accounts of the interplay between structure and ...

“It’s been a wonderful life”: accounts of the interplay between structure and agency by “good” university teachers

Brenda Leibowitz, Susan van Schalkwyk, John Ruiters, Jean Farmer & Hanelie Adendorff Higher Education The International Journal of Higher Education Research ISSN 0018-1560 High Educ DOI 10.1007/ s10734-011-9445-8

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Author's personal copy High Educ DOI 10.1007/s10734-011-9445-8

‘‘It’s been a wonderful life’’: accounts of the interplay between structure and agency by ‘‘good’’ university teachers Brenda Leibowitz • Susan van Schalkwyk • John Ruiters Jean Farmer • Hanelie Adendorff

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Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract This study is set in an era and a context in which extrinsic forms of motivation and reward are offered by higher education institutions as a means to enhance teaching, and in which teaching is effectively undervalued in relation to research. The study focuses on the role of agency in professional development and demonstrates the relevance of Margaret Archer’s description of the interplay between structure and agency for understanding how academics enhance their teaching in research-intensive universities. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted by a team of academic development advisors in order to obtain accounts of teaching academics of their becoming good teachers, in their own words. An analysis of the transcripts of the interviews with the lecturers demonstrates how dimensions such as biography, current contextual influences, individuals’ dispositions and steps taken to enhance teaching interact in a spiralling manner to generate a sense of self-fulfilment and agency. Intrinsic, rather than extrinsic motivation, is shown to be significant in propelling individuals towards action. The article concludes with an assessment of the implications of the interplay between structure and agency, the need for an enabling environment with a key role for intrinsic motivation for professional development strategies, in research-intensive universities. Keywords

Agency Structure Teaching Professional development South Africa

Introduction ‘‘It’s been a wonderful life, and when I die, I think I hope to have the satisfaction of knowing that perhaps a lot of young people have enjoyed my subject. What more can I ask for?’’ (Percival) Percival is a Professor of Microbiology, and although formally retired, he still teaches on a medical undergraduate programme at a research-intensive university in South Africa. Two years in a row he has been nominated as the lecturer who made the most significant impact B. Leibowitz (&) S. van Schalkwyk J. Ruiters J. Farmer H. Adendorff Centre for Teaching and Learning, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]

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on one of the university’s top thirty-first-year students’ academic achievement. Percival’s statement provides a glimpse of his personal biography, and displays a variety of emotions such as joy or satisfaction, and values such as commitment to the academic discipline or to the students. These emotions and values play an important role in what is increasingly referred to as the ‘‘interplay’’ between structure and agency (Archer 2000, 2007) with regard to society and individual mobility, and with regard to education (Crawford 2010; Luckett and Luckett 2009; and Wilmott 1999). An understanding of agency and its workings can provide guidance for the professional development of academics in their teaching role (Kahn 2009) and the facilitation of change in higher education (Clegg 2005). We believe the question of agency and how it may flourish in relation to contexts which might be enabling or constraining, depending on the socio-political and material conditions which influence them, is significant in the light of the increasing trend towards awards, grants and incentives for good teaching and teaching enhancement. In this article we explore the interplay between structure and agency via an analysis of the accounts of becoming good teachers by a group of teaching academics deemed successful by first-year students at a South African university. It is our intention that some of the implications of this analysis will offer insights for the professional development of academics in their teaching role, specifically in a research-intensive institution. In so doing we hope to contribute to the ongoing international debates around the nature of the ‘professional learning’ (Brew 2004, p. 5), of university teachers.

Setting and motivation for the study The University at which the research was conducted is what is referred to in South Africa as a ‘‘historically advantaged’’ or ‘‘historically white’’ institution. The University admits amongst the highest academic achieving students in the country, but remains socially and racially exclusive. A decade ago the University signalled the intention to become a research-intensive institution and has succeeded in making strong progress in this direction. During this same period, it has made contradictory policy level statements with regard to the role of teaching. For example several years ago it was announced at the University Senate that salary improvements would be made to academics who were internationally ranked researchers. Since then, however, a drive to see the three academic roles of research, teaching and community interaction as integrated has been the focus of a number of institutional discussions. Yet while there is an intention to recognise teaching, and while there are faculties or departments where teaching is overtly valued, this is not uniform across the campus. The tension that exists between research and teaching, typically at research-intensive universities, is an international phenomenon that has been well-documented in the literature (Chalmers 2011; Austin and Chang 1995). Much of this work highlights the impact that this tension has on the professional learning of academics and the extent to which they may elect to seek to enhance their teaching practice (Herman and Cilliers 2008). The University has a Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL), which actively promotes the status of teaching and provides opportunities for academics to enhance their professional development. The study was undertaken to support the work of this Centre. Given the social complexities informing the institution in which this study was conducted, and indeed, the complexities bedevilling higher education internationally, we thus take the position that good teaching and the debates that inform what good teaching is and should be, cannot be discussed in a purely technicist and a-social manner. The account of

