Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Contents
1. Editorial (Lin Norton and Ian Marsh) .......................................................................... 2
Curriculum issues
2. Curriculum interventions: embedded writing materials (Wendy Smeets, Formerly
Liverpool Hope University) .............................................................................................. 2
3. Meanings behind curriculum development in higher education (Marita Mkinen &
Johanna Annala, University of Tampere) ......................................................................... 9
the opportunity to give this support a more discipline based approach through a faculty based
model.
Liverpool Hope University has had a long history of writing support. In fact, its Writing Centre
was established in August 2003 making it one of the earliest university writing centres in the
UK. A peer tutor writing support programme was run between 2006 and 2010 with funding
from the Write Now Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL). Tutorial
numbers increased from year to year with the Centre tutoring around 400 student writers and
scheduling 750 tutorials in the academic year 2008-2009. The students who came for tutorials
tended to reflect the demographic of the institution as a whole, though the number of
postgraduate students that were seen (21.5 per cent of the student constituency) was
disproportionately high, as was also (but even more markedly so) the number of non-native
speakers of English (20 per cent of all students registered with the Centre). Feedback on
writing tutorials was very positive, with 94 per cent of tutored students reporting that they
found their session to be, at the least, very helpful.
As mentioned above, funding from the Write Now CETL allowed the team to attempt a
Writing in the Disciplines approach in which one Writing Specialist was assigned to each
faculty. The post of Writing Specialist was that of a professional writing tutor who acted as the
first port of call for writing support. With this extra staffing, the aim was to provide more
subject specific support through curriculum interventions designed with and at times
delivered with staff in departments. It was in the authors capacity as Writing Specialist for
the Education Faculty that the course component that this paper aims to discuss was designed.
Background
Like most PGCE courses taught in England, PGCE Primary provision at LHU began to be
assessed at Masters (M) level in the academic year 2007-2008. Evaluations suggested that
although the actual assignments were giving opportunities to perform at M level, the quality of
writing in some cases could be improved. Given that students studying on the PGCE primary
course came from a range of subject backgrounds (e.g. English, Geography, Biology, Art and
Design) and therefore had been exposed to different expectations regarding academic writing
at undergraduate level, it was proposed that a core module of academic reading, thinking and
writing skills could provide students with early scaffolding for writing at this level.
Consequently the PGCE Primary team worked in collaboration with The Writing Centre and
the Write Now CETL to design a sequence of independent study tasks which would then be
discussed in tutor led workshops.
Design
Tutorial records were analysed to gain a better understanding of student writers perceived
needs and of the topics discussed in tutorials.
Some of our general findings were that much of the data pointed towards students struggling to
cross borders; in other words students were going through transitions. One of the transitions
students were dealing with was switching between the conventions and rules of one discipline
to those of another discipline. This was the case with many M level students, especially on the
PGCE courses where most students did not come from an educational background but rather
had a first degree in another discipline. The same issue was observed with Combined Honours
students. The Writing Centre was used by a high percentage of both Masters level and
Combined Honours students and they often professed the difficulties Lea & Street (1998) refer
to when describing course switching.
Another transition students struggled with was that of moving from FE or HE outside the UK
to UK HE. Students need to familiarise themselves with the requirements of UK HE and their
epistemological beliefs tend to be challenged in this process. This is illustrated by the
difficulties they have dealing with referencing and finding their own voice. The number of non
UK students is very low on PGCE courses, however, there are a high number of nontraditional and mature students who may not be familiar with the requirements of HE as they
might not have been in education for a number of years and may therefore feel unsure about
meeting the current requirements.
Another transition is one in which students have difficulty coping with is linking theory to
practice. This tends to be a real problem at Masters level where students need to reflect on
their professional practice. All PGCE students go on work placements as part of their course
and one of the main aims of the PGCE curriculum is to help them become reflective
practitioners.
Materials were designed keeping in mind the data obtained on concerns expressed by students
in last years PGCE primary cohort as recorded during writing tutorials. The table below
shows a comparison between the students perceived needs as expressed when registering at
the Writing Centre and the actual focus of their tutorials as recorded by the Writing Tutors. It
is interesting to observe that the only item maintaining its top position is structure. The second
most frequently discussed topic is analysing the question. The need for support when
unpacking their assignment briefs can be observed across all Masters students. Another
interesting observation is that as students struggled to write a conclusion to their papers, they
were being redirected to their introductions by the Writing Tutors something that serves to
illustrate the cyclical nature of essay writing. All this information was kept in mind while
designing the materials for the embedded writing component.
Table 1: Needs analysis
Students Perceived Needs
Tutorial Focus
Structure
58.14%
Structure
Referencing
48.84%
Analysing the task brief
Conclusion
41.86%
Introduction
Ordering ideas
39.55%
Planning the assignment
66.67%
36.36%
33.30%
33.30%
After a number of meetings between the GGCE Primary course leader and the author, it was
decided to take a conceptual approach, aiming to develop students critical reading and writing
skills. For an overview of the topics included please see appendix one.
The decision was made to implement the writing component in the first 7 weeks of the
students course. Two hours would be dedicated each week which would consist of self study
time for the students to tackle the self study tasks followed by a tutor led discussion to provide
feedback and discussion.
Evaluation
The academic skills component was evaluated using a paper-and-pencil questionnaire as well
as focus groups with students and interviews with seminar leaders. Initial indications were that
there had been some improvement in standards of submission but issues relating to consistent
engagement with and delivery of materials, transferability of skills, student perception of task
and linkage of readings to the first assignment have also been evident.
5
The student questionnaire showed that students found the topics of Linking Theory to Practice
and Harvard Referencing the most useful. It could perhaps be argued that these were some of
the most practical study tasks. On the other hand, the more theoretical and perhaps slightly
more abstract topics such as Critical Reading and Critical Writing were least popular in spite
of our efforts to link them to the students main reading texts as well as their first assignment.
When asked what other materials could have been provided, around 45% of students requested
sample essays whereas around 25% wanted additional tutorial time. Furthermore,
incorporating their school placement into their essays and critical evaluation were seen as areas
that required additional materials.
The focus group interviews showed that students were extremely concerned about meeting the
requirements of writing at M level at the start of their course. It also became clear that even at
the end of their course, which is when the interviews took place; they still were not entirely
sure what those requirements were. When asked to reflect on the differences between writing
at undergraduate and at M level, the main differences mentioned were discipline related rather
than level related. This confirms that one of the main transitions for PGCE students is that of
course switching. The other main areas of concern the students discussed during the interviews
were those of time management and finding an effective structure for their assignments.
The interviews with seminar leaders confirmed they continued to perceive a need for writing
support. As such they were keen to keep the self study tasks on writing skills. However, at the
same time it became clear that it was a real struggle to find enough seminar time for the tutor
led discussions especially in the weeks running up to the Christmas break and the students
first work placement.
Figure 1: Impact on grades:
60
50
40
08-Sep
30
09-Oct
20
% improvement
10
0
49.2
52.14
5.9
The interviews also showed that the seminar leaders were aware of the difficulties of the first
assignment and they were quick to point out that perhaps the task brief itself needed to be
changed as the wording was deemed to be confusing. As a result, the decision was taken to
review the task brief during the summer break.
6
As for student attainment (see Figure 1), the grades of the cohort that received additional
writing support for their first assignment were compared to those of the previous cohort for the
same assignment. A like for like analysis showed a percentile increase of almost 6%. This
increase might be due to a number of factors but we hope the Writing Skills component
contributed to this improvement.
Discussion
As mentioned in the introduction, the Writing Skills component for the PGCE Primary course
formed part of a wider initiative to move towards a Writing in the Disciplines approach to
writing support funded by the Write Now CETL. As such, the relative success of the
component served to highlight a number of issues; most importantly the question of how to
best move towards more embedded writing support getting both departmental staff and senior
management on board.
Departmental staff tended to be aware of a need for more discipline specific writing support
but were wary of a possible increase in their workloads. Also, coming from a central support
service, it was not always easy to know who to best approach within a department to address
possible changes in their writing support programme. Where senior management was
concerned, there was a clear need to sell embedded writing support which leads to the
question of how to best show impact. Universities are complex organisations and
demonstrating impact can be difficult as the recent discussions and debate about the UK REF
(Research Excellence Framework) have shown.
We hope that the experience of promoting embedded writing support at Liverpool Hope will
serve to help others considering a WID approach to make an informed decision.
References
Drew, S. (1998) Seda Special 6 Key Skills in Higher Education: background and rationale.
Ganobscik-Williams, A. (in Ganobscik Williams, L. , 2006) Building an Academic Writing
Programme from within a Discipline.
Harvey, L., Moon, S., Geall, V with Bower, R. (1997) Graduates work: organisational change
and students attributes. Birmingham, Centre for Research into Quality, University of Central
Lea , M. R. & Street, B. V. (1998) Students Writing in Higher Education: An Academic
Literacies Approach Studies in Higher Education 23:2, pp.157-173
Research Excellence Framework (REF) Outcomes of the pilot exercise on research impact
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/impact/ [Accessed 30.11.2010]
Torrance, M. , Thomas, G.V., and Robinson, E.J. (1999) Individual differences in the writing
behaviour of undergraduate students in British Journal of Educational Psychology, 69, 189-199
Appendix 1:
Critical Reading Objectives:
Reading with an aim; skimming and scanning,
Finding information in a text,
Note-taking for future reference,
Critical interpretation of information.
Critical Thinking Objectives:
Reading for argument; assessing an argument,
Evaluating evidence used: research scope and data.
Criticality & Academic Writing Objectives:
Structuring an argument,
Critical appraisal,
Inserting citations into short pieces of text.
Harvard Objectives:
Learn where and why to use sources to provide evidence (re-enforcing the objectives of the
sessions on critical thinking and reading),
Learn how to use the Harvard system of referencing for journal articles and edited books and
where to find the rules for citing other sources,
Learn how to write a list of references.
Applying Theory to Practice Objectives:
Applying theory to practice. Linking theory and practice in reading and writing tasks. How do
learning theories and research results relate to the classroom?
Analysing a research article. How reliable is the methodology? How can these research results
be applied to my own practice?
Critical Evaluation Objectives:
Critically appraising research evidence,
Linking different sources exposing opposing views,
Giving evidence to support opinion.
Reflective Writing Objectives:
Reflective writing & reflective practice,
Writing a reflection on a reading text,
Writing a reflection on own experience.
Introduction
Numerous interpretations have been made of curriculum in the discourse on higher
education (HE). However, HE policy has not been engaged with scientific discourse
concerning curriculum (Barnett & Coate 2005; Trowler 2005). Still the researchteaching linkages are crucial for understanding what kind of learning is to be enhanced
in HE curriculum. An absence of research interest has left room for hidden functions of
curriculum (Margolis 2001). For example, curriculum has served as an implicit
intermediary in those processes through which students trajectories and identity
forming has been driven from within the university, often based on the cultures of
disciplines (Becher & Trowler 2001). These practices may tacitly emphasise or elide the
classic goal-oriented, product-based view (Tyler 1949), or other accents relating to
traditional, emerging and transformative features of curriculum (Barnett, Parry & Coate
2001; Parker 2003).
On the other hand, the idea of emancipatory curriculum by Fraser and Bosanquet
(2006) represents a comprehensive perspective where the interactive and dynamic set of
students experiences is seen as central to curriculum design. Similarly, Barnett and
Coate (2005) argue that a students personal relation to knowledge plays a pivotal role
in HE. They introduce an idea of curriculum as engagement, in which the cornerstone
of studies is the process of coming to know. Barnett and Coate (2005) propose that
curriculum should be one of the main concepts in the discourse on HE. It is through
curriculum that the core of the discipline is put into practice, affecting students
learning. That is why the prevailing meanings of curriculum and their relation to
curriculum theories should be reflected.
During the last decade curriculum has become one of the most significant means of
regulating HE from outside the university. The societal approach has long traditions in
curricular work. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century Bobbit (1918/1972)
harnessed curriculum as an instrument of social control. His idea was that curriculum is
a way to respond to the challenges of contemporary society. Similar features are
9
Analytical framework
The research was conducted in a multi-faculty RU and a UAS, i.e. vocational HE and
carried out in the form of semi-structured interviews during autumn 2009. The data
informed in this article is interview transcripts of the academic teachers from RU
(N=27) and UAS (N= 18) representing various departments. All academics were
involved in curriculum design and teaching. On average the interviewees had 13 years
of working experience in HE (range 330 years). Interview themes concerned practices,
processes and reforms in curricular work.
The strategy for organizing and making sense of the data was based on qualitative
content analysis. The aim of the analysis was to reveal not just a set of various
10
meanings of curriculum, but to identify the intentions and relationships of the meanings,
and to find a logically inclusive structure reflecting the responses of the interviewees.
Through the content analysis it was possible to articulate variations in the interviewees
ways of experiencing the curriculum design (cf. Krippendorff 2004; Kondracki et al.
2002).
There were four main stages in the analysis process: close reading, categorising and
reducing data, developing the conceptual framework and summarising. In the close
reading, the transcripts were examined as a whole, with note taking of free associations.
In the second stage, we used the open coding procedure to categorise the data. The basic
unit of analysis was the notional expressions and the themes of ideas. The views and
themes emerging from the data were reduced to ten categories which were named in
such a way that they encapsulated as concisely as possible the features of the themes
situated along the coding scheme. The categories were as follows: knowledge,
discipline, work, profession, expertise, effectiveness, benefit, change, identity and life.
At this step of the analysis ATLAS.ti software was used. The coding consistency was
assessed by rechecking the basic units and transcribed excerpts in their original contexts
in the data.
In the third stage, we approached the meanings behind curriculum through a conceptual
framework with two dimensions. First we applied a schema developed by Barnett and
Coate (2005) where three curricular domains are proposed, namely knowing, acting and
being. The domain of knowing refers to the core knowledge of the discipline. Acting
emphasizes skills and actions that students are expected to acquire and refers to how a
students expertise grows and develops through activity. The domain of being denotes
the formation of students personality and identity. (Barnett & Coate 2005.) In this
paper, we qualified knowing, acting and being according to our data, that is, what kind
of qualities were emphasized in curriculum design.
The other dimension of our framework rested on Bernsteins (1996) conceptions of
introjection and projection which have been used in describing the starting points of HE
curriculum design (e.g. Clegg & Bradley 2006; Moore 2001). By introjection Bernstein
(1996) refers to the construction of curriculum on the basis of internal disciplinary
interests, curriculum taking shape according to the subject taught. By projection
Bernstein (1996) describes the curriculum development on the basis of external
demands, for example, on the competence demands of working life. According to
Bernstein (1996), some disciplines have stronger inner boundaries than others. In this
paper, we use a more straightforward approach setting aside diverse disciplines, one
focusing on a comprehensive view of curriculum.
In the summarising stage, the data were scrutinised alongside the research objectives,
the conceptual framework and in close reading with the noted themes. The emerging
interpretations evolved towards a comprehensive framework of curriculum which took
the form of nine blocks (Figure 1). Each of them reflects distinguishing domains which
communicate and conceptualise the meanings of HE curriculum development. In the
following paragraphs, each of these will be addressed separately. The interview quotes
substantiating the findings are numbered and coded in such a way that the quotes
disclose the speakers organization (UAS or RU) and gender (male M or female F).
11
(2005) notion that academics are portrayed as resisting such efforts and protecting their
own interests against those of the stakeholders.
These statements reflect what Barnett and Coate (2005) call the reproductive function
of HE. According to this, the mission of education and the role of curriculum are the
maintenance and consolidation of the prevailing settings within the HEI and in the
society as a whole. Then the curriculum is not perceived to be a meaningful tool in the
further development of students learning, HE nor society.
Entrepreneurial curriculum
According to the academics, the curriculum development was firmly linked to
uncertainty and the unpredictable dwindling of economic resources. Competition for
students and between HEIs emerged in both universities:
This unit is quite small enough even after the merger, when we think
within the EU, this fight for survival (laughter). But, yes indeed,
curriculum should be such that we can get these things into sellable
articles. So I do think that Finland should make education such an item
for sale. (UAS2M.)
With this notion an academic teacher defined HE curriculum as a product whose
viability is contingent upon the competence objectives inscribed in curriculum. This
kind of high attention to the market mechanisms may lead to a situation in which HEI
becomes a production plant sensitive to market forces. We call such extreme forms as
entrepreneurial curriculum in which the traditional values of HE disciplinary
knowledge, research and cultivation are replaced by the values of economic life.
Especially in UAS effort was made to satisfy the needs of the customers from the
perspective of the students expectations as well as of the competence objectives
concerning employment market. Still confusion was caused by the contradictory nature
of the expectations:
Are we to produce all-round engineers who do alright in some jobs but
then they dont cope so well in those professional tasks or are we to
produce specialists, when the danger exists that that well make the
wrong prognoses and the job placements wont work out (UAS11M).
Rationales for the entrepreneurial approach on curriculum development have been
linked to the pressure on universities to become responsive to external demands, to the
international mobility of employees, and to the significance of the economically
productive innovations (cf. Garraway 2006; Naidoo 2005). Herewith the yardstick of
curricular quality is the employment and success rates in global markets.
Commodified curriculum
The academics had observed that many students were not keen on rhetoric of slow
growth but had already taken on board the ideology of effectiveness before arriving in
the HE. This extreme curricular view was named as commodified curriculum. Many
interviewees pointed out that many students perceive HE as an investment for the future
and regard the degree as a key to the job market (cf. Brown 2003; Parker 2003). The
danger in this point of view is that students are encouraged to make use of curricula just
for the worth of their own interests, as one RU teacher describes: Make a product
packet of yourself (RU9M). The students were encouraged to invest time and effort to
13
getting qualified which would pay off in terms of a personal capital forming, good jobs
and high incomes.
