanding, they
had developed their pedagogical approaches because this shapes
students’ capability formation. I offer illustrative examples from each of the
discipline areas, in which each lecturer first explains how they go about
research and then how this is applied in teaching and learning:
History: Professor Robert Young
What’s my conception of research? There are two dimensions to it.
One is working within a paradigm in a particular subject that one is
trying to develop, asking questions within and against the existing
historiography of my particular subject. The other is working outside of
the paradigm and that is coming up with completely new ways of
thinking about a particular subject or indeed a new subject … the
essential starting point is familiarity with the subject’s historiography.
Working backwards from the most recent interventions, around a
particular debate, working backwards to make sure that I’m familiar with
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every single permutation of that debate or range of interpretations.
From there, I would then work successively through published primary
sources … working progressively into more and more detail through the
papers of individuals, government departments and so on. So working
from existing interpretation, through successive layers of detail and, of
course, recognising at every point that these different layers of
evidence and interpretation constantly interrogate each other … What
qualities do you need? Well, concentration, enthusiasm, hard work,
obsessiveness and willingness to recognise where you’ve gone wrong
or suddenly realise that some of the assumptions and connections
which you’ve been making have been misplaced and to know when to
stop or rethink your starting point … I realise that implicitly the structure
and organisation of courses turn on providing students with as wide a
range and an accumulative range of interpretations as possible, inviting
them always to think about who has a particular axe to grind, why this
should be so, when a particular book or article was being written and
then perhaps, always allowing students to realise that there is never a
single correct answer. There are a range of perspectives and that what
they are learning to do is to think critically and comprehensively about
that range of perspectives, and that when they assemble them with the
idea of answering a particular question, they must proceed not by
assertion but by demonstrating their familiarity with a wide range of
interpretation and showing their examiner or reader of their essay how
and why it is that they’ve come to a particular set of conclusions … I
use a devil’s advocate approach in seminars to encourage students to
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critically think and rethink the positions they are advocating in relation to
the knowledge being studied, much as I challenge myself in my own
research. (Interview 5 March 2007)
Politics: Dr Martha Scott
I would identify a problem, something I was interested in, I would read
around the literature to see what other people have said about it, kind of
make notes in terms of, ok, if someone said that, what about this, why
haven’t they considered that and come up with a problem, what’s
interesting, why am I actually interested in this? And then in my case I
conduct field work and that needs planning and particular kinds of skills
in interviewing … It’s important to have a theoretical framework, I think,
being able to take a lot of information, but not to read it as being, ok,
this is just all factual stuff. You have to get the bigger picture and be
able to actually fit things together into a framework would be the way
that I think is essential for doing good research … I ask students to deal
with problems, you’re setting them interesting things, you’re trying to do,
in my particular case I’m trying to get across theory, facts and then an
ability to kind of think critically about problems and discuss and debate
them with others. (Interview 5 March 2007)
Animal and Plant Sciences: Professor Mike Smith
Identifying the research problem, that is very much in my area curiosity-
driven … and intellectually interesting … and then by reading the
literature of what people have already done in that area, talking with
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colleagues, actually around the world, you can identify particular areas
that you know that you yourself are interested in and other people are
interested in and then trying to devise novel ways, novel experiments,
by which you can hope to tackle that particular problem. I guess that’s
how the initial area of research is identified by an individual … So that’s
where there’s a matter of experience, logic and there probably is an
element of intuition after a while … There’s a certain level of factual
knowledge that students have to have to understand the topic, that’s
clear and has to be true for any field and then what you’re looking for
from the undergraduates are those who are motivated, clearly that’s
vitally important, and an ability to think logically about a problem and to
ask questions leading on from that which demonstrate that they actually
understand the biological processes, not just regurgitating facts. A
certain level of that is required, but on top of that, an ability to
understand a problem and to read about the topic, gain ideas, put them
together in a logical fashion and as a result, draw conclusions and
therefore ask questions about the topic … Being research-active is
important for my teaching. I was at a meeting last week in Switzerland, I
thought it was a very exciting meeting where they’re combining Biology
with Physics and Maths which is an area in which there are no courses
at universities that do that, or very few courses and yet I could imagine
that in a year or so’s time, I may be able to bring some of those ideas
into my teaching and that would benefit the undergraduates because I
also know that outside academia, it’s actually a very important area for,
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say, drug companies, pharmaceutical companies are moving into that
area. (Interview 2 March 2007)
In all three disciplines, lecturers understood knowledge to be partial and
revisable and open to contestation, and this is important in so far as they
expect and hope that their students will develop critical faculties and learn to
interrogate knowledge and ideas. Explaining that knowledge is revisable in an
example from Animal and Plant Sciences, Mike Smith comments:
Is there a final truth? Of course not. I guess that one starts off with a
perception of what the problem is and then you design experiments
which hopefully will solve or at least provide evidence whether a
particular hypothesis is correct or incorrect and sometimes things are
very linear and it works perhaps as you would expect. I imagine
actually some of the most exciting insights actually come from someone
doing an experiment aimed at a problem and then they see something
happening or not happening and the skill or the luck, depending on how
you judge those things, is to notice those things and to think “Actually
that might be quite interesting, that’s informative”.
