Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities Conference

Vivienne Bozalek, Wendy McMillan and I just attended the OLCK Conference in Milan at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - a beautiful old campus. So old that some of the venues had relics on display, one even had a necropolis from the third century AD - I hope that is not a metaphor for the university today! The conference has a focus on organizational management and a theoretical underpinning of the conference was a practice based approach. It was extremely friendly and non-pompous, and one great feature during the parallel sessions was a series of symposia on a theme,

for example authorship, with three presentations and  after each presentation there was a respondent, before the discussion was opened to the floor. This worked particularly well.

A highlight was the second keynote by Silvia Gerardi, who spoke both on affect and on theorizing practice (Gerardi, S. 2012. How to Conduct a Practice-Based Study: Problems and Methods, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). Her writing is very accessible for those who want to be introduced to theorizing about practices. There were several innovative ways of presenting and communicating at the conference, one of which was a talk artist, who drew on a large surface while Silvia was talking. (See at the beginning of this post.) Another was the conference dinner, where a pianist was accompanied by a percussionist and an artist. His completed work is also shown here.

I gave a presentation on the Structure, Culture and Agency (S, C, A) project. The paper was asking some questions about the kinds of theories we use in our research, how we go about choosing them,  whether theories can be combined, and how. I used the data from the project to illustrate these points, showing in the process that some issues are better explicated through a social realist approach, and some issues through a practice based/socio-material approach. However, there are aspects of these two approaches where they appear to be commensurate, and aspects where they do not appear as commensurate. I am hoping that these questions will receive more airtime in the future, as myself, Vivienne Bozalek and Peter Kahn are planning to edit a book on the question of theorising learning to teach and I am hoping that quite a lot of the data from the S, C and A project will be featured in the book.

Leibowitz being and becoming a good university teacher from Brenda Leibowitz

New article from Structure, Culture and Agency Team

A new article has just been published by members of the Structure, Culture and Agency research team. By Brenda Leibowitz, James Garraway and Jean Farmer, the article in Mind, Culture and Activity is titled:

Influence of the Past on Professional Lives: A Collective Commentary. Here is the abstract:

Brenda, James and Jean at work on the article

This collective commentary is based on the narratives of the author-protagonists, three South African
higher education developers who were involved in political activism during their youth. The commentary investigates the continuities between the author-protagonists’ youth and their later professional engagements. Drawing from social realism, the concepts of agency and reflexivity provide a helpful analytic lens. Together, the narratives suggest that these concepts may be more complex when viewed against individual narratives and that some of the differences between social realist Margaret Archer and her critics are worth bridging. Undertaking an investigation of one’s own past is beneficial for professionals engaged in higher education development.

You should be able to download the first 50 copies from:http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/VXkEex6WiqrkFdjYTSkY/full

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

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].

Interesting application of the work of social realist Margaret Archer to higher education and professional development

                                                (Picture of Peter Kahn, University of Liverpool)

I have found it quite frustrating to take critical realist writings and apply these to the setting of higher education and to the topic of professional development. One of the reasons for this is that the theory of critical realism is pitched at a meta-theoretical level. Furthermore, the work of social realistMargaret Archer targets social institutions and society more generally. I find the temptation to apply these theoretical writings to my work can become quite forced or pointless, and have been quite frustrated with the publications of several people who apply these theories to their work in higher education. Often they could made the same general level and common sense observations without referring to these theories at all. For this reason I would like to draw the attention of researchers wishing to apply critical and social realism to the field of education to the work of Peter Kahn from the University of Liverpool. He writes with others, but has a fairly consistent location of his work within the critical realist stable. Below is a list of a few papers which draw on the work of critical realism. The publication that I just read, and that I feel makes meaningful links with the professional development of academics in relation to reflective practice, is:

Kahn, P E, Qualter, A and Young, R (2012) ‘Structure and agency in learning: a critical realist theory of the development of capacity to reflect on academic practice’,Higher Education Research and Development 31(6) pp. 859-71.

It is a review article. Kahn et al write in favor of the view that "there is a need to consider both personal and socio-cultural factors in understanding student learning" (p. 859). Here are three general points from the conclusion (p. 868): 

Adapting perspectives from realist social theory, we contend that learning in our given context may be modelled as follows:

1. The situations that learners confront involuntarily are objective shaped by structural and cultural factors, including the programme itself and tasks incorporated into the programme, the knowledge structures involved and the context for professional practice.
2. Those factors possess generative powers of constraint and enablement in relation to learners' own configuration of concerns and foci for attention, as subjectively defined in relation to nature, practice and society. 
3. Projects of professional learning or educational compliance are produced through the reflexive deliberations of learners and their contemporaneous interactions with teachers and fellow students, allowing learners subjectively to determine these projects in relation to their own capacities and objective circumstances, resulting also in variation in the creation and application of resources for the adaptation of practice. 

Given the focus of the Structure, Culture and Agency research project on the institutions as contexts and the manner in which they can influence academics to participate in their professional development, the interplay between objective circumstances and individual reflexive deliberations and projects, becomes very important.

Here are a few other publications applying the writings of Margaret Archer to higher education: 

Kahn PE (2013) ‘The informal curriculum: a case study in tutor reflexivity, corporate agency and medical professionalism’, Teaching in Higher Education, 18(6), pp. 631-642.

Kahn, P E, Qualter, A and Young, R (2012) ‘Structure and agency in learning: a critical realist theory of the development of capacity to reflect on academic practice’,Higher Education Research and Development 31(6) pp. 859-71..

Kahn P.E. (2009) 'On establishing a modus vivendi: the exercise of agency in decisions to participate or not participate in higher educatiot', London Review of Education, 7(3) 261-70.

Kahn, P.E., Young, R., Grace, S., Pilkington, R., Rush, L., Tomkinson, C. B. and Willis, I. (2008) 'A practitioner review of reflective practice within programmes for new academic staff' International Journal for Academic Development, 13: 199–211.