Researching teaching and teaching research: On the subject/s of Education.
Professor Sue Middleton Department of Policy, Culture & Social Studies in Education School of Education University of Waikato Private Bag 3105 Hamilton New Zealand.
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Paper presented at the International Colloquium, Policies And Practices For Academic Enquiry, Marwell Conference Centre, Winchester, UK - 19/21 APRIL 2007 .
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The invitation sent to delegates attending this colloquium asks us: to develop international understanding of the ways in which institutional and state/system policies can, and arguably should, be developed or modified to promote the integration of the core activities of teaching, research and scholarship and, increasingly "service" or "knowledge transfer" (scholarship of engagement). I approach this from the point of view of the subject ‘Education’.1 Like some other “vocational” subjects, Education has, from its beginnings, been characterised by tensions between its theoretical, or academic, dimensions and the imperatives of professional credentialing. Like Nursing and Social Work, Education has been subject to frequent debates over its status and placement: whether it ‘properly’ belongs in the academy, in separate training colleges, in polytechnics or in a workplace apprenticeship system. In New Zealand, as in Britain, Education’s story is one of compromises, splits, restructurings, dispersions and relocations of its various functions and components. But there is something about Education that makes it unique: its objects of inquiry include the very systems and institutions in which we, as Educationists, and our students - many of whom are student teachers - work, the pedagogical processes in which we are engaged, and which we also have to help our students learn how to do and critique. In the case of Education, the place of “teaching” is central: we teach, our students teach; we teach and critique our own, and our students’, teaching. A matrix of theoretical, empirical and practical knowledge, Education “exists” in multiple sites and forms. As a subject taught and examined in universities, Education has the epistemological and organisational characteristics of a recognised body of academic knowledge. Albeit usually in less articulated forms, educational theories (about knowledge, children, learning, teaching etc.) underpin educational policies at national and institutional levels and these are often objects of public debate and political contestation, as well as academic engagement. Educational ideas emerge from, and give shape to, the rules, maxims, guidelines and hunches that guide everyday pedagogical practice. Educational theories, then, whether explicit or implicit, are deeply inscribed in the multiple settings in which we as academics research, teach, think, critique, consult, advise, administer and converse.
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I use a capital E when Education refers to Education as a subject, discipline, or body of knowledge. A lower case ‘e’ is used when discussing education as an activity or process.
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The term reflexivity describes the “special difficulties” that emerge when we “study the social world in which we are involved”” (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 1. [emphasis in the original]). A reflexive teacher education develops students’ knowledge and understanding of the “locatedness” of their own, and their pupils’, educational experiences, methods and perspectives: historical, cultural, political, geographical, biographical and so on. A reflexive teacher-education graduate is curious about, and engaged in continual inquiry as to, the nature of children, families and communities, their colleagues, current systems, policies, and curricula. Whether in a pre-school, school, or higher education setting, good teaching is as much a process of knowledge-creation as it is of transmission – in other words, it involves a kind of research. To split apart the activities of teaching and research/ scholarship undermines the very conditions that make education possible. The following brief history of Education’s changing configurations in New Zealand, illustrates how, although such splits have characterised the subject since its beginnings, its wider collective mission has been accommodated by encouraging some individuals to pursue “service roles” instead of what was traditionally regarded as “research”. I illustrate with small clippings from over 250 interviews with New Zealand Educationists gathered in a series of projects on educational ideas: an oral history of teaching (Middleton and May, 1997), a history of the PhD in Education (Middleton, 2001; 2007) and research on the impact of New Zealand’s version of the RAE (the PBRF) on Education (Middleton, 2008 forthcoming). I argue that new policies requiring all individual academics teaching degree