I recently had a job interview where I was asked (as usual) to give a presentation – on the challenges of pedagogic research and research-informed teaching (RiT). I found the topic very interesting and so I’d like to share some of my thoughts here … Of course, being a good academic, I first of all subverted the title of the presentation - talking about challenges and opportunities as the original title seemed too negative. I didn’t have much time so I focused on 3 key issues which I felt offered both challenges and opportunities to educational developers (the post was Head of Educational Development), and to the wider academic community. These were terminology, credibility and inclusivity. Because the presentation itself is too long for a blog post, I’m going to break it down into 3 separate posts covering these issues in the hope of kick-starting some further discussion.
Being a researcher (primarily) in sustainability, I should be used to lack of clarity in terminology, but there is widespread confusion over what pedagogic research is. The word pedagogy is increasingly being used in writing about research in higher education (indeed if you Google pedagogic research, the top suggestion is ‘pedagogic research higher education’). But there’s an interesting paper by Robert Cannon which describes pedagogic research as ‘a contested term’ (Cannon, 2001) and argues that it should not be used for research in HE – or indeed for research in schools! And the argument is basically this: If you look at the OED, pedagogy = the art or science of teaching; therefore this seems on the face of it to encompass teaching at all levels (including HE and schools). However, when you look at the origin of the word, it is from the teaching of children, in schools rather than in higher education (same root as paediatrician). And the concept of a pedagogue is largely used in a derogatory sense, in the sense of someone telling you what to do. The term andragogy has been used by theorists such as Knowles (1984), who argue that pedagogy = teacher-centred, didactic and andragogy = student centred, independent learning – therefore andragogy is the term that we should use. However, quite aside from arguments about whether a binary divide (teacher-centred = bad; student-centred = good) by proponents including recently Glynis Cousin (SEDA conference November 2010) it is highly contestable that the term pedagogy as it is currently used has this implication in any way shape or form – and frankly, the term andragogy has received little currency in HE research. I’m something of a pragmatist – so for me, although it’s interesting to look at where the word’s come from, its current use is also very important.
And as for RiT, the situation is worse still: There are many different conceptions of RiT, continually redefined (e.g. see Healey & Jenkins, 2009). There are arguably 4 main ways of conceptualizing RiT (Griffiths, 2004):
1. Research-led – content of curriculum based on staff research interests; focus on research findings rather than processes; often ‘information transmission’ style of teaching.
2. Research-oriented – focus on understanding process of knowledge production; teaching of inquiry skills & development of a ‘research ethos’.
3. Research-based – curriculum designed around inquiry-based activities rather than acquisition of subject content; division of role between teacher and learner minimised; two way interaction of research & teaching
4. Research-informed – draws consciously on systematic enquiry into the teaching and learning process
However, most people are only consciously aware of one or two at most. (We even found this in our own work at Plymouth when we interviewed RiT project leaders who’ve been funded to work on this area – see Winter and Cotton, 2010). So there’s still a big task ahead in terms of getting across to staff some of the wider understandings of RiT – that it’s not just about telling students about your own research, that there are other issues around getting undergraduate students engaged in the process of undertaking research.
So much for the challenges, what are the opportunities of this confusion? Well… an optimist might see some advantages in this position: There is a term I rather like entitled ‘rhetorical ambiguity’ – that almost deliberate vagueness that allows quite divergent interests to coalesce around an agenda – which could be helpfully applied to concepts such as pedagogic research or research-informed teaching. And it does seem that RiT in particular is one of those concepts: From personal experience, I have found that staff who would never normally engage with teaching enhancement activities were drawn into the RiT scheme – it really chimed with their understandings of what made good teaching. And there’s still widespread support for it – whatever it is. So RiT provides an opportunity to mobilize around a banner with a view to enhancing teaching and learning and the student experience. Does it really matter if some people are focusing on introducing students to the wider research community and practices through conferences, and that others are working on getting students to act as researchers in field-trips? Not really, since they are both enhancing the student experience which is the ultimate goal of all educational development work. So there’s a real opportunity there for expanding the work of educational enhancement and getting buy-in from the more research-focused amongst our staff.
The other opportunity which I identified was linked to the development at the University of Plymouth of a Pedagogic Research Institute and Observatory (PedRIO). This Institute will have a number of roles (not least that of ensuring that our pedagogic researchers across the university are producing REFable publications in the next year or two!) But one role of the institute will be to theorise pedagogy – what does it mean to us? How are we using it in our research and writing? There is an opportunity here because very little current research is engaged with this issue. And although there are some advantages to having a rather nebulous conception of pedagogy underpinning activities - PedRIO will need to carve out a niche for itself, and it needs to be clear exactly what that niche is.
