Higher Education Close-Up 2- July 2001
What can a case study of one university department tell us about pedagogic inquiry in HE?
Duna Sabri
This paper will explore some of the possibilities and problems of case study research with reference to a qualitative, ethnographically-informed case study of a department in a research-oriented university. In particular it will focus on issues of generalisation and on understanding the case in relation to others in a heterogeneous class. The case study under discussion is designed to extend our understanding of the factors, which inhibit or facilitate academics engaging in pedagogic inquiry. It is part of my doctoral research and through the paper I aim to test my thinking on the concept of pedagogic inquiry and its investigation through a single case study. The case study sits within a research design that includes an investigation of contexts such as the university and national initiatives, which have an impact on pedagogical inquiry.
Since the methodological issues are being discussed with specific reference to a case study, which focuses on pedagogical inquiry, a definition of the concept, as understood for the purposes of this research will comprise the first part of the paper. It is a working definition, which will necessarily be continually revised as the research progresses. The present definition arises from an analysis of literature on the concept of profession, professional development and current UK national initiatives relating to teaching in HE. The issues raised in this part of the paper foreshadow the methodological issues raised in the second part.
By pedagogic inquiry I mean academics systematically pursuing questions about teaching whether to improve learning and teaching, demonstrate its quality or communicate about it with newcomers. Pedagogic inquiry is conceived as a fundamental component of professional development. Pedagogic inquiry may happen in a variety of ways and contexts in the course of professional practice: at tacit and explicit levels; formally and informally; in public and in private; at individual and distributed levels. What follows is an outline of the context from which this definition arises.
This definition of pedagogical inquiry first and foremost is situated within the historical context of the development of university teaching as a profession. The professionalisation of University teaching is in its infancy. This is evident in the literature about the professions which in general does not seem to regard ‘academics’ as an example of a profession. University teaching seems to be most frequently discussed with respect to its role in the preparation of ‘professionals’ (for law, engineering, medicine, surveying, school teaching etc) rather than as a profession in its own right. (See for example Hoyle and John (1995); and Eraut (1994)). Moreover, a brief scan of HE institutional documents and websites indicates that academics themselves do not refer to themselves as ‘professionals’, except in defensive mode. Ozga and Lawn (1981) have shown, in the case of school teachers, how the term ‘profession’ has been deployed by teacher associations to defend teachers’ status and autonomy and to improve teachers’ conditions of employment. They also show how politicians use the term to mollify those associations and to seek acceptance of government policies.
Reference to ‘profession’ is similarly used in rhetoric and argument within the current climate of conflict over quality assurance and accreditation of university teaching. Randall (2000), Chief Executive of the QAA, for example discusses various ways of ‘regulating’ the activity of university teaching in the context of the question: ‘Is university teaching truly a professional activity?’ There are even overtones of threat in his assertion that ‘[HE] Institutions that behave professionally, and which promote professional standards among their staff, will be treated as having earned the right to play a part in the regulation of their own activities.’
It is notable that Randall locates professionalism at an institutional rather than individual level. By doing so he avoids questions about academic freedom of inquiry which are usually associated with individuals rather than organisations. Moreover, it has been argued (Handy: 1993) that universities exemplify the type of organisation whose raison d’être is to support the needs of the individuals within it. Handy compares the individuals in such organisations to a constellation of stars. It is arguable that the more research-oriented the university, the more it tends to treat its employees as ‘stars’, according them autonomy, and freedom from managerial imperatives which may limit their capacity to ‘perform’. Yet Randall conceives of the role of the institution as being one of regulation, of fulfilling the priorities set by the QAA itself. An alternative conception of professionalism at an organisational level is one that has been exemplified by the London School of Economics amongst others which has interpreted its responsibility as being to question the value and intellectual coherence of the QAA’s approach to the regulation of their teaching.[1] This is an example of pedagogic inquiry at an organisational level.
Pring (1994), speaking about school teaching, puts forward a series of arguments justifying exploration of the question: ‘Is teaching a profession?’ Two of these are: to assert the necessity of professional autonomy in the face of government prescription; and to assert the integrity of teaching in reaction to definitions of the teaching function in market terms. These arguments apply as much to HE teachers as they do to school teachers, and presuppose that teachers, by defining themselves as a profession, protect themselves against government interference and other pressures which seek to undermine their core values. The act of engaging with the question of whether teaching is a profession and what sort of profession it is, engenders a professional robustness which enables the members of an occupation to negotiate their role and relationship with each other, with clients, and government. This process of acquiring professional robustness necessitates an inquiring stance. Pedagogical inquiry, it is argued, is therefore an expression of professional autonomy. Furthermore it is an active response, at an individual or organisational level, to policies that are perceived to threaten academic integrity.