courses to “be researchers” will undermine Education’s wider mandate for service to the teaching profession. The subject/s of Education: A brief history. To do any form of intellectual work requires “an idea or representation you have of yourself as doing that thing” (Said, 1993, p.xii). It involves intellectual mastery of subject matter and psychological processes of identification. Sociologists have studied academics’ changing senses of professional identity through “analysis of identity within institutional levels … and the analysis of projected official identities at the level of the state” (Bernstein, 2000, p.204). Official (external) identities are projected into academics by authorities via statutes, regulations, handbooks, templates, contracts and job descriptions: current New Zealand university employment documents defining these as “teacher”, “researcher” and “manager/ administrator/ leader” (Middleton, 2008 forthcoming). The restructuring of systems and institutions often changes identitypositions available to academics, for whom professional identity formation is “a
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continuous and reflexive process, a synthesis of (internal) self definition and the (external) definition of oneself offered by others” (Henkel, 2005, p. 157). The external identities available to Educationists mirror the subject’s historical ambiguity as a (low status) university degree subject and as part of a non-degree teachers’ college qualification. Following Britain, New Zealand university BA degrees of the post-World War Two decades required Education graduates to have mastered four constituent disciplines: philosophy, history and sociology of education, and educational psychology, intended as complementary components of “a pluralist vision of educational studies that sought to draw on a wide range of human knowledge and experience” (McCulloch, 2002, p.103). Each was rooted in a “parent” discipline with its own journals, conferences and networks. Staff and graduate students sometimes identified with the parent discipline, writing for its conferences and journals rather than for its educational derivative. Bernstein (2000) claims that this encouraged “inward” looking, narcissistic, or introjected, collective and personal identities. While the foundation Education disciplines were taught in universities, teacher education’s professional dimensions were relegated to the ‘methods’ components taught in teachers’ colleges. An epistemological split between academic (discipline-based) and applied (professional/practicum) components was configured by a segmentation of courses taught in university Education departments and courses developed for teaching diplomas in colleges. College curriculum departments focused on the learning and teaching of specific school curriculum subjects. Colleges also had their own Education Departments. College students were not always qualified to take university Education courses, but those who were often did degree units in Education concurrently with college diploma courses. As in Britain, “two types of mud would stick: university teacher training is too academic and it is not academic enough” (Richardson, 2002, p.40). Until the 1960s, primary school teachers graduated from colleges with a diploma: to complete a BA degree required additional study at a university. University studies in Education were set apart structurally and epistemologically from the professional practice requirements. A binary between theory and practice, mental and manual, intellectual and worker, researcher and teacher was systemically entrenched (Alcorn, 2004; 2006). From the 1960s there were increasing, if vague, expectations for university Education staff to undertake some kind of research or scholarship, but it was not so for staff in colleges of Education, although a few voluntarily engaged in such activities. Many of New Zealand’s most influential and remembered education intellectuals did not work in universities or write for refereed journals. In our interviews with teachers and former teachers, names of Education intellectuals who had been a lasting influence
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recurred. While some, such as James Shelley (1920s-30s) and Jack Shallcrass (1960s80s) did teach in universities, they published little in refereed journals: Shelley was renowned as a provocative teacher, public speaker and entertainer, and Shallcrass for his radio commentaries and weekly columns on education in the New Zealand Listener. Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1960s-80s) achieved international fame by disseminating her educational ideas in the form of fictional autobiography and autobiographical fiction (Middleton, 2006). From the early 1960s, the introduction of Bachelor of Education degrees in universities involved some college staff in degree teaching. Only universities could confer degrees: college staff could contribute, but not control, degree curricula. Many students went out teaching with the three year college diploma and completed a fourth university year part-time to gain the B.Ed. College and university staff taught in teams; college staff enrolled in qualifications supervised by university colleagues. Joint research projects emerged. It was usually staff in colleges’ Education (rather than curriculum) departments who were in such close relationships. An interviewee noted, “That still persists. The Education people have more contact with the university.” During the 1990s, government zeal for market-driven tertiary education (Olssen, 2001) saw degrees introduced in polytechnics, colleges of education and the new Māori institutions, wānanga. The 1989 Education Act (New Zealand Government, 1989) defined the characteristics of the various types of Tertiary Education Organisation (TEO) and established a New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) to approve and monitor degrees outside the university sector. Colleges of education and polytechnics, quick to take this opportunity, set up three-year Bachelor of Teaching degrees, which undercut the more expensive four-year university –approved qualifications taught jointly by university and college staff. With government now refusing to fund a fourth year, universities shortened their qualifications. Teacher education’s theoretical components were drastically reduced and falling enrolments in social science and humanities faculties threatened the viability of Education as a major for these students. Education’s theoretical, disciplinary base was undermined and professional (particularly school curriculum) courses gained ascendancy. The Education Act ruled that NZQA could award degree status only to qualifications “taught mainly by people engaged in research” (section 254(3)(a)). College and polytechnic degree teachers, not previously required to be research-active, were pressured to re-invent themselves as researchers: “NZQA pointed their finger at me at the degree approval process and said, ‘you have to get a doctorate’". The Act defined colleges of education as “characterised by teaching and research required for
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the pre-school, compulsory and post-compulsory sectors of education, and for associated social and service roles” (section 162(4)(b)(ii)). College staff’s service roles included contributions to the teaching profession – writing national curricula or textbooks for schools. The NZQA’s definition of research was flexible enough to encompass some of these service “outputs” (Alcorn et al, 2004) and the development of research cultures that could include small action research projects on staff teaching practices “counted” in some institutions (Fergusson, 1999). However, under pressure to upgrade qualifications and assume a “researcher” identity, many “felt vulnerable in the presence of people who already had their masters or their doctorates and wanted to validate their classroom experience”. From the 1990s, amalgamations of teachers’ colleges and polytechnics with universities intensified pressures towards research activity. Unlike the college and polytechnic degrees, university degrees were not subject to NZQA’s authority. The Education Act characterised universities as “primarily concerned with more advanced learning, the principal aim being to develop intellectual independence” (Section 162(4)(a)(i)). Universities’ academic freedom was mandatory: they “accept a role as critic and conscience of society” (Section 162(4)(a)(v)). Universities’ “research and teaching are closely interdependent and most of their teaching is done by people who are active in advancing knowledge”(Section 162(4)(a)(ii)). Once a former college was amalgamated into a university to form a School/ Faculty of Education, would “advancing knowledge” include the former college service roles? Amalgamations required geographical shifts of staff. University Education department staff moved out of social science or humanities blocks in their universities and into former college buildings. For both groups, these physical, organisational, and interpersonal changes provoked insecurity and anxiety: “Status or lack of status became an extremely important personal feeling. We would feel like we didn't have the status that the people from the [university] Education Department had.” A curriculum specialist said: “It was very fraught. The academics who had to come across, I didn't know who they were. They didn't resonate with my department. I was always aware that I was not one of the academics”. Another had been employed as “a good curriculum practitioner” and experienced “a big tension between who I am and what I do as a good subject specialist and the other profile we have to have in the university, which is to publish.” Conversely, a lecturer with a doctorate was marginalised by her new curriculum department’s lack of research culture: “research was something that was done by certain august persons, but the people on the ground floor just taught.”
