Paul Ashwin

How approaches to teaching are affected by discipline and teaching context

Two related studies are reported in this article. The first aimed to analyse how academic discipline is related to university teachers’ approaches to teaching. The second explored the effects of teaching context on approaches to teaching. The participants of the first study were 204 teachers from the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration and 136 teachers from the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University who returned university teaching inventories. Thus, altogether there were 340 teachers from a variety of disciplines in Finland and the UK. The second study involved only the Finnish sample. The results showed that there was systematic variation in both student‐ and teacher‐focused dimensions of approaches to teaching across disciplines and across teaching contexts. These results confirm the relational nature of teachers’ approaches to teaching and illustrate the need, in using inventories such as the Approaches to Teaching Inventory, to be explicit about the context.

Peer Support: Relations between the Context, Process and Outcomes for the Students Who Are Supported

In this paper an investigation of the outcomesof a Peer Support scheme for the students whoare supported is reported. It was found thatattendance at Peer Support sessions waspositively and significantly correlated toacademic performance. This relationship wasfound even when prior levels of academicperformance were controlled for. However, itwas also found that students who attended PeerSupport sessions adopted less meaningorientated approaches to studying over thecourse of the academic year. It is argued thatthis is an indication that the quality of thelearning of these students fell. Qualitativeevidence suggests that this change in approachwas in response to an increased awareness ofthe assessment demands of the course and thatthese students had become more strategicallyorientated in their approach to studying as aresult of their attendance at Peer Supportsessions. It is argued that these resultssuggest that the outcomes and operation of thisPeer Support scheme were influenced by thecontext in which it operated. Two implicationsof these findings are discussed.

Variation in academics’ accounts of tutorials

There is a growing literature that has examined academics’ approaches to, and accounts of, teaching. One aspect that has not been examined is academics’ perceptions of particular teaching methods. In this study, academics’ accounts of tutorials at the University of Oxford were used as an ‘ideal type’ in order to examine whether there is variation in the ways that academics experience a single teaching method. An analysis of interviews with 20 academics led to the development of four qualitatively different ways in which academics described the purpose of tutorials. This article examines whether there appeared to be systematic subject‐based differences in the ways academics described tutorials, as well as examining relations between academics’ accounts of tutorials and their approaches to teaching. In doing so, the study offers insight into the different ways in which academics account for a particular teaching and learning task, which has important implications for the approach that is taken to supporting university teaching more generally.

How often are theories developed through empirical research into higher education

This article reports on a review of empirical research published in selected higher education journals in 2008, which was focused on examining how often theories are developed through research. This review found relatively little evidence of theory development. Drawing on the notions of internal and external languages of description, it is argued that this is partly due to the lack of explicit conceptualisation of the object of research in the writing-up of higher education research, and the lack of a discursive gap between the ways in which research objects are conceptualised and the ways in which data are analysed in accounts of empirical research into higher education. In conclusion, four ways of promoting such a discursive gap in the reporting of research are discussed.

The Meanings of Student Engagement: Implications for Policies and Practices

Student engagement has increasingly been positioned as a defining characteristic of high quality teaching and learning in higher education. This is because as a concept it can comfortably serve the purposes of various stakeholders across learning and teaching, institutional management, and national policy contexts. However, as many commentators have pointed out, its meaning is not clear. In this chapter, we argue that this is not, as some suggest, due to a lack of criticality on the part of researchers or because engagement is poorly defined, but rather because student engagement has many meanings. We argue that by analysing the focus and degree of student engagement, it is possible to address the problems associated with the apparent vagueness of student engagement. This conceptual ground clearing allows us to ask more challenging questions about the relations between different foci and degrees of student engagement, and explore the implications of these questions for future research and policy initiatives related to student engagement.

Implementing Peer Learning Across Organisations: The development of a model

Peer learning can be implemented by individual teachers within an organisation or can be implemented across an organisation by a central implementer. In this article, it is argued that the types of approach required in these two forms of implementation are very different and whilst the former is dealt with in the literature on peer learning, the latter has been largely unconsidered. The article reports how a review of the literature on organisational change was used to develop a model of how to implement peer learning across organisations. It describes how this model was used to guide the implementation of peer learning across a UK further education college. The results of a pilot study into the models effectiveness in this context are reported. These results suggest that the model appeared to be a useful guide to the implementation of peer learning across an organisation and, as such, is worthy of further investigation in other contexts.

Not everybody walks around and thinks “That’s an example of othering or stigmatisation" : identity, pedagogic rights and the acquisition of undergraduate sociology-based social science knowledge.