Peter Otto in History explains that finding your own voice, “that’s the most
difficult thing”. He comments in relation to his own teaching why voice and
a critical understanding of knowledge, self and self in the world (Barnett,
1997, 2007) is important in contemporary times:
I’m not telling them what they should be, Left or Right, I mean I have my
preferences but that’s not my task and as a teacher it’s not my job and I
shouldn’t say, “This is the right perspective on the world”. What I rather
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try to teach them is “Look, it’s difficult and sometimes there are
contradictions which can’t easily be solved and you have to make a
decision, but you have to make a decision based on choices and each
decision has moral implications and you have to know that and you
can’t just say the way I live is the best way to live and it’s the only way
to live and therefore it’s a great way to live and I’m not responsible for
the consequences”.
He then explains how the research process shapes his teaching:
What I think is the very process of research and the very process of
teaching in a way which parallels the research action, shows that there
is no item of truth out there … I’d say a teacher who is not doing
research-led teaching would probably say “Look, there is no truth out
there” but the trick is, which I’ve found is not to tell them because they
would say “Oh, postmodern” but to find out and then sort of engage in
discussion and say “Look, but he’s saying this and he’s saying this and
they are contradictory and both have good arguments, so what do we
do now?” … I don’t want to tell them what the truth is, I want them to
figure it out for themselves that it’s slightly more complicated than that.
(Interview 26 April 2007)
Of course it does not follow that ‘research knowledge’ (understanding
knowledge as revisable and placing an emphasis on critical approaches)
translates into good teaching, but it does seem necessary, if not sufficient, for
research-enhanced pedagogies.
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Lecturer explication of desirable skills and qualities outcomes from
research
Across all of the interviews, the skills and qualities for and from research,
identified by lecturers were:
History: building an argument, testing counter-arguments; working with
evidence; writing, presentations; having your own voice, being able to
challenge authorities; interpreting texts; information literacy (finding and
processing information, presenting it, challenging it); thinking for yourself;
working independently; citizenship, social awareness; moral awareness;
truth/knowledge as revisable; identity of an expert in some aspect of History;
dialogue and discussion (listening, commenting, criticising); knowing the world
is not simple; honesty in producing historical knowledge; confidence.
Politics: developing a theoretical framework; organisational abilities;
interacting with people (fieldwork); thinking on your feet; being adaptable;
honesty in producing knowledge; scepticism; confidence in own ideas and
arguments; awareness of other cultures; thinking for yourself; team/group
work; identifying interesting questions; synthesising material; tenacity and
stamina; intellectual curiosity; information literacy.
Animal and Plant Sciences: curiosity and question posing; global
conversations with scientists; design and do experiments; reading and
synthesising literature; knowledge is revisable; knowledge is contested;
problem solving; intuition; determination; imagination; judging truth claims;
logic; being able to converse with experts and ask intelligent questions; ethical
awareness; communication and discussion in groups; intrinsic love of
learning; confidence to critique others’ views; honesty.
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How then did research-enhanced pedagogies and an explication of
desirable research skills contribute to students’ capability formation to
choose a life that is good for them?
(II) Student voices
I therefore now turn to the voices of selected students from each department
to illustrate how experiences of research-enhanced pedagogy enable these
students to shape and reshape what it is they have reason to value, to
become what Taylor (1985) describes as ‘strong evaluators’. Students
demonstrated a strong awareness of how research in the subject was
undertaken; the dynamic nature of the knowledge generated and the kinds of
skills required; and what they had learned and achieved, and how this had
expanded their choices and opportunities whether in relation to economic
opportunities, personal fulfillment and the likelihood of lifelong learning, or
their role as critical, educated citizens. I found evidence of: ‘thick’ practical
reasoning (that is being able to reason about and choose a ‘good’ life), critical
awareness of knowledge, alternative perspectives and society, and notions of
human solidarity, developed individually and intersubjectively, and supported
by good teaching that fosters confidence, voice, participation and
achievement. We might describe these using Sen’s language as ‘functional
capabilities’ that support a process of becoming and being strong evaluators.
While these capabilities are neither developed to the same depth and degree
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nor look the same for each student in each of the three disciplines, they,
nonetheless, do emerge in some way as valuable for each of the students.
I have prioritised two significant themes arising from all the student voice
data, but drawn from a small subset of the student data to enable a richer
appreciation of these students’ learning. Similar evidence can be found
across the whole dataset. The first theme I have called ‘epistemological
knowing’, which involves students’ critical engagement with knowledge and
knowing, and the second ‘ontological being’, which involves reflexive
reasoning about the self and the ‘becoming and being’ self in the world.
The first is crucial for the second, but the second arguably stands prior to
epistemology (Barnett, 2007) – we are human beings before we are
students or learners, but as human beings can be transformed by knowing
and knowledge. Ontological being is indicative of the formation of the
capability to be a strong evaluator in ways that advance personal well-
being; that is, what makes a life go well for that person, their quality of life
at this point in time, and potentially also in the future.
