Teaching and the Student Experience
A slightly more detailed summary of Paul Ramsden’s report, Teaching and the Student Experience, can be found on the wiki that supports this blog (http://sites.google.com/site/hefutures/teaching-and-the-student-experience). This post is my immediate response to a reading of the report. I found the report very interesting and useful. There seems, to me at least, to be some contradictions between the glowing account of the current state of teaching and student satisfaction in the UK HE sector, particularly in the early part of the report, and some of the more detailed accounts of particulars. For example, the mismatch between student expectation and what they experience on coming to university, the dissappointment with the quality of learning infrastructure, the growing fragmentation of the student experience, the perception and reality of the under-rewarding of teaching compared with research, the lack of a career structure for staff wishing to specialise in teaching and contributing to the student experience, the leadership of some Deans and Heads that is inimical to good teaching, and so on. An, admittedly selective, reading of the report could produce a pretty dire picture. My experience indicates the reality is half way between the overly optimistic and the excessively bleak accounts with some evidence that things are moving in the right direction.
The report’s characteristation of the student body and the various different types of student experience will be more or less applicable for different Universities. At Leeds it is not the case that 25% of our students are part-time. The majority of our students are 19 to 21 , studying full-time, attend classes, enjoy a social life dominated by their colleagues and are taught by a priviledge academic elite (in my opinion!). This is why the majority of them come to us in the first place. However, much else is true - they are plugged into social networks that extend beyond HE, many more of them are working whilst studying, and blended and flexible provision is becoming increasingly important to their success and experience. There are many aspects to the the future of HE and universities will need to buy into them carefully and selectively, particularly with respect to different student constituencies. Whether Leeds will succeed in maintaining its particular mix of students, or even want to, will unfold over the next 10 years or so.
I liked very much the notion of partnership between students and academic staff, the importance of not using e-learning as a substitute for face-to-face interaction and the preservation of ‘the intimacy of the pedagogical relationship’ - although I have found the latter to be achievable via social networking techniques in conjuction with F2F interaction. The general thrust towards engaged partnership rather than a simple service model is especially welcome but part of the problem, as implied by the report, is student expectation based upon the comfort zone that the familar service model offers. I think there is some mileage in thinking about engaged partnership along the lines of a broad apprenticeship model - as engagment as a member of a community of practice. Participation as a member of a community may well be part of the answer to countering the fragmentation that can occur from flexible participation around the edges of a disperate student body and the current tendency to encouraging the development of personal learning environments.
Finally, for this post, I was very pleased to see the clear connection being made between scholarship and the development of teaching and the delivery of learning. Very few departments could put together a coherent degree scheme based exclusively on their research strengths and staff. How then can a research led approach be applied to all modules and across whole programmes? There are several ways this can be done of course, especially if a distinction is made between research outcomes and research processes. Research outcomes will be specific, the research process is generic. Elsewhere I have made use of a distinction between ‘discovery’ research and ’scholarship’ research - I’m afraid I cannot remember where I first heard this. Discovery research is what tends to get funded, counts towards research assessement and is supported by sabbaticals. This is where promotions are gained, careers progressed, reputations made and Chairs won. Scholarship research is more generally seen as activity associated with curriculm development and plugging the gaps in the progammes, for instance level one broadly based introductory modules. Often level 2 and 3 modules are based on scholarship research when they need to be taught to meet subject benchmarking criteria but the topic is not covered by the department’s discovery research activity. Scholarship in this sense is low status and generally no provision is made to support it or reward it.
Scholarship is an essential practical bond between teaching and research […..] involving the reinterpretation of knowledge and the identification of superordinate themes. [….] Project fellowships and study leave to produce scholarship related to teaching will help to sustain a spirit of innovation in teaching and a high quality student experience. They will also help to redress the perceived imbalance between rewards for teaching and for research. (page 14)
Hear, hear!
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