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How do we enable transformative university transitions?

by Rita Hordósy

The Covid-19 pandemic meant a ‘swift and acute’ disruption to student experiences through the ‘dissolution of the physical and social environment’, and immediate financial hardship experienced by many. The issues of student retention, success, connectedness, and feeling included remain pressing issues for current entrants. To look at what it means to become a university student and a graduate, and to understand these issues in the whole student lifecycle, it is useful to draw on experiences from before the pandemic. Using yearly interviews with 40 home, undergraduate full-time students who started their studies in 2013/2014, my research at an English northern red brick university (NRBU) focused on how students understood, and made sense of, their experiences of student life as they moved into, through, and beyond university. All outcomes (research reports and papers) of this project are available via this link.  

Through the market system, a homogenised university experience became something packaged and sold, with the social elements all being included in the price tag to market one particular version of being at university. However, university choice and participation is experienced differently in a system that remains stratified and socially segregated, with large variety in student budgets creating differential contexts for learning.  

University space and time 

To make sense of how the university space and time are felt by students, I conceptualised transformative university transitions as a dynamic, perpetual and uncertain series of changes and movements through time and space to become a university student, and subsequently a graduate. For James, NRBU and its city as the spaces for reflection are intricately linked to who he became throughout the four years of his BA and MA: 

You, kind of, realised the limits of yourself and you realised the potentials of yourself, and that means that it harbours a weird significance, (…) that, kind of, roots you here. Not as intimate as it is your home, but as a second home of a place where you can feel like you belong, and that it is your city. James, fourth interview 

The overall university time is often understood based on the cycles of the academic year, chronicling how their approach changed to the wider community, their own learning and their future. Assessing her university time, Mary discusses the complex interlinks of exploring questions of identity, her relationships to others, and shifting focus on her university studies:   

I think I can’t imagine my life if I hadn’t gone [to university]. (…) It’s made me the way I am, I think. I absolutely loved Uni. Each year was so different as well, for me it was quite distinct. The first year was sort of a bit mental and kind of discovering who I was and all that… Second year was probably the worst. (…) I got a First but I don’t know, I think the change from the first year felt difficult. (…) I tried to calm down a bit in the second year but I went too far and I just had a boring time. And then third year I kind of had a bit of a balance between the two. (…) my life here was set up and I liked the house, and I was in a good relationship, do you know what I mean? And the course was getting really good and the dissertation…

[Mary, fourth interview]

The changing foci – as discussed below – of becoming social, academic, and a university graduate can be understood as stressors, where budgeting constraints and financial futures cut across all else, and can cause constant friction for the poorest students. Similarly, physical and mental ill-health of students, their families and friends, sometimes with tragic outcomes, can have a profound impact on their experience and outcomes.   

Social aspects of acclimatisation 

Although the first academic year is characterised by a sense of arrival, the new environment, timeframe, concepts, rules and especially new peers make university transitions emotionally overwhelming. The predominant stress factor throughout this period relates to the social requirements of university life, with the first few weeks even more tumultuous. However, centring living in university halls, joining sport clubs and other extracurricular participation can be exclusionary through high costs or basing it on excessive alcohol consumption. 

Finding a university community is key: the experience of being a student is constructed in social spaces, to be retained through the friendships made, ‘who I’ll keep in touch with forever’ [Chris, fourth interview]. The importance of peer groups relates to solving everyday issues and information gaps, support in their studies, and learning from and about each other in a broad sense, as Olivia points out: 

I think just learning off people has been, like, probably the most important thing actually, and not even from studies. (…) the people that you meet and the groups that you go to, through university, things you feel that become really important to you.

[Olivia, fourth interview] 

Upon finding a social fit within the university community, students talk about seeing beyond the initially perceived homogeneity and coming to appreciate the diversity across the institution. This then allows them to ‘stick out’, but also orientate themselves towards their academic duties.  

