Conclusion

Over the last decade a wide range of policy initiatives have been introduced to raise the status of teaching and learning in higher education. Labelled as the ‘poor relation’ of the research/teaching divide, teaching has benefited from these new initiatives and associated funding streams to spark innovation and embed good practice. Policies and discourses that have focused on teaching excellence have used it as a performative lever to drive up general standards. Teachers who have won awards for excellence have been in the vanguard of this drive: through example and interaction with others, they have been entrusted with promoting teaching and learning across the sector as a whole. In the midst of all the initiatives it is often very difficult to establish what

anyone means by ‘teaching excellence’ and the underlying purpose(s) it is meant to serve. In the rush to ‘do’ something about teaching, to innovate and to enhance its status among the higher education community, an important opportunity for serious debate about its quality (referred to in the comments above by an NTFS Advisory Panel member) has been passed by. The time is right for such deliberation given the changes that have occurred recently both inside and outside the academy. The rapid shift from

elite to mass systems, increasing student diversity, the emergence of new technologies and the increasing epistemological and ontological uncertainty of higher education institutions all suggest the need for a proper engagement with teaching and what we understand by excellence in teaching. The title of the series to which this book contributes is ‘Key Issues in Higher Education’. One conclusion that emerges from this book is that we have yet to have a satisfactory debate about the key issue of teaching excellence. There has been little real debate about whether the pursuit of teaching excellence is a ‘good thing’ and little debate of any substance about what it means and the type of higher education it is trying to foster. Perhaps the first of these ‘debating points’ is already off the agenda.

Given policy commitments in this area, it is unlikely that teaching excellence will be interrogated at this deep level, and if this happens, such debate is likely to be confined to the margins. The second debating point carries more potential. It is possible to view our current situation as 50 per cent complete. Teaching excellence has been put squarely on the higher education agenda, but we now need to ask: ‘what sort of teaching excellence do we want and what is it trying to achieve?’ The intellectual culture of higher education requires such a debate if

teaching excellence is to become a meaningful concept (a question that was posed in Chapter 1). Academics expect to interrogate concepts, to understand their origins and to consider competing interpretations. If mechanisms designed to promote teaching excellence are to have any lasting effect in higher education, then there needs to be some recognition, on the part of the academic community, that such mechanisms have been thought through and adequately conceptualized. Sufficient planning time needs to be given to managers of award schemes for teaching excellence to enable them to consider research evidence and provide opportunities for robust deliberation between stakeholder groups. If there are no real opportunities to debate teaching excellence, this will

have significant repercussions. At the very least it will give rise to policies aimed at promoting excellence that are muddled, incomplete or contradictory. The NTFS is a good example of this (see Chapter 3). It set out with noble ambitions but suffered from the tension between wanting to recognize existing achievement and supporting future development. Given this tension, it only achieved moderate success with the latter, due to confusion over the development aspect of the scheme (its relative importance compared to rewarding existing achievement); whether a ‘research’ project was required (which discouraged some institutions from entering: see Chapter 4); and the limited direction and support given to the Fellows’ collective activities (see Chapter 3, pp. 53-4). These difficulties reflect deeper uncertainties about the meaning of teaching excellence that could have been resolved at the outset (see Chapter 10 for a discussion of how recognized excellence and developmental enquiry might be brought together in a

productive relationship). Further problems emerged when NTFS panel members sought to conceptualize teaching excellence and clarify criteria for the scheme. Offered little in the way of background material on metalevel debates about education that underpin understandings of teaching excellence, they also had to devise criteria in a context characterized by ‘speed and efficiency’. This gave them little time to deliberate on matters of substance, so it was unsurprising that assessment difficulties emerged later, with one panel member attributing this to ‘the lack of discussion about the meaning of the criteria’. Other significant muddles currently surround teaching excellence that are

