The SCA study as ‘currency’ for change: reflections on what this might mean going forward

A key component of the entire SCA project has been that of reflection. Our very first data collection activity required us to reflect on institutional positions, polices and perspectives with regard to teaching and learning. We also essentially asked our interviewees to reflect on their own professional learning, and at then at various points in the project, we as the research team were asked to reflect: on the experience, on the collaboration and on our own professional learning. And then we were asked to contribute to this blog – to share through this less formal yet equally revealing medium, an experience, a process, an event, that came about as a result of the study. Thus, some further reflections …

I spent quite a bit of time contemplating what might be an appropriate title for this posting. What did I really want to say in reporting on a particular outcome of the study? Telling a story was one thing – and might have some value or generate some interest – but my sense was that the sub-text would be more interesting. I was curious about the extent to which my enthusiasm about what had been achieved (uncovered?) as a result of the study at my institution might be clouding my judgment as to what was really happening – and potentially could happen – in changing conversations about teaching and learning at my institution.

But first the story …

As part of the larger study and working with the different data sets (document analysis, survey and in-depth interviews) we (Brenda, Nicoline, Jean and I) worked on our institutional case study report. This was a challenging process as we grappled with issues around audience (who would read this tome?), and argument (what message did we want to get across?). We were fortunate, however. Brenda, as the principal investigator on the project, provided much of the preamble for all of the institutional case studies and this provided an immediate way into the writing process. Nicoline and Jean were both working on their PhDs which were situated within the study. Their scholarly insights helped to strengthen the analysis and the discussion. We shifted between using ‘report-like’ text and following a more discursive approach – highlighting enablers and constraints for the professional learning of academics in their teaching role while seeking to understand what this might mean for teaching and learning at the institution. The institutional case study report is available on request (email brenda@uj.ac.za), its contents are not the focus of this posting. What is interesting is how the document emerged as an instrument for change.

The case study report served at the institution’s Committee for Learning and Teaching at a time when a task team had been commissioned by the Committee to investigate the Promotion and Recognition of Teaching at the institution. This proved serendipitous as the task team took the research findings as set out in the case study report on board as a point of departure for their work. As their set of ground-breaking recommendations (including issues relating to promotion, teaching sabbaticals and fellowships, and peer review of one’s teaching) went out to faculties for comment, an opportunity arose via the annual in-house Scholarship of Teaching and Learning conference to capitalise on these different outputs and activities. Thus we conceptualised a closing event for the conference that would bring together the findings from the case study report and the recommendations of the task team in a unique way exploring: “New ways of talking about teaching: Acknowledging teaching as an institutional good”.

The session was made up of short inputs on key aspects from the case study report and the task team’s recommendations. These were interspersed with opportunities for ‘multi-group brainstorm’ sessions during which responses from the audience of over 100 academics were captured in real time and displayed on the screens in the venue. The excitement was palpable and the response both positive and interesting as people spoke about how the recommendations will let them ‘come out of the teaching closet’, but also how they expressed concerns about what exposure of their teaching practice to peer review might mean for them.

I believe the event was special and it felt good to end the conference on a high note. But what about that sub-text I spoke of earlier? The interesting bits lie beneath the story. There is the issue of agency, both corporate and personal. In conceiving the session with colleagues from the Centre for Teaching and Learning in the way that we did – using the audience, the technology – represented a considerable risk on my part as the one who would have to stand in front and manage the process. I was willing to take the chance because I believed that the institutional case study report provided credibility and substance. As a group we were confident as we sought to ‘deal’ with audience in a currency we felt they would understand and value (research!). This same ‘currency’ was recognised when the task team referenced the study in their report.

Another issue relates to the responses of the academics. The excitement about the different recommendations made to recognise teaching, on the one hand, and the hesitancy to accept a review process on the other hand. These are matters that are unfolding as I write and as the faculties submit their responses to the recommendations. Already applications for teaching fellowships have been called for. It will be instructive to see how these processes evolve.

But finally, it is about effecting change (dare we use the word ‘transformation’) across the system. It is about a multi-site study funded nationally to support such change. It is about how change takes time (this SCA study has been ongoing now for four years), and how those of us in academic development (agents) have to take risks both individually and corporately to use what has been achieved to challenge existing structures and adopt new discourses around teaching and learning. To date the project has generated a number of outputs in the form of journal articles (over and above the different institutional case study reports). The three PhD students have all made significant progress and as I write, a number of other publications are in various stages of preparedness. This is important not only for the contribution this makes to scholarship, but also because this is the currency we need to use to effect change, to enable us to take risks and to stand up ‘at home’ for what we believe in so that we might alter the landscape. I remain cautiously optimistic.

Susan

Updates

Clever Ndebele has written a new paper using an Archerian framework:

Conceptualizing a Staff Development Agenda for the Professionalisation of Teaching at a South African University: Attempts at an Action Plan, in Anthropologist 18 (2), 629 - 638.

ABSTRACT:  This study was inspired by the author’s participation in a Post Graduate Diploma in Higher Education course at one South African University. As part of the requirements for the successful completion of the Diploma, one had to design an educational development agenda for a university. Using the Archerian social realist theoretical framework this paper conceptualises an agenda for the professional development of academics in their role as teachers at the University of Higher Learning. The study argues that while structures can be put in place, it is the agency enacting those structural roles and working in the domain of culture that can actualize an educational
development agenda. Based on this argument, the study recommends a commitment from management as key agents in the provision of resources for the implementation of the proposed educational staff development agenda.