Learning to be academic 

Given learning experiences exist on a continuum within the life course, students will initially attempt to adapt their (often unsuitable) learning and revision techniques, whilst also grappling with a new learner identity. Upon gaining some level of familiarity and comfort with how the university operates, the academic aspects start falling into place. This tends to coincide with the second year, where the narrower and deeper focus on the subject area is compared to the broad and disjointed nature of the first academic year. 

To conquer the complex and unbounded nature of university knowledge, most students start actively prioritising and being selective on the basis of perceived importance within and between modules, tailoring the academic experiences to their needs. Students actively seek out more personalised relations with university staff and start go recognise the wide range of attitudes and interests of their tutors and lecturers. For instance, Kim discusses how her relationship with one of her lecturers changed over time: 

I think it definitely gets more friendly towards third year, there was one lecturer that we had in first year who was terrifying. (…) But then we’ve had her for a module this term and she just chats to people, she makes jokes in the lectures, she’ll show you pictures of her dog and stuff. I feel like they become a bit more friendly with you, as if you’re on the way to being on their kind of level intellectually maybe, as well as more mature.

[Kim, third interview]

Countering the alienation of the first academic year, second and especially third year students start to feel that they are known, and seen as individuals. The personalisation of learning along the clearly defined interests and the growing independence allow for creation of knowledge. Dissertations as capstones mean students become experts in an area they are passionate about: Aina, in her Masters year expressed her goal of ‘contributing to the actual field [of research] and just developing my career’ through a PhD. It is indeed through becoming passionate via the university studies, extracurricular activities, internships and part-time jobs that helps formulating career plans.

Towards becoming a graduate 

Throughout the final year, time once more becomes tumultuous, given the concerns around finishing university and figuring out what is next. As opposed to initial career ideas that looked at the ‘rest’ of the students’ lives, the later interviews saw their thinking focus on a shorter time-horizon. Robert tentatively embraces the uncertainty, keeping his options open: 

It’s not like I’m stuck down one route now. I’ve still got a whole load of different things to choose from, which is bad in a way, because it means I’ve got to make a decision at some point about what I’m going to do and it might be easier if someone just went “there, do that”.

[Robert, fourth interview]

This element of making important decisions prompts a distinction of ‘proper jobs’ versus ‘bog standard jobs’, with some graduates opting for ‘graduate gap years’. What some participants describe as a ‘random’, ‘bog standard’, ‘shitty’, or ‘normal’ job, tends to be in an industry not related to their degree: in catering, retail, service industry or the care sector. Such roles are considered short term, offer substantive flexibility for the graduate, do not require specific qualifications, and are not competitive – simply put, students are not invested in them. Conversely, graduate jobs are described as ‘real’, ‘adult’, ‘proper’, ‘a more academic’, a ‘career kind of’ job that they ‘would enjoy’. These are in sectors and industries they are striving to work in, and necessitate a degree and some specific skills. These competitive roles require flexibility from the graduate, but remunerate better, whilst also promising career progression. The ‘real’ jobs necessitate emotional investment and dedication, with constraints on leaving these roles. 

There are three key features of how graduates are thinking about their futures. First, they see themselves as graduates of their course at NRBU, hoping to work in a related sector, using their disciplinary knowledge or employing some specific skills they developed. Second, graduates aim to find an employer or role they can believe in, wanting to see the value of their work on a smaller scale and generally do good in the world – this is sometimes juxtaposed with prioritising earnings. For instance, Khaled in the third interview talks about a ‘materialistic view’ of ‘just doing [a job] because I’m getting money’ not fitting with how he ‘was brought up to think’, connecting this to his working-class background. Finally, they also reflect on their newfound confidence: in their abilities, them as people in social contexts, knowing their own strengths and weaknesses. It is this confidence that allows graduates to embrace the complexity of potential options and the trade-offs, as well as non-linear and serendipitous futures. As Amina suggested:   

I have changed, it’s been, I don’t know how to describe it, (…) I’m not the same person I was when I first initially started personality-wise. I’ve got so much more self-confidence in me as well, which I’ve never had and I’ve learned so much over the past three years (…) I’ve changed in every possible way someone could change.

