Sue Clegg

Forms of knowing and academic development practice

Academic development has emerged as an important new site of practice in higher education internationally over the past 40 years, and has been influential in shaping the terms of debate about teaching and learning in higher education. Academic development has shifted its focus from the individual teacher to strategic interventions at institutional and national levels. This article argues that much of the writing by academic developers has a rhetorical function in legitimising academic development’s role. The article explores the sorts of accounts academic developers produce about themselves, and argues that academic development practice is a form of artistry and a ‘concrete science’. The article asks questions, therefore, about the contexts within which academic development has emerged, the stakes both for academic developers and the wider academic community, the sorts of knowledge being produced by academic developers about themselves and others, and the relationship between theory and practice and the possibilities of critique.

The challenges of reflection: students learning from work placements

The importance of employability in higher education and increasing numbers of students working while studying led leaders on a social science degree to introduce work experience modules. This paper reports on an in‐depth case study based on the analysis of staff and student interviews, the students’ reflective assignments, and a focus group session with students a year after completing the module. The themes of reflection and linkages are discussed. Linking theory to practice was difficult, but when achieved, students spoke of new ways of seeing the social sciences. The major challenge was learning to be reflective about themselves as employees, while reflecting on the workplace. The paper concludes by emphasising the value of this mode of study for producing deep learning.

Possible Selves: Students Orientating Themselves towards the Future through Extracurricular Activity.

This paper explores the under‐researched area of extracurricular activity undertaken by students through the lens of the possible selves literature, which has largely been developed in the North American context. In the UK the employability agenda assumes an orientation towards the future and employers are increasingly expecting students to display capacities beyond those of simply achieving a degree. Extracurricular activity is one site where students might be able to develop these additional capacities towards their future imagined selves. Our case study, based on in‐depth interviews with 61 students, found different orientations towards the future, with only some displaying future selves attuned to employability. Other students were more firmly orientated to the present and developing student identities or unable to elaborate or act on imaged futures because of the contingencies of the present. We conclude that paying attention to differing temporalities and to the insights derived from the possible se...

Cultural capital and agency: connecting critique and curriculum in higher education

This paper explores some of the unresolved tensions in higher education systems and the contradiction between widening participation and the consolidation of social position. It shows how concepts of capital derived from Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam provide a powerful basis for critique, but risk a deficit view of students from less privileged backgrounds. These students are more likely to attend lower‐status institutions and engage with an externally focused curriculum. The paper argues for greater attention to agency, and community and familial capital, in conceptualising the resilience of those from less privileged backgrounds. While the recognition of ‘voice’ is important, a curriculum that acknowledges the context independence of knowledge is essential if these students are not to be further disadvantaged.

Kindness in Pedagogical Practice and Academic Life.

The paper presents the argument that kindness in teaching is both commonplace yet unremarked and that, moreover, it is subversive of neo‐liberal values. In arguing for the value of attending to kindness, we reject the dichotomy between emotion and reason and the associated gendered binaries. We distinguish kindness from ‘due care’ and acts that are required of professionals, and instead locate it philosophically in personal values and with a concern for lay normativity. We illustrate our claims for the pervasiveness of kindness through a re‐reading of student data from an earlier study. These data are used to elaborate the concept. We conclude by suggesting that what is subversive in thinking about higher education practice through the lens of kindness is that it cannot be regulated or prescribed.

Femininities/masculinities and a sense self: thinking gendered academic identities and the intellectual self

This paper draws on the theoretical resources offered by feminist scholarship to enquire into the discourse of the intellectual and how women do being an academic. My starting points are threefold: Val Hey’s interrogation of Butler’s work and her emphasis on the importance of sociality; Carrie Paechter’s exploration of the available personal sets of masculinities and femininities that modify the ‘person who is me’; and my own attempts to draw on other traditions in theorising agency and a sense of self. Drawing on these resources I re‐read some data on academic identities to explore the potentialities of academic personhood and the discourses associated with the idea of the intellectual as a site of gendered personhood. The position of woman as intellectual is analysed in terms of Beauvoir’s assertion ‘I am a woman’ and the paradox of a universal voice and the female sex.

