Search

Universities might aspire to teaching excellence, but do they enable academic teachers to make good teaching decisions? Using a critical realist perspective, a qualitative interview study in England and Australia explored academics' experiences of teaching decisions and their responses to strategic, institutional and departmental teaching policy and planning. Complex and contradictory conditions that challenged academics' experiences of teaching and prevented effective decision-making were found. The paper identifies aspects of university functioning that act to prevent the achievement of teaching excellence. It argues that excellence in teaching requires coherent and integrated approaches and commitment right across the institution. For this to happen, universities need to consider how stated strategic learning and teaching ambitions are communicated, implemented, supported and, importantly, how they are understood and enacted throughout all levels and areas of the organisation, including many that hitherto do not consider they have a role in learning and teaching.

Research experiences are prominent in universities' undergraduate programmes across Australasia and are known to produce a variety of positive outcomes for students, educators, and universities. While there is growing research focused independently on undergraduate research and the role of assessment in higher education, how undergraduate research is assessed is not well understood. This paper reports on a scoping study and illuminates current assessment strategies and best practices in undergraduate research at universities in Australia and New Zealand across 17 disciplines. It offers empirical evidence and reflections based on a mixed-methods study involving 54 survey responses and 4 interviews with academics who engage in best practice. We explore what gets assessed and how, the main purpose of assessment, what drives undergraduate research assessment, and what criteria are used. Contributions and implications for undergraduate research assessment practice are discussed and key principles for design proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the changing context of universities, organisational structures for teaching and research problematise academic roles. This paper draws on a critical realist analysis of surveys and interviews with academics from universities in England and Australia. It identifies important academic work, not captured simply in descriptions of teaching or research. It shows that many academics, who are not research high flyers nor award-winning teachers, carry out this essential work which contributes to the effective functioning of their universities. That work is referred to as academic artisanal work and the people who do it as academic artisans. Characteristics and examples of academic artisans are presented, and the nature of artisanal work is explored. Implications for higher education management and for future studies are discussed. The paper points to an urgent need to better understand the complex nature of academic work.

Findings from interviews with mid-career academics in English and Australian universities elucidate how academics interpret and navigate complex institutional contexts in shaping academic jobs. The paper argues that how they do this is a function of what they notice and respond to as well as the mode of reflexivity they employ. Three core areas are seen to affect academics sense of agency as they shape their own jobs: how they orient themselves to the world around them including the academic institution and department; their underlying goals and purposes as they seek to have a fulfilling role; and how they relate to structural conditions of the workplace. The paper argues that understanding academics' differing foci of awareness in these areas is helpful to institutional policies and strategies.

New understandings of drawing, emerging from the conjunction of methods and models from cognitive science and arts-based research, have important practical applications for art education and beyond. This article gives a brief account of recent drawing and cognitive research and discusses the relevance for art teachers. Through their research, the authors demonstrated how drawing makes visible the embodied and situated nature of human cognition. Their findings demonstrated an interchange between conscious, directed thought and the responses, habits, and routines that lie beneath conscious awareness.

The development of cultures of support has become important in programmes for the preparation of research students. The paper draws on in-depth interviews with 21 research education coordinators from Australian and United Kingdom institutions to identify the strategies that they use to build research cultures and integrate research students into them. Students' research cultures are not always linked to departmental research cultures more generally. Local contexts and conditions and staff (including supervisors') attitudes are found to be critical in how research education coordinators respond and what is considered possible in order to ensure that research students are involved in research cultures.

How do academics make sense of university policies and strategic initiatives and act on them? Interviews were conducted with 27 mid-career academics in different disciplines, different research-intensive university environments and two countries (England and Australia). Data were analysed iteratively utilising a critical realist perspective, specifically, Archer's modes of reflexivity. The paper argues that individuals' responses to university policies and initiatives, to changes in policy and policy conflicts, can at least partially be understood through interrogating the modes of reflexivity they employ.

How can universities ensure that strategic aims to integrate research and teaching through engaging students in research-based experiences be effectively realised within institutions? This paper reports on the findings of a qualitative study exploring academics' perceptions of the challenges and barriers to implementing undergraduate research. Academics were asked about perceived constraints and enablements, how they defined undergraduate research, the forms of undergraduate research used, and they were encouraged to provide examples. Perceived constraints included particular institutional policies and structures, academics' mindsets and lack of skills and questions of time and money. It was found that different definitions of undergraduate research lead to different practices and varying opportunities for further development. This paper presents different forms of engagement in undergraduate research allied to these different definitions and it draws on interviewees' ideas about what has been enabling in their context to suggest possible strategies for institutions to move forward.