[Amina, third interview] 

Recognising the multitude of dimensions at play, a diverse and interlinked set of future plans emerge, entangled in a commitment to personal concerns, values and identity, social relationships, belonging to a community and a place, as well as the wider structural constraints. Such limits are linked to financial insecurity and a sense of urgency to find a job, any job. Further, with fewer family connections future graduates are less likely to gain suitable work experience or help with job applications. 

How to enable transformative university transitions?  

Through their non-linear, multidimensional, and diverse transitions, this generation of students became (mostly) independent and (certainly) reflexive adults. University as a transformative space and time is much more than an investment into one’s human capital that should pay off as employment opportunities and earnings, or the way to fulfil short-term labour market needs. Graduates become engaged members of a broader community, gain substantive expertise in their chosen area of interest, and develop a broad plan for their futures.   

To foster transformative transitions for all, embracing the diversity in student and graduate experiences that also change over time is key. This means, first, knowing who students are, using sufficient scaffolding to make knowledge accessible, and fostering an inclusive university community. Second, a whole-institutional support provision throughout the student lifecycle that understands transitions as changeable and diverse could ensure more equitable access. Finally, stable and substantive non-repayable financial support is fundamental to level student experiences for those from poor backgrounds, especially in the context of the current cost of living crisis.     

SRHE member Rita Hordósy is a Nottingham Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, and a co-convener of the SRHE Student Access and Experience Network. Her current research compares and contrasts the research / teaching nexus across European universities in Hungary, England and Norway. This blog is based on her recent paper ‘I’ve changed in every possible way someone could change’ – transformative university transitions’, in Research Papers in Education.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rhordosy

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SRHE News at 50: Looking back…

by Rob Cuthbert

SRHE News is now 50 issues old, covering a momentous 12 years for higher education worldwide, but especially in the UK, and even more especially in England – an opportunity to reflect on what we thought and how we felt as it happened, and whether things seem different now.

Since 2010 the UK has seen four general elections, four prime ministers, and in England nine Secretaries of State for Education, and seven ministers for higher education (two appointed twice). In that time Brexit accounted for much political turmoil but ‘got done’, after a fashion. Undergraduate fees were trebled, to deliver most tuition income via students rather than a funding agency. The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 aimed to enshrine the market with students as customers, and established the Office for Students. There was much political talk of ‘low quality courses’; the Teaching Excellence Framework rose and fell. Two Research Excellence Framework exercises continued the remorseless evidence-defying concentration of research funding. Publishing worldwide was roiled by open access initiatives, especially the EU-inspired ‘Plan S’. Vice chancellors’ salaries soared into the stratosphere but more and more staff joined the precariat; industrial action became commonplace as job insecurity and low pay for many was aggravated by swingeing reductions in USS pension entitlements. Covid disrupted everything with a lightning shift towards online learning amid much student dissatisfaction, but enrolments surged. Government incompetence accentuated massive problems with school examinations and HE admissions, with disruptive enrolment changes rippling across the entire HE system. As HE coped with all this it was assailed by politicians wanting to fight culture wars, and cronyism installed apparatchiks where once there had been civil servants.

After the first issue of SRHE News in February 2010, No 2 (The World to Come), came out just before the May 2010 election with HE facing major financial cuts, but we were still upbeat:

… in difficult times let us think not only of what the community can do for our institution, and what our institution can do for our students. Those things are important, but let us think too of what our higher education sector, working together, can do for the community in the difficult world to come.