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.

Student support through personal development planning: retrospection and time

This article presents an analysis of higher education students’ retrospective meaning making of their experiences of personal development planning (PDP). An earlier study of first year students had indicated that students rarely reflected on their own meta‐cognitive processes and were preoccupied with practical study skill matters, particularly time management. The authors were interested, therefore, in looking at whether students in their final year had developed the ability to reflect on their learning, and which aspects of their learning experiences they felt supported them in these developments. They undertook 20 in‐depth interviews which explored how students approached learning and the supports they had found useful as well as probing specifically about the PDP elements of the course. Their analysis reveals the complexity of students’ understandings of their own first‐year experiences: their lack of engagement, and ‘faking’ reflection and planning by completing ‘plans’ only after the event. Retrospective realisation of relevance and an increased focus on results and the future shaped their understandings in the final year. The authors draw on theorists of time to explore how understanding the multiple temporalities involved in education might offer insight into the difficulties students experience and their lack of future orientation in the first year. Rather than being simply mundane concerns, time, time management, and perceptions of the present in terms of the past, present or the future illuminate some of the difficulties of reflection and of the projection of future selves implicit in the term ‘personal development planning’. Tempo and timing appear to be essential in terms of students’ shifting personal epistemologies, their experiences of self as both relatively unchanging and developing, and their capacities to judge relevance and access support.

Power, pedagogy and personalization in global higher education: the occlusion of second-wave feminism?

In this paper, in keeping with developing feminist methodologies, we reflect on how we became second-wave feminists in the 1970s. We consider how the theories and practices that we were involved in have been changed as the global socio-political context has transformed higher education practices. Second-wave feminism originated as a political project around ‘the personal’. As it entered the academy, feminism developed and drew on emerging concepts in the social sciences and humanities to develop more sophisticated conceptualizations of the personal. Personalization and the personal have now become ubiquitous in the pedagogical discourses of higher education. As higher education has expanded in the context of globalization and itself become global, it has both elided and incorporated questions of diversity, difference, inequality and power. Concepts such as the personal, love of learning and knowledge, have entered the new literatures of learning and teaching in global higher education. However, in some of these versions concepts of the personal appear to be based upon an impersonal and disembodied subject. New forms of global higher education have built upon feminist theories and yet, at the same time, they have done so by the marginalization and occlusion of feminist critiques. This is evident both within the mainstream neo-liberalism and also within the critical and post-structuralist literatures. In this paper, we offer an alternative critical feminist reading of some of these tendencies and speculate on the lack of personal reflexivity which allows some British authors to expunge feminist analysis from their texts. This leaves a denuded and a-historical concept of the personal, a pale shadow of the agentic political subject of second-wave feminism. The personal as a political project forms the basis of our critique of global higher education practices. It allows for a re-imagining of universities not as disembodied sites of masculine freedom but as socially situated spaces for creative thinking for the twenty-first century.

The Interview Reconsidered: Context, Genre, Reflexivity and Interpretation in Sociological Approaches to Interviews in Higher Education Research.

The paper makes a number of arguments about the research interview and maintains that, despite the near ubiquity of the method in higher education research, the interview remains under-theorised and mis-described. We argue that by virtue of being ‘insider’, higher education research involves a form of tacit ethnography where multiple sources of data impact on the interpretation of events. The ‘interview’ therefore needs to be understood in its rich contextual setting. The paper critiques the genre of journal writing and the tendency to under-describe methodology, with a reliance on a description solely of method. Papers that challenge this practice are discussed as offering alternative ways of writing research. Finally the paper analyses the role of reflexivity in interviews, both the researchers and the researched. It points to the contradictions involved when the forms of reflexivity evoked are tied to the very policies and practices (for example, ‘employability’) we are attempting to critique. The paper concludes that we need a much richer understanding of our methodologies and of knowledge making.