This paper asks the question: do people with different levels of research productivity and identification as a researcher think of research differently? It discusses a study that differentiated levels of research productivity among English and Australian academics working in research-intensive environments in three broad discipline areas: science, engineering and technology; social science and humanities; and medicine and health sciences. The paper explores the different conceptions of research held by these academics in terms of their levels of research productivity, their levels of research training, whether they considered themselves an active researcher and a member of a research team, and their disciplinary differences.

Can current trends to develop teaching-only academic positions be reconciled with the notion of the interrelationship of teaching and research as a defining characteristic of universities? In particular, what does academics' engagement in research add to students' learning? A study of 200 undergraduates' perceptions of the role of staff research in their university education is presented to contribute towards answering these important questions. The data, which include a large number of qualitative responses, show that students believe that academics' engagement in research deepens student understanding, increases enthusiasm for learning and teaching, encourages postgraduate study, develops skills useful for employment and enhances undergraduate research activities. The article argues that academics' engagement with research is a key contributor to making higher education "higher" and effectively increases the value of education to the student.

Changes in expectations of research education worldwide have seen the rise of new demands beyond supervision and have highlighted the need for academic leadership in research education at a local level. Based on an interview study of those who have taken up local leadership roles in four Australian universities, this paper maps and analyses different dimensions of the emerging leadership role of research education coordination. It argues that while there is increasing clarity of what is required, there are considerable tensions in the nature of the coordination role and how coordination is to be executed. In particular, what leadership roles are appropriate and how can they be positioned effectively within universities? The paper draws on the Integrated Competing Values Framework to focus on the activities of coordination and on ideas of distributed leadership to discuss the leadership that characterises coordination. It is argued that without acknowledgement of the influences that coordinators need to exert and the positioning and support needed to achieve this, the contemporary agenda for research education will not be realised.

Universities have a long history of change in learning and teaching to suit various government initiatives and institutional priorities. Academic developers now are frequently required to address strategic learning and teaching priorities. This paper asks how, in such a context, academic developers can ensure that work they do in relation to one specific institutional priority can support future learning and teaching strategies. Two examples of efforts to integrate research and teaching are discussed to demonstrate the length of time needed to develop institutional understanding and how to create sustainable resources to meet the needs of changing initiatives. The paper highlights the importance of a sustainable approach to ever-changing learning and teaching priorities, suggesting that resources and other work developed to meet institutional initiatives should be structured so that they can be readily reused or adapted when policies change. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications for academic development.

This article critically examines existing models and different ways of understanding undergraduate research to argue that there is a need for a coherent framework for student research that can contribute to curricular and pedagogical decision-making. A framework derived from analysing and integrating models of undergraduate research within the literature and from investigation in different countries is presented and explained. This framework graphically highlights the curricular and pedagogical choices involved where it is intended to engage students in research and inquiry. The article then indicates how it has been and can be used and discusses implications for research and practice.

International research collaboration raises questions about how groups from different national and institutional contexts can work together for common ends. This paper uses issues that have arisen in carrying out the first stage of an international research project to discuss a framework designed to map different kinds of multi-national research collaboration in terms of increasing complexity and increasing time to research outputs. The paper explores factors that enable and that constrain progress in carrying out collaborative research. The paper highlights the complex interplay within research practice of factors that derive from institutional structures and those that appertain to individuals as agents. It uses the personal and collective reflexive deliberations of the authors, to demonstrate that as the complexity of the research interface increases, and as the time to research outputs increases, so structural risk increasingly develops into agentic risk, and that structural risk becomes increasingly required to be managed through agentic action.

In order to bring teaching and research together, a fuller understanding of how academics conceptualise research and scholarship is needed. The paper discusses different ways in which research and scholarship are conceptualised and then provides two alternative models of the relationship between teaching and research based on different conceptions of teaching and different ideas about the nature of knowledge. The paper suggests that if the relationship between teaching and research is to be enhanced it is necessary to move towards a model based on the notion of academic communities of practice. The implications for higher education of doing this are then examined. It is argued that there is a need to reconceptualise the role of higher education and to renegotiate relationships between teachers and students. (Contains 3 figures.)

Research into undergraduate research and inquiry in Australian universities was conducted during an Australian Learning and Teaching Council National Teaching Fellowship. In this paper we share experiences of this project as a student and an academic, reflecting on key challenges, including undergraduate research as an immersion experience for students; negotiating changing staff-student relationships; funding implications; and institutional challenges. We argue that academic developers have a key role in informing institutional policy concerning the integration of research and inquiry and interpreting the spirit of this for the academic community, bridging the divide between research staff and teaching staff, making links between research and teaching committees, changing academics' attitudes about the value and implications of undergraduate research, working with research staff on teaching and learning issues, and making available to staff resources to facilitate undergraduate research implementation.