In this case the students personal development planning (PDP) was seen as a separate
one-off paper or a career planning draft introduced by the teaching staff (cf. Clegg &
Bradley 2006). UAS teachers especially pointed out the tendency to support students
activities in creating the career and social status. The RU teachers appeared to be more
confused than the UAS teachers regarding the time and success objectives of todays
students (cf. Clegg & Bufton 2008). They had observed that at the same time as
students seek courses which are useful to them and promote success, they are wary of
anyone exploiting them. This gives rise to contradictions, if new solutions, for example,
research-based and tutored strategies (cf. Healey 2005) were sought for engaging
students within research activities across the curriculum. According to one interviewee,
this was turned down by the student association: We wont do a stroke of unpaid work
for you, so do your research yourselves (RU25M).
Brown (2003) calls such views acquisitive learning indicating students focus on the
learning they need to pass examinations and get a diploma. It is based on a rational
calculation where the moral foundations of HE are lost (Lawn 2001).The means to
passing through may turn out questionable, like plagiarism, which did not appear in this
study, but has been discussed alongside with instrumentalism (Brady & Kennell 2010)
and commodification (Parker 2003) in conceptualising the curriculum.
This kind of approach projects Vallances (1986) concept of academic rationalism. The
purpose of HE is then to ensure that students assimilate knowledge structures pertaining
to a certain academic tradition and to conserve, added to that, the prevailing social
hierarchies. Then curriculum again manifests itself as a function of reproductive
curriculum, this time from within the disciplinary cultures (cf. Barnett & Coate 2005).
Fragmentary curriculum
Fragmentary curriculum refers to the splintered nature of the content of studies, but also
to the isolation of HE from society and labour market. The changes in the life of work
were usually recognized as pressure, as something which should be taken into account:
The life of work had changed, but higher education had not (RU7F). Yet in RU the
cooperation with the stakeholders was rare in the curriculum development. The need to
consider the acting skills for working life was often solved in line with the goal-oriented
(cf. Tyler 1949) and, as we call it, fragmentary curricular thinking: as a separate course
module. Consequently, predicting the required competencies and the supply in the
curriculum did not always seem to match.
The interviewees had recognized that students with an eye for societal changes and the
life of work look for a basis for why it is worthwhile studying something, taking into
account what it especially brings forth. This appeared for example in the extending of
the degree in such a way that it would ensure the individuals employability, as in the
following:
I have many students that are going too broad, in a way trying to
specialize in everything, and they talk about lifelines. I can well
understand that in order to ensure a placement somewhere in the life of
work they try to find competencies that would fill every box there could
be situations vacant. (RU7F.)
Following Jaspers (1960/2009), this kind of fragmentation curricular thinking may turn
HEIs and their curricula into intellectual department stores. Such fragmentariness serves
to increase emphasis on the isolation of knowing and acting from their contexts (cf.
Young 2010). Then the studies may appear to the students as a very uncontrolled and
inconsistent process.
Unilateral identity forming curriculum
The notion of studies serving to develop one-sided or narrow identities emerged in both
universities. In this notion the curriculum design does not pay attention to the studies as
an entity and has inflexible views of students life course. Some academics made
connections between subject matter and identity, such as I can imagine that people
build identity according to the major subject in university degrees, that I am a student of
that and that subject (RU17M), whereas in UAS interviews identity was spoken of
mostly in connection with the professional identity. It was frequently considered that
professional identity only takes shape in the life of work, as the next interviewee puts it:
Well of course professional identity develops here to some extent, but, certainly more
in working life (UAS17M).
This kind of unilateral identity forming curriculum is problematic from the perspective
of the students disciplinary and generic skills as well as their workplace experiences
and future careers. Barnett and Coate (2005) suggest that curricula are educational
vehicles for developing the student as a person. Yet the means for forming and
15
encountering personal identities are not necessarily present in HE. For instance, Kunttu
and Huttunen (2009) has reported that as many as 25 per cent of Finnish students in HE
do not find their studies meaningful. Therefore studying should not be seen merely as
mastery of the content of a certain subject or as a process of creating a CV for
employment, but rather as a qualitative process building personal meanings (cf. Barnett
2009).
what can be found when we set about looking into the background.
(RU16M.)
The interviews confirmed that multi-disciplinarity had become a core theme in
curriculum design (cf. DeZure et al. 2002). Such kind of disciplinary discourses opens
up a vista for students engagement with knowledge generation and inquiry. Teaching
could be more student-focused, if the intention of teaching is on developing and
chancing students conceptions (cf. Trigwell & Prosser 2009). In all, this approach gave
room to the traditions of disciplines without the personified feature but took into
account the changes in the society and the world, and was aware of the external
demands when developing curriculum not in reactive, but in a proactive and reflective
way.
Integrative and working life conscious curriculum
The second interconnected approach, namely the integrative and working life conscious
curriculum, was proposed to bridge the gap between market-oriented competencies and
fragmentary curricular thinking. Acting was characterised by domain-specific and
generic competencies, as in the following:
Knowledge in itself, there needs to be a great deal of it, expertise is the
basis of everything, but actual competence subsumes so many other
things so that in order to be able to use that knowledge you need to be
able to do so many other things (RU18F).
Highlighting the competence objectives is not to diminish the inherent value of
knowledge and research, but rather a new kind of curriculum thinking in which
knowing, acting and context-dependent generic skills are perceived as a part of
competency and domain-dependent knowledge (cf. Aamodt & Plaza 1994; Crawford et
al. 2006). The academics argued that HE should find a way to define and accomplish
the competence objectives widely enough, as the following quotation shows:
As I see it really the only thing you can do for the students are to
encourage them to respond to challenges and so that they learn in such
a way that they understand that the learning is for them. In a way this
notion that I am transferring something into your head and then you
can go out, well thats long gone, because if we talk about IT, for
example, in two years after youve taught some things they are out of
date. (UAS12F.)
The citation possesses two significant points. First, work cannot offer a universal
category with which to develop HE curricula (cf. Barnett & Coate 2005), because it is
impossible to anticipate that which has not yet been invented or innovated. The
expertise and know-how produced by curriculum must be scrutinised in a wider frame
of reference than the present needs in working life, because it is difficult to know what
the working life or society will be like when the student graduates. Employment of
graduates is usually reflected as one of the most important factors for the quality of HE,
but it can only be a weak indicator of programme quality (cf. Barnett & Coate 2005;
Parker 2003). The employability agenda has turned out to be too narrow and
problematic for example in the UK, where academics discuss the oversupply of
graduates and on-going changes in the labour market and society in general (e.g. Brady
& Kennell 2010; Tomlinson 2008).
17
Second, the teaching and learning processes should be taken into account in curriculum
design. It is challenging to interconnect them, but in our data we had some examples of
integration of the specific and the generic, in curriculum design and its implementation,
like the following:
In the group exam the students made it clearer to themselves how their
knowledge is constructed, not in relation to me, the person in charge of
the studies, but in relation to other students. (--) they had to defend their
own stances and views, which is one kind of core skill. One as it were
main competency in working life. (RU20F.)
This refers to how Barnett and Coate (2005) view acting: as invisible, like the personal
mastery of discipline and visible, like the engineers or journalists knowing how and
knowing why. The transferable and generic skills were characterised to be one of the
most important work-related competence objectives within various disciplines, but
seldom openly declared in curricula (cf. Bennet et al. 2000). By integrating and
explicitly articulating the skills that are based within subject-specific areas, the skills
that are intended to be transferable and the employment-related capabilities in the
curriculum, students could be facilitated to cope in different contexts (Barnett & Coate
2005).
Integrative and working life conscious curriculum seeks to respond to knowledge and
competency needs expected by job markets, but positioning them into the academic
teaching practises and curricular intentions. The possible direction here is that education
transcends the dualism between thinking and doing the disciplinary and the generic
practice.
Autobiographical and career-conscious curriculum
The interviews raised the question of the relation of knowing and acting to the students
own meaning making, life course and identity building. The third interconnected feature
of the comprehensive curriculum could be illustrated in terms of autobiographical and
career conscious curriculum. The view motivates students to understand, and to be
aware of the connections between studies, growth of expertise, working life and their
own life course. These were even seen to be rewarding and proof of the success of the
academic teachers work:
Somebody comes along and tells you that their career has got off to a
great start what theyve done in their life, there are absolutely
fantastic success stories. And I think thats what sustains us, in the best
possible manner, if we get good feedback from working life, thats
another. (UAS12F.)
When the objective of studying is clearly in mind, studies will likely progress well, also
promoting the productivity targets set for the HEIs. The view is suggestive with
Vallances (1986) description of personal success and the curriculum concept stressing
self-fulfillment. Still many students are in a life situation in which they are actively
seeking their subjectivity and place in society, because they dont really know what
they are about (RU9M). The challenge is how to surpass the lack of engagement (cf.
Clegg & Bufton 2008). Students unsure of their fields of study and future objectives
may drop out of success-oriented HE, especially if curriculum as lived text is ignored.
A university teacher describes this dilemma as follows:
18
Discussion
The present study brought to the fore curriculum in a comprehensive framework. The
meanings behind curriculum development varied within nine complementary domains,
composed of polarities and interconnected views. Regardless of the disparate legally
instituted profiles and HE offered by RU and UAS, against expectations, there were
very few differences in the talk of the institutions. Instead, disciplines and professional
fields have their complex backgrounds, history, nature and research areas, which
emerged in diverse curricular cultures (cf. Becher & Trowler 2001; Jaspers 1960/2009).
According to the results, the three extreme perspectives that raised the issue of
curriculum in service of external purposes reflected the various attitudes towards the
neo-liberal influences in HE policy. Several authors have argued about the effects of
increase in market-driven principles in HE (cf. Evans 2004; Coate 2009; Naidoo 2005;
Smith 2003). These perceptions may arise from the view on curriculum development as
an ambivalent requirement: it is by law the task of the HEI, but autonomy in its
implementation is provided for.
From the uppermost internal point of view, the findings suggest that it was difficult for
the academics to conceive of what is relevant knowledge in HE and the nature of its
connection to the knowledge society needs. In all, the danger in strong views is that
they did not position the HEI as a proactive driver of societal debate, reform and
interaction between academics, representatives of working life and other stakeholders.
Moreover, the problem is that obscure criticism in the staff serves to distance the
students and curricular work as invisible objects.
19
20
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24
Introduction
The field of Geographical information systems (GIS) is becoming a popular discipline
across a range of degree programs in several different universities globally. GIS, a
technology driven discipline, was introduced into the educational system only in 1990s.
GIS technology and principles are being applied across wide ranging discipline areas;
from environmental science to anthropology and engineering to education (Koch &
Denike, 2004). Within a short period, the nature of the GIS has changed rapidly,
making it simpler for them to be useful for a larger number of diverse disciplinary
groups. Nevertheless, these developments, especially the availability of easy-to-use
software applications, have encouraged superficial approaches to learning and
assessment in this emerging GIS discipline.
Past student results and feedback have shown that many students fail to retain the
relevant discipline knowledge. The Learning and teaching research undertaken in this
paper aims to address the issue of superficial learning by promoting deeper learning as
well as critical thinking. It is proposed that the pedagogical principles underlying the
design of the assessment to support learning has a significant impact upon students
ability to demonstrate deep learning (Gibbs & Dunbar-Goddet, 2009, Ramsden, 2003).
Consequently, the study presents a model, coupled with initial data collection, which
links the pedagogic design principles that underlie assessment, with the recent
developments in GIS pedagogical content knowledge.
One of the major recommendations emerging from the current pedagogical content
knowledge in GIS, such as Geographical Information Science and Technology Body of
Knowledge, is the need to cover the three facets of GIS, which are (DiBiase et al.,
2006): GIS as a discipline which has a theoretical basis, a technology part in the form of
software as well as hardware, and the application of GIS to different disciplines.
Judiciously designed formative and summative assessment tasks with timely verbal and
25
written feedback are the best ways to engender deep learning in all of these facets of
GIS.
This study presents a learning-assessment-feedback model involving several curriculum
design principles, coupled with an initial qualitative data set, used in an introductory
GIS course with over one hundred multidisciplinary students every year. This research
study demonstrates the effectiveness of this learning-assessment-feedback model, in the
GIS context, underpinned by empirical evidence. This model incorporates several
curriculum design principles such as the utilisation of a model body of knowledge,
active learning, problem-based learning, and flexible learning in the assessmentfeedback regime.
Context
GIS is a relatively new discipline and universities worldwide are already including GIS
in their curricula across a range of disciplines. Graduating students with GIS
competence are reported as having greater employment opportunities (Gewin, 2004).
Therefore, for an effective learning of the discipline, it is essential that recent
developments in the education research are foregrounded in its teaching. Several areas
where research has been done are:
designing a curriculum;
identifying key learning concepts through the determining of threshold concepts
in the discipline;
an effective and diverse assessment-feedback regime;
active and authentic learning; and,
problem-based learning in a real-world context, flexibility in learning, and
taking into account multidisciplinarity for GIS.
Situation
Student
feedback
Background
Ability
Experience
Explicit organisation
Blocks
Units
Timetable
Clear blueprint
Formative
Summative
Assessment
Clearly stated
Aims
Goals
Outcomes
Appropriate
Students
Scope, sequence
Related to aims
Related to Practice
Content
Organisation
Questionnaires
Focus group
Participation
Content
Student oriented
Variety of methods
Opportunity for self direction
Learning in real life settings
Figure 1: The GIS pedagogy model in use, modified from (Prideaux, 2003)
Such an approach starts from designing the aims and outcomes of the course followed
by a sequential arrangement of learning activities, leading up to appropriate assessment
26
all of which is related to relevant content. This approach is student-centred, with several
opportunities for self-direction, guided responsibility for their learning choices and
learning/assessment opportunities offered in real-world contexts. Furthermore, all these
curriculum design principles for GIS learning are incorporated in the assessmentfeedback regime, involving both summative and formative assessments. The learning
centric model presented in the study, similar to that suggested for medical education
(Figure 1) (Prideaux, 2003), is then continuously evaluated and revised using the
feedback from students.
BoK) (DiBiase et al., 2006). The GIS&T BoK is produced as a model curriculum
initiative which involved more than seventy educators, researchers, and practitioners
(DiBiase et al., 2006). It has ten knowledge areas, seventy-three units, and 330 topics,
covering different aspects of the discipline (DiBiase et al., 2006). One of the major
recommendations of the GIS&T Bok is to include the three domains of the GIS in its
education, which include geographical information science, geographical information
technology, together with its application to different areas (Figure 2).
Science
Nature of geographic data
Data models
Spatial autocorrelation
Geodetic datums
Coordinate systems
Geo-ontologies
Geo-semantics
Spatial analysis to get an insight into
a problem
Technology
Hardware
Computer system
Data input
Global positioning systems (GPS)
Digitiser
Scanner
Total stations
Satellite images
Data output
Plotter
Digital media (CDs, DVDs)
World wide web (Hardware?)
Applications
Diverse disciplines
Environmental science
Urban planning
Geology
Natural resource
management
Disaster management
Health
Software
Virtual earth systems
GoogleEarth, ArcGIS Explorer
Desktop application
ArcView, Geomedia, Mapinfo
Advanced application
ArcGIS, MGE
Figure 2: The three domains of GIS that should be included in its education (Srivastava,
2010a)
Learning concepts
Over the past few years, emphasis has been given to the identification of threshold
concepts in different disciplines. Threshold concepts are defined as the key concepts in
a discipline area that transform student thinking and their capacity for further learning
(Meyer & Land, 2005). According to the threshold concept hypothesis, there are certain
concepts, in diverse disciplines, that should be mastered before further progress can be
made in that discipline (Meyer & Land, 2005). When these concepts are understood the
way in which the student views learning in that discipline is transformed (Meyer &
Land, 2006). In the GIS education context, ideally, students are required to develop and
integrate spatial knowledge together with processes and skills, in order to achieve a
level of conceptual understanding of the field in preparation for professional practice in
the spatial information industry (DiBiase et al., 2006, Kemp, 2003).
Identification of key threshold concepts and the subsequent identification of the
elements of troublesome knowledge, which can form a barrier to learning, will advance
GIS pedagogy. Attempts have been made to identify threshold concepts in GIS and to
explain their transformative, integrative, and troublesome qualities (Srivastava, 2010b).
These threshold concepts are identified as data models and interoperability, both of
28
Liminal space
Interoperability
General map
user
Data models
Data collection techniques
Generalisation
Georeferenicing
Spatial layers
Overlaying
Geovisualisation
Geoprocessing
Metadata and data search
Threshold barriers
GIS
professional
Figure 3: Learning the key threshold concepts will transform a student from a general
map user to a GIS professional
Problem-based learning in a real-world context
Research in psychology suggests that human learners are not passive information
storage systems (Shuell, 1986), rather, they are self-determining agents who actively
select information from their perceived environment, and they construct new knowledge
in light of what they already know (Prince, 2004, Shuell, 1986). This evidence-based
approach can be utilised when designing assessment tasks, for it is worthwhile noting
that an activity itself without a clear design behind it could well not lead to more
effective learning outcomes and student success (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). In the
assessment tasks, students can be asked to utilise both their prior knowledge from their
respective discipline areas and their learnt GIS skills in a real-world context. A two-part
assignment enables students to firstly plan a GIS project, receive feedback both on their
plan and on the idea embodied in the plan, and then upon its subsequent execution. This
provides them, not only with the opportunity to learn about GIS application, but also to
acknowledge the limitations of the technology. The problem-based learning approach
was found useful to GIS training, involving mostly the technological component, while
teaching GIS to people from different backgrounds and GIS skill levels (Dias, 2004).
