Terry’s Blog

The broadest description of my vision is of an intellectual community based upon identity, belonging, shared values and based upon and infused by a research led learning culture (try to work in a notion of learning ecology here?). ‘Intellectual community’ includes UGs, PGs, academic staff (teaching and research) and support staff.

The big challenge: how to improve the student experience without compromising our research activities, indeed improving research performance, and without adversely affecting the staff experience.

Fashionable to think of outcomes in terms of students’ employability but it is perhaps better and of more general applicability to think of outcomes in terms of students’ personal effectiveness (elaborate on this idea in terms of life long learning, notions of ‘expert learners’, critical engagement and effective citizenship).

Problem: for a number of reasons that can be enumerated a perceived and partially real contradiction has developed between research and teaching. Main reasons behind this are related to the predominant emphasis on research performance (and the implicit assumption that the benefits for teaching would automatically accrue somehow). Funding success and publication became more important than teaching for career progression. The push from the top was to make more space and time for research, for example the original institutional interest and enthusiasm for e-learning was based upon the (false) promise that we could teach more for less in terms of resources and time - the background to this was also the increasing number of students coupled to a falling unit of recourse and the notion that research funding was the way forward.

Teaching became a problem from the perspective of the research imperative. The emphasis and diversion of resources to research became a problem from the perspective of those still interested in teaching. What should, and to some extent had been, complementary became contradictory.

We are now encouraged to integrate research products, methods, experience and, crucially, personnel into our teaching more explicitly but without prejudicing the research activity in any way. Indeed we should continue to find ways of devoting more time to research given the drive to develop peaks of excellence and become world class. How do we achieve this given that, the way research activity and teaching activity are currently configured and constituted, to become world class in both at the same time leads to contradictory objectives and mutually confounding processes?

Problem: trying to integrate research with teaching in the way described above is highly problematic because the model and methods or teaching are static and traditional. Solution: introduce a learning culture, a student skill and expectation set, teaching and learning methods base upon a logic of enquiry, and a model of active and engaged learning that fits better with the activities, processes and ethos of a research based School. The contradiction between research and teaching is based upon incompatible processes, procedure, models, expectations and activities. If teaching and learning IS research then the contradictions disappears and synergies and efficiencies take their place.

Devise a year 1 that, by its completion, has produced students with the self-model, meta-cognitive skills and expectations to be active learners in a research based intellectual community. The very best students achieve this by the end of year one and a few more by the end of their degree but I don’t think we have yet got the most effective learning ecology to achieve this for all our students.

First year induction - students must know ‘the deal’. They must know what to expect. More used to a didactic approach to teaching and learning rather than the more enquiry based approach at University. What they need to know and be able to do by the end of year, how we will help them achieve this and what their responsibilities are. We cannot guarantee success - this is largely down to the student - but we can ‘bend’ the odds in their favour. Stress active learning, the need to become proactive, to engage with the learning process, to become self motivating ‘professional’ learners - not just to get a good degree but to develop the forms of personal effectiveness required for career, active citizenship and life (the life long learning agenda). The emphasis on active learning and meta-cognitive skills will help get a good degree but. Perhaps even more importantly, is the acquisition of learning and information literacy skills that a university education is uniquely equipped to deliver. This process must start immediately at level one. Meta-cognitive and personal effectiveness skills are a ’slow growing crop’.

Notion of the ‘expert’ students. First degree as an apprenticeship focussed as much on skills as on content. Skills now more varied and important compared with earlier generation so students due to the nature of the information and knowledge economy and society and the end of the job for life era. We are now CV, portfolio, portmanteau careerists. We now are members of a learning society where learning skills are explicitly in all areas of life, not just in a ghettoised education system. University education is about developing a portfolio of learning and life skills, not just content and certification although this is still important.

Three factors shown to be highly correlated with student satisfaction, the development of good meta-cognitive skills, the development of a confident and motivated attitude (self-model), and (especially at level 1) frequent, timely and effective feedback (precisely what has been cut in an effort to reduce teaching work loads and make room for research; how can this be achieved without increasing teaching workload an impacting on research performance).

Notes:
Key is the infusion of research and enquiry based approaches in our teaching that corresponds to the research activities of staff. Research for writing an essay is very similar to what is required to write a lecture - identify the information that is needed, locating it, evaluating it, synthesising it and integrating it into an argument, writing and presenting it (identify the differences as well as the similarities given student status as ‘apprentice’ researcher. Find quote ‘we are all researchers now’. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22we+are+all+researcher) Peter Scott.

Tend to see the University as a research institution that teaches. In fact it is a learning institution that integrates teaching and learning.

Universities are learning organisations - in the sense that UG, PGs, academics engaged in teaching and research in various mixes, are all ‘learning’. Can reverse the usual order of things i.e. rather than seeing teaching (i.e. learning) taking place in a research culture we can say that research takes place in a learning culture.

Engage students in the knowledge creation process (in two senses in that knowledge is partly a personal construct as well as a public one tjw).

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,5500,628918,00.html
Peter Scott is vice-chancellor of Kingston University
A lot to learn: We are all researchers now. And we can no longer separate research from teaching

Peter Scott
Tuesday January 8, 2002
The Guardian

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