Optimism dwindled as fees were tripled; No 3 asked ‘What Next?’, and the 2010 SRHE Conference feared the worst:

Two issues came through strongly at Conference … first, that this might be the end of the idea of higher education as a public/social good; and second, that the Government has chosen to deconstruct one of the UK’s greatest achievements – a higher education system which until now is still the envy of many other nations and a highly successful export brand. This is a high stakes gamble with the life chances of a whole generation. (No 4 The English experiment)

No 5 asked: Is SoTL special and precious, or too special and too precious?, suggesting that universities should take their share of responsibility for the plight of HE:

For many of our universities the “student experience” has become the organising concept, the fount of a thousand strategic priorities and key performance indicators. But the student experience tends to be conceived as if the interpretivist paradigm had never existed, becoming no more than a quantitative summation of student surveys and managerialist evaluations. The ‘student experience’ has become a stick to beat academics with, instead of the carrot that motivates them. It has also become a tool for reductionism, as students are driven ever closer to being the consumers and customers which neither they nor their teachers wish them to be. The student experience is conceived as some kind of unified average instead of being celebrated for its individually constructed uniqueness.

No 6 urged us to reframe (This isn’t why I came into higher education) and No 7 said we should be Taking the long view of higher education reform, in contrast to the short-termism embedded in HE policy, exemplified by The ‘failure’ of the CETLs and the usefulness of useless research  (No 8):

… how ‘useless’ or ‘useful’ was the scholarship of teaching and learning embedded in or stimulated by CETLs and the CETLs programme as a whole? The HEFCE-commissioned evaluation tells us only that it was not very ‘useful’ in the terms defined by the current policy framework. It tells us next to nothing about its value in other frames of reference, or even in a policy frame over a longer timescale.

In 2012 the Finch review of options for academic publishing seemed immediately to have got it wrong, as later experience showed:

… we must look beyond Finch for the open access formula that ‘maximises benefits and minimizes risks’. (No 9 ‘Open access’ publishing: is gold overpriced, is green more sustainable?)

As the year progressed we were thinking about the future (No 10 Strengths, weaknesses and the future of research into higher education) and asking ourselves at the 2012 Conference What is higher education for?’ (No 11). In early 2013 we hoped that good sense might yet prevail:             

HEFCE still might, as the Government White Paper suggested, take the lead among the various sector regulatory bodies such as QAA and OIA, all having set their face against the super-merger to create a super-regulator hypothesised but not thought through by the Browne Review. (No 12 Hanging by a thread)

Alas, it didn’t:

Just like the railways, the national system of HE in England is being dismantled, with new forms of competition being imposed or encouraged. Public subsidies will continue, but in a much less transparent form, which will presumably provide growing profits for new HE providers. The rationale for spending cuts and wholesale privatisation is increasingly challenged. In sum, we seem to be edging closer to repeating the history of rail privatisation. It may not be Virgin territory, but is higher education on the right track?” (No 13 On the right track?)

Universities minister David Willetts left in a Government reshuffle in mid 2014:

… after all the noise about open access, the UK is left with a model which is out of line with the emerging preference of most of the developed world, and provides public subsidies for big publishers. This is not paradox but consistency. In open access to research, as in open access to undergraduate opportunities, David Willetts professed to improve standards and openness but his legacy is worsened access for some, increased cost and debt for many, a transfer of public funds to private sector providers, and a system which is likely to cost the government more than the system he inherited. (No 17 This is an ex-Minister)

However, his tenure was probably the high point of the last 12 years. After musing about Degrees of freedom (No 14) by early 2015 we had resorted to satire (with topical cricket references):               

This editorial is in affectionate memory of policy making for English higher education, whose demise is deeply lamented. (No 15 Reputation in Ashes)

But some of the problems of HE are self-inflicted: the woeful experience of UNC Chapel Hill was an example of

… a long-term institutional systemic failure of academic accountability and quality assurance. The sorry saga reminds us that while embracing plurality and difference in higher education is a necessary condition of academic excellence, inspiring future generations also needs a sufficient measure of the more prosaic virtues of compliance and accountability. (No 18 Embracing plurality and difference in higher education – necessary but not sufficient)

By 2015 we were picking over REF outcomes (No19 Was that a foul REF?) with football analogies. We lamented the tragic loss of our former SRHE President (No 20 David Watson, 1949-2015), sadly just before he and we were able to celebrate 50 years of the Society (No 21 Special 1965-2015 Valuing research into higher education: advancing knowledge, informing policy, enhancing practice).