The context of learning is considered as a vital factor that can motivate students towards
a deep learning approach. The delivered lectures were full of vivid illustrations linking
basic GIS concepts to real-world examples. Most of the illustrations were of the local
areas of the university with which students were familiar, or other well-recognised areas
29
such as maps of Australia together with the map of the world. The deep learning
approach is reported to be further facilitated by the use of vivid illustrations that
encourage students to relate theory to the real-world, and thus developing understanding
the concepts in a real-world context (Healey, 2005).
Additionally, illustrations from the lecturers research activities were also included in
the lectures. To achieve this, simple examples of geoprocessing, map creation, and
remote sensing integration with GIS were chosen. Maximising the synergy between
research and teaching is advocated for geography teaching as well as in research
(Healey, 2005, Le Heron et al., 2006). Such an approach is even more important for
enriching a problem based learning environment.
Active learning
Several approaches have been taken to teach GIS in different circumstances. This has
included an applied approach where students worked with a local organisation to
enhance their GIS skills (Benhart, 2000), problem-based learning where students solved
a problem in order to learn GIS (Beringer, 2007, Drennon, 2005, King, 2008,
Srivastava, 2008), field based techniques where students were involved in a field based
GIS inquiry approach for learning (Carlson, 2007), and web-based learning where
lectures were replaced by web-based interactive learning modules (Clark et al., 2007).
The problem-based learning approach was found useful to GIS training while teaching
GIS to people from different backgrounds and GIS skill levels (Dias, 2004). Although a
student may have used different learning approaches at different times, it is the teaching
approach that influences the depth of their learning (Ramsden, 2003). The academics
approach to teaching has been found to be related to students approaches to learning
(Ashwin, 2006). It is the combinations of diverse approaches adopted for teaching GIS
to multidisciplinary students that have enabled them to become confident GIS users and
professionals.
The active-learning method is based on theoretical constructs of learning informed by
significant theorists, including Vygotsky (1978), Piaget (1972), Bruner (1974), and
Lave and Wenger (2002). Active learning engages the student to consider knowledge
in authentic contexts (Brown et al., 1989) and to interact with authentic tasks, which
build on the successful completion of the previous task and thus constructing
knowledge through learning activity (Biggs & Tang, 2007) and demonstrating it in
assessment (Angelo, 1999). The GIS discipline is dominated by computer-based tools,
the inclusion of physical activities such as drawing maps and converting them to a
digital GIS map using modern spatial tools such as Google Earth and GPS, will provide
a different perspective for learning. This is further developed, if such activities are lined
up with formative assessment with a final summative assessment. This not only helps
students by supporting them to develop their confidence to complete tasks with GIS, but
also will further enhance their GIS understanding and skills.
Activities may include drawing a map with pencil and converting it to a digital raster
GIS map and subsequently creating vector based GIS files. Such activities can also
include cartographic principles, scanning, geo-referencing, and heads-up digitisation.
The effect of such a series of inter-related learning activities is likely to influences the
students understanding of the discipline. This will further enable students to develop
crucial skills and can also be used to demonstrate key GIS concepts, as well as promote
critical analysis and thinking.
30
Multidisciplinarity
Often geography is recognised as the basic discipline of GIS, and geography has been
considered multidisciplinary for several decades (Fenneman, 1919). A similar trend can
be seen with the GIS. The tools for GIS analysis and visualisation are becoming easy to
use and more user-friendly. This is encouraging students from different disciplines to
enrol in GIS courses. Therefore, heterogeneous class composition in GIS courses is
becoming a common feature and with each subsequent year the cohort is becoming
even more diverse.
The heterogeneous class composition was taken into consideration when designing
learning activities associated with course content, by starting from the basic concepts in
a familiar context and then moving on to more complex concepts. Several real-world
examples from different disciplines were also used in explaining the key concepts. Two
of the four assessment tasks were designed to encourage students to utilise their prior
respective discipline specific knowledge in relationship to GIS.
Flexible learning
For this course, several learning resources were made available to students this in turn
provided them with flexible learning options. These resources were in the form of
lecture slides, a tutorial book, and a list of relevant textbooks, online resources, and
software help.
The lecture slides for the weekly lecture allowed students to return to key concepts.
Textbooks are also considered to be a remarkably flexible learning resource (Ramsden,
2003). What makes them flexible is found in the guidance and direction offered by the
lecturer in the use of the textbook, rather than the book being a lone source of correct
information. Therefore, a list of textbooks, their relevant chapters for different weekly
teaching and learning sessions, and short descriptions about what these chapters cover,
was provided with the lectures. This information provided about the contents covered in
these textbooks supported students to select the right text to further develop their
understanding in the areas of either the most interest or the areas of most difficulties.
This provided students with flexible learning opportunities, and, within the designed
structure, this also encouraged them to adopt a deep learning approach.
The step-by-step instructions in a tutorial manual further provided opportunities for
flexible and self-paced learning of the GIS software technology. Each student received
a copy of GIS software for their home computer. This provided further exposure in the
use of the GIS software. Students used this tutorial book as a reference when they did
their assignments and even beyond this course. The tutorial manual also provided good
linkages with several web and software resources (ESRI, 2010) that were utilised by
some students to extend their GIS learning to the other areas. Many students enrolled
themselves in the different virtual GIS courses offered by the ESRI Virtual Campus.
This enabled them to reinforce their GIS knowledge. Learning about and using online
courses is considered an important tool for future professional development, as they are
designed for flexible learning and just-in-time learning (Harris, 2003).
32
Finally, the data evidenced the importance of the interactions with the lecturer as well
as the knowledge and skill of the lecturer.
The one-to-one discussions help with understanding the assessment
tasks.
Personal feedback on assignment and suggesting ideas on how to
improve assignments are appreciated.
The level of confidence in the subject matter that will greatly facilitate
my ability to obtain desired work.
The weekly questions were a great idea because it continues your
learning even after the lecture time and tutorial time.
Aspects in need of improvement
The students also identified areas for improvement, which will be a central
consideration when this model of curriculum is enacted in future iterations.
Better interaction between lecturer to studentmore personalised lectures,
feedback, tutorial presentation.
One to one assistance with application
More feedback on assignments
Ratio of tutors to students too low More than one tutor per tutorial
Examples of students assignments
In the second and third assessment tasks, students are assessed on their ability to apply
GIS to their respective discipline areas. The following table presents diverse examples
of students assignments demonstrating the effectiveness of the adopted pedagogic
approach (Table 1).
Geographical
Information
Technology
Threshold concepts
Active learning
Problem based
learning
Flexible learning
Authentic learning
Application
Multidisciplinarity
Assessment-feedback regime
Geographical
Information
Science
Students feedback
Focus group
Students performance
GIS
learning
34
Conclusions
The use of GIS is becoming popular across a range of disciplines and the trend is likely
to continue. To prepare the upcoming workforce to be skilled in GIS, it is imperative to
provide them effective education. This can be achieved with the combination of
recommended model GIS, pedagogical content knowledge developed by GIS experts,
incorporated in a designed curriculum, including learning and assessment strategies
developed from recent findings in educational research. This study attempts to address
the issue of identifying a model GIS pedagogy which covers the most recent, relevant
course content as well as the appropriate teaching, learning and assessment strategies
applicable to a multidisciplinary group.
The recent findings of education research can be classified into several categories such
as those addressing learning concepts, deep learning approaches, utilisation of web 2.0,
assessment-feedback regime, curriculum design, active and authentic learning, and
learning through engagement. All of these approaches can be utilised in a specialised
discipline such as GIS, which is trans-disciplinary, still, evolving and becoming
increasingly valued in diverse work areas.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the University of the Sunshine Coast for providing
resources required for the preparing the manuscript. The authors are also thankful to the
conference delegates who attended the presentation of the paper at the 3rd International
Pedagogical Research in Higher Education Conference and provided comments and
suggestions on the study.
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37
An emergent perspective
As an outcome of a review of 40 years of student learning research, Tamsin Haggis
(2008) concludes that:
Even in the 2000s, a great deal of discussion about learning in higher
education is still focused upon the same basic questions that arose in the
1970s; What can we discover about how individuals learn?, What are
the implications of our knowledge about individual learning for
classroom teaching and curriculum design?, How can we get students
to take a deep approach to learning the content of our curricula?, and
What is going on outside the classroom which might impact upon
learning outcomes? (p.384)
While not discounting the value of such research, she also observes that:
there is as yet little research that attempts to document different types
of dynamic interaction and process through time in relation to learning
situations in higher education (p.389). Further, research into learning is
still not able to deal well with the fleeting, the distributed, the
multiple and the complex.
and noted that there were alternative perspectives and methodologies that were
frequently used in the general fields of adult education, sociolinguistics and critical
social theory that could be relevant and helpful for those undertaking research in higher
education.
In similar vein, Sue Clegg (2007) observes that:
The bigger danger is that we become complacent in the questions we
ask about higher education. With that complacency comes the danger of
accepting other peoples descriptions about the purposes of higher
education, and confining ourselves to research that tells us how to do
things better. I dont believe we should confine ourselves to these sorts
of questions, nor do I think it produces good research.
38
In part, she associates this complacency with the tendency of higher education
researchers to confine themselves to the higher education literature which can
perpetuate old ideas and hierarchies as well as newer practice, and newer
orthodoxies. Accordingly, she challenges us to draw on knowledge and disciplinary
insights that are not confined to higher education literature (and) to extend our
theoretical vocabularies in order to pose new questions - moves which she suggests
may require a degree of intellectual promiscuity.
More recently, Graham Gibbs (2010) in a reflective commentary on his own 35 year
long engagement in pedagogic research, observed that much pedagogic research, both
a-theoretical and theoretical in approach, has been founded on the assumption that
findings derived from research in one context will be generalisable or transferable to
other contexts, or that the researched phenomena are actually present in other contexts.
Challenging this view, he contends that many context variables are so influential that
extrapolation from one context to another is fraught with difficulties and leads to many
errors and confusions, including the adoption of contextually inappropriate educational
practices, wrong-headed explanations of local pedagogic phenomena, the alienation of
teachers who know more about the crucial features of their context than do the
pedagogic researchers, and a retreat into methodological obscurantism on the part of
researchers, in an attempt to explain apparently inconsistent findings which are more
likely due to unnoticed contextual variables. It follows that he advocates much more
attention to and reporting of, contextual variables.
These views resonate with recent shifts in our own (pedagogical) research perspectives
and influence our conceptualization, as well a critique, of pedagogical research projects.
While we similarly value and draw on insights from an extensive body of student
learning research which highlights the vast array of influences on student learning and
provides insights into the complicated ways in which those influences play out in
individual students learning lives, we also believe that the complexity of student
learning phenomena is insufficiently acknowledged and addressed in research.
Researchers tend to focus on one or a few concurrent influences and their effects (a
reductionist perspective) and anticipate the presence of high probability or causal linear
relationships between those influences and effects (determinism). We observe that the
same researchers are often ready to concede that their own lived experience of
learning makes a compelling case for describing student learning in terms commonly
used by complexity theorists.
i.e. student learning:
Constitutes embedded and interwoven phenomena that cannot readily be
differentiated and disentangled;
Involves relationships between those phenomena that are often non-linear and
recursive, and can lead to the emergence of unforeseeable new phenomena
(more than the sum of the parts). The resultant unpredictability can make it
difficult to foresee the nature and scale of impact of changes that are made or
happen to particular phenomena (e.g. the butterfly effect);
Is both self organizing so that a degree of stability or sustained progress can
occur when actors and other elements are in sufficient accord (e.g. when there
is shared understandings of learning purposes) and adaptive over time given
the capacity of actors to change and instigate change;
39
40
Refshauge, & Ellis, 2001). In particular they anticipated learning about the physical
form and function of bodies, how the functionality of those components might be
impaired in illness or injury, and how treatment might be applied to mobilise or
manipulate body parts to improve function. The following brief outline of one of the
new papers offered to first year students illustrates how the revised curriculum did not
accord with this view.
The Exploring Health Priorities paper introduces students to local, national and
international health priorities and how they may be examined from a number of
different perspectives. Focusing on a primary health model, students are encouraged to
explore the distribution of major causes of premature death and morbidity, the
contribution of social determinants, the role played by behavioural and biomedical risk
factors, the policy context and the role of physiotherapy in the management of complex,
chronic health issues relating to asthma, diabetes, osteoarthritis and stroke. The
question is posed what is the role for physiotherapy amidst the matrix of behavioural,
cultural, economic, political and social factors affecting these health issues?
We were aware from previous research of the challenges associated with implementing
major changes in curriculum, in part attributable to the stability of many students
existing conceptions of learning and teaching (e.g. Scott, Buchanan and Haigh, 1994).
Some students strongly resist changing their conceptions of practice but we also
realised that for the profession to continue to be seen as a viable response to the rapidly
changing economy of health care, reform would be needed. We were aided in our
argument by the unfortunate but very timely reform of one of the professions primary
sources of public funding, which rapidly and radically altered the perception of more
than half of the profession who were in private practice. This change led to wide-scale
redundancies and loss of practice income and served to heighten the rhetoric over the
need for physiotherapy to reform, and allowed us to make not only economic
arguments, but also pedagogical arguments in favour of the new curriculum.
The overall strategy adopted to address this issue of potential lack of alignment
included ensuring that explanations as well as overviews of the curriculum were
provided, preparing students for unfamiliar learning and teaching approaches,
encouraging regular informal feedback, and requesting formal feedback and
undertaking research on students experience of and response to the curriculum.
The Research
While we had an initial hunch that students expectations for and the reality of the
curriculum would at times diverge, we decided that the research, in keeping with the
shifts in our perspectives, should have a more open focus and agenda, as reflected in the
following research questions:
What do students accounts of their experience of being a student in a
physiotherapy programme reveal about:
- Their perceptions, thoughts and feelings with respect to the
environments within which their learning occurs and the occasions in
which they are engaged in learning,
- Their internal conversations, reflexive deliberations and decisions about
their on-going learning,
42
- The personal and structural factors that they take into account and
attribute their decisions about learning to?
What do these accounts reveal in relation to the variability, stability and
complexity of students learning lives in this context?
What discourses make certain perceptions, thoughts and feelings possible
and others impossible for student physiotherapists?
What technologies govern how students practice being students and
physiotherapists?
We also decided to look further for possible precedents for the project that we were
beginning to conceptualize. As we anticipated that the research might take us into new
methodological territory, we hoped some related guidance would be available. While
the precedents were few in number, they have proved helpful and are now reviewed.
During the period 2004 -2008 a group of UK researchers (Biesta, Field, Goodson,
Hodkinson and McLeod) engaged in a Learning Lives project (see
http://www.learninglives.org/index.html). The broad focus of their research was on
interrelationships between learning, agency and identity in peoples learning lives. i.e.
..we seek to understand how identity (including ones identity as a
learner) and agency (the ability to exert control over ones life) impact
upon learning dispositions, practices and achievements. On the other
hand, we seek to understand how different forms and practices of
learning and different learning achievements impact upon individual
identities (including learner identities), on individuals senses of agency,
and on their actual capacity to exert control over their lives.
The forms of learning in which the researchers were interested included formal,
informal, tacit and incidental learning and they also sought to understand
transformations that occur in individuals learning dispositions, practices and
achievements that are prompted by changes in their life courses. Related data was
gathered from 120 adults aged between 25 and 85.
This longitudinal study involved both retrospective life history/biographical research
and real time life course research and had qualitative and quantitative data strands.
The former data mainly took the form of stories which resonated with the researchers
interests in peoples interior conversation, storying or theorizing work. Stories offered a
window or lens for viewing learning, agency and identity interactions. The findings
also suggested that stories could be important vehicles for learning from life, depending
on their descriptive, analytical and evaluative features (narrative learning).
A wide range of article and papers have been published on aspects of this project,
including several that address methodological issues and approaches associated with
the project (e.g. Hodkinson and McLeod, 2007a, 2007b).
Tamsin Haggis (2004) undertook a longitudinal investigation of individual student
narratives about their learning in higher education. She approached the research from
the perspective that learning was a complex and situated phenomena, and that
understanding the ways in which the specifics of context and history translate, in
dynamic and unstable ways, into multiplicity and difference in the lives of situated
individuals should be fruitful. In particular, she explored how internal (e.g.
phenomenological explanations of experience or self) and external (social
43
structure/discourse) elements might play out in students lives and intersect to form the
decision that higher education is both meaningful and possible at a particular point in
the life of the individual (p.339). Complexity theory, which is founded on nondeterminist assumptions, was a key analytic lens for the study and reflected the
researchers view that non-linear processes and patterns characterized human learning.