(III) Theme one: epistemological knowing
Students’ ability to reflect critically on their lives and their futures is
grounded in research-enhanced pedagogies that enable access to
knowledge, an understanding of knowledge as provisional and contested,
and a ‘coming to know’ (which includes engaging with a plurality of views
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among their own peers in classes). This is a complex capability. For their
part, students identified having come to critical understandings through
exposure to different points of view, their fellow students and to academic
texts. They said things like:
Lily (Plant and Animal Sciences): Seeing how people’s opinions do differ,
like treading your way between what you believe and what you don’t
believe does help quite a lot … I think it really does considering how you
live in a world full of lots of different people who obviously might not think
the same, who might not agree on the same things that you do and it is
really important to not get particularly riled up about that, it does perhaps
make you get on better with people. (Interview 26 March 2007)
Lorna (Plant and Animal Sciences): It does help you to understand things in
a better way and see that there are other points of view, there are other
people’s opinions and all research is just evidence for a certain thing and
there’s maybe disagreement. So yeah, it definitely helps in life. (Interview
20 April 2007)
Paula (History): I think I’ve learnt how to look at texts and take them
beyond face value. I think the one thing I’ve definitely noticed is the
importance of language, I never really thought about it before, but just the
certain words you use to describe something, certain metaphors you draw,
the way you write about something can tell you something about yourself
and I think when I’m writing I’m now much more aware of what words I use.
(Interview 2 April 2007)
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Narend (History): What we often do is compare different perspectives on
certain events … nothing is accepted at face value in the seminars, [the
lecturer] always makes us look for the quirks and the omissions as well in
pieces. I think he’s very good at doing that, he’s very good at making you
look for what’s not there in source material. (Interview 5 March 2007)
Stella (History): I think … young people especially want to know the
answers or to seek out answers in life and to feel, “I know my view on
capitalism, I know my views on socialism and therefore I’ve made up my
mind”, and you seek that because you want to feel certain in the world that
you have an opinion that’s worth listening to, but actually being destabilised
… being continually introduced to new ideas is very much a reflection of
everyday life, that people’s opinions change, you’re introduced to new
information, you might change your mind about what you feel about certain
events … it’s a very good attribute of a tutor to be able to continually
remind you that you don’t have the answers and that it is unrealistic to
expect that you ever will have the answer but all we can ever do is engage
with new information and argue from that. Yeah, that’s very much a life
skill I think rather than a history skill. (Interview 21 February 2007)
Patricia (Politics): Well I think with politics almost everything is revisable …
so much of it is different people’s theories and it is different analysis, so I
think, you’re never really going to have a set perfect definition of anything
within politics, it’s all quite fluid and it’s all going to change quite a lot, but it
is quite important to have all these different theories because then it helps
each person to develop it a bit further because you’ve got all these different
things that you can look at in different ways, that you can understand
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things. It almost brings you closer to your own understanding of certain
things … I think I’m much better than I was when I started at university,
firstly because I’ve got more knowledge to back up my argument and
secondly because you just kind of learn to take in what other people are
saying more, especially through having three years of seminars and be sat
in a group, you kind of have to listen to what everyone else says before you
can formulate your argument, whereas before, I thought I knew what I knew
and I’d just argue the point, whereas you do find that you’ll be sitting in a
group situation and you’ll find different points of view coming in and you
can understand partly what people are saying and that then shapes my
argument that I’m going to give in response. (Interview 19 March 2007)
Bruner (2005) argues for the importance of “cultivating the possible”, that is
being open to different interpretations of knowledge and social arrangements.
Nussbaum (2006) advocates the development of critical thinking as
foundational to democratic life. In these students, we have compelling
evidence of how research-enhanced pedagogies have enabled them to
develop such capability, and that they value this intrinsically, regardless of
whether or not it leads instrumentally to economic opportunities or income
generation in the future. We have evidence that these young people are
asking questions, not taking arguments at face value, showing respect for the
views of others, and, in the case of History and Politics in particular, thinking
imaginatively about lives very different from their own. In a compelling
example, Patricia discusses her learning from a dissertation that looked at the
Rwandan genocide:
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 46
I don’t know, it’s quite difficult because I don’t want to go into anything even
related to politics once I’ve finished university, so it almost seems a bit like,
“Well will it ever be valuable to me?” but then I think you can never discount
knowledge, I think it’s never going to be something that you will never come
across again, kind of thing, but I think particularly because my dissertation
does look at kind of human nature and like actions which are quite in some
ways inexplicable. I think, well I think it will be quite valuable to me in that I
just have a better understanding firstly of world events and what’s
happened but also why things have happened.
(IV) Theme two: ontological being
Patricia’s comments show how critical and imaginative knowing is crucial to
being. This core capability supports a process of thick practical reasoning, of
subjecting goals and values to reasoned scrutiny, and questioning those same
goals and values as students identify and choose what they value being and
doing. This is constitutive of becoming a strong evaluator. Convincing
evidence is to be found in the students’ comments on being educated through
research.