In comparison with the development of other professions, university teaching has a unique starting point. Its twin principal component of academic practice, research, already bears all the hallmarks of professionalisation. A profession’s conception of its own knowledge base, Eraut (1994) observes, is rarely unanimous amongst its members, is closely linked to its search for autonomy and status and is likely to be based on current training schemes for preparation in that profession. These factors are barely emerging in higher education with respect to university teaching. For academic research within the disciplines on the other hand, these factors are thoroughly embedded: there is debate about the canon or core knowledge; autonomy is fundamental and status is expressed through publication, there is participation in conferences and promotion; and doctoral programmes form apprenticeships for prospective entrants to the profession. The trappings of professional knowledge and its recognition are already in place for academics, and they relate, primarily, to research. It has to be said that there are signs that the professional apparatus which supports research can be adjusted to support the professionalisation of teaching: following North American Universities there is in the UK a growing number of teaching assistantships offered to doctoral students and increasingly appointment panels are requesting systematic evidence of good teaching – to name but two examples. Whilst these adaptations are important, it is fair to say that there are few structures, which generate and sustain a professional knowledge base in relation to university teaching. The creation of such structures (or the adaptation of existing ones) necessitates pedagogical inquiries of a fundamental kind.
The professionalisation of university teaching is unusual in the route it is taking as well as in its starting point. The Institute for Learning and Teaching has been established as:
… the professional body for all who teach and support learning in higher education in the UK. It exists to enhance the status of teaching, improve the experience of learning and support innovation. It also develops and maintains professional standards of practice [with respect to teaching].[2]
Unlike other professional bodies, it caters for one component of its constituent profession’s practice and ignores all others. More significantly, it has not been led by the practitioners of the occupation that it is intended to represent. This is not simply an aberration in the pattern of the development of professions but a feature of the conditions, which brought about its inception. The context is secondary and further education where centralisation has brought the national curriculum in the former and compulsory training in the latter. The ILT is perceived in HE as simply another form of centralised regulation: membership is voluntary as far as the government is concerned but there are enough ambiguous signals that membership may in future be linked to funding to prompt some universities to put pressure on their academics to join. As an instrument of regulation, then, it is not so much toothless as teething.
We have seen that the organisation set up to represent and regulate university teaching has not emerged from academia. Expressions of professionalism come in response to external pressures from the QAA and the funding councils. Academics are being asked to ‘reflect upon’ and ‘examine their own practice’: these injunctions are of little consequence if university teachers are operating within a policy context and professional framework which is not of their own making. To a significant extent government agencies have appropriated the ground upon which university teaching can, should its practitioners wish to, build its own professional structures and its own conceptions of professional knowledge. Stenhouse (1975 quoted in Day 1999) suggests that teachers as professionals should not only engage in ‘systematic self-study’ but should also adopt a questioning stance with respect to the conditions and policy contexts which affect the quality of learning and teaching. Given the characteristics of the current professionalisation process perhaps the most crucial purpose of professional development in university teaching is the identification and debate of the assumptions, which underpin national policy, and the implementation of those policies. The definition of pedagogic inquiry, therefore, is extended to the identification, and critique of assumptions that are latent in the policy framework within which the practice of university teaching is situated.
A concept related to pedagogical inquiry is the scholarship of teaching but there are important differences. It is worth delineating the two concepts given the increasing currency of the scholarship of teaching in the UK. Whilst a systematic approach may be common to both, the former is context-specific in that it is heavily influenced by all those factors that we know to be crucial in teacher education such as the life history of the teacher (Clandinin quoted in Day 1999); and prior conceptions of learning and teaching (Prosser and Trigwell 1999). It is shaped too by the discipline and paradigmatic commitments of the inquirer (Toma: 1997). Pedagogical inquiry is situated within the organisational structure of learning and teaching: the department, the institution and the higher education system.
Perhaps the most significant difference between pedagogical inquiry and the scholarship of teaching is the anticipated product: for the former it is enhanced teaching for the ultimate purpose of student learning (and teacher learning). In the latter the final product is an artefact that makes possible the critical evaluation of the artefact itself: the link between the Scholarship of Teaching and the practice of teaching is thus somewhat tenuous. A further perspective on this distinction is offered by Carolin Kreber’s work (1999, 2000 and with Cranton: 2000) which distinguishes between the process and product of the scholarship of teaching: learning about teaching and the practice of teaching. Pedagogical inquiry places the former as subordinate to the latter.