The data consisted of narratives gathered from 12 students who were completing an
Access Course and which incorporated references to processes involved in learning,
school, family, employment, post school learning, ideas about learning, higher
education, teacher, and work and life beyond university. The narratives were subject to
inductive analysis using a constant comparative process to discern different stories
being told as well as well as the elements of each story. Progressive detail was added to
particular stories through the analysis process with increasing appreciation of the
diversity and complexity of the ways elements of the stories were connected. As in the
Learning Lives project, Haggis drew on constructs of meaning making, identity and
agency when interpreting patterns in the data, emphasizes the need to give as much
attention to difference as to commonality in the aspects of students learning lives and
to allow for the emergence of unnamed and unexpected factors and interrelationships
involved in learning (p.350). At the same time she did not dismiss the possibility of
large-scale, generalisible patterns to be apparent in phenomena.
A New Zealand study with parallels has been completed recently by colleagues at
Auckland University (Madjar, McKinley, Deynzer and van der Merwe, 2010). In this
project, which involved collaboration between four secondary schools and two tertiary
institutions, the researchers investigated the experiences of students who are currently
under-represented in the university student population when making the transition from
secondary school to university. The project was a longitudinal, prospective qualitative
study and the focus was on student experiences from the time they engaged in preenrolment planning and decision-making to the time they encountered examinations at
the end of their first semester. Their experiences in relation to such aspects as enrolling,
adjusting to university study and a university environment, making changes in their
social relationships and networks, handling study loads, exams and feedback were
investigated. Insights were sought in relation to the ways students constructed and
talked about their experience of transition and wove that experience into their general
life narratives; the nature of the stepping stone or stumbling blocks that students
might encounter during the transition process; and factors that contributed to or
detracted from their motivation and confidence, their integration into the academic and
social domains of university life and decisions they made to stay, leave or change
courses. Data was gathered from 44 students from predominantly low-decile schools
using semi-structured interviews, student journaling and photo-based stimulated recall.
Analyses involved coding of text and narrative analysis. The findings emphasized the
complexity of the transition process which was influenced by the existing attributes,
knowledge and skills of the students and the circumstances and conditions of the
environment they found themselves in. The findings concerning stepping stone and
stumbling blocks were the foundation for recommendations concerning ways in which
the transition process might be improved concerned.
Cieslik (2006) investigated the distinctive biographical experiences of a group of adult
learners which disposed them to differing modes of reflexivity, which in turn helped
account for development of their learning identities and careers. The interrelated
concepts of reflexive deliberations and internal conversation which have been
formulated by Margaret Archer (2003) were drawn on as theoretical lenses. Archer
proposes that a property of individuals (agents) is the power of reflexivity that enables
them to take stock of situations that they find themselves in, including a sensitivity
44
towards social structures that they perceive constrain and enable aspects of their lives;
an ability to contemplate their own concerns and desires - what they care and are
concerned about in the natural, practical and social worlds that they inhabit; a
predisposition to work out what their ultimate concern is, and how other concerns
might be subordinate but yet accommodated to it; a consideration of the decision to
sustain or change structures and their properties, or whether or not to continue to
address their concerns and desires; and also, a desire to identify their place in the
world, and how they might make their way in the world.
This capacity for reflexivity is manifest in internal conversation or self-talk; The
inner conversation is how our personal emergent powers are exercised on and in the
world...This interior dialogue is not just a window on the world, rather it is what
determines our being-in-the-world (p319).
Archer (2003), as an outcome of her own research, also identified four different modes
in which individuals engaged in reflexive deliberations with differences in how
individuals experienced and responded to agency and structural constraints and
enablers. Autonomous reflexives sustain complete internal conversations with
themselves, leading directly to action. Communicative reflexives need to have their
internal conversations completed and confirmed by others before they take action.
Meta-reflexives are critically reflexive about their own internal conversations and
socially critical about effective action. Fractured reflexives cannot conduct a
purposeful internal conversation, but go around in circles of ever increasing distress and
disorientation.
Using interviews, Cieslik gathered biographical data from a group of 10 adult learners
in a basic skills programme concerning their associated internal conversations and
reflexive deliberations. This data was the foundation for case studies presented to show
how similar formative experiences are mediated differently by actors as a result of the
operation of their internal conversations. This illustrates how there can be a range of
different consequences of earlier socio-structural conditioning that can create confusing
patterns of relationships that individuals may have with education. These are patterns
that then defy some of the simpler mechanical relationships that are often represented in
large-scale survey research (p.248).
Analysis of internal conversations revealed the differing contributions that agential and
structural processes made to individual learners (dis)engagement in formal learning
provision and Cieslik concluded that the research points to the need for both students
and practitioners to develop ways of understanding how formative life course
experiences and modes of reflexivity can inform engagement with formal
learning(p.249).
As for Cieslik we have found the notions of reflexive deliberation and internal
conversation helpful when thinking about the phenomena that we are interested in and
they have become central constructs in our own project. Similarly, we wish to give
attention to the views that adults have about the enabling and constraining influence of
personal agency and structural properties on their lives and consequences for their
modes of reflexivity.. Archer has characterized her related research focus as the life of
the mind and again we have found this phrase captures succinctly and evocatively the
essential focus of our research.
45
teach with integrity only if an effort is made to examine the impact of his or her work
on the students (Shulman, 2002, p.vii). He defines that agenda as the pedagogical
imperative (p.vii). It has been readily accepted that the appropriate imperative for
pedagogical research at Manukau, is the life of the mind of students who are having
their first encounters with university education at the new campus.
Conclusion
While the scholars cited above have been very influential in our developing views about
this orientation to pedagogical research, equally influential have been the insights we
have gained as we have reflected on our shared experiences of learning, teaching and
researching in the context of this project. Those reflections have validated the
significance of our individual reflexive deliberations and accompanying internal
conversations, while also confirming the value of our overt conversations. Perhaps we
are betwixt between autonomous reflexives and communicative reflexives.
47
References:
Archer, M. (2003) Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge
UniversityPress, Cambridge, UK.
Carr, J., Jones, M., & Higgs, J. (2000) Learning reasoning in physiotherapy programs.
In J. Higgs & M. Jones (Eds.), Clinical Reasoning in the Health Professions (pp. 198204). London: Butterworth Heinemann.
Cieslik, M. (2006) Reflexivity, learning Identities and Adult Basic Skills, British
Journal of Sociology of Education, 27(2): 237- 250.
Clegg, S. (2007b) Extending the boundaries of research into higher education. Paper
presented at the 30th HERDSA Annual Conference, Adelaide, 8-11 July.
Gibbs, G (2010) The importance of context in understanding teaching and learning:
reflections on thirty five years of pedagogic research. Keynote presentation to the
Annual Conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning, Liverpool.
Haigh, N. and Naidoo, K. (2007) Engaging in the scholarship of academic development
practice: facing a challenging agenda. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the
Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), Brighton, U.K.
Madjar, I., McKinlet, E., Deynzer, M. abd van der Merwe, A. (2010) Stumbling blocks
or stepping stones? Students experience of transition from low-mid-decile schools to
university. Auckland: Starpath Project, The University of Auckland. Available at
http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/webdav/site/education/shared/about/research/docs
/starpath/Stumbling-blocks-or-stepping-stones-Research-Report-25-March-2010.pdf
(accessed 16th June, 2010)
Haggis, T. (2004) Meaning, identity and motivation: expanding what matters in
understanding learning in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 29(3), 335352.
Haggis, T. (2009) What have we been thinking of? A critical overview of 40 years of
student learning research in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 34(4), 377390.
Higgs, J., Refshauge, K., & Ellis, E. (2001) Portrait of the physiotherapy profession.
Journal of Interprofessional Care, 15(1), 79-89.
Hodkinson, P. and Macleod, F. (2007a) Contrasting concepts of learning and
contrasting research methodologies. Paper presented at the Teaching and Learning
Research Programme (TLRP) Annual Conference, November, Cardiff. (Sample paper
from Learning Lives project)
Hodkinson, P. and MacLeod, F. (2007) Contrasting concepts of learning and contrasting
research methodologies: some strengths and weaknesses of life history research. A
paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER).
Nicholls, D. A., & Larmer, P. (2005) Possible futures for Physiotherapy: an exploration
of the New Zealand context. New Zealand Journal of Physiotherapy, 33(2), 55-60.
48
Nicholls, D. A., Reid, D. A., & Larmer, P. (2009) Crisis, what crisis? Revisiting
'Possible Futures for Physiotherapy'. New Zealand Journal of Physiotherapy, 37(3),
105-114.
Shulman, L. (2002) Forward in Ethics of Inquiry: Issues in the Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning. CA: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching.
49
Thoughts and feelings that you have been having about your life as a student
doing the physiotherapy programme. These may be thoughts and feelings
that you havent talked about previously, or they may be ones that you have
shared with others: other students, your teachers, friends, parents. As your
thoughts and feelings about being a physiotherapy student and doing a
physiotherapy programme may have been changing, we can talk about those
changes as well.
Occasions when you can recall these sorts of things were going on in your
mind in relation to your experience of doing the physiotherapy programme:
when you were
sorting out or clarifying your thoughts about something,
wondering why,
figuring out what is relevant or applies to you
considering what matters most to you - or doesnt matter or isnt a
priority concern for you,
imagining or wondering about the future what might happen or
occur,
trying to make your mind up about what to do - what it would be
best to do.
On some of these occasions you may have been aware that you were having
a form of conversation with yourself: you were talking something over with yourself. Tell me if you can recall such conversations.
Moments when you can recall making decisions which you feel were
important, or you were glad you made: decisions that have helped you
accomplish something that you care about and are setting out to do, to
achieve.
For each of these important decisions, the main reasons why you felt it was
the appropriate or right decision to make.
50
Scharl and Szab have also considered that some of the key elements in the learning
process are the development of the students autonomy and responsibility (2000: 3, 6),
their involvement in the teaching-learning progression (80) and the need to implement
student-centred attitudes in the educational systems (6).
Therefore, the interest in the quality control and management systems of learneroriented educational programs has followed the principles formulated by the European
Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (cf. ENQA,
http://www.enqa.eu/, 2007). The control of quality in higher education has become one
of the main objects of pedagogical research, as Sangeeta et al. have explained in their
relevant article Conceptualizing total quality management in higher education (2004).
These researchers, together with Muresan et al. (2007), Pandi et al. (2009) and Ali and
Shastri (2010), have realised that Total Quality Management is a very slippery concept
which depends on the educational context and which is in constant change and
evolution. However, in all their definitions there appears to be an increase in the
importance of the students satisfaction in market terms, what they call a customer
oriented definition (149) of quality systems, and the view of educational processes as
transformation/ production systems (152).
Adhering to these principles, constructivism has tried to integrate the students skills
and procedure, transversal, personal and interpersonal competences (cf. Tuning
Program, 2003; Fallows and Steven, 2000) in order to achieve more successful results
in the students work life once the educational process has finished. This encourages the
learners responsibility for their own learning and involves teachers support throughout
the whole process. As regards the role of the teachers, specialists like Jennifer K. Rice
(2003) or Tigelaar et al. (2004) have supported the principles promulgated by the
European Commission in the official document of Education and Training 2010 (2004)
concerning the Common European Principles for Teacher Competences and
Qualifications. According to these principles, teachers acquire a crucial role in
supporting the learning experience of young people and adult learners (1) and new
principles such as teamwork, life-learning, skills with new technologies and the
teachers counselling role have become basic in our understanding of education in the
European Space. Furthermore, following this line of educational research enquiry, the
advantages in using innovation and new technologies for the evaluation of teaching and
learning procedures seems to be essential within the current European Space for Higher
Education (Yancey, 1992 and Murphy, 1994).
Research questions
Considering the previous ideas and concepts as the basis for our small-case study, the
main characteristics of our project and the main goals we wanted to achieve when it was
designed will be described. During the academic year 2009-2010, the Department of
English and German Philology at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) has carried out a
project entitled Study of the processes, strategies and work loads of the students in the
Masters course in Textual and Cultural Studies in English as a means of guaranteeing
the internal standards of quality based on the assessment of students learning
processes from the perspective of quality assurance in education in the Masters course
in Textual and Cultural Studies. Relying on Muresan et al.s (2007) approach to quality
learning (among others previously mentioned) and the educational principles
established by the Spanish Ministry of Education (2005) for the Spanish integration to
the European Space, which considered the Spanish adaptation to the European Space as
a historical opportunity for our University system (30), the aim of this project was to
assess quantitatively and qualitatively the learning strategies and the workload of these
MA students with the aim of improving teachers supervision in their learning processes
52
and the students results at the end of the academic year. To our knowledge, in the
Spanish university context, this is the first innovative experience carried out at a MA
level with the aim of ensuring educational quality by assessing the students learning
processes in a rigorous way.
Methodology
First of all, it is important to take into account some of the main characteristics of this
Masters course: it is a 60 ECTS credit-degree, and involves either onsite or blended
learning modality. In the first semester, there are three compulsory subjects for all the
students (Approaches to the Study of the Literary Text in English, Issues in Film
Studies, How to Write a Research Paper in English). In the second semester, they
must choose three subjects among a variety of 8 subjects depending on their interests,
labour perspectives or future research interests (Trends in Contemporary British
Fiction, Main Trends in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Alternatives to the Canon,
Cinema, Culture and Society, Issues in Representation. Forms, Methods and
Problems, British and U. S. Film Genres, Metalinguistic Resources in English
Academic Texts, Computer Tools for Research, Professional and Teaching
Purposes) and then, there is a final Masters Thesis (15 ECTS). Three groups of
participants were involved in our project: i) the 20 MA students in the year 2009-2010
(the findings that have been interpreted for this study respond to the number of students
who answered all the questionnaires, around 70 % of the students participating in the
Masters course in the academic year 2009-2009), ii) the 12 teachers in the Masters
course and iii) a representative group formed by 7 graduate students who have
completed the Masters course in the last 4 years and are currently PhD students in our
Postgraduate program.
To compile data on individual learning strategies and following Scharl and Szabs
idea that questionnaires are one of the best tools to raise awareness in the students and
to know their learning styles (2000: 17), a questionnaire was devised by a quality
assurance specialist at our University. This questionnaire sought to enquire into the
individual learning strategies and skills students used in all the subjects of the Masters
course together with the final MA dissertation; their personal dedication to the specific
learning activities requested in each subject (measured in number of hours per week)
and their perception of the teachers and students role in their learning processes. This
questionnaire was designed following the principles established by the Tutorial
Project framed within the new procedures that have been launched in the last years by
the University of Zaragoza in order to ensure total quality systems of high education
(see:
http://www.unizar.es/unidad_calidad/calidad/procedimientos/def/C4-DOC4ANX6.pdf). We used statistical methods (SPSS version 8) to process these data. In the
course of the academic year and while these data were being compiled and processed,
the graduate students and the teachers conducted joint regular meetings to discuss the
results, find and implement several initiatives targeted at improving the students
learning processes. The final stage of this project was completed at the end of June
2010 when all these data were compiled, processed and commented on by the students,
the teachers and the graduates. These results provided a fuller picture of the students
learning styles and level of autonomy and they can become the basis of future initiatives
created in order to improve the teaching quality in the next academic years and which
may mean the beginning of many other research projects targeted at improving the
quality of our Degree and Masters programs.
Interpretation of findings
53
In order to summarise the main findings of our project, firstly, I will show the
comparative results concerning the compulsory subjects and the optional ones and then,
more general and complex conclusions will be extracted from these outcomes.
First semester
Figure 1
Graph 1 - Previous individual knowledge (%)
GOOD
POOR
75
50
50
50
50
25
ASLTE
IFS
HWRP
Key: ASLTE, Approaches to the Study of the Literary Text in English; IFS, Issues in Film Studies;
HWRP, How to Write a Research Paper in English.
In the subject Approaches to the Study of the Literary Text in English we can see that
75 % of the students considered they had enough previous knowledge to face the
subject while in the other two only 50 % thought so.
Second semester
As can be seen, 100 % of the MA students considered their previous knowledge enough
to pass the optional subjects. The students, the teachers and the graduates agreed that
this was due to the fact that the compulsory subjects had set the basis for the optional
part of the year. So, although at the beginning of the year some of them considered they
were not sufficiently prepared to follow the course, once they had been working on the
compulsory subjects they acquired the necessary skills and knowledge to participate in
the Masters courses.
Figure 2
Graph 1 - Previous individual knowledge(%)
120
100
80
60
GOOD
POOR
40
20
0
TCBF
MTCUSF
IRFMP
MREA
CT
ATC
BUSFG
CCS
Key: TCBF, Trends in Contemporary British Fiction; MTCUSF, Main Trends in Contemporary U.S. Fiction;
IRFMP, Issues in Representation. Forms, Methods and Problems; MREA, Metalinguistic Resources in English
Academic Texts; CT, Computer Tools for Research, Professional and Teaching Purposes; ATC,
Alternatives
to the Canon; BUSFG, British and U. S. Film Genres and CCS, Cinema, Culture and Society.
First semester
54
If we look at the following graph, the majority of the students had worked several days
a week or once a week in Issues in Film Studies and How to Write a Research Paper
in English, while 50% reported they needed to work everyday to reach the required
level in the subject on Literature.
Figure 3
Graph 2 - Distribution of workload (%)
weekly
lesson days
everyday
10
20
30
40
50
60
everyday
lesson days
weekly
HWRP
25
37,5
37,5
IFS
25
37,5
37,5
ASLTE
50
12,5
37,5
Key: ASLTE, Approaches to the Study of the Literary Text in English; IFS, Issues in Film Studies;
HWRP, How to Write a Research Paper in English.
Second semester
In contrast to the first semester, the students had changed their learning strategies in the
second half of the academic year, since at the beginning most of them studied everyday
whereas in this semester, they did it weekly in most of the subjects. This may be due to
the fact that in the second part of the year they had already developed a working routine
and were more capable of organising their time schedule than at the beginning of the
year.