Narend offers a slightly complicated account; on the one hand his course on
liberation struggles in Southern Africa has, “made me very pessimistic on the
ability of individuals to really work against the kind of tide”. I then ask: “has it
made your life worse rather than better having this knowledge?” He
responds:
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 47
No because I’d rather be, I wouldn’t want to be ignorant of this. I think, I’m
not saying things are hopeless, I think you need, the best way I can
describe it is with an analogy, it’s like saying if you had cancer and you had
six weeks to live, would you rather know or would you rather not? I’d say
I’d rather know because then I could plan out what I was going to do and
make sure I say goodbye to everyone. So I think once you realise the
constraints then you can kind of work within it, then you can try and do little
things that can make a difference. I just think the idea that if I didn’t know
about this then it would make my life better, I strongly disagree, I think it
would probably make my life worse … I think that’s kind of the price you
have to kind of pay for knowledge. I’m hoping that the module has
enhanced my ability to argue and to analyse material and I believe it’s
improved my general knowledge of the area. I guess just studying
something I’m interested in all along, it’s made me decide that if I’m going
to have a career, I want to do something I enjoy and something that’s
relevant to me and I feel that there’s no point, I feel that I’m quite good at
what I do and I think why should I just do something like banking if I’d
rather, I think it’s made me want to sort of follow my ambitions rather than
just kind of go after money, so to speak.
Paula describes some of her valued functionings:
… it made me more aware of looking at my own viewpoint and the way I
look at news stories and things like that and the assumptions I make,
because I come from a very white middle-class background, I come from a
town that’s, you know, there’s not racial tension because there are only
white people really and things like that, so it’s very easy to make
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 48
assumptions or hold views that you never have to test because you are
only surrounded by sort of the same kind of people as you and I think
maybe that’s part of coming to uni as well, but this course has made me
reassess and think about my own prejudices and my own stereotypes and
stuff. I think this has given me more confidence in a certain kind of debate.
Debate was always quite big at my school, but everyone held the same
opinion … That said, I have no idea what I want to do … so, it could be
difficult matching my ideals against the reality of the world, I’m not sure….I
think the way it’s made me reassess my prejudices because that’s very
much, I mean, your judgements and your prejudices make you, very much
characterise the way you deal with the world and deal with people, read
things, interpret things, things like that and by having to look at that and
challenge, those being challenged, I don’t think I’ve changed in any
dramatic sense, but it’s made me just more aware of the way I look at the
world … I think it is something that could, you know, if you choose the right
thing, I don’t know, maybe make a difference, I’m not sure.
Lorna talks about what has been valuable for her from learning research skills
and doing research:
Definitely more confident, more adept at coming into new situations as well
and circumstances that are unusual to you … It’s not a normal situation
when you first start university and they do throw you in at the deep end and
when you’re doing a project, that’s completely new to you, so that’s helped
with when I started [part-time] work as well ‘cos that was a new situation.
So coming to university helped me, like put myself out to go to the hospital
and get a job, yeah, new circumstances, that’s helped … Confidence.
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 49
Presentation skills which I’d never really done before, that was something I
got from coming here. Organisation, a hundred times better than when I
first started and planning out my work and my time. Time management,
golly, I wouldn’t have coped in the first year if I’d this amount of work …
you’re surprised at what you do know when you think about it. You think
three years ago, I knew none of that and that’s all I know now, I’m sure I
must know everything about oxin now. Yeah, definitely twice the
knowledge that I came with, it feels like I’ve learnt absolute loads in three
years. And, yeah, just going out into a general place, you think, it does
make you more optimistic that if there’s other people, you don’t feel like,
you feel like you’re in par with them, you don’t feel that they’re so much
better than me, they’ve done this, they’ve done that. You’ve been to
university, you’ve learnt all the things, you’re just as good as them. You can
hold your own.
Lily explains her career choice and how research-enhanced pedagogy has
helped her reflect and decide on what she hopes to do:
I guess I just like the process of thinking of questions, thinking of ways to
answer those questions. It is very important because it can be related to,
not necessarily scientific endeavours, you can relate it to other things,
generally like projects and stuff, not necessarily to do with science
completely, I think, maybe … it’s because, let’s say, you know, it’s to do
with having a problem and trying to think of a way to solve it and thinking of
a logical and streamlined way of doing it and how it could be related to, I
don’t know, doing projects in the community, for example, or something like
that … Because I’m not necessarily going on to do a PhD or anything like
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 50
that, I’ll probably go into the real world and stuff and how it could be quite
relevant to that kind of thing … I also want to do things on a conservation
slant but just generally to do with the environment, so that’s why I was
thinking that that would be a good route to go in and I was thinking to
myself that I really have to go and do a course or whatever in project
development … it wasn’t something which had occurred to me, I did fourth
year because I wasn’t very sure whether I wanted to do a PhD or not and
that’s why I’m slanting more towards conservation now.
Finally, Stella explains:
I think a good life is a life with choices and job satisfaction and I think
that this course has certainly helped me to think of a job that I will be
satisfied in and it has helped me to, yeah, to have choice over my
profession. That sounds very wishy-washy, but what I mean by that is
to feel empowered that I don’t have to be a generic History graduate
and work for Marks and Spencers on a graduate scheme or whatever.
That I can, that a good life is, having learnt the things I’ve learnt from
my degree, using them in a way that means I can continually engage
with those issues. So even if I don’t end up being a campaign manager
or working for an NGO, that I will continue to be compassionate and
have a role and relationship with Southern Africa and I think that’s
important, that I have learned that that’s important to me. It’s kind of a
self, a growth thing. When you find that you’re really good at hockey or
whatever, that suddenly changes everything, that you then factor
hockey in your life, for the rest of your life because you enjoy it so much
and although I can’t do degree, after degree, after degree, I can
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 51
certainly continue to engage with the [southern African] region and that
is important to me. It’s been an awakening to what I’m interested in.