In October there were Green shoots but no Green Paper (No 22) but, when it finally appeared, we could only speculate, gloomily: Where do we go from here? (No 23):

The Green Paper on HE issued in November 2015 suggests that the problem with English HE is its failure to embrace the market, red in tooth and claw; the Government proposals are designed to accelerate market forces and promote competition as the solution. Teaching in some places is ‘lamentable’: solution, a Teaching Excellence Framework which sorts out sheep, goats and others, and rewards them accordingly. It is still too difficult for new providers to enter the HE market: solution, levelling the playing field to make it much easier for entrants with no track record. The market isn’t working properly: solution, sweep up most of the key agencies into a new super-regulator, the Office for Students, which will put students’ interests ‘at the heart of the system’, to echo the previous White Paper – on which there was much ado, but almost nothing to show. And much more, but with a consistent theme in which students are the key customers and what they pay for is simply economic advantage in the workplace. In 50 years we have come a long way from Robbins and ‘the general powers of the mind’, let alone the ‘transmission of a common culture’.

David Watson, with his memorable analysis of the ‘Quality Wars’, was still our guide:

Central administrators trying to standardise and ‘calibrate’ that which should be diverse do so at their peril. External examining is quintessentially subjective: academic standards are those which academics agree to be the standards, through legitimate processes. What matters are robust and rigorous processes; ‘calibration’ (if it means measurement, as it almost inevitably would) is not necessary and probably not achievable. Grade inflation is a systemic risk when competition treats students as customers: it is a predictable outcome of Government policy. The HE Academy research suggests some grade inflation at the margins; that we have not seen more is a tribute only to academics’ concern for standards in the face of institutional pressure for better ‘results’ to improve league table position. (No 24 The Thirty Years Quality War)

The Brexit referendum in 2016 gave us a new Prime Minister but by analogy suggested that parts of the HE establishment were ripe for change (No 25 Universities reel after Hexit vote). No 26 (‘May in October: a climate change for HE?’) asked: would the new PM mean changes to HE policy? Not at all:

Smita Jamdar, partner and head of the education team at lawyers Shakespeare Martineau blogged for WonkHE about the Bill … “Some, maybe even a lot, of this may change as the Bill works its way through Parliament, but the main principles on which it is founded are unlikely to. We will undoubtedly be left with a more explicitly regulated, less autonomous and less stable English higher education sector, with greater risks for prospective students, students and graduates alike. I only hope that the upside, whatever Ministers think that might be, is worth it.” (No 27 Post-truth and the Higher Education and Research Bill)

In 2017 amid political ferment we asked What’s wrong with higher education management? (No 28):

The responsibilities of HE’s governors and senior managers are clear: to stand up for the best of academic values and to be transparent about their motives – supporting sustainable research and teaching. Their role is not to be a transmission belt, either for unthinking performance measurement from above or for unthinking academic populism from below. They need to rediscover, where it is lost, their responsibility to lead the institution by exercising their independent value-based judgement, and to educate those inside and outside the institution about the legitimate perspectives of other stakeholders in the higher education enterprise, and about the inevitability of disagreement and compromise.

And then in No 29 ‘What’s wrong with politicians in HE?’:

The storm brewing since the election was sparked into life by the intervention of Lord Adonis, self-styled architect of the fees policy and director of the No 10 Policy Unit under Tony Blair. It captured all the worst features of politicians in HE in one episode: selective attention to issues; pursuing personal interests in the guise of caring about the issue; selective memory; rewriting history; not taking advice from people who actually know how a policy might work; and – worst of all to academics – contempt for evidence.