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the interplay between structure and agency as described by Archer offers a means to take into account the social complexities of power and inequality in which all action occurs, and to acknowledge the influence of these situations, whilst granting individual actors the potential to influence the broader educational settings and their own professional lives.

‘Being and becoming’ good lecturers Important contributions to the literature on good lecturers and their professional development have focused variously on the qualities or attributes of the good lecturers, on how good lecturers become what they are, and a significant third element considers the role of external features such as the institutional context. In this section we consider these three foci, and the additional contribution that may be offered from the perspective of structure and agency. Important work on the attributes of good lecturers has been conducted by Chickering and Gamson (1991), highlighting student-centred approaches; and by Carpenter and Tait (2001), emphasizing spaces for engagement between students, and students and lecturers. Trigwell (2001, p. 66) provides a list which suggests that in fact attributes of being a good lecturer are not that easily distinguished from attributes of becoming a good lecturer. For example one of Trigwell’s characteristics is that good teachers should ‘‘be good learners, prepared to learn from their own practice, through reflection’’. When asked to describe their characteristics as good lecturers, academics in the Leibowitz et al. (2009) study described both innate qualities and characteristics, such as humour or passion, as well as developmental attributes that allowed them to grow or become good lecturers, for example intrinsic motivation or the act of constant reflection. Berliner’s triad of influences shaping the good lecturer, namely context, practice and talent, demonstrates that good teaching is something that develops over time, and that it is intentional, as he describes practice as ‘‘extensive, deliberate’’ (2001, p. 465). One of the most commonly cited deliberate actions to enhance teaching, is that of reflection, as argued by Scho¨n (1987) and Kane et al. (2004), implying that reflection on practice leads to improvement. The practice of reflection is given further consideration by Lea and Callaghan (2008); McLean (2006); Nixon et al. (2001) and Rowland (2000), who argue that reflection includes a consideration of the purpose of—or values associated with—teaching. Allied to the notion of reflection on the values or purpose of education, is that of intrinsic motivation, which in Leibowitz et al. (2009) was found to be a highly significant factor in sustaining lecturers’ commitment to good teaching practices. Given this interrelatedness of the characteristics of good lecturing and of becoming a good lecturer, for the purposes of this study we do not make a distinction between the two, and refer simply to ‘good lecturers’ with both dimensions as understood. The third aspect of the literature on good teaching and the development of good teaching, that is helpful to understand the professional development of lecturers, pertains to the influence of context, as either enabling or constraining good teaching practice. The literature on the professional development of teaching academics provides many examples of the influence of institutional context. For example, ‘‘greedy’’ universities place too much pressure on academics (Wright et al. 2004). Universities influence the impact which professional development initiatives may have on teaching (Stes et al. 2007). Other structural features such as the discipline, with its messages about knowledge, culture and learning have a strong influence on teaching (Lee 2009) and the department or workgroup also influences approaches towards teaching and learning (Trowler 2008). Less has been

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written in the literature on professional development about the significance of the material aspects such as funding and resources, possibly because in the environments giving rise to this literature, from the developed world, these material elements are taken for granted. One would have to refer to a larger body of literature on social justice (see for example Fraser 2003, on the complementarity of distribution and recognition) in order to stress the importance of the material aspects of context. In countries such as South Africa where funding for higher education is lower than the international norms (National Advisory Council on Innovation 2006) and where there are great material disparities between institutions (Council on Higher Education 2006), this aspect of context cannot be ignored. Even if we assume that good teaching can be developed and is not purely innate, the question still arises, why do some people become good teachers and others do not? Why are some teachers more motivated to enhance their teaching than others? What role does personal biography play, what role does the specific context play, and what role does individual agency play in relation to structure? The literature on good teaching provides many examples of these dimensions of good teaching, but does not provide an explanatory framework about how it all fits together. The answer to this series of questions can be found, we maintain, in the work of sociologist Margaret Archer, on the interplay between what she refers to as ‘structure’ and ‘agency. In the next section we describe those aspects of her account of the interplay of structure and agency that are useful for understanding being and becoming good lecturers in higher education.

