Search

Teaching Excellence Awards have raised the profile of teaching as a scholarly project. There are however a number of questions about what constitutes teaching excellence and how ‘excellence’ is understood in current higher education. In a post-colonial South Africa, where significant injustices permeate our society, we question whether excellence can be understood in a generic manner. Furthermore, we argue that as universities are a public good, teaching excellence needs to explicitly attend to the ways in which universities contribute to broad goals of transformation and inclusivity. We analysed data from the national Teaching Excellence Awards and 13 South African universities’ awards to interrogate the discourses that underpin ‘excellence’ in this context of social inequality. We found that while the awards have gone some way to enhancing the position of teaching in institutions, ‘excellence’ was largely articulated in fairly generic ways which failed to take into account the enablements and constraints of the discipline and the institution. Furthermore, the guidelines and criteria privilege a decontextualised notion of excellence that seeks a ‘gold standard’ and validates performativity, rather than a contextualised response to the needs of the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), we examine academics’ perspectives on the discourse of ‘teaching excellence’ based on an empirical study with 16 participants from five post-1992 universities. The article reports the findings on academics’ views of the term and concept of ‘teaching excellence’, examples of what ‘teaching excellence’ may look like in practice, whether a distinction between ‘good’, ‘good enough’ and ‘excellent teaching’ can be made, and the measurability of ‘teaching excellence’. The research findings suggest we need a more nuanced inclusive interpretation of ‘teaching excellence’ which recognises the conjoined nature of teaching and research in higher education, and also rebalances a focus on outcome-related measures with understandings of purposes and development of the processes of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education institutions are joining many other social entities in shifting how participants are evaluated; work is undergoing increasing analysis through metrics, big data analytics, and related methodologies. As applications of academic metrics expand, new formulations of what is considered as ‘excellence’ in teaching and research are being constructed and new kinds of academic ‘star’ faculty and journals determined. Academic participation is being tightly coupled with specific, manipulable quantitative measures, providing formidable lessons about how intellectual endeavors are valued. This paper presents analyses of ‘performative metrics’ approaches: metrics-related methodologies are being manipulated at levels including faculty member, department, publisher, and university, often in ways well described by game and drama theory (Howard 1994). Academic life is often associated with potentials for unbiased pursuits of knowledge; as discourse intensifies concerning metric manipulation, identities and reputations of academic participants could shift, providing challenges to those who desire trust and impartial merit rewards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an overall change in higher education towards the achievement of outstanding patterns of quality and excellence that assure competitiveness at a global scale. Teachers feel the pressure of official regulations for achieving quality and excellence, based on questionable concepts of quality that do not take into account the experience and beliefs of teachers and lead to emotional states that may promote or hinder adjustment to changes. The present study used a categorical content analysis to capture the emotions that twelve university teachers associate with the changes experienced and with the pursuit of quality emphasized in Portugal by the Bologna Process. The results show that participants revealed mixed emotions regarding change. Students elicit mostly positive emotions, whereas bureaucracy, marketization and career changes generate negative emotions that impede the quest for quality, although in a minority of participants they prompt resilience that stimulates engagement in quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the notion of excellence in relation to teaching is removed from its privileged place in order to render it, and its implications, for analysis. We argue that teaching excellence needs to be understood in the larger context of the neoliberal university in which competition is taken for granted, and therefore, metrics for comparison are evermore necessary. Following this argument, we explore excellence as an instrument of neoliberal ideology in higher education. We explore different manifestations of teaching excellence enacted in policies that that are illustrative of five different countries. Implications for further analysis, and for resistance to the expansion of neoliberal ideology through teaching excellence, are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association of research and teaching, and the roles and responsibilities of students and academic staff and the nature of their interrelationship are important issues in higher education. This article presents six undergraduate student researchers’ reports of their learning from collaborating with academic staff to design, undertake and evaluate enquiries into aspects of learning and teaching at a UK University. The students’ reflections suggest that they identified learning in relation to employability skills and graduate attributes and more importantly in relation to their perceptions of themselves as learners and their role in their own learning and that of others. This article draws attention to the potential of staff–student collaborative, collective settings for developing pedagogic practice and the opportunities they can provide for individual student's learning on their journey through higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the role of emotion in teaching about social issues in higher education. We draw and expand upon Boler's notion of a ‘Pedagogy of Discomfort’, Goodman's and Curry-Steven's concept of a ‘Pedagogy for the Privileged', and on Freire's idea of a ‘Pedagogy of Hope', in reflecting on our own experiences in teaching a graduate-level course on social movement learning. We argue for the importance of further sociological theorisation of the role of emotion in teaching and learning in higher education, and acknowledge the challenges a Pedagogy of Emotion present to those teaching in the social sciences at the post-secondary level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between all scholarly activities, most importantly between teaching, learning, research and professional learning. The article builds on the work of others who call for a social justice approach to inform the SoTL. It focuses on the implications for professional learning, as an aspect of the SoTL which has been neglected. The tripartite account of participatory parity as advanced by Nancy Fraser is shown to be a valuable frame to describe instances of social justice, as well as the kind of institutional arrangements that should be instituted to support participatory parity. Alongside this, the notion of a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ is shown to be an effective, but challenging means to advance awareness of justice and injustice amongst academics. The article draws on examples from three action based research projects run by the authors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teaching and learning is a growing field of research and practice globally, and increasing investments are being made in developing academics as teachers. An inability to adequately account for disciplinary knowledge can lead to academic development inputs that are unable to fully address the needs of students, educators, or disciplines themselves. Semantics, from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), provides insight not just into the hows of pedagogy but also the whats and whys, particularly the ways in which knowledge needs to be connected up in meaning-making. This paper argues for the use of semantic profiles to open up conversations with educators about teaching, learning, and the nature of knowledge in their disciplines. It raises important questions about the practical uses of LCT tools in higher education and shares initial ideas, informed by lecturer feedback in one case study, of how these tools can be used in academic staff development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research ethics in education is a challenging topic to teach and to learn. As the staff and student body in UK higher education and elsewhere diversifies, the challenges increase as shared reference points diminish. My teaching reflections focus on a key tension explored in this article: how the imperative of internationalising the curriculum conflicts with hegemonic codes of conduct regarding research ethics that seem resistant to change. The framework of threshold concepts is applied to the teaching and learning of research ethics in education not, as is usual, to identify such concepts, but to draw attention to the critical role of the intersection between learner and curriculum and how institutional expectations need to be re-appraised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the adoption of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) by 10 Malaysian university academics. SoTL was part of a pioneering sector-wide initiative for improving teaching and learning. The qualitative study showed that there had been no true learning phase for SoTL because academics had high expectations of rapid success in their new research area, including journal publication. Most of their peers did not understand or value SoTL and so SoTL researchers established minority self-sustaining groups across disciplines and universities. SoTL brought new ways of thinking about teaching that were transformational for the teacher but not necessarily welcomed by the students. Students resisted radical change, and teachers were drawn back to educational practices they no longer valued. SoTL was experienced in a hierarchical educational culture where questioning of self and others was difficult and this hindered teacher development. We conclude with recommendations about realistic expectations and the importance of social learning for those considering SoTL for academic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores teaching in higher education through poetic transcription in order to illustrate the range of influences that shape the ways in which we teach. Through using poetry, this paper examines dimensions such as the past, emotion, humour and uncertainty, which are important aspects of teaching that are sometimes sidelined by more traditional research methods. The paper evokes the richness and complexity of academic life through placing the personal and the particular at the centre in a way that highlights the complexity. In this way it invites participation in the lives of others through providing a window into the academic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]