The prospects for HE looked increasingly bleak (No 30 ‘HE finance after Hurricane Adonis’) and       

The excessively economic framing of HE policy is ‘nonsense on stilts’, and it will sooner or later collapse under the weight of its own absurdity. (No 31 Nonsense on stilts)

The government overreached itself with its winner-takes-all mentality to quango appointments, when the execrable Toby Young’s appointment to the Office for Students board was overturned (No 32: The Toby Young saga and what it tells us about the blunders of our governments):

DfE civil servants trying to respond to the Commissioner for Public Appointments were between a rock and a hard place. Saving the minister and his fellow-travellers in OfS from their mistakes was a hard place to be, but the civil servants’ biggest mistake was losing hold of the rock of civil service integrity.

But it wasn’t just ‘them’ doing it to ‘us’:

Too many ‘academic staff’ are less likely to see the bigger picture, and more likely to weaponise educational and academic values for some real or imagined battle with ‘the university’ or one of its malign manifestations: ‘the management’, ‘the admin’ or sometimes just ‘them’. But it does not need to be like this. (No 33 Doing academic work)

Populism and Donald Trump’s ‘fake news’ had taken hold in the USA; the UK had its own problems:

The Times leader writer represents a culture where distrust of the rigour of the social sciences is all too common, fuelled not only by hoaxes such as these, but also by every instance of academics who slip into unthinking intolerance of anything but a dominant perspective. The appropriate response to alternative views is rigorous examination sufficient to assess their worth, not a priori dismissal. … The price of academic freedom is eternal academic vigilance. (No 34 Fake research and trust in the social sciences)

By January 2019 we had resorted to more football analogies (No 35 Academia: the beautiful game?):

… more research is needed. And more teaching. And better policy, leadership and management. Then academia could be a beautiful game.

The open access movement was regrouping for a fresh onslaught:                              

Plan S is higher education’s version of Brexit. It may not have generated quite as much media coverage as that unreal thing, but it has its full share of intransigent minorities, suspicion on all sides, special pleading, accusations that the elite is merely looking after its own interests, and claims that a voiceless majority will be the ones who suffer the most. (No 36 Axe S?)

Meanwhile, Philip Augar’s postsecondary review, commissioned long before by PM Theresa May, had been published after a long delay, amid scepticism that it might ever see its proposals implemented:

… former education secretary Justine Greening had said it was “inconceivable” that the new Prime Minister would adopt the Augar review plans. She “believes that the model she explored in government of funding English universities through a graduate contribution plus a “skills levy” on employers could be taken up by the next prime minister.” Her plan would abolish tuition fees and loans … the Augar review’s recommendations were “hugely regressive” in increasing the burden on low- and middle-earning graduates, while lowering it for those on higher incomes … It is possible to take a very different perspective on Augar, as Nick Barr (LSE) did in declaring it progressive rather than regressive, simply because it proposed to redress the balance between FE and HE. But Greening’s comments are directed more towards heading off the Labour Party’s putative promises on tuition fees, returning to a pre-Augar position which re-institutionalises the chasm between the HE market and the micromanagement and planning of FE. (No 37 Augar and augury)

No 38 echoed that plus ça change vein (#AbolishOxbridge (or, the survival of the elitists)) and by January 2020 widespread industrial action was reflected in No 39 Happy new year? If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here:

The employers are between a rock they did not create and a hard place which they have brought on themselves. The hard place is the deep concerns of many staff about their workload and working conditions, the precarity of their employment, their pay and pensions.

And then came Covid lockdowns, bringing even more work for some, while others had too much time on our hands, so SRHE News offered a new kind of diversion – an SRHE-themed cryptic crossword. Its conspicuous lack of success did not deter a second attempt before we admitted defeat. No 40 advised What to do in the pandemic but No 41 (On not wasting a good crisis) criticised national responses:

It seems that in English higher education, some people have been determined not to waste the Covid19 crisis, either as an opportunity or as a threat. How well have they done? Consider the efforts of the Office for Students, Universities UK, and the government in England.