The paper examines influences of doctoral study and structured early career interventions on academic work. It uses evidence from a survey in six Australian universities (n=1158) to explore academics' engagement with research and teaching development. It regards universities as social situations that are ambiguous, presenting conflicting opportunities for growth and development and the pursuit of personal objectives. Academics' emphases on different aspects of academic work involve complex responses that are subject to many influences. It shows that doctoral work may avoid developing key skills that academics need and that the extent to which doctoral study prepares academics for different aspects of their role is different in different disciplines and institutions. It also shows that the conduct of academics in their major roles is little influenced by the training and development they engage in. The paper discusses the survey findings in terms of what constrains and what enables academics to take up particular development opportunities. It argues that to understand academic practice, analysis of how organisational influences are interpreted is needed. (Contains 9 tables.)

In the context of the fast changing university, how are academics to grow the capacity to cope with continual change and what can academic/faculty developers do to assist them? The paper first establishes the context of higher education as a challenging environment. It then reviews ideas about scholarship and explores the application of these ideas to university study of students and academics. It examines the role of the scholarship of teaching and learning in developing the capacity for critical reflection and then applies these ideas to academic practice more generally. Finally, the implications for academic development are addressed.

This paper explores why it is important for universities to integrate research and teaching at the present time and considers how it can be achieved. Political, institutional and disciplinary factors affect the relationship, whether the aim is to integrate teaching with research or to integrate research with teaching. So the article explores factors that facilitate and factors that discourage integration. By way of providing an example of implementation, imperatives and challenges in developing this relationship at a large research-intensive Australian university are outlined. Finally, the paper draws some general implications from this discussion to suggest where moves by disciplinary communities to integrate research and teaching might be heading. (Contains 2 figures.)

While there has been a good deal of discussion about the scholarship of teaching and learning, and models have been developed to understand its scope, the effects on students' learning of academics engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning are unclear. In the context of initiatives to develop the scholarship of teaching and learning in a large research-intensive university in Australia, this paper discusses the relationship between faculty performance on a set of scholarly accomplishments in relation to teaching and learning from 2002 to 2004, and changes in students' course experiences from 2001 to 2005. The paper provides evidence of the relationship between the scholarship of teaching and learning and students' course experiences and demonstrates the effectiveness of institutional strategies to encourage the scholarship of teaching and learning. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

This article reports on a study of senior academics' views of their disciplinary and interdisciplinary affiliations. It questions the idea that academics have a firm and fixed disciplinary identity from which they then act and suggests that academic work in the contemporary university challenges and changes how individuals view their disciplinary affiliation. The article provides empirical data that lends weight to critical questioning of anthropological metaphors, which have tended to dominate discussions of disciplinarity. It suggests that contemporary understandings of disciplinary and interdisciplinary identity need more fluid metaphors and models; ones that can capture the shifting and questioning uncertainties that give expression to the rhetorical and reflexive nature of academics' disciplinary affiliations. The article explores the implications of a dominant emphasis on disciplinary relationships for understanding disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and examines the practical implications for structures and systems that are designed to enhance and evaluate research and teaching within higher education.

When implementing institutional strategies to bring research and teaching together, learning occurs. A research-intensive university in Australia put in place institutional strategies to strengthen the relationship between research and teaching.

New research training agendas necessarily bring with them renewed attention on the professional development of research supervisors. This paper charts specific aspects of the University of Sydney's Postgraduate Supervision Development Programme, particularly the development of a new innovation called the Recognition Module. The Recognition Module invites research supervisors to develop an online case study of their supervision practice as a form of professional academic development. To this end, we showcase the work of two supervisors who have engaged with the Recognition Module, and note the qualitative changes in their thinking about supervision. Further, we argue that the Recognition Module works to develop three sorts of processes--first, it provides institutions with a way of recognizing and rewarding those who partake in ongoing development activities; second, it provides evidence that development and change has taken place; and third, it provides individual research supervisors themselves with initial information about how best to structure their supervision in order to guide students toward timely completion.

Discusses different ways in which research and scholarship are conceptualized and then provides two alternative models of the relationship between teaching and research. Suggests that if the relationship between teaching and research is to be enhanced, it is necessary to move towards a model based on the notion of academic communities of practice. Examines implications for higher education. (EV)

Examines ways in which research and teaching have been changing and shows how it is linked with the crisis in ideas about knowledge. Argues that to understand the changing relationship between research and teaching, it is important to view it in the context of these changes. Implications of this analysis for the future of research and are drawn. (DB)

Efforts to link faculty research activity and teaching performance have been confounded by different conceptions of the two enterprises. Any link comes from what the two have in common as in their common concern with the act of learning, although in different contexts. Greater emphasis must be placed on the ways in which knowledge is generated and communicated. (Author/MSE)

Eleven tutor counselors in the British Open University were interviewed to ascertain how they responded to the idea of using a facilitative teaching style in their tutorials. Analyses of their responses using a systems model revealed factors which offer a tentative explanation of why some tutor counselors were more amenable to changing their teaching styles than others. (14 references) (LRW)