More than any other piece of data Stella’s voice captures what it means to
have formed the capability to be a strong evaluator and “to stand differently in
the world” (Barnett, 2007, p153).
These are hopeful stories of identity formation, which point to being human as
a rich and complex thing, and to human flourishing and well-being. Not all of
the students whose voices are represented here are the same: they include
middle- and working-class students, male and female students, and minority
ethnic students. What their voices show is that what it means to be educated
though research is something more complex than the acquisition of discrete
research skills for employability, or enquiry learning in which student learning
opportunities to be educated are somewhat vaguely described. At the same
time, knowledge and knowing has been mediated by lecturers who are
committed both to epistemology and ontology, to teaching and student
learning, and to facilitating pedagogical intersubjectivity, which enables rather
than disables students’ voices and confidence. Such research-enhanced
pedagogies resist the “miniaturization” (Sen, 2006) of student identities and
challenge research-intensive universities’ marketised interpretations of lifelong
learning, being world citizens, and graduate skills and attributes.
Conceptualising research-enhanced pedagogies, student identity formation
and teaching in the language of capability, strong evaluators and a human
development paradigm not only counters dominant human capital language, it
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 52
also provides a framework for reimagining the research/teaching nexus with
regard to well-being and quality of life in university teaching and learning.
(V) Quality in teaching and pedagogies
What became clear from the data, however, even though a focus on whether
good researchers make good teachers had not been intended, is that lecturer
commitments to student learning and good teaching are inescapably an issue
in any thick description of a research-enhanced pedagogy. Perhaps not
surprisingly, because the lecturers interviewed had been recommended by
heads of departments as both good researchers and good teachers, or were
known to me as such through personal contacts, commitments to teaching
students well was common to all nine whom I interviewed. There is then the
argument that for students to develop as persons there is a “need for an
ontological turn on the part of teaching staff” (Barnett, 2007, p109). Lecturers,
as much as students, would need themselves to form their own capabilities
about what makes life good for them.
However, forming professional identities in this way confronts unhelpful
systemic and institutional barriers. Thus it was also the case that in one of the
departments, commitments to its research profile outweighed teaching
arrangements. Individual teachers still expressed teaching commitments, but
these were shaped also by departmental arrangements that curtailed contact
between research-active staff and undergraduate students. To take one
example: in the History department, the third-year special subject ran over two
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 53
semesters for four hours each week; in the Politics department, special
subject options ran for only one semester for two hours a week. Thus Martha
Scott complained that it was difficult to develop students’ research skills in a
12-week course.
Nonetheless, all the lecturers I interviewed indicated strong commitments to
research, teaching and student learning. Following the capability approach,
we might say that committed, research-active teaching is constitutive of the
social arrangements that enable learning. At the same time, lecturers struggle
in the context of a policy and institutional environment that was rather less
conducive to such efforts with the overwhelming emphasis on research
productivity to enhance individual and university reputation, with far less
reward and recognition for quality teaching. Working against this grain to
teach well and enthusiastically and be research-active is rather admirable
under these contemporary conditions.
However, not all their colleagues could be described in the same way. Helen,
a joint History and Politics honours student remarked:
I’ve walked past lecturers in the street and they wouldn’t recognise me
because why would they, there’s so many … also occasionally I have
got the feeling that by coming to lecture to us, we’re interrupting their
personal research schedule. That might just be me being cynical, but in
them having to break up their day to come in and do a lecture, they’re
being interrupted when they would rather be away studying … If we
have a problem in Politics and we ask our seminar tutor, they usually
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 54
have to refer back to the lecturer anyway, but then if we go and speak
to the lecturer, they’re not going to know who we are, so it’s quite
impersonal and usually people don’t bother. I think there’s something
good if you can go and speak to your lecturer and they know you and
they know who you are … the Politics department is one of the best in
the country, they’ve got a lot of lecturers there who have written
countless books and they have a big cabinet with all their books in, but
it means nothing if they’re not giving these skills to the students which
isn’t happening. You don’t get that from an hour a week. (Interview 21
February 2007)
This underlines that it is lecturers’ pedagogical approaches that bridge the
research and teaching divide, and that they do it well or less well. Being
research-active is, then, necessary but not sufficient.
Allan Luke (2006, pp5-6) reminds us that: “As we face the social and cultural,
political and economic challenges of this new millennium … the remaking of
knowledge and pedagogy is the key to educational change and to
reawakening the transformative and generative capacity of educational
systems.” Such attention to critical pedagogies directs us to “the normative
questions of which pedagogies can and should be developed for human
beings” (p5). Capabilities introduces a language of flourishing (Nussbaum,
2000) and of equalities. Moreover, universities and higher education in the UK
is still for the most part based in public institutions, which ought to be built
around the defence of the notion of the public interest that they serve and of
‘education’. At the very least, there is still a debate to be had, even in the face
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 55
of market ideology, about the normative purposes and outcomes of
universities; capability theorising offers robust tools for such dialogue.
Alternatively, we can go ahead with producing graduates from higher
education with technological, scientific, vocational and research skills, who are
at the same time lacking critical faculties and imagination and an openness to
participation in democratic public life.