55
Figure 4
Graph 2 - Distribution of workload (%)
120
100
80
everyday
lesson days
60
weekly
40
20
0
TCBF
MTCUSF
IRFMP
MREA
CT
ATC
BUSFG
Key: TCBF, Trends in Contemporary British Fiction; MTCUSF, Main Trends in Contemporary U.S.
Fiction; IRFMP, Issues in Representation. Forms, Methods and Problems; MREA, Metalinguistic
Resources in English Academic Texts; CT, Computer Tools for Research, Professional and Teaching
Purposes; ATC, Alternatives to the Canon; BUSFG, British and U. S. Film Genres.
First semester
Figure 5
100
80
60
YES
40
NO
20
0
ASLTE
IFS
HWRP
Key: ASLTE, Approaches to the Study of the Literary Text in English; IFS, Issues in Film Studies;
HWRP, How to Write a Research Paper in English.
All the students agreed with the importance of having a personal plan for study in order
to improve their results and manage their study time effectively.
Second Semester
In this graphic we can also see that after some months, students were more capable of
integrating the study routine in their learning processes without elaborating a detailed
plan of study, especially in those subjects like Metalinguistic Resources in English
Academic Texts or Computer Tools for Research for Professional and Teaching
Purposes in which the learning process relies on tasks and skills learning and on
activities carried out during the lessons.
56
Figure 6
Key: TCBF, Trends in Contemporary British Fiction; MTCUSF, Main Trends in Contemporary U.S.
Fiction; IRFMP, Issues in Representation. Forms, Methods and Problems; MREA, Metalinguistic
Resources in English Academic Texts; CT, Computer Tools for Research, Professional and Teaching
Purposes; ATC, Alternatives to the Canon; BUSFG, British and U. S. Film Genres.
100
90
80
70
60
50
YES
40
NO
30
20
10
0
TCBF
MTCUSF
IRFMP
MREA
CT
ATC
BUSFG
First Semester
Table 1
ASLTE
Taking notes
Ask previous questions
Read
Highlight
Learn by heart
Do C-maps and outlines
Summarise
Solve problems
Reflect on the received
information
Think about the relevance
of what has been studied
in daily life
IFS
HWRP
Key: ASLTE, Approaches to the Study of the Literary Text in English; IFS, Issues in Film Studies;
HWRP, How to Write a Research Paper in English.
As regards the learning strategies, the most common ones in the first semester were
reading, highlighting, the elaboration of C-maps and outlines and the individual
reflection on the information that had previously received in the classroom. In this
respect, the teachers thought that these results were coherent with the nature of the
degree and they considered the critical capacity of the students, future employability,
the process of learning for life and the transversality of subjects as the main goals
behind these skills and procedures.
57
Second Semester
Table 2
Taking notes
Ask previous
questions
Read
Highlight
Learn by heart
Do C-maps and
outlines
Summarise
Solve problems
Reflect on the
received
information
Think about the
relevance of
what has been
studied in daily
life
ATC
1
3
3
1
5
5
2
4
4
1
1
1
3
1
4
2
1
2
1
1
1
1
BUSFG
1
3
1
1
1
2
3
3
1
1
1
Key: TCBF, Trends in Contemporary British Fiction; MTCUSF, Main Trends in Contemporary U.S.
Fiction; IRFMP, Issues in Representation. Forms, Methods and Problems; MREA, Metalinguistic
Resources in English Academic Texts; CT, Computer Tools for Research, Professional and Teaching
Purposes; ATC, Alternatives to the Canon; BUSFG, British and U. S. Film Genres.
In the second semester, students appeared to use the same learning strategies as in the
compulsory subjects since they are closely related to the general and specific
competencies designed for this Master. However, they proved unable to identify the
relevance of learning and its employability, so the instruction focusing on employability
skills was one of the aspects for improvement in future courses.
First Semester
The most problematic aspects in the first term were the compilation of notes and the
access to bibliographical resources, the preparation of the assignments and practices and
the solving doubts. All the students agreed that teachers were the basic method of help
when they had doubts either during the class or in the tutorial hours. The teachers saw
the availability of bibliographical resources as the main thing to improve for the second
semester of the year. Thus, the importance of the tutorial role, which has been fostered
by the European Commission (2004) and researchers like Arnold (1999) or PrezLlantada (2008) among many others, comes to the fore from the very beginning of this
small-scale study.
58
Table 3
Key: ASLTE, Approaches to the Study of the Literary Text in English; IFS, Issues in Film Studies;
HWRP, How to Write a Research Paper in English.
ASLTE
IFS
HWRP
Second Semester
Figure 7
Key: ASLTE, Approaches to the Study of the Literary Text in English; IFS, Issues in Film Studies;
HWRP, How to Write a Research Paper in English.
250
200
150
Total
100
50
0
ASLTE
IFS
HWRP
When the students were asked about the difficulties they faced in the second part of the
academic year, the most relevant ones were the attendance and understanding of the
lessons and their work on assignments and practices. In all the cases, they explained
that the problems were solved thanks to the guide and help of the teachers in the tutorial
hours. For the next year, some referential documents which can help students to write
essays and to improve their understanding have been included in the program. Some of
the problems that appeared in the first semester, such as those related to the use of new
technologies, the use of moodle or solving questions had already been solved by the
second term. Therefore, the results of this initiative of quality improvement in the MA
in the first term proved to be very useful to advance in the upgrading of the learning and
teaching quality of the second part.
First semester
After analysing the number of hours students devoted to each individual skill, we
observed that the preparation of the essays and assignments, the personal study and the
compulsory readings were the tasks to which students devoted more time while the
59
attendance to tutorials and the search of bibliography were the quickest tasks to be
performed. And then, the total number of hours was of 195 for Approaches to the
Study of the Literary Text in English, 197 for Issues in Film Studies and 156 for
How to Write a Research Paper, as can be seen in the next graph:
Second Semester:
After analysing the number of hours students devoted to each individual skill in the
second semester, it was realised that students still devoted the greatest part of their time
to the preparation of the essays and assignments, to their personal study and to the
compulsory readings. However, attendance to tutorials and office hours and the time
spent in bibliographical research and optional readings reasonably increased since the
students were more familiarised with the teachers and were more involved in their own
research process.
Figure 8
Key: TCBF, Trends in Contemporary British Fiction; MTCUSF, Main Trends in Contemporary U.S.
Fiction; IRFMP, Issues in Representation. Forms, Methods and Problems; MREA, Metalinguistic
Resources in English Academic Texts; CT, Computer Tools for Research, Professional and Teaching
Purposes; ATC, Alternatives to the Canon; BUSFG, British and U. S. Film Genres.
Graph 6. Total number of hours of workload and distribution / number of hours
(second semester)
Essays
Tutiorials
Search of bibliography
Literary works
Films
Optional readings
Compulsory readings
Assignments
Individual study
110
220
20 20 25 22010 21
22
85
31 20 101012
55
155
25 0100
0 53
45 010 67
5
75
35 20010 45
40
100
115
30 20 40
30 40 35 30 20 20 40
80
205
115
0
100
200
300
150
25 0 50
150
115
30 30
400
40
130
500
600
700
800
According to the total number of hours devoted to each subject, we can see that in all
cases but one (computer tools) the workload was higher than the expected workload as
happened in the compulsory subjects of the first semester. To solve this weakness, we
decided to revise the workload of the subjects and adjust course contents to the
estimated workload.
Table 4: Real Workload
Key: TCBF, Trends in Contemporary British Fiction; MTCUSF, Main Trends in Contemporary U.S.
Fiction; IRFMP, Issues in Representation. Forms, Methods and Problems; MREA, Metalinguistic
Resources in English Academic Texts; CT, Computer Tools for Research, Professional and Teaching
Purposes; ATC, Alternatives to the Canon; BUSFG, British and U. S. Film Genres.
TCBF
MTCUSF IRFMP
MREA
CT
ATC
BUSFG
Total
181
190,6
192
157
100
200
193,33
If we compare the results of the real workload with the one expected for each subject, it
can be seen that the real workload was superior to the expected one. Reducing the
workload in each subject was a means of optimising and ensuring the quality of the
teaching in this Master. This table illustrates the initial expected workload:
60
1-Plenary
lecture
Attend the
lectures
Explanation
of theory and
Concepts /
Orientation
for the subject
2-Practices
3-Seminars
in group
4Individual
reflection
25
--
Guides the
activity
12
--
0,48
Explain their
work
Guides,
counsels and
evaluates
13
--
0,52
Reflection and
learning
Counsels in
individual
tutorials
--
55
2,2
Readings,
5Individual / bibliographical
Team work research, study
Guides and
evaluates
--
82,5
3,3
Films, new
6Computer technologies
room /
Audiovisual
Presents and
guides in the
search of
information
--
--
--
50 hs
137,5 hs
7,5
ECTS
TOTAL
However, it is likely that this imbalance was due to the fact that the group of students
was very heterogeneous, they came from different educational backgrounds and their
specialities were very different. A revision of the course syllabi and the curriculum
design was deemed as a possible line of improvement in the near future.
Once a comparative analysis between the first and the second semester of the masters
course was established, the graduate students hold a meeting and concluded that from
their personal experiences it was necessary to study almost everyday, to participate in
the lessons, to have a personal plan of study and to prepare every assignment and essay
before the deadline finishes in order to finish the MA with success. They also agreed
that this masters course implies a heavy workload for the students, as they have to read,
understand, summarise and assimilate a lot of concepts. Thus, teamwork appears to be
very important and the personal situation of each student should be considered by
taking into account if the person is a full time student or not.
initially devised for the degree. Qualitatively, the teachers perceptions of the students
learning progress deemed it necessary to provide them with ongoing supervision both
onsite learning and blended learning. Compared to previous academic years, the
increased counselling role echoed a more successful acquisition of concepts and
competences and thus, a more integrative and realistic approach to learning. Evoking
the Deming cycle based on the Plan-Do-Check-Act stages in learning processes
(1986), this preliminary innovation project targeted at guaranteeing quality in learning
will set off a quality management procedure which we hope may help us identify weak
points and elicit improvements of the teaching quality and of our mission statement.
Then, it becomes evident that only by obtaining a more accurate view of the students
learning attitudes and strategies can teachers cater to the students needs conveniently
(cf. Lizzio et al., 2002 and Gibbs et al., 2007).
In the light of this small-scale experience, we believe that conducting pedagogical
innovation projects can assure the quality standards in high-educational context in
general and in this Masters course in particular. Although the restricted and local
significance of our findings must be taken into account, an added value of this
experience has been the close cooperation of both students and teachers and the joint
efforts in guaranteeing quality standards in higher education. Adopting a set of
standards and then redesigning our curriculum to focus on the knowledge, skills, and
attitudes contained in those standards has been a long and challenging process
(Campbell et al., 2000, 95); initiatives such as this one may confirm that this challenge
is worthwhile when we bid for high quality standards in educating the future
generations.
References
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and Performance Assessment in Teacher Education, New York, Allyn and Bacon.
Deming, W. E. (1986) Out of the Crisis, Boston, Mass.: MIT Press.
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Available
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2010)
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63
64
group in three hour weekly classes which gave time to hold discussions and reflect on
the students learning. The group remained together as one during the sessions and this
made it easier to develop a sense of group identity necessary for peer collaboration.
The second reason was that as a group of experienced practitioners the use of
appreciative inquiry to explore good practice provided an opportunity to consider how
students related theory and literature on quality in early years to their own practice.
Written consent to take part in the research was negotiated with students and ethics
approval was obtained using the university guidelines and procedures. It was made
clear to the students that the collection of data would not impact on students learning
and assessment. Data was collected from class discussions, face to face and online
tutorials (email), content analysis of students visual presentations in which they
outlined their observation plan to conduct their inquiries and analysis of students
comments on their personal learning in their final written papers. The idea was that
evidence would be collected on the use of the learning model as close as possible to its
actual use. At the end of the teaching a questionnaire was sent out to all students to ask
for their views on the experience.
The methods of appreciative inquiry appeared to offer a way of helping students to
align their ideas of practice with the literature on quality in early years. It was designed
to engage students in discussions about pedagogy to develop their understanding of
practice. In a sense this way of supporting students learning paralleled their
investigations. The model uses the stages of appreciative inquiry. It is an adaptation of
the 4 D cycle which involves: discovery (what is the best?), dream (what might be?),
design (what should be the ideal?) and destiny (how to empower, learn and improve?)
(Reed, 2007). It is the first three stages of the 4 - D cycle which will be explored as
these formed the basis for classroom discussion.
Discovery
phase
Visit 1:
Aim/objective
Choose methods
to observe
Discovery
phase
Visit 2:
Aim/objective
Choose methods
to observe
Discovery
phase
Visit 3:
Aim/objective
Choose
methods to
observe
Design phase
Creating an observation plan to use provides a
way of recording evidence from visits leading to
evaluation
In England the term pedagogy is often equated with teaching (and the curriculum)
however by examining the role of the practitioner and use of learning resources students
were able to develop their ideas beyond this limited definition. They identified, for
example, the importance of developing relationships with others in the setting. Class
discussions used a more open definition of pedagogy to explore relationships in early
years settings and how this supports childrens learning (Paptheodorou, 2009). These
ideas of pedagogy are not discrete but do overlap and it is interesting to note that
students became more aware of these subtleties. Stephen (2010) identifies that
strategies which encourage practitioners to interrogate their understanding of pedagogy
help develop professional understanding which is shown in their practice.
practice in early years settings; they identified the conditions which were conducive to
good practice; and from these were able to develop statements to frame their inquiries.
Figure 2: Exploring good practice and the role of early years practitioners.
Set out below is part of the discussion used in one session to explore good practice.
The activities begin with paired activities so students share with a partner their own
experience of good practice. These are then shared with a group of 4 to 6 students.
From their stories students begin to identify what conditions support good practice and
then use this information to create statements of propositions about practice.
1. Identify from your own experience how a good early years practitioner works. In
pairs share your story about a good experience of working in early years. What was
wonderful about it? What helped it go well? How did it make you feel?
2. Share your story and make notes of any key words or phrases to describe best
practice
3. Students work in groups of 4 or 6 and share their initial ideas
4. Feedback from the groups is recorded to identify any patterns in responses and what
this shows. These are shared with the whole class and below a few key themes are
shown:
listening/open mind/communication/sharing/approachable
supportive/ encouraging /enthusiastic
inspirational/confident/knowledgeable/accommodating
5. Using these ideas we can create a statement to reflect what good practice is and how
it can be shown through the work of the early years practitioner. Students work in the
same small groups. These are shared with the whole class and discussed to identify
what kinds of evidence can be used to show this is happening. Below are examples of
statements created by the groups:
create a safe, stimulating and welcoming environment both indoors/and outside
where children learn and achieve with the support of inspirational practitioners
good provision is where children are happy, settled, contented and engaged
adapting plans and activities to build on children's interests
6. Students then apply these ideas to their own area of interest and consider how they
could investigate practice in their own inquiries.
The statements had a common structure yet the areas of practice covered by students
were diverse. Table 1 shows the range of ideas developed by the students covering both
different topic areas and how these were linked to different aspects of pedagogy. To
help students make their choices they were asked to identify if the topic could be
developed by exploring the role of the practitioner, the use of learning resources and the
environment and how it encouraged childrens learning and developing relationships.
These were all areas which had been examined in class discussion. Students could
effectively use this early work to develop their own choice of statements in their
observation plan.
Overall students did report positively in their written papers on the value of the module
teaching and learning on their professional learning. In their papers submitted for
assessment, and reviewed after their work was assessed, students have reported in their
reflections on their own learning. Content analysis of this work suggests that students:
can reflect on work issues in a different and more systematic way using their inquiry
knowledge (different model from other work based learning modules); their evidence
could be shared with others (posters and PowerPoint displays were especially helpful);
69
and having the opportunity to reflect on issues from their practice helps to appreciate
quality provision.
70
Students presented their observation plan and the rationale for its use in a visual
presentation: they used either a poster or PowerPoint display. The schedule for these
presentations was extended to allow students time to prepare. The visual presentations
provided good case study evidence on students inquiries. Students displayed a
willingness to share and review each others work and appreciated receiving peer and
tutor feedback. Group work prior to assessment did support students preparation and
helped to confirm what information they needed to include in their presentations. This
also helped to inform their written papers. For example they were able to structure their
evidence more coherently to report on their observations and use of findings. Students
presentations and written papers were clearly structured and their ideas focused. One
student has reported in her written paper how she will use this experience in her work to
conduct inquiry based learning. She noted that it was useful because she understood the
process and could better understand how to research practice.
Discussion
Developing the right kind of environment to conduct group work is not easy. Using
scripted discussions which followed a similar format with the focus on positive
experiences and use of open questions did encourage collaboration (Figure 2). Students
were willing to share their ideas. They enjoyed using their experiences as the starting
point for discussion. It made it easy to work with the class using group tasks. Students
were happy to share their work and provide feedback on each others' visual
presentations. A summary of the statements used by students in their observation plans
and revealed in their presentations was provided as part of the research (Table 1). We
discussed these findings in class and this provided a useful tool to discuss students'
ideas on pedagogy and how they could interpret the data from their observations. More
importantly the tutor feedback on the students' visual presentations did provide the
starting point on how individual students could develop their ideas in their written
papers. Students reported that this was a first, since feedback on their work; more often
came after they had formally submitted their papers for assessment.