The interplay of structure and agency Archer locates her ideas on the interplay of structure and agency within the ‘‘morphogenetic’’ approach (1982), which refers to change of structure over time. The individual is not entirely free and autonomous, nor is he or she entirely determined by structure. He or she has powers of acting and of transforming society (Archer 2002). Structure consists of the rules and resources that may constrain or enable action, where these constraints have ‘‘differential malleability’’ (1982, p. 462) with some structural properties having more constraining power, or are more difficult to change, than others. Examples of rules and resources could be the rules for promotion, or the resources allocated to teaching, such as technology support or tutors. These circumstances are not of our choosing, and most constraints except the most dire can be circumnavigated, but with varying degrees of effort (Archer 2000). Out of the interplay between structure and action, new properties, such as agency, emerge and these are irreducible to what came before (Archer 2000). Structure and agency may once again interact or interplay, leading to new emergences. From our interactions with the world, our personal identity emerges, which is a matter of ‘‘what we care about in the world’’, our fundamental concerns (2002, p. 15). Emotions play an important role, as they have the ‘‘power to modify the cognitive goal’’ (2000, p. 196), thus the desire to act, to maintain a relationship with the environment, or to disrupt that relationship. Emotions, one of the most important of which for professionals is selfworth, provide a ‘‘commentary on our concerns’’ (2000, p. 195), as is evident in the comment about his teaching ‘‘life’’ by Percival in the introduction. These concerns are invested in various aspects of our lives, for example family or careers. Our concerns prompt judgment about what matters, and what to care about. A crucial aspect of the interplay between structure and agency with regard to enhancing one’s own performance would be sense of competence, ‘‘positive feedback from practical reality signaling (some) performative achievement’’ (Archer 2000, p. 196). Via an ongoing internal conversation,

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which she refers to as ‘‘reflexivity’’ (2007), our concerns or commitments attain a ‘‘unique pattern’’ (Archer 2000, p. 240), which generates our personal identity. Archer maintains that our personal identity, that we acquire at maturity, is the outcome of a ‘‘continuous sense of self’’ (2000, p. 9), also evident in the sense of continuity of identity and commitments of Percival. Out of this emerges for many of us a social identity, which she describes as the capacity to express what we care about in social roles that are appropriate in doing this (2002, p. 17). Such a social role could be that of a ‘‘lecturer’’. If being a good lecturer is important to one’s sense of self worth, then one would be spurred to cognitive action if one’s sense of competence was affirmed. When there is alignment between an individual’s commitments and their social roles, social identity is achieved (Archer 2000). The emergence of agency as a positive response to a sense of self worth and competence would also support the account of identity as emerging from an individual’s trajectory within a community of practice (Wenger 1998). According to Wenger, ‘‘Identity is produced as a lived experience of participation in specific communities’’ (1998, p. 151). This sense of identity leads to creativity and meaning making, essential in order to flourish as a good teacher. If it is enhanced via participation in a community of practice, and presumably within prior communities, this helps to explain why an individual’s biography is relevant to the story of one’s becoming a good teacher. Archer’s theories have been elaborated in general sociological texts. In this study, we attempt to demonstrate how this interplay between structure and agency holds in the specific context of teaching in higher education. The research design of this study is described in the next section.

