ABSTRACT
Within UK higher education, and to some extent elsewhere, teaching and research are increasingly organised within separate academic structures, and subjected to discrete quality assurance procedures and funding arrangements. The divisions between research and teaching continue both for policy reasons (differential rewards are offered to universities for teaching and research), and for cultural reasons (individual promotion and institutional kudos come more readily from research than from teaching). Universities are often anxious to reject any suggestion that they might focus solely on teaching, claiming instead to be ‘research-led’ or ‘research-intensive’ and thus engaged in ‘research-led teaching’. These claims seem only to confirm perceptions of the differential status of research and teaching, and their meaning remains unclear. What is clear in much policy and institutional discourse is the assumption that research and teaching are fundamentally separate and distinctive activities between which a relationship of some kind may or may not exist. Numerous research studies, meta-analyses and reviews address the nature of this relationship in terms of ‘links’, ‘nexus’, ‘interaction’, ‘influence’ and ‘impacts’ (e.g. Brew and Boud 1995; Hattie and Marsh 1996; Brew 1999; Zubrick et al. 2001; Jenkins 2004). Attempts are made to produce statistical correlations between Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA) scores and the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) (Drennan 1999), or other measures of research ‘productivity’ and teaching ‘effectiveness’ (Hattie and Marsh 2002). Unsurprisingly, many of these studies exhibit fundamental methodological flaws arising from the quantitative assessment of teaching and research ‘quality’ using indicators of doubtful validity or usefulness. Epistemological questions, and the consequent ways in which the complex activities of teaching and research are understood, are rarely explored in any detail in discussions of the research/teaching ‘nexus’ (Brew 1999: 293), giving many of the studies the rather fragile and rickety air of a complex but insubstantial house of cards.