The research showed, for example, the need to allow more time for review of students
findings. Where the students work on their inquiries was shared with others it was
helpful and this showed the value of using affirmative questioning to develop students
analysis. Students reported that these sessions helped them determine what was
required in their written analysis. By working in groups with others on the same or
similar topics they had the opportunity to talk through their ideas. It did not replace the
use of individual tutorials with the tutor.
The principle of simultaneity was not fully achieved. It was not easy to review the
research evidence and share these with students. There were times especially close to
assessment when email traffic with individual students was at its highest and the needs
of teaching were more immediate. How to create synergy between teaching and
research does require more skill. I had underestimated how much time was needed to
complete research tasks. I was aware of the need to ensure that decisions about
assessment were not contaminated by the research process. It also showed how even
when ethical procedures are followed to minimise risks to participants it is necessary to
adopt empathetic intelligence, to link thinking and feeling in such a way that we can
understand others perceptions (Norton , 2007). By doing this work I learnt how to
develop better protocols to minimise this risk of contamination.
Elliott (1991) and McNiff (2002) both provide advice on methods which can be
employed and these offer a clearer route to evaluation for the teacher as researcher
compared to methods of appreciative inquiry. There is a need to recognise the
71
Conclusion
The model for learning was informed by methods of appreciative inquiry. It did help
students to choose an area to investigate and it did facilitate peer and tutor review
throughout the teaching and learning. Students were able to make the theory-practice
link to evaluate aspects of good practice in early years settings. The strength of this was
in developing exercises using affirmative questioning which helped to structure
students learning. It did raise my own pedagogical awareness and recognition of the
conditions which would encourage peer collaboration. These ideas have been taken
forward into current practice with students taking this module. Students are placed into
learning groups as soon as they have identified their area of interest so that they have
the opportunity to share with others interested in similar aspects of practice. Using
paired and group discussion is especially helpful in creating these groups and giving
purpose to the use of peer collaboration.
The use of appreciative inquiry methods to develop a model of learning about practice
in early years settings did show that students were able to use it to explore different
aspects of pedagogy from their practice. However, it has been difficult to assess the
impact of this learning on students practice. It was perhaps demonstrated in the high
grades which students achieved both in their visual presentations and written papers.
Evidence from tutorial records showed that students appreciated the feedback on their
visual presentations because this informed their analysis in the written paper. The
feedback forms used for the visual presentations have been adapted to make clear to
future students how the work for the visual presentation is linked to their written
analysis. Using open questions to monitor students understanding of pedagogy did
reveal that they employed subjective definitions of quality. The links to the literature
did begin to develop with students becoming more confident in their use of literature
searches to obtain relevant journal articles. One student developed these ideas to
present themes from the literature and how they related to her understanding of practice
and curriculum documentation. To what extent students were able to develop their
learning within their professional practice is unknown as this was outside the scope of
the study. Further evidence on this aspect would need to be collected. However, the
focus on the use of peer collaboration did support the development of more focused
work in seminars which I found extremely helpful as part of my own professional
development.
72
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74
Introduction
The quality of higher education is no longer a utopia, but rather a basic condition for the
right performance to develop modern human resources, create new scientific knowledge
and extend multiple services to society. It is well known that in recent years the concept
of quality of education has been controversial and even mysterious among experts and
scholars, however, the high quality has now become a necessity for any serious
institution and it is time for clear proposals to achieve this goal successfully. Starting
with the academic community understanding the university as a community of lifelong
learning. The challenge for all those working in higher education is to establish a
framework on university quality development, research for its implementation and
development, and finally, communicate the findings to the entire academic community
to have cleared the institutional evolution. On our way, we contribute a teachers
professional profile based on competence as a valuable tool to improve the academics
evolution in relation to the 21st. century society and its deep challenges.
The twenty-first century university
The material analyzed and presented in my doctoral thesis is a consistent base to
improve the deep analysis of epistemological, political, social and cultural life of the
university in this century. Today not only the quality of the university is understood as a
set of parameters that demonstrates the productive relationship between the institution
and its environment (close connection between universities and local, regional and
global contexts); even more, we aspire to achieve academic excellence defined as the
anticipated vision to contribute to society useful innovations and suggestions to avoid
emerging problems (a principle with which many authors agreed: UN, 2005, Knight,
2003; Jackson, 2003; Pearce, 2006; Kunstler, 2006; Freed et al, 1997; AAUP, 1999;
Walvoord et al, 2000; UNESCO, 2000; AQU, 2001, Gates et al, 2002; Kollenburg,
2003; Figuera et al, 2003; UNESCO, 2004; QAAHE, 2004, Hill et al, 2006). However,
there is no consensus about the content of a comprehensive theory of academic
profession where teaching, research and management are the main and integrated roles.
75
Competence as a set of internal qualities that allow the person to anticipate a successful
performance in a given context (McLelland, 1973) was one of the most important
contributions of the twentieth century in the field of social sciences, but the universities
in general did not take advantage of using competency to refresh the potential of its
members, instead of this, the labor experts had developed competency models for
human resource management [Le Foterf, 1991 and Bunk, 1994 (cited in Figuera, 2000,
Echeverra, 2001 , 2002); SCANS Report 1992, 1993, Valverde, 2001; Corominas,
2001, Jackson, 2003]. Our research developed a competency model that
guides
the
teacher's
performance
throughout
is
career.
A Structural Model of Teacher Professional Competence
9.
Scheme 1
Reality
Theory
Construct
Competencies
Scientific
Practical
Personal
Social
Construct
Category
Academic
Activities
Dimensions
Indicators
Teaching
Research
Services
Dimension
Indicator
Indicator visible
on:
T
Indicator
evaluation trough:
Formative
(process based)
Evaluation
F
Results based
Evaluation
S
Key: T: Teaching; R: Research; S: services. F: Formative (process based) Evaluation; S: Results based
Evaluation; F & S: Formative (process based) Evaluation and Results based Evaluation.
In light of the demands and challenges for the university it is essential to review the
qualities needed in professors to be excellent in teaching, research and services to the
university and society. So we should clarify the term competence providing an updated
definition of human competence based on David McClelland (1973) and also Jacques
Delors (1996) contributions. Integrating both ideas we define the professor general
competence as: a set of internal qualities that allows the professor to sustain a
specialized expertise from which to improve learning processes at individual and group
contexts, with innovative-proactive vision towards continue development of their
lifelong career.
76
Category
Dimension
Indicator
The
knowledge
of the field
of expertise
Teacher
Professional
Competency
Scientific
Compete
ncy
The research
integrated as
learning
engine
Contribution
to new
scientific
knowledge
Indicator
visible on:
Indicator
evaluation
trough:
T
S
F & S
F & S
F & S
F & S
F & S
F & S
F & S
X
X
F & S
F & S
X
X
F & S
X
F & S
X
X
F & S
S
X
X
S
S
relation between theory and reality (left to right on scheme 1); starting with competence
construct, follow the categories, dimensions, and finally, indicators and ways of their
evaluation. Thus we can easily understand the operational pathway of the model to
make possible the application on terrain; also from this point we can go towards theory
understanding first the indicators, dimensions, categories and construct (right to left).
Scientific Competency
Effective demonstration of knowledge from specialized previous formation and work
experience, that allows the comprehension, interpretation and actualisation of the issues
and problems of his/her area.
Practical Competency
Represents the set of knowledge and criteria about methodologies, procedures, tools of
application that allows to the teacher develop his/her academic activities (teaching,
research and services) with actions oriented to achieve the professional excellence.
Table 2. Practical Competency
Key: T: Teaching; R: Research; S: services. F: Formative (process based) Evaluation; S: Results
based Evaluation; F & S: Formative (process based) Evaluation and Results based Evaluation.
Construct
Category
Dimension
Indicator
Linking the
knowledge
with reality
Teacher
Professional
Competency
Practical
Competency
Indicator
visible on:
T
S
X
Indicator
evaluation
trough:
F&S
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
F&S
F&S
F&S
F&S
S
Personal Competency
This competency means the subjective position of teacher about the knowledge
authority false image, so then, he/she changes and recognize that learning is an
obligation and the universal human values improves the real development the academic
profession.
Table 3. Personal Competency
Key: T: Teaching; R: Research; S: services. F: Formative (process based) Evaluation; S: Results
based Evaluation; F & S: Formative (process based) Evaluation and Results based Evaluation.
78
Construct
Category
Dimension
Indicator
Critically
Permanent
Learning
Teacher
Professional
Competency
Personal
Competency
Ethical
based
performance
Indicator
visible on:
T
S
Indicator
evaluation
trough:
R
X
X
F&S
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
F&S
X
X
F&S
X
X
X
X
F
S
F&S
F&S
F&S
F
F
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
F
F
F&S
F
79
Category
Dimension
Indicator
Comprehension
of other persons
Teacher
Professi
onal
Compet
ency
Social
Compete
ncy
Improvement of
learning
communities
Leadership for
research
activities
with
students
Look
for
opinions,
criteria and proposals to
whom work with.
Integrates in his/her job
suggestions and ideas
from other persons.
Look the advisement
from senior colleagues
Adjust
his/her
ideas
thinking
in
team
development.
Adjust his/her speech
considering the audience
characteristics.
Collaborates
in
organization of courses,
conferences, seminars.
Promotes and is an active
part on study teams about
key academics subjects.
Establishes
virtual
networks for document
exchange
between
colleagues.
Look
for
his/her
involvement on interinstitutional
academic
teams.
Is an active part of
multidisciplinary teams of
specialized consulting and
advisory.
Clearly explains the
meaning of the Study
Research Projects (SRP)
with the students.
Stimulates the reflection
with
students
about
subjects for research.
Search about the students
expectative and interests.
Attends the demands
during the SRP process.
Promotes the evaluation
and permanent adjustment
of the process.
Generates opportunities
for exchange experiences
between students.
Indicator visible
on:
Indicator
evaluatio
n trough:
X
X
X
X
X
X
F&S
F&S
F&S
F&S
F&S
F&S
F&S
S
F&S
F&S
F
F
X
F&S
F&S
80
This model is for the long life academic career and the demonstration of the whole
indicators depends on the opportunities in professors development inside universities;
so then, the incentive from high management boards are key to make possible the
teachers professional realization and university excellence.
References
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Association of University Professors (AAUP). Washington D.C. Available
electronically: Http://www.aaup.org/statements/Redbook/collegia.htm
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Sistema Universitari a Catalunya. Barcelona: AQU.
Arreola, R.A. (2000) Determining the Faculty Role Model, en Arreola, R.A. (Ed.):
Developing a Comprehensive Faculty Evaluation System. Bolton, MA: Anker
Publishing Co. Inc., pp.1-40.
Boyer, E.L. (1990) Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton,
NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Bond, L., Smith, T., & Baker, W., (2000) Preliminary Analysis Report: Construct
Validity Study of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. National
Partnership for Excellence and Accountability in Teaching (NPEAT). Washington:
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NATFHE, (2002) Guidelines for Higher Education branches: Peer Review & Peer
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coming metamorphosis of the university. On the Horizon. Emerald Group Publishing.
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QAAHE, (2004) Handbook for academic review: England, 2004. The Quality
Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAAHE). England: QAAHE.
Rodriguez, S. (2003) Nuevos retos y enfoques en la formacin del profesorado
universitario. Revista de Educacin, n 331, pp. 67-99.
Saravia, M. (2009) Evaluacin del Profesorado Universitario. Un Enfoque desde la
Competencia Profesional. USA, UK, Germany: VDM, Verlag.
Available
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SCANS, (1992) Learning a Living: A Blueprint for High Performance. A SCANS
Report for America 2000. The Secretarys Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills.
U.S.
Department
of
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Available
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http://www.ttrc.doleta.gov/SCANS/lal/LAL.HTM
SCANS, (1993) Teaching de SCANS Competencies. The Secretarys Commission on
Achieving Necessary Skills. United States, Department of Labor.
Struthers, J. (2002) Working Models for Designing Online Courses and Materials.
Generic Centre. Learning and Teaching Support Network.
ONU, (2005) Indicadores clave de la informacin y de las comunicaciones. Partnership
para la medicin de las TIC para el desarrollo. Santiago de Chile: UNESCO.
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lEducaci Superior. Pars, Octubre de 1998. Barcelona: Gramagraf.
UNESCO, (2004) La Evaluacin y la Acreditacin en la Educacin Superior en
Amrica Latina y el Caribe. Instituto Internacional para Educacin Superior en Amrica
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They Change. ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education Washington DC.
83
Introduction
This article sets out to enrich our understanding about the linkages between teaching
and research, drawing upon principles of theoretical elaboration and adopting the
perspective of variation theory (Marton and Booth, 1987) to explore the concept of
discipline-based expertise in higher education. This conceptual approach is then
combined with findings from a phenomenographic study that explored the variation in
university teachers experiences of discipline-based expertise, in the context of their
main teaching and research practices. What is offered may become a useful heuristic for
examining the links between the openness of the space of variation created during
teaching, and the beliefs held by teachers about knowledge and knowing in their
disciplines. The intention here is to enhance what we know about the way
teacher/researchers understand expertise and its connection to the openness of the space
of variation and learning encountered by students. We suggest that these are related
through the depth of understanding in a discipline that teachers attain through being
research active. Smeby (1998) argues that to be an effective teacher one must have
developed a good understanding of the discipline taught. Depth of understanding in a
discipline affects a teachers capacity to introduce variation in the critical dimensions of
the content that is taught, variation being a necessary feature to develop discernment
(Marton, Runesson and Tsui, 2004). When something is varied during teaching and
something is kept constant, this pattern of variation makes up a dimension of
variation. The dimensions of variation relating to the same aspect of content make up
the space of variation and its limits (Runesson, 1999). Thus, the openness of the space
of variation created by the teacher is the space of learning for students (Marton,
Runesson and Tsui, 2004).
84
with the world, so representing a widening of the world experienced by the learner.
Learning in a discipline that leads to qualitatively different ways of understanding or
seeing things in a new way represent a significant transformation. New ways of
understanding or seeing can be linked to the acquisition of threshold concepts (Meyer
and Land, 2003) or a change of perspective and understanding a threshold concept. This
description of learning aligns with the implicit teaching intentions and learning
outcomes achieved through a conceptual change approach to teaching (Prosser and
Trigwell, 1999). In this non-dualistic view of learning and awareness, a change in
understanding indicates a new way of seeing the world or applying meaning to the
world (Marton and Booth, 1997) and can be enacted through our experience and
interactions with the world, demonstrated as a flexible performance capability (Perkins,
1996; Tozer, Fazey and Fazey, 2007). Thus, student learning becomes meaningful and
is indistinguishable from the learning that occurs during the research process engaged
with by university teachers to attain expert status in their disciplines.
Variation and Expertise
Experiencing the world in different ways relates to what we notice during the process of
learning thus leading to differences in ways of understanding, which can range from
more dualistic and unconnected views of phenomena to contextual and connected
understandings or outcomes that characterize expert knowledge structures (Dufresne,
Leonard, and Gerace, 1995). More complete expert understandings of a phenomenon
represent more powerful ways of knowing or seeing, the ability to relate it to the
context and see the whole rather than just the parts, attending to them simultaneously
(Marton and Booth, 1997). The suggestion, therefore, is that variation in experience is
essential in achieving discernment and attaining expert ways of seeing in a discipline
(Runesson, 2006). Through an increase in the space of variation, by varying an
individuals perspective or frame of reference (Mezirow, 2009) to an aspect of a
phenomenon, the critical features have the potential to be discerned in different ways
(Fazey and Marton, 2002). An absence of variation and perspective, for example within
routine performance and practice, therefore reduces the potential space of experiential
variation and learning. To examine this notion, in the context of teacher/researchers
becoming experts in their disciplines in higher education, it is likely that experiential
variation may be achieved through engagement with different research projects,
occurring naturally either during a teachers career or through engagement with several
research studies over a less prolonged period.
The ongoing engagement of educators with both research and teaching that focus on
conceptual change can lead to further transformation in both disciplinary and pedagogic
understandings of subject matter (Trigwell, Prosser, Martin and Ramsden, 2005) that
are ultimately rooted in a teachers epistemological beliefs (Hofer and Pintrich 1997). In
this way, research becomes integral to teaching in higher education and fundamentally
linked with learning, as well as student achievement (Brew and Boud, 1995). In theory,
deep, holistic and connected understandings of a discipline developed through exposure
to variation during both teaching and research should enable university teachers to be
more pedagogically flexible with the capacity to widen the space of variation, and the
potential space of learning for students. Therefore, enabling teachers to enact
descriptions of phenomena during teaching which have the potential to lead to
transformation in understanding and new ways of seeing in a discipline.
87
A Phenomenographic Study
Aims and Methodology
The next part of this article expands on notions of discipline-based expertise by
providing research-based evidence to support the theoretical elaboration presented
previously. The aim of the phenomenographic study was to investigate variation in the
underlying meaning of how university teachers experience the phenomenon of
expertise in their disciplines in the context of their main teaching and research
practices. The study considered the different ways university teachers experience and
understand what it means to be an expert in their discipline, what expert understanding
is, how they evaluate the claims of experts and what role do experts have to play in
others learning, particularly in enhancing student learning. The empirical relations
between ways of experiencing the phenomenon were also explored to reveal key
variations in experience, providing insights into the nature of expertise and the
implications for the openness of the space of variation and learning created during
teaching.
