Slide Slide 11

‘‘Enhancing’ Higher Enhancing’ Higher Education?Education?

Paul TrowlerLancaster University

Slide Slide 22

A couple of A couple of questions…questions…

When was the last time you made a change to your teaching and learning practices? What was the driver for that

If you made a change aimed at enhancing your teaching and learning tomorrow, what would it be

Slide Slide 33

What does What does enhancementenhancement mean?mean?

a) Doing things a little better (more pictures, more activities)

b) Doing more things (taking into account sustainability, the EU, new types of students)

c) Doing different things (a thorough review of practices, goals etc)?

Slide Slide 44

Not only practices Not only practices (‘doing’) but (‘doing’) but

values/ideologiesvalues/ideologiesShifting attention to:

The workplace (‘enterprise’)

The student (‘progressivism’)

The social world (‘social reconstructionism’)

The discipline (‘traditionalism’)

Slide Slide 55

Today’s agenda..Exciting Today’s agenda..Exciting changes…changes…

InternationalisationCitizenshipSustainabilityDistance learningetc

Can involve changes to both practices and to conceptions of what HE is for – to values/ideologies

Slide Slide 66

But…Agency But…Agency andand StructureStructure

Agentic bias underpinning a lot of thinking about enhancement: wanting it will make it so…

The reflective practitioner – usually progressivist, but certainly solipsistic and agentic (now dropped from the national standards in favour of ‘evaluation of practice’)

Slide Slide 77

Agency…..Agency…..

Slide Slide 88

Thinking about structure Thinking about structure and agency (1)and agency (1)

Can be thought about several linked ways:

Structure Agency

Constraint Freedom

Society Individual

Stability Change

Policy Implementation

Giddens 1984; Bourdieu 1992; Bhaskar 1992; Archer 1995; Harvey 2002

Slide Slide 99

Survey of the literature Survey of the literature shows… shows…

Teacher education reformists

“continue to regard knowledge as the primary source of professional expertise and reflect fundamental faith in objective or true knowledge for teaching”

(Cochran-Smith, 1998, p 926)

Slide Slide 1010

Agency in the Agency in the literatureliterature

“Tear down walls and realign …purposes, roles and functions in new ways”

(Middlehurst, 1997, p 138)

"radically new vision of how the university might become a special sort of workplace/community of thinkers and doers, working together to understand and solve real human problems, in a competitive global market".

(Sinnott and Johnson, 1996)

Hazemi et al (1998) inform us that university education is being revolutionised by the use of web-based teaching and learning systems and that this will have a fundamental impact on all aspects of university life.

Slide Slide 1111

Structure…Structure…“Men [and women] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past”

Marx: The 18th Brumaire…

Slide Slide 1212

Has implications for Has implications for policy implementation….policy implementation….

“The system of institutions and practices, values and rules, is a historical accumulation or sedimentation of compromise solutions to past conflicts” (Kogan, 1978, 117-8)

“Most policies are ramshackle, compromise, hit- and-miss affairs, that are reworked, tinkered with, nuanced and inflected through complex processes of influence, text production, dissemination and, ultimately, re-creation in contexts of practice” Ball, 1998, p 126)

Slide Slide 1313Policy dispersion and refraction

Slide Slide 1414

Some (dispiriting) Some (dispiriting) examplesexamples

“schools do and can change but usually very slowly, and seldom in ways which fundamentally alter the basic and familiar structures or “grammar” of schooling as we know it. Moreover, when such change occurs it is seldom if ever the direct result of the fashionable, funded and heavily promoted educational reform movements or waves with which we are so familiar, and which have been passing, with little or no observable effect, across the North American educational scene for at least a century.”

Farrell (2000) page 87.

Slide Slide 1515

The South African The South African ‘Transformation’ Agenda‘Transformation’ Agenda

Programmatisation

Mergers

Switched resource allocation

A ‘skewed revolution’ (Cooper and Subotsky, 2001)

Slide Slide 1616

Theories of Theories of (sustainable) change (sustainable) change sometimes lackingsometimes lacking

Not much thought about in the study of teaching and learning in HE (which generally takes a psychologistic approach).

Nor is theorising change much considered in the development of policies designed to enhance teaching and learning at any level (systemically, institutionally, departmentally):

- Disciplinary differences in teaching and learning- Organizational cultures and contexts- Learning architecture and learning organizations- Communities of practice/TLRs/cultures of teaching and learning

- Lack of ‘joined-upness’ in policies

Slide Slide 1717

Problems:Problems: Disembodied learners Disembodied teachers No view of ideological contests Occlusion of broader contextual factors institutionally

Apple (1979) – we are inclined…

“…to forget that there are objective institutions and structures ‘out there’ that have power, that control our lives and our very perception” (p.140).

Slide Slide 1818

Significant Structural Significant Structural Influences –Influences –

The InstitutionThe InstitutionThe institution is very significant, eg Prosser et al 2006:

Institutional differences, institutional missions and differences between departments within institutions have significant effects on the effectiveness of accredited programmes for HE teachers.

Slide Slide 1919

Significant Structural Significant Structural Influences –Influences – DisciplinesDisciplines

Ways of Thinking and Practising: “coming to terms with particular understandings, forms of discourse, values or ways of acting which are regarded as central to graduate-level mastery of a discipline or subject area.” (McCune and Hounsell, 2005)

http://www.ed.ac.uk/etl/docs/ETLreport4.pdf

Signature Pedagogies – Lee Shulman, Carnegie Foundationhttp://carnegiefoundation.org

South Africa:“institutional rhetoric notwithstanding, responses tended to

preserve discipline-based collection modes of curriculum, slightly re-packaged to suggest compliance with the policy.”

(Ensor, 2002, page 91). See also Moore, 2003.

Slide Slide 2020

Significant Structural Significant Structural Influences –Influences – Workgroups and Workgroups and

place…place…“If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place”Auge, 1995, p 78)

Slide Slide 2121

Significant Structural Significant Structural Influences -Influences - Discourses Discourses

The Discourse of New Higher Education

Managerialist discourse (the locale and the managerialist station – Prichard, 2000)

Policy as text/policy as discourse (Ball, 1997)

Captured by the discourse? (Trowler, 2000)

Slide Slide 2222

So?So?

Awareness of structural constraints can help identify the beartraps which slow, stop or divert enhancement.

But conflict and diversity will always exist.

So will the ‘implementation gap’.

Slide Slide 2323

With acknowledgement and With acknowledgement and thanks to…thanks to…

Dr. Paul Ashwin – his keynote talk at HECU3, Lancaster, July 2006

Dr. Joelle Fanghanel – her comments on an earlier version

Terry Wareham – advice on this talk and discussions on our paper Beyond the Chi of Change

References at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/trowler/bib.htm