at least partly attributable to the lack of real debate about its meaning and purpose. For example, many countries are pursuing a process of educational reform in which teaching excellence is being used performatively to increase system efficiency and to harness higher education teaching for the good of the economy. This performative use of teaching excellence is an implicit policy goal rather than something that is explicit and subject to serious critical scrutiny. At the same time governments are attempting to respect the histories, missions and autonomy of higher education institutions through policies devoted to diversification. Although the overall aim is still performative in seeking to stimulate system performance through diversity and competition, this policy gives rise to different understandings of teaching excellence, and some of these are not premised on economic productivity. The new CETL programme in the UK (see Chapter 4, p. 67-8) is a good

example of policy support for diversification, with large numbers of institutional centres of teaching excellence being created. It is possible to see this programme as a postmodern ‘celebration of difference’, with multiple expressions of teaching excellence coming into being. One cannot fail to be impressed by the wide range of innovative work being proposed. In reading through the applications, however, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that teaching excellence can mean almost anything. In this situation, the potential for tensions between implicit government agendas to do with the relationship between higher education and the economy, policies on institutional diversity, notions of academic freedom and whether there is a need for some shared vision about higher education teaching and its purpose become apparent. Further debate about these tensions and how they might be resolved is crucial in order for teaching excellence to be a meaningful force in the future. There are also contradictions between policies designed to promote

teaching excellence and those that concentrate on excellence in research. For example, award schemes may try to foster teaching excellence but research assessment exercises pull in the opposite direction and encourage people to see teaching as a burden. It is no surprise, therefore, that some people find that receiving an award for teaching, particularly in

‘research-intensive’ institutions, becomes a ‘poisoned chalice’ (see Chapter 3, p. 55). Clearly there is a need for higher education policies to demonstrate

‘joined-up thinking’ if they are to be effective. But the policy contradictions relating to teaching and research reflect deeper uncertainties about the teaching/research relationship in higher education. This uncertainty, as noted in Chapter 4 (pp. 64-7), is evident in policies and discourses related to teaching excellence. The ambivalent status of ‘research-led’ teaching demonstrates that there is still some confusion as to what significance disciplinary research has for teaching excellence. And the contribution that pedagogical research might make to it is even more unclear! There is a real need, therefore, for a sustained debate about these issues if teaching excellence is to be given the chance it deserves. In Chapter 11 it was noted that higher education policy and specific

policies related to teaching and teaching excellence do not appear to be evidence-based. Serious debate about teaching excellence and the quality of research that generates evidence about it makes this situation more difficult to sustain. Award schemes for individual teachers have been introduced, for example, more as an act of political will than because they are rationally defensible on the basis of research evidence. Their development also demonstrates a selective appreciation of the research evidence that would provide a sound basis for such schemes. For example, in the development of the NTFS, the ILTHE drew on extensive research it had undertaken into award schemes in the UK and other countries and operational research on how to recognize and reward teaching excellence (for example, Elton and Partington, 1993). More attention might have been given to ‘metalevel’ debates about education that underpin understandings of teaching excellence (for example, Williams, R., 1961; Williams, J., 1997; Malcolm and Zukas, 1999). This omission meant that there was little self-conscious, rational debate about different understandings of teaching excellence within the NAP. In the absence of debate, it is likely that the current mismatch between

‘official’ and ‘ordinary’ teacher and student perceptions about teaching excellence (see Chapter 6) will continue. Evidence presented in this book supports previous research studies. Ordinary teachers and students adopt a discourse on excellence that celebrates the ‘soft’ skills and personal qualities of the teacher, their communication skills and their ability to manage complex human interactions and relationships. This is very different to the emphasis on planned systems, resources, standardized processes and predetermined outcomes that feature in official discourses of excellence. These seek to make teaching ‘teacher-proof ’. If this mismatch is to be resolved for the good of teaching excellence, then there has to be a robust dialogue between policy makers and ordinary teachers and students (who represent the ‘end users’ of policy).