The sample
The outcomes presented here are based on interviews with 20 university teachers, from
across a range of disciplinary fields (humanities, social sciences, science and
mathematics and technology) and academic domains (hard and soft). The disciplinary
classification system used here was based on Biglans (1973) cognitively based
classification system comparing a hard science and mathematics perspective versus a
soft humanities and social sciences perspective. Their experiences ranged from
teaching assistants and newly appointed university teachers to senior university
teachers with more than 20 years teaching experience.
The participants were either full-time staff engaged in teaching and research (15) or
postgraduate students (5) researching and acting as teaching assistants in undergraduate
classes, or teaching part-time on Masters level courses, or both. The intention being that
the sample would reflect variation in gender, discipline, teaching experience, teaching
level, academic domain and cultural/language background in order that any variation
within the group might be representative of the population as a whole:
Drawing upon a sample across two universities in the UK provided an enhanced data
acquisition opportunity. This allowed us to consider institutional factors and
disciplinary cultures as an influence on the experiences of the teachers. We do
acknowledge, however, that the sample may be limited in terms of discipline breadth,
with participants from across the humanities and technology being under-represented.
88
Furthermore, we recognise that the range in length of teaching experience means that
long serving individuals are perhaps inadequately represented.
Data collection and analysis
Semi-structured interviews were conducted at each university, recorded and transcribed
verbatim, then analysed interactively in line with the methodology described in
previous phenomenographic studies (cf. Marton, 1981; kerlind, 2004; Trigwell et al.,
2005). This involved repeated reading of the transcripts revealing the variation in ways
of experiencing the phenomena by searching for and identifying the critical aspects that
emerged across the categories of description constituted in the outcome space. The
outcome space represents the qualitatively different ways of understanding the
phenomena represented amongst the participants interviewed, determined through the
identification of critical aspects of variation in the meanings. Variation between the
meanings and their characteristics was revealed through comparing and contrasting
meanings to determine similarities and differences. kerlind (2004) notes, the different
ways of experiencing a phenomenon are internally related through the phenomenon
being experienced and through the inherently related nature of human experience
(p.366). Therefore, the meanings constituted were typically representative, inherently
related and complete, given the diversity of the population. The key relationships
distinguishing the meanings were explored to provide aspects of variation between the
meanings. A series of themes emerged from the categories, which formed variation
around the critical aspects of the meanings expressed and experienced.
The differences between the categories are represented by key variations in the way
individuals experience expertise, characterising expertise as knowledge transmission
to engaging conceptual construction.
Experience A: Expertise as the ability to impart facts and transfer knowledge.
In this category, the focus is on the expert as having the ability to impart facts and
knowledge to the learner by a process of information transfer. The expert is viewed as
being an academic who is very knowledgeable in a particular discipline. Their expertise
stems from varied experience and broad subject knowledge that can be transferred to
learners through presentations, engaging in discussions with learners and questioning
with students. The primary role of the expert, when interacting with learners, is to be a
source of ideas, reflecting models for understanding and inspiration.
If hes worthy of such a title as an expert I think he should be able to
transfer a lot of his knowledge to you because after all hes probably very
experienced in that field be it on the practical side or via research or
whatever... If he can only transfer a particular amount of knowledge on a
very specific subject that hes a particular expert about then that would
limit his abilities to teach I think. If he can apply or teach a wider sort of
context or subject, um, then I think that would benefit the students even
more. Like I say if hes so called expert I think he should be able, well
obviously give a lot of his expertise over to his students. [Illustrating
knowledge transfer] Male, Environmental Science
91
Categories
and Key
themes
A: Imparting facts
and knowledge
transfer
C: Developing
holistic
understandings
and the ability to
think in certain
ways
Role of
experts in
learning
Transmitter
Facilitator
Engager
Experientially derived
Conceptually
derived
How experts
attend to
knowledge
92
conclusions, at a fundamental conceptual level, afforded to them by their vast and broad
set of experiences.
Discussion
The three qualitatively different ways of experiencing expertise in the academic
disciplines were constituted using an interview-based phenomenographic approach. The
outcome space described and the key themes within provide an overview of the
qualitatively different ways of experiencing the phenomenon across the differing
disciplines. These experiences of expertise can be used to explore teachers beliefs
about knowledge and ways of coming to know in their disciplines, examining the
differences in the beliefs about expertise held by teachers across the hard and soft
academic domains (Biglan, 1973; Becher and Trowler, 2001).
In category A, teachers perceptions of the phenomena of expertise are partial, focusing
on dualistic notions of knowledge. The knowledge experts hold can be transmitted
without the need for variation to enhance learning. Teachers descriptions of expertise
in category B were based around experience and knowing how to do something. These
perceptions draw parallels with notions of expertise as a performance capability. These
were inclusive of category A, but expanded with an understanding of the importance of
gaining expertise through experience with not all answers being known. The conceptual
change associated with a move from category A to B represents a change in perception
where university teachers experience expertise no longer as discrete elements that can
be transmitted to students, a process of routine application. In category B experience is
perceived as an important element of expertise, with teachers beginning to recognise the
role of variation in learning. In this category experience is situated in a research context
requiring the ability to take on other perspectives due to changing circumstance.
However, these understandings still fall short in attaining discernment of the critical
features described in category C. Teachers did not recognise that there were certain
ways of thinking and understanding and that these ways could be made aware to
students. In category C, teachers experiences of expertise focus around holistic
understandings of a discipline that reflect certain ways of thinking and seeing.
Understandings of expertise in category C are the closest to those described in the
theoretical elaboration at the start of this article. They draw parallels with expertise as
the ability to recognise patterns of meaningful information, that reflect the enhanced
perception or awareness (Marton, Runesson and Tsui, 2004; Bransford, Brown and
Cocking, 2000). They perceive that core and key concepts in a discipline are integral to
student learning and the understanding. They understand that in order to promote
conceptual change their role in learning is to challenge students natural attitude, their
habitual and tacit assumption that what they experience in a discipline is reality as such
(Fazey and Marton, 2002: p. 239). They understand that variation in experience is
paramount, and that depth of subject knowledge is linked to integrated conceptual
understanding (Shulman 1987).
Four teachers, all from the hard academic domain, described their experiences of
expertise in category A in terms of applying facts and concepts, three were in the
science and mathematics disciplines and one in technology. Nine teachers described
their experiences of expertise in category B in terms of experience in a field and
knowing how to do something. Seven of these were from the soft academic domain; six
from social sciences and one from the humanities, the remaining two were from science
and mathematics, the hard academic domain. In the highest and most sophisticated
category C, seven teachers described their experience of expertise as certain ways of
thinking or knowing in their academic disciplines. These teachers were more evenly
93
distributed across the academic domains, three in the soft and four in the hard academic
domains.
Neumann (2001) suggests that disciplines exhibit a strong influence on academics
beliefs on teaching and on students learning, also in their experiences of research. The
results here suggest some disciplinary influence on understandings and beliefs about
expertise and the process of coming to know in a discipline (Becher and Trowler,
2001). Disciplines from the hard academic domain are more likely to be represented in
the lower categories indicating partial understandings of the phenomenon that reflect a
focus on the parts rather than the whole and parts within. Disciplines from the soft
academic domain are least likely to be represented in the lower categories, and most in
the middle category suggesting that beliefs about ways of knowing in these disciplines
reflect more complete understanding where the parts are experienced against the whole.
In the highest category, the most complete conceptions were not restricted to either the
soft or hard academic domains. These enhanced understandings of expertise reflecting
an ability to discern simultaneously the whole and the parts within, against the context
(Marton and Booth, 1987). Teachers develop a sophisticated awareness and
understanding of expert ways of thinking and knowing as being related to what is
learned in an experience and how it is understood (Marton and Slj, 1976).
Summary
The primary goals of research are concerned with discovery and developing enhanced
ways of understanding the world and are similar to those for teaching and student
learning. The way teachers make their expert ways of seeing and thinking available to
students during teaching, through the openness of the space of variation, have the
potential to bring about meaningful learning (Kinchin, Lygo-Baker and Hay, 2008).
The results from this study reveal that teachers differ in their understandings about
ways of knowing in their disciplines (Booth 1997; Becher and Trowler, 2001) and,
therefore, their potential to open the space of variation and learning encountered by
students (Hathaway, 2008).
By drawing upon both theoretical and research-based analysis, this article highlights the
qualitative variation in the way university teachers experience expertise, in the context
of their main teaching and research practices. We suggest that research and disciplinebased expertise should not be separated from teaching or the enhancement of student
learning and understanding. Linking research and teaching, through our understanding
of expertise in disciplines in higher education, means that the teaching and research
nexus can be made tangible (Brew, 2006). Hence, challenging evidence that has been
misinterpreted to separate teachers and researchers in their teaching performance
(Hattie and Marsh, 1996; Hattie and Marsh, 2004) and assumptions about student
learning as being different to the learning of researchers.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge discussion with J Fazey early on in the research and the
financial support received from the European Social Fund, as part funding of doctoral
studies undertaken at the College of Education and Lifelong Learning, Bangor
University.
94
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97
Introduction
The loci of enunciation of this paper and of this researcher are 1. the critical pedagogy
in the light of Freire and Giroux; 2. the post-structuralist movements in light of Bakhtin
and Derrida; and 3. the new literaries and multiliteracies in the light of Gee (2004,
2007), Lanshear & Knobel (2007, 2008), and Cope & Kalatziz (2000). I believe that,
taken together, these areas can intertwine in order to problematise the pedagogy of
higher education. Framed within the tensions between conventional versus
contemporary schooling, literacy of the print text versus multiliteracies of multi-texts,
and reproduction of memorized texts versus processes of meaning-making, these areas
challenge our views of education. I do not intend to focus on one category of the binary
opposition and eliminate the other counterpart. What I am suggesting is a practice
addressed by Santos (2007) as epistemological diversity and the ecology of
knowledge or in what Derrida theorized as deconstruction. While for Derrida it is
essential to question the fixity of these opposites, for Santos (2007), we must recognize
and co-exist within them, so to speak we must account for the various knowledges
(scientific and non-scientific) of the humanities, of physical and medical sciences, and
of other non-canonic forms of knowledge:
The epistemic diversity of the world is potentially infinite. There is no
ignorance or knowledge in general. All ignorance is ignorance of a
certain knowledge, and all knowledge is the overcoming of a
particular ignorance. There are no complete knowledges. (Santos
2007).
Hence I believe that by recognizing others knowledges we position ourselves through
constant questioning and incomplete answers (Santos, 2007: 79). In order to think
through the various areas analysed in this paper (conventional pedagogy, critical
pedagogy, critical literacy, visual literacy, philosophy of language, and traditional
98
applied linguistics); it is necessary to unsettle the idea that they belong to isolated
categories. Rather, they intertwine and help us understand how conventional and new
pedagogies dialogue. Thus, having the epistemic diversity and the ecology of
knowledges in mind, I would like to suggest three epigraphs as the underlying
concepts to be problematised in this reflection:
1. The banking concept of education:
Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically
the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into containers, into receptacles to be
filled by the teacher. (Freire 2009: 52)
2. The Salvationist teacher:
It is up to us, teachers, pastoral missionaries (Popkwewitz 1998), to redeem their
suffering through speaking it loudly. (Dussel 2009: 103).
3. Reproduction (linear thinking) x meaning making (multimodal) processes:
Meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalitites (images, words,
symbols, interactions, abstract designs, sounds, etc.), not just words. (Gee 2007a:
110).
The first epigraph by Paulo Freire in his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed states
that education has suffered from the narration sickness in which teachers decide what
will be taught/discussed in class (Freire 2009: 52). Corroborating with Freires words, I
want to discuss reproduction models of education and what the Brazilian philosopher
Saviani (1990) has defined as critical-reproduction, so to speak a discourse that sees
itself as critique, when, in fact, it is also reproducing pre-established concepts. The
second epigraph brings up the metaphors of the revolution and salvation. Ines Dussel
(2009) in her article Education and the Production of Global Imaginaries on teachers
visual culture draws attention to a pattern that Latin American teachers maintain when
interpreting images: the intrinsic role of the savior and the revolutionary of
education. In the light of the post-structuralist movements, I want to unpack the
Enlightenment idea of revolution and the Salvationist discourse of modernity (for
example the grand narrative lets save the savage and uncivilized) very often present
in teachers practices. According to this idea, there is no educational change without a
revolution promoted by teachers. The third epigraph, based on Gees concerns on
situated meaning and situated practice (Gee 2004), draws on the idea of rupture
within linear textual practices and emphasizes meaning-making processes through
multimodal texts. Challenging the decontextualized linear textual order, Gee (2007a)
goes on to argue that meanings are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not
general or decontextualized. Whatever generality meanings come to have is discovered
bottom up via embodied experiences (p.105). Building on Gees notion of situated
practice and on Monte Mors ideas on meaning-making as a rupture process, I want to
explore the tensions and overlaps between what is considered meaning-making and
critical-reproduction. Hence, I agree with Gee and Monte Mor when both critique the
reproduction paradigm and state that educators should cause ruptures in the system.
These crises are the small changes/discourses I would define as critique. Based on
these epigraphs, this paper aims at tackling three questions:
How do we teachers operate within/are aware of the tensions among reproduction,
critical-reproduction, and meaning-meaning in our pedagogies?
99
1. During Feudalism, God was the center of the universe. Man couldnt do much
without his help. As population grew, many people started to live farther and farther
from the kingdoms, where they were controlled by kings and religious authorities, and
began to question the idea that God was the center of the universe.
2. Modernity consists of admitting that man is the center. Due to mans capacity, many
things that make it easier for humans to live have been invented. As a consequence, the
world has become a place where people who have a higher level of intellectualism and
greater purchasing power to buy whatever is invented receive recognition, while those
who arent talented or dont have money are often put aside.
100
teaching (linguistic aspect) and education (social and critique aspects). In the Brazilian
National Curricular Orientations (OCEM 2006), they state:
How do we conciliate foreign language teaching and education? This
question might give the impression that foreign language teaching
focused exclusively on its linguistic aspect does not educate. It does,
but it contributes to one kind of formation, the one that understands
that the role of schooling is to fill the student with content,
filling him/her up with knowledge until s/he becomes a complete
and educated being. When we defend the educational aspect of
foreign language teaching, we claim for the understanding of
citizenship. This is, by the way, a social value to be developed
throughout various school disciplines and not only in the study of
foreign languages (translated by this researcher, Menezes de Souza &
Monte Mr 2006: 91).
This educational proposal, anchored by a philosophical-educational-practical approach
(Monte Mr 2007), entails the challenge of balancing linguistic and socio-oriented
stances of English language teaching, what I have called English language education.
literacy connected to language teaching feel that they were, to a certain extent,
cheated by an educational system which provided them one structuralist view of
teaching languages. This view, entailed in methodologies such as grammar-translation,
communicative approach, and critical reading, do not account for self-reflexivity in the
learning process, for identity and citizenship constructions as well as for the
interrelations between language and culture. By envisioning the possibility of
engendering other aspects of teaching (such as critique and the ones mentioned above),
the teachers feel a revolt and are willing to make a revolution to save education and
the world as seen in its our responsibility as teachers, opinion- makers, to change to
make our students reflect, think and be critical citizens and thinkers (excerpt 3, lines 3
and 4). I argue that this interpretive habitus (Monte Mor, 2007) is intrinsically
connected to the fact that education is one of the vehicles of modernity (Usher and
Edwards 1994) and as such, it is shaped by the so-called grand narratives. Teachers
seem to internalize these narratives as if they were natural practices. I would argue that
one of the grand narratives which permeate teachers imaginaries is the salvation one.
Dussel (in Mignolo 1995) explains that the modern (European) civilization understands
itself as the most developed, the superior civilization, this sense of superiority obliges it,
in the form of a categorical imperative, as it were, to develop (civilize, uplift,
educate) the more primitive, barbarous, underdeveloped civilizations (p.117). In
education, very often, we see ourselves as the superior beings who will develop, uplift,
illuminate, educate, and save our students. In the article about a reflection on teachers
Visual Culture, Ines Dussel (2009) critiques this discourse of the salvation teacher.
The author discusses visual productions by some Latin American teachers and states
that these visuals comprises images of children who suffer, mothers who suffer, people
who suffer (Dussel 2009: 103). The images engender schools as fountains of hope,
given the redemptive ethos of teaching since the nineteenth century. Here I return to
our second epigraph: It is up to us, teachers, pastoral missionaries (Popkwewitz 1998),
to redeem their suffering through speaking it loudly. (Dussel 2009: 103). I see this
metaphor of pastoral missionaries still occupying a space in teachers imaginaries
provided that, often times, we want to save our students from what we consider their
ignorance. Many times, we also feel responsible for their actions, successes, and
failures in and outside schools. What interests me in this discussion is the agency
provided or perpetuated within salvation/revolution ways of interpretation. Are we
promoting any kind of agency when we want to redeem students from their suffering?
103
Excerpt 5
Final Paper Group B:
1: Therefore, this essay on Blindness is an attempt to express how the movie 2:
echoed with our thoughts and our reality as we believe the blindness in this
3: case is not a matter of being visually impaired but the ignorance to
4: comprehend the world around us.
During the course, many films were used in order to serve as a pedagogical tool which
bridged theory and practice. I have elsewhere defended (Ferraz 2008) that movies can
be used to challenge traditional pedagogical views where linguistic approaches prevail.