The A-levels debacle of 2020 prompted reflections on Policymaking in a pandemic (No 42):

My HEPI blog on 16 August 2020 about the A-levels debacle said: “for five months the Government and Ofqual have been too secretive, made bad choices, refused to listen to constructive criticism, tried to tough it out and then made the wrong concessions too late.” Not decisive, not inclusive, not transparent, and not how to make policy in a pandemic.

Things hadn’t got better in January 2021 …

What are the key issues in HE quality and standards, right now? Maintaining quality and standards with the massive transition to remote learning? Dealing with the consequences of the 2020 A-levels shambles? The student experience, now that most learning for most students is remote and off-campus? Student mental health and engagement with their studies and their peers? One or more of these, surely, ought to be our ‘new normal’ concerns. … For government, the new normal was just the same as the old normal. (No 43 Quality and standards in higher education)

… they just got worse, with the appointment of Lord Wharton as chair of OfS …

We need more people, leaders and staff on all sides, to speak truth to power – not just playing-to-the-gallery ‘our truth’, but a truth people inside and outside HE will find persuasive. (No 44 Cronyism, academic values and the degradation of debate)

… and worse:

In sum, government HE policy is in something of a hole, pursuing internally contradictory policies which might play to a wider ‘anti-woke’ agenda but in economic and political terms seem likely to run counter to any thoughts of levelling up. But the Secretary of State keeps digging, even after the great A-level disaster of 2020. It may not be too long before this becomes another fine mess. (No 45 Another fine mess)

But when PM Johnson finally reshuffled Education Secretary Gavin Williamson out of digging an even deeper hole, all we could do was hope:

We can hope that the faux outrage of the culture wars and the faux consultations on decisions already made might give way in future to something more approaching evidence-based policy and proper consultation. (No 46 English higher education policy: hope and pay)

The spectacular success of the online 2021 SRHE Conference allowed us to get back to basics:

… does research into HE also need to (re)connect and (re)build? What exactly is the territory for research into higher education now, what needs to be joined up, where should we be building? … several maps and guides … suggest a field that is maturing rather than one in immediate need of reconnection and rebuilding.(No 47 Are these transformative times for research into HE?)

 

But soon we discovered in detail how the crony-laden Office for Students proposed to attack HE’s basic values:

In 699 pages of consultation the OfS has done its bureaucratic best to profess transparency, openness and rigour, while diverting our energies and attention from what an experienced ministerial adviser called the ‘assault on the values which our HE sector holds dear’. The consultations amount to a detailed enquiry about how exactly these values should be assaulted. We are in a consultation tunnel with only one track. What we can see is probably not the light at the end of the tunnel, it may be the lights from an oncoming train. (No 48 Tunnel vision: higher education policy and the Office for Students)

In July 2022 SRHE was rocked by the end of The Helen Perkins era (No 49):

For so many SRHE members, Helen Perkins and the Society have been inseparable and it will be hard to imagine SRHE without her. But the academic and financial health of the Society have never been better, and the staff team she created but now leaves behind is a strong guarantee that SRHE will continue to develop and prosper.

For 12 years SRHE News has aimed to fulfil the ambitions of the editorial in SRHE News No 1:

SRHE News is changing, with a new editor, a new format, and some new ambitions. SRHE News will carry official communications from the Society, comment on developments in the field of research into higher education, and provide news and current awareness for the research community. The News will have a global perspective and the balance of content will reflect members’ interests. I hope we can make SRHE News a publication that informs and entertains SRHE members – academically credible journalism with a unique research-into-HE perspective.

