ABSTRACT
As Alan Skelton points out in the introduction to this volume, performative and psychologised understandings of ‘teaching excellence’ predominate in UK higher education today. Whilst the meaning of excellence is a matter of public debate, some of the problems associated with ‘teaching excellence’ derive from the unspoken assumption that the meaning of teaching is clear to all – a question which Macfarlane (Chapter 3) explores in this volume. We want to begin with teaching, rather than excellence, by making a case for the use of the term pedagogy, rather than teaching. We then reflect on our ongoing conceptual work on pedagogic identities to offer a more coherent, contextualised and situated understanding which links pedagogy to issues of disciplinary and vocational practices; values, purposes and beliefs; national and institutional policy and practice; the relationships between teaching and teachers, and learning and learners, and so on. We revisit five pedagogic identities from earlier work (Malcolm and Zukas, 2001; Zukas and Malcolm, 2002a) and look at these in relation to the notion of teaching excellence, particularly in the light of Skelton’s (2005) analysis. These are analysed afresh in relation to conceptualisations of academic identity which incorporate discipline, research and pedagogy, and a new identity is incorporated into the analysis – that of the educator as disciplinary actor. Drawing on actor network theory (ANT), we suggest that the force of ‘teaching excellence’ is inevitably undermined by the competing, entangled and powerful actor networks of discipline and research practice.