Results
The results from this project differ from more typically traditional research
projects. They need to encompass knowledge generated through both its
major theoretical element and the empirical data. The results then are:
1. An original theorisation of the research/teaching nexus as a matter of
students’ ‘capability formation’, understood as each student’s
substantive freedom to do and be what they value doing and being.
2. Pedagogical approaches need to pay attention to ‘human being’,
including: students’ acquisition of critical perspectives on research
knowledge through texts, practices and participatory debates with their
lecturers and their peers; each student developing confidence in their
ability to publicly debate, defend and even change their epistemological
positions; developing respect and understanding for different
perspectives; and fostering students’ capability to become ‘strong
evaluators’.
3. While it may be mundane and is certainly not original, it bears
repeating that this project, as with many others, found that teaching
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 56
well needs the support of departments and institutions and message
systems that value and reward quality pedagogies.
4. Research methodologies that include student voices, and diverse
student voices, as well as lecturer voices enable richer understanding
of student learning experiences and outcomes.
5. Debating the normative purposes of higher education in the context of
concerns for human development, equalities and the ‘moral urgencies’
that confront societies in the 21st century ought to be integral to the
research/teaching nexus and not an optional add-on.
Recommendations
The key recommendations for higher education, for understanding the
research/teaching nexus, and for quality in teaching and learning are that: (i)
the research/teaching nexus needs to be embedded in the debates about the
normative purposes of higher education; (ii) the concept of ‘research-
enhanced pedagogies’ is helpful, but needs to pay attention to what is
understood by ‘research’, ‘enhanced’ and ‘pedagogies’ and to what it means
to be ‘educated’ through research; (iii) ‘enhancing’ learning in the disciplines
through research ought to integrate the formation both of students’
epistemological and ontological capabilities; and (iv) if both the research and
teaching elements in the research/teaching nexus do not inflect towards a
more equal and just student experience on the one hand, and a concern with
the moral urgencies of our society on the other, we need to raise serious
questions about what the point is of the nexus. Yet to do this we also need
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 57
assertively to acknowledge and reward lecturers’ whose teaching approaches
and commitments form students’ capabilities through a practice of research-
enhanced pedagogies.
Higher education, and research-intensive universities in particular, ought then
to debate these kinds of questions:
1. What normative purposes for higher education flow from
conceptualising the research/teaching nexus as (a) being educated
through research, and (b) as capability formation?
2. How through research/teaching can we help students to form valuable
capabilities during their undergraduate years so that higher education
supports each student in having the substantive freedom to live in ways
that they have reason to value and to choose?
3. How might the concept of ‘capability’ serve as a catalyst for
pedagogically driven change in higher education and a critical
scholarship of teaching?
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the lecturers and students who gave of their time to be
interviewed, the anonymous referee of the draft report for further stimulating
my thinking about ontology, and my colleague at the University of Nottingham,
Monica McLean, for the gift of our challenging dialogues.
The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 58
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Teaching: Enhancing the ‘Teaching-Research’ Nexus Literature
Review. University of Lancaster, unpublished draft.
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Walker, M. (ed.) (2001) Reconstructing Professionalism in University
Teaching. Buckingham: SRHE/Open University Press.
Walker, M. (2004) Pedagogies of Beginning. In: M. Walker and J. Nixon (eds.)
Reclaiming Universities from a Runaway World. Maidenhead:
SRHE/Open University Press.
Walker, M. (2006) Higher Education Pedagogies. Maidenhead: SRHE/Open
University Press.
Zamorksi, B. (2000) Research-Led Teaching and Learning in Higher
Education Norwich: Centre for Applied Research in Education,
University of East Anglia.
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Appendix A: Methodology and methods
This project comprised two related parts. The review phase of conceptualising
and theory generation was the key component of the research. The idea was
not to generate an extensive new empirical database, but rather to explore the
capability and related literature, and consult information available on websites
and in secondary publications. In addition, a small amount of original
qualitative data from a single institution was collected as a check on the
emergent theorisation. A theory-data analytical ‘conversation’ was therefore
envisaged. From September 2006, a conceptual and critical review phase was
begun to enhance understanding of the research/teaching relationship as both
ontological and epistemological, in relation to the quality of student learning
experiences and teaching practices. This phase continued through the project
and took account of: (i) the existing (and well-known) literature on the
research/teaching nexus; (ii) websites of relevant Centres for Excellence in
Teaching and Learning (CETLs) at the universities of Manchester, Reading
and Sheffield; (iii) UK higher education policy and the concept of knowledge
economies; and (iv) the capability approach in relation to higher education. In
general, because the CETLs were at an early stage of development and had a
primary focus on undergraduate research and enquiry learning as methods,
these were not found to be particularly helpful conceptually, although it is
envisaged that they will become more so over time as the CETL projects
unfold and the results of their own research is made public. Additionally,
comprehensive websites on the research/teaching nexus developed at the
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universities of Melbourne (www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/) and Sydney
(www.itl.usyd.edu.au/tandlresearch/itlresearch.htm) were consulted.