Research design This study became possible due to a task the authors of this paper were engaged in as part of their work to enhance the stature of teaching at the university. In 2006 the University adopted a strategy to enhance the learning experience of the first-year student, known as the ‘‘First-year Academy’’. A small-scale initiative launched as part of this strategy was the ‘‘Rector’s Dinner for Top Achieving First-year Students’’. One purpose of this initiative was to spotlight the commitment and dedication of lecturers of first-year modules. In this scheme a list of the 30 most successful first-year students is compiled each year, and at the beginning of the following year, they are invited to a dinner with the University’s Principal. The lecturers, whom these 30 students nominate as having made the most impact on their achievement, are also invited to the dinner. The students write letters to the lecturers, explaining why they have nominated them. The lecturers write replies, with a message of support for the students. In order to explore what could be learnt from this group of lecturers about good practice and support for good practice, a team of researchers from the CTL embarked on a small-scale research project to interview a selection of these lecturers in 2008 (see the outcome in Leibowitz et al. 2009) and in 2010. The 2010 study is the focus of this article. This interpretive study is what Crawford (2010) and Clegg (2005) would refer to as a ‘‘bottom up’’ account, focusing on how the lecturers describe their attributes and their engagement with their own professional development. It avoids the tendency of academic developers to ‘‘impose their own views on others’’ (Kahn 2009, p. 206). The interview approach was adopted as an attempt to enable the interviewers and interviewees to surface a ‘‘sense of who they are and what their current experiences meant for them’’ (Taylor 2008, p. 30). The team devised a semi-structured interview schedule (see Appendix 2) focusing on how the lecturer perceived him or herself as good and what he or she did in order to

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become, or to sustain him or herself as a good lecturer. Our intention was to hear from the lecturers in their own words. We were aware that they, like all individuals in interview situations, make strategic and rhetorical choices about how they portray themselves (Cousin 2009; Edwards 1997). Because they are constructing their identity and sense of self as they tell their stories, they tend to portray a more unified and organised sense of who they are than might be the case in reality (Taylor 2008, p. 30). However we believed that given our focus on human intentionality and agency, their control over the telling of their stories was necessary. We did not seek to define what we considered to be good lecturers, but rather selected academics out of the group that had been nominated by the 2010 top performing students. This selection was conducted according to criteria which ensured a spread in terms of level of seniority, discipline, race and gender, and preferred to choose those who had either been nominated by more than one student in the same year, had been nominated in a previous year or who had received other teaching awards at the University (and who had not been interviewed by the team previously). Ten academics agreed to participate in the audiotaped interviews, which lasted between half an hour and one and a half hours (see Appendix 1). In some cases the lecturers followed up the interviews with written accounts or provided further information and examples of their work. We do not believe that the fact that the nominations came from academically strong students distorted the study unduly in favour of an elite or elitist group, as many of the interviewees subsequently stressed that they were surprised to have been nominated by the strongest students. They believed they cared more about the struggling students. The ten interview transcripts were subjected to thematic content analysis by the different members of the research team, drawing on a set of codes that were developed by the team in the earlier study, but revised in the light of the data and in reading of the work of Archer (2000, 2007) on structure and agency. The codes, used as subsections for the findings in the next section, are: biography, contextual influences, dispositions of the lecturer (emotions and attitudes); and steps taken to enhance teaching.

Findings: becoming a good lecturer Biography Biographical influences featured prominently in the motivation to become a good lecturer in several of the accounts and generated the personal identity that Archer refers to. These influences are part of the ‘‘given’’ in an individual’s trajectory, and are themselves influenced by the ceaseless interplay between structure and agency in earlier phases of an individual’s life trajectory. In Wendy1’s case biographical influences included that she struggled with mathematics as a student (possibly a constraining influence), but that a model lecturer provided her with the impetus to teach well, thus an enabling influence. Lecturers gave examples of how their families and childhoods—whether these were middle class or working class—influenced them to want to become good lecturers. The frequency of these references is not surprising, since the family is a key influence in

1

All first names are pseudonyms.