In the light of Giroux (2002), I stated that when seen under an educational perspective,
films provide, on one hand, a lucid vision (a relief for life) and, on the other hand, a
straightforward connection to social reality or to what he has coined public life. Films
can provide agency and critical reading (Ferraz 2006: 76). Giroux (2002) envisions
films as a new form of pedagogical text not simply reflecting culture but actually
constructing it that signals the need for a radically different perspective on literacy
and the relationship between film texts and society (Giroux 2002).
In the course, some movies were not in English, as indicated by student D: Language
was not the matter anymore; there were even movies in Portuguese, including my own
(excerpt 4, lines 4 and 5). In fact, she was skeptical of my choice of using films in other
languages than English provided that she was attending an English graduate course
taught in English. The underlying principle within this discourse is that, when English is
used full time in classes, students will learn more. As I have argued in the beginning
of this paper, I do not attempt to diminish the role of the linguistic aspect of learning
foreign languages. However, this paper claims that classes focused on linguistic
learning (and only) do not account for the richness of interpretations films can provide.
Thus, the outcome of using films was to challenge the idea that movies in English
classes should be used for linguistic enhancement, vocabulary expansion, and so forth. I
was interested in discussing how movies were able to connect with theories we had
been working on. In that sense, any movie in any language could possibly provide
insights for discussion. Cache, for example, was used to open up discussions on
multiculturalism, immigration, and global flows. Entre les murs (The class), another
French movie, was used to debate education, lay/popular knowledge versus canonic
knowledge, among many other issues raised by the students during discussion. Both
excerpts 4 and 5 comprise examples of a change of perspectives in relation to the
process of meaning-making. If, in the beginning of the course, students were
questioning the way I used films in the classes; in the end, as we can see through both
excerpts, they were reflecting on how films can connect theory and practice (excerpt 4
line 2); and how they can help us reflect upon our reality (excerpt 5, lines 1 and 2). I
interpret that the metaphor of the blindness created by group B (final paper- excerpt 5)
is an example of the meaning-making process I have defended in this paper. By stating
that we believe that the blindness in this case is not a matter of being visually impaired
but the ignorance to comprehend the world around us (excerpt 4 lines 2 to 4), group
Bs self-reflexivity draws attention to the blindness they had felt when started dealing
with the theories discussed in the course. Excerpt 5 below will discuss meaning-making
process:
104
Excerpt 5
Student B2:
1: Since talking about culture is talking about ourselves, our group couldnt help
2: but come up with examples from our everyday life in Brazil: our own version
3: on how multiculturalism works. Have we been promoting multiculturalism?
4: Or have we just been trying to pour our cultural backgrounds in a pot and
5: spread the word that weve been living happily ever after?
Finally, in the light of Monte Mrs rupture process, I intend to investigate if students
were able to break their interpretative habitus or if they kept on reframing given
interpretations as in Savianis critical-reproduction. Thus, I want to explore this tension
between meaning-making and critical-reproduction. Monte Mr (2008) revisits the
studies of Ricouereans hermeneutics in order to understand how meanings are
produced and how they entail socio-cultural practices. According to the author:
Ricouer, thus, proposes that a hermeneutics of suspicion may be more
congruent with the exercise of interpretation, considering that it
allows the interlocutors to question the meanings that are given by
religious-oriented or tradition-oriented interpretive practices, and to
build up their own contextualized and situated meanings. This is a
practice that has been identified as critical hermeneutics by
academics due to the possibility that it raises for deconstructing and
reconstructing meanings (Monte Mr 2008: 10)
In this sense, meaning-making is a questioning of traditional given practices; of
reproduced discourses which are maintained in society. I acknowledge that this is an
essential process for any educational context, in any discipline. The excerpt 5 above
opens up for an arena of debate where, on one hand, it might be interpreted as criticalreproduction of established discourses (e.g. when student B2 states: have we been
promoting multiculturalism?) and, on the other hand, it might be considered meaningmaking process (when student B2 brings the context of multiculturalism to her context
and questions the version of multiculturalism assumed in Brazilian contexts). I assume
that operating within these tensions of interpretations is how we should put into
practice the epistemological diversity of Santos. In the case if this excerpt, depending
on where you depart from (your locus of enunciation) and on which theories underpin
your interpretation, this excerpt might be considered a reproduction or meaning-making
process. I believe that, given student Bs reflections in the course, it is meaning-making
process.
Conclusion
Based on the three epigraphs and the three questions raised in this paper, I have tried to
problematise the tensions of interpretations generated by students in a graduate course
of Language and culture in English. The first epigraph, based on Freireans thoughts,
questions the banking concept of education (reproduction of models) and states that this
kind of work do not account for issues of critique and citizenship. The second one deals
with the intrinsic discourses of the revolution in the educational system and the
salvation of the world models inherited by us teachers through modernist discourses
of grand narratives. The third epigraph builds on two notions: the rupture process in the
light of Monte Mr (2008) and the hermeneutics of meaning-making in the light of
Ricouers conflict of interpretation (1977). Both processes challenge the first two
notions discussed here in that they attempt to account for the production of knowledge
105
by students. They also attempt to discuss post-structuralist theories and how students
can connect to them, in local and contextual ways. When in contact with such theories,
the teachers started to be aware of the tensions among reproduction, criticalreproduction, and critique in their pedagogies. By the same token, they started to debate
the kinds of agency they are performing when they opt for meaning-making processes
or for reproduction practices in their classes. Building on Menezes de Souza & Monte
Mrs proposals of the interweaving between foreign language teaching and education,
Mattos & Valerio (2010) in their article Critical Literacy and Communicative teaching:
gaps and intersections, claim that both approaches, however different in their
proposals, are not incompatible, but complementary. This echoes in Santos ecology of
knowledges and epistemological diversity. The challenge is two-fold: 1. how to
envision a co-existence of various pedagogies and literacies and 2 what kind of agency
we assume when we tackle reproduction and/or socio-cultural oriented models of
education in language teaching.
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We would like to thank Dr Rachel Segal, Dr Helen King, Dr Heather Fotheringham and Dr Michael
Rofe for useful guidance and comments on earlier drafts.
2
For the mainstream, see Hawkes (2010), Cohen (2010), Goldacre (2009), Starr (2010), and Akst (2010).
For some influential reports and academic articles, see Ginsparg (2004), Mallard, Lamont and Guetzkow
(2009), Casadevall and Fang (2009), Ware and Monkman (2008), Suls and Martin (2009), Armstrong
(1997), and British Academy (2007).
3
For the same claim made in academic papers, see Mahoney (1985), Goldbeck-Wood (1999) and
Casadevall and Fang (2009).
108
inherently biased towards prominence, either of institutions or individuals (e.g. Suls and
Martin 2009); against innovation (e.g. Armstrong 1997); and against negative results
(e.g. Fanelli 2010). The benefits of the anonymity of authors and referees in terms of
quality are also far from clear (e.g. Van Rooyen et al 1999). This body of criticism has
led one former editor of the British Medical Journal to say that peer review is slow,
expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, something of a lottery, prone
to bias and abuse, and hopeless at spotting errors and fraud (Smith 2006, p.179). There
are also new technologies available for exploitation, alongside increasing online
interaction between academics, and between academics and the research that they use
and discuss. In the light of these criticisms and changes, the following question seems
appropriate:
[I]f we were not burdened with the legacy print system and associated
methodology, what system would we design for our scholarly
communication infrastructure? (Ginsparg 2004, p.7)
Amongst the alternative methods that have been developed, the following are the most
prominent.
Non-blind reviewing
Concerns about the effect of personal bias and prejudice have led some journals to
remove the anonymity of referees, authors, or both. The following journals have
adopted some form of non-blind reviewing: Biology Direct, the British Medical Journal
range, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, and the Frontiers range.
Publication of correspondence
Another transparency innovation is the publication of correspondence between referees,
authors and editors. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and EMBO Journal have
adopted this method.
No explicit quality control
There has been a marked rise in the use of individual and group blogs for research
dissemination, which rarely have systematic quality control processes. Beyond this,
some formal academic websites publish contributions without any significant quality
control process at all (often these are preprint sites, and so could be considered as
importantly similar to the hybrid models discussed below). ArXiv, an e-print archive,
operates this kind of system.
Peer commentary
Peer commentary models invite the wider community (usually with some qualifications
and limitations) to comment on contributions, and those comments then form the peer
evaluation of the work. The three Public Library of Science: Currents websites operate
this system, as does the multi-disciplinary journal Philica.
109
Hybrid models
There are several outlets that have combined a traditional system with aspects of these
alternative models of quality control. Shakespeare Quarterly and Atmospheric
Chemistry and Physics operate models of this sort.
Of these alternative models, it is the peer commentary approach that has proved most
controversial, and which offers the possibility of a radically different method for
disseminating research. Not only does this system minimise operating costs, it also
drastically decreases time lag and, in embodying a more democratic and communitarian
outlook, is well placed to fulfil the fundamental purpose of peer review, to make
[publication] answerable to the peer community as a whole (Harnad 1996, p.107).
The peer commentary model has received praise and criticism in almost equal measure.
A recent survey found that, on the one hand, 61% of researchers with experience of
systems fundamentally similar to the peer commentary method believed it to be
effective. On the other hand, only 14% (a small but significant number) thought it
preferable to other models (Ware and Monkman 2008). From the debate about the peer
commentary approach, three criteria for a successful peer commentary system have
clearly emerged. These criteria relate almost entirely to the nature of the community
that the service is designed to support.
(i)
High ratio of authors to readers (Ginsparg 2004). For the community to provide
sufficient comment to create a quality control system, it is important that there are
enough people prepared to engage with the system.
(ii)
(iii)
Community of peers (Harnad 1996, Gunnarsdottir 2005, Suls and Martin 2009). For
the quality control system to be a variety of peer review, and not just audience
engagement, it is crucial that that those who comment are in a relevant sense peers
of those who have produced the commented-upon material. Evidence suggests that this
works best when there is a demarcated core group who are self-policing
(Gunnarsdottir 2005).
There are powerful reasons to believe that these three requirements are satisfied by the
community of academics accessing pedagogical research. The following section will
highlight the substantial level of engagement amongst that community, which addresses
both the first and third points. Relevant to the second point is the fact that, through the
focus on e-learning, the pedagogical community has been required to adapt to new
technology and in the main is now noted for its early adoption of new online tools.4
Indeed, the nature of peer commentary is particularly suited to the emerging, interactive
ethos inspired and enabled by Web 2.0 technology. A peer commentary system is thus
well suited to an online service designed to support the dissemination and discussion of
literature about learning and teaching.
4
Talk of the pedagogical community, or the pedagogical research community in this paper is not
intended to obscure the complex, shifting, multifaceted and multidisciplinary nature of that community,
or its highly composite nature: all it indicates here is the community of individuals who are involved in
learning and teaching processes in higher education, to whom pedagogical research can be of direct
assistance, and to whom Shulman and other originators of SoTL directed their discussion.
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See e.g. Barnett (2005), Baume and Beaty (2006), Gurung and Schwartz (2009), Greenhow, Robelia
and Hughes (2009), Kreber (2005), and Murray (2008).
6
It is important not to overlook the fact that, whilst the classroom is indeed private in a sense, the
broader inclusion of the student voice in pedagogical research, sadly lacking at present, can play an
important role in SoTLs aim to make the teaching process more visible.
111
against community-endorsed norms of rigour and worth. Given the fact that SoTL is
supposed to be an activity in which a very wide range of academics can engage, it
would be preferable to adopt a system of peer review that allows a broad participation
from within the teaching community. When thinking about those norms or standards
that might be relevant, the fact that contributions are sought from individual academics,
perhaps without a deep or broad knowledge of the pedagogical literature, entails that
those standards will necessarily differ from those that operate in disciplinary research.
Donald Schn has made this point:
For any problem of interest to teaching and learning, insofar as it arises
and is studied in the actual contexts of practice, one cannot...meet the
standards of normal-science rigour. Hence, there can be no such thing
as a scholarship of teaching unless we can change the rules that
govern what counts both as legitimate knowledge and as appropriately
rigorous research into teaching and learning. (Schn 1995, p.34)
The third element of Shulmans picture of pedagogical scholarship, that the items of
scholarship be used, built upon and developed, also has ramifications for any peer
review-style quality control mechanism adopted by an online service to support SoTL.
The notion of a peer (or expert) may have to be reimagined: rather than involving
singular expertise in a rarefied and highly specialised area of research, the experts
will become those who will be best able to judge the efficacy and practical value of the
contribution, i.e. those who teach. This general phenomenon has been described as the
distinction between immediate efficacy in practice, that is to say direct use value on
one hand, and social-cultural token value, on the other hand (Gunnarsdottir 2005,
p.565).
We have reviewed the elements of SoTL described by Shulman: publicising the
reflections of individual teachers; community evaluation; and a connection with use.
When employed as criteria for an online service to support SoTL, the picture that
emerges is of a service that allows individual academics to upload their practices and
reflections in a suitable form, without obstructive methodological restrictions; enables
fellow practitioners of all kinds to discuss and explore those contributions; and uses the
judgements and comments of the wider community to evaluate the worth of
contributions, rather than a subset of privileged experts. This picture mirrors the peer
commentary method from section one: a website that has (largely) open submission, a
discussion component, and a peer commentary method of quality control, will come
closest to supporting the aims of SoTL as originally envisaged.
Even in this brief survey of the debate, there is one complexity that requires further
discussion. As mentioned above, one of the key initial motivations of the SoTL
movement was to raise the status of teaching within higher education institutions. Some
have felt that this requires the adoption of a traditional peer review system in order to
ensure the appropriate level of respectability (see e.g. Canning 2007). There are indeed
plausible connections between the status of teaching and the respectability of quality
control methods for pedagogical research, and this seems to highlight a tension within
the aims of SoTL between: a) the acceptance of pedagogy as a robust discipline, b)
and the presence of SoTL in the working lives of the majority of teachers. However, if
one looks at the origins of SoTL in the work of Boyer, Shulman and others, the
paramount concern is clearly that as many teachers as possible engage with SoTL.
Given the developments discussed in the previous section, it may in any case be unwise
to adopt a traditional peer review system just as other disciplines are beginning to look
beyond that model.
112
The debate has developed since its inception in the 1990s see Hargreaves (e.g. 1996, 1997) and
Hammersley (e.g. 1997, 2004). See also Howe, 2009.
8
Much of this criticism may derive from the frequent amalgamation of evidence-based policy with
evidence-based practice, for which highly contrasting approaches to using evidence may be appropriate
(see Simons 2003, p.305; Hiebert et al 2002).
113
as it changes and evolves over time can support the individual in a way that an
authoritarian conception of what works cannot.
In developing the specific criteria for an online service that supports evidence-informed
practice it is therefore important to address the attendant caveats of the notion, in
particular the misconception that evidence of what works can be contained as a fixed
body of knowledge to be disseminated to practitioners.
The online service should value the judgement of each practitioner while allowing them
to compare and contrast their methods with those of others, and with the implications of
research-based evidence. This can be done by allowing users to actively engage with
the content: their own perspectives and judgements should be added to the consensus so
that each is part of a mutually supportive and changing community that allows them to
become an active member, rather than being subject to any particular orthodoxy (either
explicit or implicit). The websites functionality should therefore allow users to upload
their own material and create case studies, allowing them to help form the evidence
base rather than be its passive recipients.
It should bear in mind that what is at any given moment considered best should be
continually re-evaluated. A website that acknowledges these principles should allow
users access to a range of types of evidence appropriate to whichever context they are
working in, be it institutional strategy, curriculum design, or how to engage their
students in class. It should include content that ranges across the spectrum, from short
case studies to quantitative studies in peer-reviewed journals.
It should bridge the potential gap between the evidence and the practice that it
enhances, by facilitating reflection on that evidence and discussions amongst colleagues
about how it may best be applied. Extending the service beyond the repository aspect to
provide online forums and offline workshops will allow discussion of the evidence to
take place.
In summary, this section has argued that key areas of concern within EIP can be
mitigated by an online service that: allows a wide range of submissions from a very
broad range of perspectives, involving multiple methodologies and disciplinary
perspectives; and allows users to engage in their own way, and with full respect to their
own context. This conclusion mirrors that of the previous two sections.
Conclusion
This paper has discussed three debates that have key implications for the design of an
online service intended to support the pedagogical community in accessing evidence on
learning and teaching: i) discussion around the process of peer review, ii) the nature of
SoTL and its community, and iii) controversies within EIP. In all three of these areas
the lessons for an online service to disseminate and support pedagogical research are
clear: remove barriers to participation and contribution, and harness the ability of the
community to evaluate contributions. Section two described the origins of SoTL in the
desire to make teaching visible and community property, and argued that those needs
are best met by services that place minimal restrictions on contributions, and allow
members of the community to explore and discuss those contributions, providing
community-based quality control. Section three argued that a similar approach would
address some key controversies involved in the concept of evidence-informed practice,
and would ensure that individual reflection and communal discussion is not discarded in
favour of simplistic notions of evidence and what works. Section ones consideration of
114
generic developments around the system of peer review, and focus on the development
of the peer commentary method, seems to suggest precisely the kind of model implied
in sections two and three.
In summary, whilst it remains to be seen whether EvidenceNet has been able to
successfully fulfil the needs that these concerns suggest, this paper has outlined the
issues raised by the process of developing EvidenceNet, which led to the ethos that
underlies its inception: a greater role for the wider learning and teaching community in
the way that research and evidence is collated, presented and explored.
To see how these issues have played a role in the ongoing development of EvidenceNet,
please visit: www.heacademy.ac.uk/evidencenet.
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