Supplementing the review and providing empirical data to interrogate the
emerging analysis and theorisations, qualitative data were collected in one
research-intensive university in England. This utilised a narrative, voice-
based methodology to elicit the perspectives of a limited number of students
and lecturers. The method drew on Polkinghorne’s (1998, p11) concept of
narrative as “a scheme by means of which human beings give meaning to
their experience of temporality and personal actions”, together with Ochs and
Capps’ (2001, p2) notion of storytelling as “social exchanges in which
interlocutors build accounts of life events [as] a tool for collaboratively
reflecting upon specific situations and their place in the general scheme of
life”. The idea was to identify a small number of articulate respondents. This
narrative-analytic approach is intended to reveal how student learning
identities are formed at the nexus of teaching and learning practices, and
embedded in larger ideological influences (for example, educational values).
In addition, the idea of student voice is held to be particularly important in
generating rich accounts of student learning and experiences (Flutter and
Rudduck, 2004; Rudduck and Flutter, 2003). Student voices on learning have
the potential to explicate the deep structures of higher education teaching and
learning and point to that which pedagogically driven change (Elliott, 2000)
ought to pay attention. Moreover, as Rudduck and Flutter (2003) have argued,
students’ perspectives on learning and teaching, combined with their
experiences of [higher] education, suggest important directions for
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improvement both at an institutional level and on a day-to-day basis in
classes.
There is no claim made that any of these voices of lecturers or students are
either representative or comprehensive, simply that we need to take student
voices in particular, and also lecturer voices, into account in understanding
learning outcomes at the research/teaching nexus. The interest here is not in
a representative group or sample across all disciplines, but an approach that
recognises that we can learn from what students say about their experiences
of learning and transformation about what practices sustain their learning, and
what dispositions and identities have to be achieved for multidimensional
learning outcomes that include ‘knowing’ and ‘being’. Nonetheless, the
limitations of these ‘snapshot’ data are also acknowledged; learning is
recursive rather than linear, dynamic and changing over time.
For this reason, the emphasis is on the data as illustrative rather than
representative or comprehensive, and on the capacity even of small-scale
fieldwork data on lived experiences to complement and interrogate theory
development in a dialectic of theory and data as a form of grounded theory
(Strauss and Corbin, 1997). Moreover, this approach places the researcher’s
“capacity to make meaning of data at the heart of the theorizing process”
(Piantanida et al., 2004, p332), to bring a conceptual perspective to bear on
individual voice ‘texts’ and to establish plausible relationships among concepts
through a process of coding data (Piantanida et al., 2004) so that: “The
creation of a conceptual mosaic is the core of the theorizing process”
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(Piantanida et al., 2004, p340). The methodological questions we then ask of
ourselves are:
… does the portrayal of the inquiry provide evidence that the research
was conducted in a rigorous and ethical manner and does the
substantive theory have a coherent conceptual integrity; does it ring
true, does it offer useful insights; does it have the vitality and aesthetic
richness to be persuasive? (Piantanida et al., 2004, p341)
Three subject departments, all with high Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA)
and 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) scores were chosen, to
include an arts (History), social science (Politics) and science (Animal and
Plant Sciences) discipline. On each department’s website, specific reference
was made to that department’s excellence in teaching and in research.
Identifying a small number of respondents in each department proved more
difficult than had been anticipated. Directors of Learning and Teaching offered
suggestions, heads of departments were helpful, and personal contacts were
also mobilised. An email invitation went out to lecturers and students
explaining that I was conducting a research project that explores the link
between research, teaching and quality in student learning, and that I hoped
to interview people whose teaching was shaped and informed by their own
research, with positive learning outcomes for their students. In the case of
students in these same departments, I hoped to interview those who felt they
had had positive learning experiences through encounters or involvement in
‘research-rich teaching’ in the department, at any stage during their
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undergraduate degree. I explained that I had made no assumptions regarding
one best or right way to forge links between research and teaching. I did,
however, make the assumption that research practices such as critical
enquiry, intellectual openness and curiosity, collaboration, intellectual grasp
and passion for the subject, communication skills and ethical sensitivity would
feature in some way or form in the variety of teaching and learning
approaches. I made clear that the project was not intended to explore whether
the quality of teaching and learning is better when lecturers are active
researchers (and hence implicitly evaluate individual lecturer’s practices). I
was particularly interested in what students had to say about good
experiences of learning where their lecturers are also active researchers. A
short project outline was also attached and contact telephone and email
details provided. Interviews took place between February and April 2007 on
the university campus. In all nine lecturers and 21 final-year undergraduates
were interviewed:
• History: four lecturers and ten students
• Politics: three lecturers and four students
• Animal and Plant Sciences: two lecturers and seven students
A semi-structured interview schedule, grounded in the conceptual exploration
of the project (see Appendices B and C), was developed. Some considerable
time was spent developing the interview schedules so that they were
sufficiently robust to capture the conceptual themes, while also allowing for
the unexpected.
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The lecturers included men and women, with a range of experience from
lecturer to professor. No assumption was made that senior academics would
be better or worse teachers than junior staff, and this was not a focus of this
research. The students included men and women from diverse backgrounds,
including middle-class and working-class students, one international student
from North America, and two minority ethnic students. Initially, it was planned
to interviews 30 students in pairs over 15 interviews, but this proved
problematic so both students and academics were interviewed individually.