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The 1990s saw rapid growth in the numbers of masters and doctoral enrolments as reclassifications of the work of TEO staff required them to upgrade qualifications, develop research “skills,” and produce quality-assured “outputs.” The theoretical nature of some post-graduate courses seemed remote from the backgrounds and concerns of many TEO staff and school- teachers returning to study. Internationally, the roles of the academy, the workplace, and the sponsors of research were being theorized in terms of new modes of collaborative, situated (Mode 2) knowledge production (Gibbons et al, 1994). Similar ideas informed the introduction of professional doctorates. While some Doctor of Education degrees were simply PhDs with coursework, others experimented with workplace-based collaborations between researchers in higher education and education professionals in schools. Could research design, evaluation, dissemination and ownership also be a partnership between academic and professional? Green and Maxwell (2001) see some of the new doctorates as challenging the very definitions of research. PBRF: New Zealand’s first RAE As in Britain and Australia, recent restructuring of research funding for New Zealand’s TEOs is “outputs-driven.” The research component in equivalent full-time student (EFTS) enrolment funding is being replaced by a contestable Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) to increase “the quality of research through peer assessment and performance indicators” (Ministry of Education, 2002, p.17). Research funding is being allocated on the basis of three, differentially weighted, “elements” of each TEO’s research performance over a six year period: 25% for its external research income, 25% for research degree completions, and 60% for “the research quality of its staff, based on peer review” by 12 panels of experts in a subject, or group of subjects (Tertiary Education Commission, 2003, p. 11). Education had its own subject panel. Unlike Britain’s RAE, the units of assessment of research quality are not departments, but individuals. Accordingly, in 2002, every degree-level teacher submitted a personal Evidence Portfolio (EP) listing all quality assured research outputs, evidence of peer esteem, contributions to the research environment, and brief descriptions of four nominated best research “outputs”. Institutions awarded each EP a provisional grade, confidentially communicating these to staff. Provisionally graded EPs were sent to the 12 subject panels for final evaluation. Months later, participants received their confidential personal grades – a “mark” of A, B or C (if deemed “research active”) or ‘R’ (“Research Inactive’). Collective grades and rankings of subjects and institutions were made public
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(Performance Based Research Fund, 2004). Despite its relatively high number of A and B rated individuals, as a subject Education’s collective ranking was amongst the lowest (Alcorn et al., 2004). Institutions and media berated Education’s “huge research inactive tail” urging remedial action to help it catch up with high scoring subjects like philosophy or physics (Middleton, 2005). The PBRF’s research assessment exercise is a site of “struggle to produce and institutionalise particular identities” (Bernstein, 2000, p.66). Before its introduction, some Education staff self-identified as “researchers”, but others chose: “curriculum leader”, “intellectual”, “activist-writer”, “poet and literary critic”, “musical director/ conductor” etc., illustrating Bernstein’s claim that “the analysis of identity within institutional levels” may conflict with “the analysis of projected official identities at the level of the state” (2000, p.52). Interviewees’ “internal” professional identities fell into three main categories. “The academics” were familiar with, and comfortable in, a university research culture. “Curriculum staff” were former college of education staff whose contracts had not previously required research and who had prioritised “service roles” to the teaching profession. “Researching professionals” were those whose identities bridged boundaries between academic and curriculum. They had usually worked in college Education departments, and regarded new imperatives to research as an opportunity to upgrade qualifications, teach degree courses, and identify as researchers. The academics, the curriculum staff and the researching professionals – all integral to Education’s collective mission, were affected by the PBRF in different ways (Middleton, 2008, forthcoming). At the time of writing (February 2007), research assessment in Britain and Australia is under review (Adams & Smith, 2006; Sheehan, 2006) and New Zealand’s PBRF concluding its second (but partial) round (allowing exemption for those who scored well in 2003 and who wish to retain their grade until its regular 6 year cycle completes in 2012). A new category for beginning researchers has been added. All degree staff are still required to participate and this will perpetuate the systemic bias against Education and similar professional credentialing subjects (nursing, social work, etc.). Integrating teaching, research and "service roles" in Education. Policy-makers, and university managers hoped that the PBRF would offer “a means of securing additional public resources for New Zealand’s universities and in a manner that would help protect, if not increase, the degree of institutional and sectoral differentiation” (Boston, 2006, p.6). It was designed to “claw back” into universities the research “top-up” EFTS funding that, since the introduction of degrees in institutions other than