A final point to be explored in this working definition of pedagogical inquiry is that it starts with an inclusive approach to the existing state of professional knowledge in university teaching (rather than, as the scholarship of teaching does, impose the practice of educational research). It is widely believed that many academics conceive of their professional knowledge with respect to teaching as limited to ‘what students need to know’. If this is indeed the case it demonstrates that that this is the public component of professional knowledge in university teaching. It does not preclude the existence of informal and tacit knowledge, which underpins the practice of university teaching. As Eraut (2000) argues such knowledge is either not communicated (because the knower is unable to communicate it) or it cannot be communicated (because of the nature of the knowledge itself). He also suggests a number of conditions, which have been known to enhance the ability of respondents in workplace settings to talk about their knowledge at work. These are listed below along with [in square brackets] potentially equivalent conditions for university teachers.
Some mediating object which colleagues were accustomed to discussing
[examination papers, examination scripts, essays and problem answers submitted by students]
A climate of regular mutual consultation encouraging those consulted to describe what they know
[team teaching, college or departmental teaching committees, working groups, teams preparing for external accreditation of courses]
Training or mentoring relationship in which explanations are expected, sometimes of cultural or behavioural norms as well as more technical matters
[involvement in orientation of graduate tutors and new colleagues; reciprocal peer observation]
A crisis, review or radical change in practice, which causes people to exchange opinions and experiences, sometimes also making values more explicit
[preparation for and participation in Quality Assurance Agency inspection visit; strong, negative student feedback; student disciplinary matters; negative reports in national media]
Given these possible ‘sites of articulation’ it may be that much professional knowledge in university teaching is largely uncodified, unsystematic, becoming visible when the need arises and existing in highly contextualised forms: within institutions, departments, within disciplines and sub-disciplines, within courses, and within the personal and collegial practice of academics.
Pedagogical inquiry, as defined here, therefore, takes into account the present nature of professional knowledge as largely informal and tacit, held by individuals and at what Eraut (1996) calls collegial levels. An example of the latter could be an examiner’s report, which is systematic, evaluative of teaching and seeking the development of teaching practice for the purpose of enhancing student learning.
Of course, not all professional knowledge in university teaching is informal and tacit. Since universities were first established academics have written about academia and, in particular, about the relationship between teaching and research. Their contributions about the role of higher education in society or the role of the intellectual in politics and culture, often implicitly, express a notion of profession. Often the authors are academics who are not specialists in educational research or more broadly the sociology of the professions, but they write as members of an academic profession, as insiders, sometimes as advocates, arguing their case to society, government and their fellow academics. Recent examples are Edward Said’s 1993 Reith lectures on Representations of the Intellectual (1994); Louis Menand’s edited book of various contributions on the Future of Academic Freedom(1996) and Marjorie Garber’s Academic Instincts (2001). Notions of the value of critical thinking and freedom of inquiry lie at the heart of these conceptions of academia.
At this point it is instructive to return to the debate within school education about the role and purpose of educational research. One of the most important reference points within that debate is Hargreaves’ (1996) annual lecture to the Teacher Training Agency in which he argues that educational research has been driven by the interests of researchers, not teachers, that such research is irrelevant to teaching practice, and that it is not surprising, therefore, that teachers do not make use of educational research. He further argues that educational research should support evidence-based teaching in a way akin to the evidence-based practice movement in medicine. Needless to say the lecture has provoked a plethora of responses, which have included those who defend a purely academic agenda for educational research (Hammersley 1997) on the basis that ‘it does not generate a cumulative body of knowledge; and is not geared to resolving the classroom problems that teachers face.’ More recently, in an issue of the Oxford Review of Education devoted to exploring the relevance of educational research, Hagger and McIntyre (2000) examine the ways in which beginning teachers can be expected to make use of educational research and, most particularly, the implications of this research for teacher educators. What is most striking about this body of literature about the research is the depth and extent to which it problematises the relationship of educational researchers and practitioners. In the process, rich understandings of the nature of the expertise gained in both informal and formal settings are gained and a tradition of mutual respect and critical inquiry between practitioners and educationalists is developed (see for example, McIntyre and Hagger 1992). This respect is most forcefully expressed through a vigorous discussion of these issues at institutional and local levels. This does not preclude educational researchers from publishing in academic journals and neither does it require the teachers to become educational researchers.
Having sketched the ideas which have formed this working definition of pedagogical inquiry, I now outline my research questions. These are:
What kinds of pedagogical inquiry occur? [What is tacit/explict? Individual/distributed?]
What role, if any, does educational research play in pedagogical inquiry?
How is pedagogical inquiry situated within other aspects of academic practice, in particular discipline research?
How does the full range of activities which could be construed as pedagogical inquiry relate to those components of university and national policy which aim to encourage professional development in teaching?
What commonalities and differences in respect of pedagogical inquiry are there in the assumptive worlds of academics, HE managers and policy makers?
How does university and national policy interact with pedagogical inquiry at faculty and individual academic levels?