Only 21 students volunteered in the end. In particular, it proved difficult to
contact volunteers who were satisfied with their experiences of research-led
teaching in Politics and this dataset is the least satisfactory. Interviews lasted
on average an hour, were tape-recorded, with the permission of the
participants, and fully transcribed. Interview transcripts were read and coded
for research/teaching nexus and capability themes. During the data analysis,
a further organising concept in Taylor’s (1985) idea of ‘strong evaluators’
emerged.
The project was approved through university-recognised ethics review
process and adhered further to British Educational Research Association
(BERA) ethical guidelines. Lecturers and students in the empirical phase were
all volunteers, and the University and interviewees have been anonymised.
It had been planned to establish a critical advisory group of five colleagues,
but this also proved difficult to organise and instead I relied on informal
feedback with colleagues who would have been part of such a group,
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feedback to a presentation at the University of Nottingham, and papers
delivered at various conferences between July and December 2007 (Appendix
D).
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Appendix B: Interview schedule – lecturers
1) What is your conception of research? What does a researcher in your
subject actually do? Which values and abilities sit at very heart of your
own discipline?
2) How then does research shape your teaching of the subject? What
exactly is it that you do? Please give concrete examples from your
module/s. How do students experience or come to know about your
research or know that you are research-active?
3) What then is your conception of ‘research-led teaching’? [The
University describes it as: a curriculum and teaching/learning process
of creating and deepening knowledge by engaging students in learning
activities that mirror the process and activities of research.] What for
you would constitute quality in research-led teaching in your subject?
4) What kind of learning outcomes or student development do you aim
for/think happens because you are research-active?
5) [If not discussed]: Which of these features of a research-intensive
environment are significant in your own teaching: critical knowledge
and critical thinking; critical information literacy; problem-solving;
collaboration, self confidence, intellectual grasp and passion for the
subject; effective communication; ethical sensitivity, responsible
citizenship; ability to deal with risk and multiple perspectives? Would
you want to emphasise the importance of any one? Why? Is there
anything missing that you would want to add?
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6) What in your view does student exposure to/engagement with research
and enquiry through your teaching contribute to one or more of the key
purposes of higher education (Having individual economic opportunities
for employability, and also contributing to economic growth; becoming
educated citizens; having personal fulfilment)? How and in what way?
What about current notions of lifelong learning and global/world
citizenship, are they relevant at all to research-led teaching in your
discipline and subject?
7) This project has a concern with not just what knowledge students might
acquire, but also what they might become as persons – the intellectual
and social resources they might acquire as a result of what they learn
and experience as learners for planning and choosing a good life for
themselves. How do you respond to this? Do you see developing
student agency and well-being as significant at all?
8) Is there anything else you would like to add or say about your own
research-led teaching?
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Appendix C: Interview schedule – students
1) Please discuss modules during your degree studies in which you feel
you experienced ‘research-led teaching’. [The University describes it
as: a curriculum and teaching/learning process of creating and
deepening knowledge by engaging students in learning activities that
mirror the process and activities of research.]
2) Why in your view were these modules research-led? [What do you
think a researcher actually does when researching his/her subject?] For
example, how did the lecturer/s incorporate their research into
approaches to teaching in these module/s? Can you give specific
examples of what they did? (Did they talk about their own research?
Did they get you to do your own research? Did they encourage critical
discussions etc?)
3) What do you feel you have learned or gained (i) in general, but also (ii)
what specific skills and abilities, have you acquired through research-
led teaching? (For example, critical reasoning, openness to ideas,
ethical understanding, communication etc). Would you agree with the
argument by Charlie Leadbetter that cultures of creative dissent,
dispute, disrespect for authority, diversity and experimentation are key
to contemporary knowledge economies?
4) How (if at all) has your involvement in research through research-led
teaching helped you in: having economic opportunities; becoming an
educated citizen; having personal fulfilment? What about becoming a
lifelong learner and a global or world citizen?
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5) What is the most valuable learning you have gained through your
encounters with research in research-led teaching? Why do you value
this? What difference does it make to your life? How does it improve
or enrich your life now and in the future?
6) How, if at all, have you been changed as a person in ways which you
value by these experiences and learning? (For example, are you more
confident, curious, or creative, or compassionate, or responsible etc?)
7) What, if anything, from these experiences and learning will help you in
planning, choosing and having a ‘good’ life, now and in the future?
Have these experiences increased your agency and well-being in any
way?
8) Is there anything else you would like to add about your experiences of
research-led teaching?
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Appendix D: Conference papers from the project
1) Walker, M. (2007) ‘Strong Evaluators’: Research-Enhanced Pedagogy
and Student Capability. Paper presented at the international ISSOTL
conference, Sydney, 2-5 July 2007.
2) Walker, M. (2007) Perspectives on valued student learning
achievements at the research/teaching nexus. Paper presented at the
conference ‘Learning Together - Reshaping higher education in a
global age’, London, 22-24 July 2007.
3) Walker, M. (2007) The normative purposes of universities, and
pedagogy at the research/teaching nexus. Paper presented in the
symposium ‘Perspectives in the Research/Teaching Nexus’, annual
conference of the Society for Research in Higher Education, Brighton,
11-13 December 2007.