Ian Brailsford

Why history? Why now? Multiple accounts of the emergence of academic development

More than 40 years after its beginnings, academic development stands uncertainly on the threshold of becoming a profession or discipline in its own right. While it remains marginal to the dominant stories of the university, it has become central to the institutions contemporary business. This Research Note describes an enquiry that uses a multiple histories approach to explore the emergence of academic development in three national sites. Our intention is to provoke a more critical engagement with academic developments current forms and future possibilities.

Developing new academic developers: doing before being?

A small group of new academic developers reflected on their induction into the profession and wondered if things could have been done differently. The researchers decided to question the directors of three tertiary academic development units about how they recruited new developers, what skills and competences they looked for and how they inducted new appointees into the role. This article interrogates the interview data, employing Winter’s ‘dilemma analysis’ to tease out the ambiguities, judgments and problems inherent in the issues of employing new academic developers. Finally, the authors discuss ways of enhancing the induction experience for new academic developers.

The role of the disciplines: alternative methodologies in higher education

The editors of last year’s special issue of Higher Education Research & Development (31:5), on the development of higher education research, noted its ‘multiple series of intersecting cognate fields’ of study while acknowledging the strong theoretical influences from sociology, psychology and philosophy on higher education studies (Macfarlane & Grant, 2012, p. 621). This special issue explores the ways that disciplines typically associated with the arts and humanities contribute to the field of higher education studies. We take our cue from Tony Harland’s (2012) view of higher education research as ‘an open-access discipline’ that includes all-comers from disparate academic origins. Provocatively, Harland queries whether or not research into higher education is research any academic can do, akin to the amateur with a love for their subject but possibly lacking the expertise associated with a professional in the field (p. 706). Whether or not we agree with Harland, we do think there is scope for conscious consideration of the disciplinary knowledge and training that current higher education researchers, whatever their origins, do bring to the discipline. Our initial call was for contributions from researchers with potentially ‘alternative’ methodological underpinnings, which does rather prompt the question – alternative to what? Methodologies in higher education research have tended to be confined to a narrow range. As Malcolm Tight’s (2011) analysis of submissions to Studies in Higher Education demonstrates, the dominant methodologies in higher education involve the research interview method, surveys or multivariate analyses, leaving other forms of enquiry relatively under-utilised and under-examined. It is not just other forms that are neglected, however. According to Sue Clegg and Jacqueline Stevenson, the prevalent method utilised in higher education research, the research interview, is also under-examined, despite its ubiquity. Their article reconsidering the interview as method opens our special issue, a move which may, as the authors acknowledge, seem somewhat perverse given its focus – yet it is appropriate, as the kind of re-examination that they engage in of the forms of knowledge and truths that are produced through research in the field was the hoped-for outcome for the special issue. As is wont to happen when what is normalised is subject to scrutiny, the research interview begins to look decidedly other in their hands, and the insiderstatus of the higher-education interviewer, who is ‘a fish in the water’, a further strand adding to its complexity Like ourselves, Clegg and Stevenson also call for researchers from the broader humanities to bring their own distinctive approaches and ‘sensibilities’ to higher education research, and the second of our papers does this by drawing from two other humanities disciplines, anthropology and philosophy. Cecily Scutt and Julia Hobson re-evaluate narrative and storytelling within higher education research and propose that these disciplines have the ability to explore the ‘unsayable’ aspects of university life overlooked by other methodologies. In this paper, methodology is combined with epistemology to interrogate how higher education research data comes into being and is structured, which allows questions relating to ‘imagination, authorisation and subjectivity’ to be posed. In their apt turn of phrase, ‘ethnography tells smaller

Expanding assessment methods and moments in history

History courses at The University of Auckland are typically assessed at two or three moments during a semester. The methods used normally employ two essays and a written examination answering questions set by the lecturer. This study describes an assessment innovation in 2008 that expanded both the frequency and variety of activities completed by 182 undergraduates taking a course on the history of African‐American freedom struggles. All week‐by‐week tutorial assignments were collected for textual analysis to see if students were moving beyond the recollection and regurgitation of facts (surface learning) and instead were dealing with the deeper historical issues. The quality of student work coupled with our own classroom observations indicate that innovative assessment methods at regular moments during the semester made a positive difference to the student learning experience.

“We know no such profession as a university teacher”: New Zealand academics' teaching capabilities and student performance in the years of academic boom and student strife

– The historical study aims to trace moves towards professionalising university teaching in the era of post‐war expansion in higher education using the University of Auckland, New Zealand, as the specific case study., – The historical analysis draws from published papers and original documents chronicling the state of teaching abilities in New Zealand in the late 1950s and 1960s and also draws from the University of Aucklands own archives., – University teaching by the early 1970s was no longer a private matter. Facing greater accountability from the New Zealand government and university students over the quality of teaching, New Zealand universities responded by creating professional development units to enhance the teaching capabilities of their academic staff., – This case study adds to the emerging histories of higher education academic and staff development units in Australasia and the United Kingdom. It demonstrates the growing realisation amongst academics, students and policy makers in the 1960s that lecturers could not be entirely left to their own devices given the potential harm poor teaching could have on student performance.

‘The ha’porth of tar to save the ship’: student counselling and vulnerable university students, 1965–1980

Student counselling is a generally accepted service offered by most institutes of higher education. This was not always the case. This paper uses the original reports and documents from the early years of the Counselling Service at the University of Auckland, New Zealand to explore what the educational problems were to which counselling was understood to be the solution, what exactly counselling was meant to achieve and then how the new service went about its mission of supporting vulnerable students. The historic legacy is that once a university accepted responsibility for students’ learning problems it was difficult to draw a line between emotional and academic support. Moreover, once established, counselling expanded from helping individual students who came looking for assistance and branched out into other therapeutic activities across the campus.

Defining pedagogical standards and benchmarks for teaching performance in law schools: contrasting models in New Zealand and the United Kingdom

The tertiary sector is operating in an increasingly market-driven environment. Teaching standards are under intense scrutiny as universities strive to meet the expectations of students exercising consumer choices. Continuing professional development programmes have a pivotal role in supporting and shaping best practice in modern law schools. Early career academics in both the New Zealand and British university systems share similar teaching and learning objectives. However, the respective professional development programmes have different compliance regimes. The United Kingdom has adopted a scheme of formal training and teaching accreditation, supported by the UK Professional Standards Framework. In New Zealand mandatory training requirements are more limited. It is submitted that New Zealand universities should similarly require probationary academics to undertake a formal programme which promotes an understanding of the scholarship of teaching. It is further argued that programmes in both jurisdictions should emphasise subject-specific pedagogical knowledge to expose law teachers to the distinct academic and vocational aspects of their discipline.