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universities, had been increasingly dispersed. However, this disadvantages some professional university subjects that include practicum components in their degrees, despite the fact they include a critical mass of high performing individuals. In relation to other subjects, and internally to the discipline, as with Britain’s RAE (McNay, 2003), in Education the PBRF “preserves structural relations between social groups but changes structural relations between individuals” (Bernstein, 2000, p.xxiv). The PBRF projects onto all degree staff the external identity “researcher,” citing the Education Act’s requirement that NZQA-approved degrees “be taught mainly by people engaged in research.” This is driving a wedge through Education as a subject, exacerbating differences and inequalities between “professional-practitioners” and “researchers”, encouraging the second and discouraging the first. The reclassification of professional practice experts as “inactive” meant that many “experienced what is, to some a sense of crisis and loss. Cherished identities and commitments have been undermined and, for some, this has been experienced as an assault on their professionalism” (Beck & Young, 2005, p. 184). The imperative to research for all degree teachers undermines teacher education’s service roles: My appraisals were reinforcing initially the service component to go out to schools and conferences. They are now very clearly saying, ‘Stop doing that, start doing more formal work with what you're thinking and writing.’ It's a big change and partly that's PBRF driven. However, in prioritizing the sections of the Act referring to NZQA-approved degrees, this policy overrides the sections devoted to defining a university and a college of education. Colleges of education are, today, amalgamated and subsumed into universities. According to the Act a university degree is taught mainly by those “active in advancing knowledge”(Section 162(4)(a)(ii)), a description that better accommodates the “service roles” mandated for colleges of education (section 162(4)(b)(ii)), and now a requirement for University based teacher education. A way round this would be to allow the practical components of university-based teacher education degrees to include a proportion of staff (say 20%) who are honorably exempt from PBRF surveillance. Unlike today’s “senior tutors” (teaching-only positions), these professional practice staff would have an equal, but different, career track. They could apply for sabbatical leave and spend it in “service roles” or other local or overseas professional settings. They would write and publish, but in professional/ consultancy outlets. Promotion opportunities and pay scales would be equivalent to those of research
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track staff. Reporting a proportion of Education staff as “exempt” - rather than, as currently, “Research Inactive” (failures) - in PBRF’s league tables, would put Education on a level playing field with other subjects, raising its status without undermining its wider mission. Educationists’ experiences also illustrate some wider worrying implications of recent policies across the disciplines more generally with respect to academic freedom. Projected official identities are being internalised as career aspirations: “I can aspire towards the A research category. It is personal ambition. It has become something I can aim for”. Numerical scores signify, or reify, identity: “Getting the Cs to Bs” or “I’m an A.” The PBRF was described as: “an uncomfortable sort of reminder at the back of most things now, around the university. There's pressure to do things that are ‘PBRF-able’.” Taking on institutional service roles (head of department etc.) might get in the way of research productivity: “The PBRF creates quite selfish careers. If you're going to be successful in that exercise then it's for yourself - not having a commitment to the department.” Some spoke of a new self-consciousness, “which occasionally takes the form of self parody like, ‘Gee, that could earn you a few brownie points’.” There was a more calculating attitude to be “smart and strategic about both where I publish, how I choose, and who I choose to publish with.” Some will no longer consider local (New Zealand) journals: “I went to the Web of Science, looked up the journals that had the highest rating or ranking in terms of Education, and thought, ‘Right. The next article that I submit, I am going to submit it to this highest ranking journal.’” Positioning recipients as commodities of economic value, good scores are being used in promotion, job and grant applications; as currency in the “accumulation of a symbolic capital of external renown” (Bourdieu, 1988, p.98). In New Zealand, as elsewhere, Government policies are increasingly based on (often commissioned) “evidence-based” research. While programmes like the NZ Ministry of Education’s TLRI encourage support some smaller-scale collaborative projects with multiple methodologies (Alcorn, 2006), there are signs of a wider political drive towards prioritizing medical-style “gold standard” work, an approach seldom used in Education in New Zealand (Crothers, 2005). New Zealand’s Education Act requires universities, and their staff, to develop intellectual independence and to “accept a role as critic and conscience of society” (section 162(4)(a)(v)). Determining academic priorities according to an external agenda, in order to “get an A”, “be classified as research active,” or “be competitive” marks a shift away from the Education Act’s mandate that universities “develop intellectual independence” and act as “critic and conscience of society” by advancing knowledge through research, teaching, and service roles.
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