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individuals’ educational biographies (Leibowitz 2009). The family is the primary socialisation agency in general (Bernstein 1990), and in relation to education and literacy in particular (Hannon 1995). Percival’s account shows how his father supported his developing a love for his subject: ‘‘I remember saying to my father, ‘‘You know Dad, I’m not very good at sport, but I’m very interested in microscopy’’, so he said, ‘‘Son, if that is your interest, that is what you must do’’, I have never forgotten it because many fathers push their children to go and do something they don’t want to do, so it allowed me time to go and collect samples of mud from the streams and so on…. I can tell you in all honesty that I never changed, my whole life actually has been a hobby, that gives you an idea as to why I so love my subject, because it has always been with me.’’ (Percival) In the following account Cyril’s motivation for becoming a good lecturer draws strength from the fact that he might be the only one of his peers from a rural school for black children in apartheid South Africa that reached university: ‘‘I grew up in very difficult circumstances and if I think back today, in that whole class that were with me in primary school in Wolseley I think I am the only one who got out of that situation. I never forget those who were with me and especially if I go back to my family and I see the people who were with me at primary school, I do realise how happy I am and how blessed I am, so I need to do something in small ways also on their behalf…. And those are the things that drive what I am doing.’’ (Cyril) This is an example of what Yosso (2005) calls ‘‘community cultural wealth’’, where family and community aspirations or forms of resistance motivate him or her, in an agentic fashion, to succeed in education. Prior professional experience is another form of biographical influence mentioned by some of these good lecturers. Wendy taught in a tertiary institution for disadvantaged students in the largely rural Northern Cape Province before arriving at Stellenbosch University. Cyril and Mahlubi were high school teachers and both were involved in the provincial administration responsible for schools. The insights they acquired from these experiences better positioned them to respond to the diverse needs of the students they now encounter at the University. Current contextual influences The second set of influences on the lecturers’ becoming and remaining good teachers derived from their immediate work contexts. The dramatic, and positive influence that a workgroup (Trowler 2008) can have on enhancing teaching, is illustrated in Wendy’s comments: ‘‘Last year I taught in John’s group and that I must also say I was privileged last year to teach within a group of people. Both John and Jaco were nominated for awards previously and so to work with them was a dream come true really, because everyone is trying to be good at what they are doing and be good lecturers and make Maths 1 enjoyable… That drives you to be as good as them and to be inspired by what they have done.’’ (Wendy)

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The interplay between structure and agency is illustrated in the extract below, in which the appreciative behaviour of students motivates the lecturer to enhance his teaching. This positive feedback about his competence spurs the lecturer on to do more. In this extract Cyril explains how he comes to know that his teaching has meaning for his students: ‘‘the only barometer that I have to measure [my good teaching], are the many emails that I get from students and it’s strange, those emails never come during the course of the day, they always come very late at night, suddenly when you start to feel ‘‘I need a sleep now’’, then here pops up this email… those are the little things that happen to you that drive you and tell you,… that maybe what I am doing has meaning.’’ (Cyril) Archer (2000, 2007), attributes much significance to the role of the emotion of self-worth within an individual’s reflexivity, especially for professionals, whom it prompts towards further action. This is evident in the comments by Kirsty, who talks about walking out of a good lecture feeling ‘‘on a high’’. She is constantly driven towards achieving this sense of competence and fulfilment: ‘‘It’s a two-way process, a person actually does want satisfaction out of their work, so if you know you are not doing a good job and you can see this in students’ reactions and in their marks, then it is a natural thing to think how you can do it better.’’ (Kirsty) The positive role played by students in enhancing a lecturer’s sense of agency can be attributed to the interplay between structure and agency, in the sense that the students attracted to the University are part of the given elements that a lecturer has to respond to. There needs to be a sense of fit between their aspirations and interests, and those of the lecturer. The students’ cultural capital could also be considered, rather mechanistically, as resources within the structure. Other aspects of the immediate context which are either enabling or constraining are resources, such as services provided by the Centre for Teaching and Learning. Mahlubi said, ‘‘January I was at Predac (the 4 day teaching seminar for newly appointed lecturers). It was incredible, the support that you gave us, and that built me’’. Another enabling factor is the policy environment. Mahlubi appreciated the current University principal’s vision of a pedagogy of hope for the University, with which he identifies. The institutional context is both constraining and enabling, however. Cyril mentioned as a negative influence, the pressure to perform well in all three roles, i.e. teaching, community interaction and research. Receiving mixed messages at the same institution was also highlighted as a negative influence: ‘‘One thing that has bothered me from the beginning… is that there are two messages that are being shouted loud and clear and they’re conflicting. It makes it really difficult when you are starting out here…. there must also be some recognition of what it takes to be a good lecturer because it’s not just standing up there, it’s hours of preparation, it’s writing out notes for the students, it’s really well thought out lessons…. I think many people just become so despondent then eventually they just remain in the teaching side of things, or they go over to the research and just by nature of trying to be a good researcher your teaching is going to be neglected.’’ (Wendy) The reach of the environment extends beyond the university itself, to the country with its research ratings system and a world-wide university culture, which leads Kirsty to observe about maintaining good teaching, ‘‘It is an uphill battle’’. Archer sees constraints