This article places itself in conversation with literature about how the experience and outcomes of university education are structured by intersections between social class, ethnicity, gender, age and type of university attended. It addresses undergraduate students’ acquisition of sociological knowledge in four diverse university settings. Basil Bernstein’s concepts of pedagogic identity, pedagogic rights, classification and framing are employed to analyse curriculum and interviews with 31 students over the period of their undergraduate degree. The nature of a sociology-based disciplinary identity is described and illustrated, and it is shown how the formation of this identity gives access to pedagogic rights and the acquisition of valuable capabilities. Addressing the question of whether pedagogic rights are distributed unequally in a stratified university system, it was found that they were not distributed, as might be expected, according to institutional hierarchy. It is argued that the acquisition of university sociological knowledge can disrupt social inequality.

A Bernsteinian View of Learning and Teaching Undergraduate Sociology-based Social Science

Abstract Taking a perspective drawn from Basil Bernstein, the paper locates itself at the boundary between teaching as transmitting disciplinary knowledge and teaching as a set of generic ‘good practice’ principles. It first discusses the value of undergraduate sociology-based social science knowledge to individuals and society. This discussion leads to highlighting the importance of pedagogical framing for realising the value of sociological knowledge. A longitudinal three-year study in four different status universities suggested that studying undergraduate sociology-based degrees can give students access to what Bernstein called ‘pedagogic rights’ of personal enhancement; social inclusion; and political participation. Access to the rights is through the formation of a ‘specialised disciplinary identity’ whereby the student becomes a person who knows and understands specific content, which is applied to lives and society, and who has developed the skills and dispositions of a social scientist. In pedagogical terms more evidence of equality than inequality was found: despite some subtle differences, whatever the status of the university attended, the same disciplinary identity was projected and students’ perceptions of the quality of their teaching strongly mediated the formation of a disciplinary identity and access to pedagogic rights.

How does completing a dissertation transform undergraduate students’ understandings of disciplinary knowledge?

Dissertations are positioned as the capstone of an undergraduate degree, bringing together what students have previously learned from their programmes through a piece of independent research. However, there is limited research into the ways in which engaging in a dissertation has an impact on students’ understandings of disciplinary knowledge. In this article, we explore the relations between students’ accounts of sociological knowledge in their second and third years and how they engage with sociological knowledge in their dissertations. We argue that for the work of the dissertation to have an impact on students’ understanding of sociological knowledge, students need to see their discipline as providing a way of answering their research questions. We explore the implications of this argument for both our understanding of the role of dissertations and research-based learning in universities more generally.

Questioning theory–method relations in higher education research

This special issue aims to explore the relations between theories and methods in research into higher education. These relations are important because they play a crucial role in shaping the knowledge claims that we make on the basis of our research. The Higher Education Close-Up 5 (HECU5) Conference, held in Lancaster, UK, in July 2010, aimed to promote a closer conversation between these two important dimensions of the research process, and earlier versions of each of the articles in this special issue were presented at this conference. The articles by Hammersley and Trowler featured in this issue highlight the different meanings that can be attached to the word ‘theory’. It would be possible to do a similar exercise for the term ‘method’. A helpful way of thinking about ‘theories’ and ‘methods’ is to see ‘theories’ as representing different ways of characterising the social world when we research it and ‘methods’ as representing different ways of generating and analysing data about that social world. Under this view all empirical research involves theories and methods, whether or not they are explicitly discussed by researchers. Whilst ways of thinking about theories and methods are often related, part of our argument in this editorial is that it can be helpful to separate them in order to avoid our ‘theories’ playing too strong a role in shaping what comes out of our ‘methods’. Rather, what is needed is an ongoing dialectic between methods and theories that allows us to use the outcomes of our research methods to interrogate and develop the theories that are used to characterise the objects of our research. The increasing discussion of the roles of theories and methods in research into higher education is a positive development because it offers researchers more resources for thinking about how they characterise the social processes that they focus on in their research. The articles by Coleman, Shay and Luckett all show how new ways of theorising helped them to reconceptualise the ways in which they analysed students’ literacy practices (Coleman), curricula in higher education (Shay) and a programme review (Luckett). These discussions also raise questions about how researchers generate and analyse data about these social processes. In her article, Paxton raises troubling questions about the extent to which data generated from students tells us about their experiences of higher education or about their experiences of engaging with the research processes that we establish as researchers. The articles in this issue also exemplify the value of researchers attempting to be more reflexive about the roles that such theories and methods play in shaping the outcomes of research. As examined in the articles by Morley on widening participation and Smit on student disadvantage, such reflexivity can be powerful in helping researchers to think critically about the manner in which the unquestioned adoption of dominant ways of thinking about higher education can distort both the ways in which we research