Joan Rué

Towards an Understanding of Quality in Higher Education: The ELQ/AQA08 Model as an Evaluation Tool

Abstract This paper describes a model for the analysis of the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Empirically validated through an extensive student‐focused survey, this model puts forward a concept of quality that challenges that which is commonly used in institutional analysis. Research indicates that quality, rather than being a simple technical outcome, is a construction responding to the principle of situated action, in which different well‐aligned functions exist within certain settings and contexts. The ELQ/AQA08 model proves a valuable evaluation tool for the analysis of teaching and learning practices and offers strong possibilities for the consolidation and improvement of key aspects of these experiences in the context of higher education.

Towards high-quality reflective learning amongst law undergraduate students: analysing students’ reflective journals during a problem-based learning course

There is wide agreement that problem-based learning is a key strategy to promote individual abilities for ‘learning how to learn’. This paper presents the main contributions that reflective journals and the problem-based learning approach can make to foster professional knowledge and quality learning in higher education. Thirty-six reflective journals and semi-structured interviews conducted with law undergraduate students participating in a problem-based learning course are analysed. The findings from this case study suggest that problem-based learning contributes to: improve professionalisation of vocational studies; develop general skills such as communication and teamwork; bridge the gap between theory and practice; and foster self-regulation and autonomous learning amongst students. Reflective journals, peers’ cooperation and collaboration and the supportive role of educators are fundamental aspects of problem-based learning, which empower students in their own learning. Reflection nurtures the quality of learning and needs to be considered as an applicable learning strategy for professional and non-professional disciplines in higher education.

Reconstructing teaching professionalism in the new modernity: an agenda for new action narratives 1

The reflections developed in this text on the reconstruction of professionalism in teaching are located within a historical and social dimension, given that it is only within the boundaries of the coordinates of the spirit of historic time and the present culture (Zeitgeist) that proposals for professional reconstruction can be fully understood. Bearing this in mind, we can see the need to proceed, yet again, to the task of this reconstruction due to the fact that society has evolved from the first to the ‘second modernity’, with the resulting crisis in the educational models of the recent past. With the aim of highlighting the new forms of professionalism in this new setting, action research can play an important role. Nevertheless, for this role to be played in depth it is necessary to analyse and draw appropriate conclusions from two major aspects: the understanding of action in education and the understanding of research, in relation to the current academic canons in social sciences.

Action Research in Education, in the Era of Liquid Modernity[1]

Abstract In the post-Franco context of the 1960s in Spain, we asked ourselves what type of changes were necessary for the teaching profession to respond to the demands of a democratic society. This article reflects the discourse developed over many years within the personal experience of one of those young people who received John Elliotts seminal work back at that time and their intellectual influence in the years since. It is concerned to see to what extent action research makes sense in education, within the context of the cultural change we are immersed in today. The debate about who rules the change can be reformulated today again within the socio-political and cultural context of the present moment of modernity. But the paradox of the change dilemmas cannot be resolved, but constitute the essence of action research; they are its justification. It is argued that a central feature of this new state of modernity is the recognition of uncertainty and deliberation is seen as a basic means to face it. While the structure of the systems tends to reproduce through different means the conventional model of dual systems and professional models based on technical rationality, educational discourse very often emphasises the discourse which emerged in the new age of liquid modernity. This contradiction leads to three possible scenarios, each with important practical consequences on curricular development, on teaching professionalism and on the type of research required. Each of these is considered.