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other than the most stringent, as circumnavigable, depending on our ‘‘knowledgeability and commitments’’ (2007, p. 10). They require more energy and expense to resist. One could argue that Wendy, Kirsty or Cyril have the energy to circumnavigate the constraints generated by mixed messages with regard to the role of teaching. Crawford (2010) writes that the constraints or enablements in a structure only have impact if individuals perceive them as being relevant. An interesting example of the importance of perception is Servaas, who as a senior professor, consciously volunteered to teach first-year students in 2011. He was responding to a widely held belief at the University that the quality of new first-year students was deteriorating due to the reforms in the school curriculum. In his case this perceived problem led to a positive and agentic step, unlike many academics at the University, who would simply see this as a constraint. The data from this study suggests that constraints may be absolute or partial, and in a small number of cases, actually unleash creative energy. These responses depend partly on the severity of the constraints, as Archer suggests, and partly on the level of agency of the individuals. Dispositions The second dimension we used for categorising data in relation to ‘‘becoming’’, is that of lecturer dispositions, in which we included values, attitudes and emotions. These would all reside within the notion of agency. In this study no lecturers mentioned extrinsic factors enabling their sense of agency and most provided examples of how their own values motivated them to sustain themselves as good lecturers. The values of sustainability and human rights motivated Cyril to teach geography to pre-service students: ‘‘To me the most important thing in my teaching is what underpins my teaching. It’s more respect for the other. That is what is at the basis of why I am doing what I am doing… That’s why I can work right through the night just on one lecture because I know I am not preparing for the students in my class. I am also preparing for all those who will get to the class of that teacher one day.’’ (Cyril) Nixon et al. (2001) refer to commitment to one’s students and commitment to society as attributes of a ‘‘new academic professionalism’’. Wendy typifies this commitment to students: ‘‘it’s a very expensive exercise, so I feel that part of my responsibility of being employed as a lecturer is providing a service and I think that that’s an understanding that contributes to me doing my best because I feel students are here and I’m here to provide a service for them.’’ (Wendy) Lecturers also mentioned values that pertain specifically to the South African sociopolitical context. Mahlubi, who teaches isiXhosa to non-native speakers of the language, is motivated by the value of diversity and what he refers to as ‘‘nation building’’: ‘‘I am driven by the passion to teach my language and cultures to our students, a great step towards unity in diversity and nation building’’. A significant disposition for academics is curiosity about the discipline, or even curiosity about students and student culture. Well into his fifties and a professor of theology, Servaas is fascinated about modern pop culture and the lyrics in the music the students listen to. He also volunteers to teach first-year students in order to learn more about how the new school curriculum is preparing students for university. He is driven by his love for innovation, ‘‘I think there is one mortal sin and that is probably boredom, I would be simply bored out of my wits to just repeat the same stuff’’.

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Steps taken to enhance teaching Reflection is the most common enhancement activity cited by the lecturers. Sizwe writes notes about his reflections after each lesson: ‘‘I make sure that after each and every lesson, I sit down, I can call it ‘‘in-service training’’, I sit down and say, ‘‘OK let me look where I can do better, and where did I lose my students, and where did I push them too fast?’’ (Sizwe) While reflection may be an act that a lecturer consciously performs, it is also attitudinal, a way of responding analytically or critically to information that comes his or her way. Cyril described his reaction to the letter from the top-performing student in this manner: ‘‘Oh I can tell you I am very critical about my own work and I’m very aware of all my gaps…. But for the first time when I started to read what [the student] wrote about me, it gave me a better understanding of what she is getting from me, or let me rather put it, what I have helped her to start to see…. I looked through that booklet that we got after the award ceremony, it can be quite interesting to go and analyse what were the things, what are the common threads in the students’ comments.’’ (Cyril) Reflection is also about being open to criticism from others, ‘‘so I stopped doing [an activity in the classroom], because I felt that was a bit unfair to them, so I am open to any criticism that students have’’ (Lee Anne). As an example of practical steps taken, only Cyril mentioned writing a paper about teaching for a scholarly journal. This is not surprising, given the low value traditionally accorded to publishing on teaching as opposed to publishing in one’s disciplinary area of expertise, in research-led institutions. Another step taken was to innovate. Wendy successfully introduced an essay into the mathematics class. Many of the respondents mentioned constant and careful preparation, which, in line with Berliner’s triad of influences on good teaching (2001), could also be seen as an activity undertaken to improve teaching.