Vivienne Bozalek, Patience Sipuka and I gave a paper at the UKZN Teaching and Learning Conference, 25 - 27 September 2014, at the Edewood Campus, Durban, thus taking the research to a new audience. The conference itself was interesting, with keynotes by Gayatri Spivak (very refreshing and iconoclastic), William Pinar (he gave a strong critique of the CHE Report on the Four Year Curriculum) and Reitumetse Mabokela, and ex-South African who now works at Michigan State. She gave an impassioned keynote about the state of higher education in South Africa, and the relative inability to transform the sector in terms of student outcomes and staff representativity. She argued that it is the responsibility of all in the sector to try and make a difference, we cannot just blame those at the top. This resonates well with the idea of Structure, Culture - and Agency, I would argue.

The Professional Development of Academics with Regard to the Teaching Role – an Inter-institutional Investigation from Brenda Leibowitz

The S, C and A group has been busy - latest news

Completion of Phase One

We have now completed all eight institutional case studies. We have started compiling a full report on the basis of the eight studies, and hope to have the report complete well before the end of this year. Our recommendations at this stage include the following:

• that research be conducted into the ways in which history, resources, conditions of employment and geography impact on teaching;
• the discourse, science and art of teaching needs to be uplifted nationally; 
• the status of teaching and learning should be recognized; 
• time and resources need to be made available for professional development;
• the findings indicate a binary between research and teaching which should be addressed;
• communities of practice should be supported as the data indicates that academics seek assistance from colleagues for teaching; 
• the capacity, image and status of professional developers is variable across institutions, and should receive attention.

Latest Publications

Our two most recent publications are:

1. Leibowitz, B. 2014. Conducive Environments for the Promotion of Quality Teaching in Higher Education in South Africa. Cristal, 2 (1) 47 - 73. 
2. Ndebele, C. and Maphosa, C. 2014. Voices of Educational Developers on the Enabling and Constraining Conditions in the Uptake of Professional Development Opportunities by Academics at a South African University. International Journal of Educational Science, 7 (1) 169 - 182.  

Writing Retreat and Future Plans

18 members of the project participated in a very productive writing retreat at Montefleur, near Stellenbosch. We wrote, we walked and we formulated plans for the future. The plans include: a panel and several papers for the 2014 annual Heltasa conference; a colloquium on professional development, including on the findings from our project, which will be held the Cape in the last week of July 2015; and an edited volume on quality teaching and professional development with a focus on the social and relational aspects. 

Here are photos from the retreat:

What does a 'depth ontology' imply for research on quality teaching and professional development in higher education?

By now several papers have emerged from the Structure, Culture and Agency project, including one which considers significant structural and cultural factors influencing teaching and learning and professional development across the eight higher education institutions in our paper in Higher Education (Leibowitz, Bozalek, van Schalkwyk and Winberg, DOI 10.1007/s10734-014-9777-2) and several others listed in the pages on this blog-site. But I would like to concentrate on the Leibowitz et al study referred to here, in order to tease out something that has been worrying me about our own research using as guiding concept, the interplay of structure, culture and agency. In this article, the focus is on enabling and constraining factors as perceived in particular by academic developers, and this is discussed as they appear to play themselves out across eight sites. The result, in my view, does not lead to 'depth', and makes me wonder how we have benefitted from basing our research on a 'depth ontology'. It feels, by contrast, rather 'flat', and could have been achieved without reference to the work of Margaret Archer at all. It points to a risk associated with multi-site studies, of not looking at the interplay between the dimensions. The way forwards for the analysis of data in studies using the interplay of structure, culture and agency, it seems to me, is provided by three questions which Margaret Archer poses in the article she wrote with Dave Elder-Vass, in 2011. The three questions she poses in the extract below, can be usefully adapted, and can form the base for analysis of data for our own project, and others considering the interplay, and how teaching and learning contexts can be enhanced. I am quoting from the rather enjoyable article to read, by Archer and Elder-Vass, in full:

(a) My own concern as a working sociologist is to develop and refine an analytical

framework that is useful for conducting substantive analyses of why the cultural order

– or part of it – is, in Max Weber’s words, ‘so rather than otherwise’. That is why I call

the Morphogenetic approach an ‘explanatory framework’, in other words, a practical

toolkit (Parker, 2000: 69–85). This means attempting to provide guidelines to produce

particular explanations of cultural phenomena in different times and places, the most

important being:

How the prior context in which cultural interaction develops influences the form it

takes.

Which relations between agents respond most closely to these influences and which

tend to cross-cut or nullify them.

Most generally, under what conditions cultural interaction results in morphostasis

rather than morphogenesis.

One can just as easily apply this to the structural order as well, or to both the cultural and structural, at the same time. In a future article, to come out shortly in Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CRISTAL), I pay more attention to the human and agentic element. I believe that if we do wish to understand how teaching and learning can be enhanced, it is precisely the interplay between structure, culture and human interaction, that needs to be investigated. What interests me personally in all of this, is the human or individual component, and the extent to which this is indeed reflexive, or more unconscious or habitual or conditioned, as critics of the work of Margaret Archer argue. 

O

Archer, M.S. & Elder-Vass, D., 2011. Cultural System or norm circles? An exchange. European Journal of Social Theory, 15(1), pp.93–115. Available at: http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/1368431011423592 [Accessed May 31, 2014].

Leibowitz, B., Bozalek, V., van Schalkwyk, S & Winberg, C. 2014. Institutional context matters: the professional development of academics as teachers in South African higher education. Higher Education. Available at: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10734-014-9777-2 [Accessed July 2, 2014].