The significance of the interplay between structure and agency The study supports the notion of an interplay between structure and agency, which has been demonstrated in relation to the dimensions of biography, current contextual influences, lecturer dispositions, and steps taken to enhance teaching. The interviews demonstrate that being a good lecturer involves a great deal more than a static set of skills, personality attributes or knowledge. Biographical and immediate contextual features constrain or enable the lecturer to exercise agency. Agency in the higher education teaching and learning domain is exemplified by many self-initiated activities such as reflection, innovating, engaging in scholarship, and on occasion, by working against the grain. Agency is not free floating, but emerges from, and impacts on, the various contexts and personal attributes. Archer (2000, p. 50) puts this succinctly, ‘‘Our continuous sense of self, or self-consciousness, is advanced as emerging from the ways in which we are biologically constituted, the way the world is, and from the necessity of our human interaction with our external environment’’.

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This study has taken place in a specific research-led and comparatively privileged institutional context in South African terms—one that features only some aspects of structure. Certain enabling structural elements, especially material, are taken for granted by individuals in a setting like the one described in this study. Thus it is only by investigating the interplay between structure and agency comparatively, in conditions of deprivation as well as contexts of plenitude, that one can assess how aspects of an environment may influence the interplay of agency and structure. The concept of agency is often deployed in relation to individuals having to go against the grain in obvious ways, for example working class students entering academia (Clegg 2005). To gain a more embracing understanding of the concept, contexts such as the one referred to in this study, where constraints might be more subtle, are also important. The interplay between structure and agency has implications for strategies for the professional development of academics. It points to the need to take institutional context as well as lecturers’ contextually influenced biographies into account. It suggests maximising the lecturers’ commitments, values, and most significantly, their sense of self-worth. The removal of disabling rules, counteracting a culture which undervalues teaching—the features which might constrain the emergence of agency—are very possibly more appropriate elements of such a strategy, than extrinsic forms of motivation such as greater awards or rules or exhortations of how to teach better. In the same way that educators are frequently exhorted to take into account their students’ prior learning, perhaps it is time to take into account and respond to the biographical and structural features that have constrained or enabled an individual academic’s trajectory, and that continue to do so. Recognising that there are many more facets to being and becoming effective in one’s role as university teachers—and acknowledging that these multiple facets interact in a variety of ways—offers a cautionary to heads of academic departments and academic development practitioners not to take the lived experience of the academics they work with at face value. Even a university teacher who has been recognised for her or his good teaching has in all likelihood done so as a result of a unique interplay between the structure and agency that comprise their lived experience. A one-size fits all approach becomes inappropriate in this situation. Thus this interplay points to the importance of contextually sensitive professional development, and teaching and learning enhancement policies and programmes. The significance of human agency, and of intrinsic motivation in particular, points to the need for close attention to institutional cultures and discourses that value teaching as an important aspect of the academic enterprise, and to the need for the promotion of opportunities for academics to take conscious steps to enhance their own practices such that they too might reflect, ultimately, on having experienced ‘a wonderful life’. Acknowledgments Thanks to Kevin Williams for providing a constructive and critical response to a draft of this paper.

Appendix 1: Lecturers interviewed See Table 1.

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Author's personal copy High Educ Table 1 Lecturers interviewed and their details Lecturer (pseudonym)

Faculty

Gender

Race

Seniority

Awards

Cyril

Education

M

B

Lecturer

Nominated by first-year student in 2009

Servaas

Theology

M

W

Professor

Rector’s award—2009

Lee Anne

Economics and management sciences

F

W

Lecturer

Nominated by two first-year students in 2009; 4 students in 2008

Percival

Health

M

W

Professor

Nominated by first-year student in 2009; 2008

Kobus

Agric

M

W

Professor


Wendy

Science

F

W

Lecturer

Nominated by first-year students in 2009

Mahlubi

Arts

M

B

Lecturer


Sizwe

Military

M

B

Junior lecturer

Was ‘‘junior best lecturer’’ in 2009 in Military Academy

Marcus

Engineering

M

W

Professor

Rector’s award in 2003

Kirsty

Arts

F

W

Associate professor

Nominated by two students in 2009; 2 students in 2008; received the Rector’s award in 2007

Appendix 2: Interview questions 1. 2. 3. 4.

What What What What

are the attributes that characterize you as a ‘‘good lecturer’’? facilitates your becoming and remaining a good lecturer? prompts you to want to enhance your teaching? could be done to enhance your being or becoming a good teacher?

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