The 2014 Conference set new challenges for SRHE News, starting with the launch of srheblog.com. We imagined that SRHE might ultimately create:   

… a website for research into HE which is:

  • differentiated and searchable, so that specialists can easily find the research that particularly interests them – as if Google Scholar had been tailored just for people doing research into HE
  • interactive, so that you can find other people with similar interests and engage in structured and unstructured discussions with them – as if SRHE Networks had suddenly gone 24/7 digital and local wherever you are
  • constantly refreshed and updated with new entries, with a range of regular targeted communications for which anyone could sign up and sign out at any time – like The Chronicle of Higher Education, the best kind of newspaper sites, or the Impact of Social Sciences blog
  • genuinely global in its reach, to promote capacity-building, inclusion for isolated researchers and breadth for researchers wishing to learn from other perspectives
  • accessible for non-specialists and useful as a vehicle for communicating research results to a broader public and improving research impact
  • entertaining, informative and readable, like SRHE News
  • and free (No 16: Sustainable blogging)

We’re still working on it …

Rob Cuthbert, editor of SRHE News and Blog, is emeritus professor of higher education management, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Fellow of SRHE. He is an independent academic consultant whose previous roles include deputy vice-chancellor at the University of the West of England, editor of Higher Education Review, Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and government policy adviser and consultant in the UK/Europe, North America, Africa, and China.

Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk, Twitter @RobCuthbert.


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Education from scratch, or resisting the lure of the oven ready meal

by Karen Gravett

Ready meals can be enjoyable, quick and simple to make. And yet we know that prioritising a diet of oven ready dinners is not really good for us. What does this have to do with education? The educational equivalent of the oven ready meal is the ‘best practice’, the quick fix principle that seduces teachers into thinking that generalised solutions can solve knotty educational challenges.  In 2007, Gert Biesta explained clearly ‘Why what works won’t work’. Biesta’s argument is that generalised strategies for addressing educational challenges are problematic, as such prescriptions for practice severely limit the opportunities for educators to make judgments in ways that are sensitive to and relevant for their own contextualized settings.

Despite Biesta’s wise words, today the pressure upon university educators to fix educational issues – to resolve students’ dissatisfaction with feedback, to ‘solve’ student engagement, remains stronger than ever. Attempts to simply synthesise the findings of educational research are common, and requests that educators provide simple, digestible ‘best practices’ have assumed even greater volume.

It is easy to understand why. Simple solutions that promise ‘quick wins’ are intensely desirable in our busy and competitive sector, where evidencing teaching enhancement really matters. Complex conversations involving theory and nuance? Less so. Like an oven ready lasagne, the best practice solution offers speed, simplicity, and consistency, but perhaps little actual goodness.

But educators also know that the teaching environment is far from consistent. It is rarely simple. Rather, it is messy, emergent, patchy, emotional, material, complex, and shifting moment to moment. Indeed, the limits of context-free ‘best practices’ are only becoming more evident as student and staff populations diversify, and as educators understand more about how to recognise and respond to that diversity. If we take assessment feedback as an example, how can any simple solution claim to offer a context-free best practice? Yes, dialogic feedback has been shown to be useful and powerful, but we cannot simply ask teachers to engage students in dialogue and assume that they will take on board a teacher’s feedback, in order to develop themselves, and improve. There are multiple reasons why dialogue might be inhibited including poor communication skills, a lack of time and space, a lack of motivation, miscommunication, power relations between students and staff of race, gender, class and disability, technological affordances and constraints, and so on. The teacher needs to consider what is taking place within the situated practice (Gravett 2022), as well as their own values as a teacher, making judgments as to how to proceed within that specific interaction. As Sian Bayne and colleagues (2011) explain: ‘best practice’ is a totalising term blind to context – there are many ways to get it right’.

Inevitably, others will pose (at least) two objections to this call to embrace complexity. Firstly, they may say − but what is the point of educational research if it does not generate solutions, solve problems, and create scalable implications that can easily be placed in the educational microwave? I suggest that educational research is about giving colleagues the confidence to ‘educate from scratch’. It encourages teachers to think about the ingredients of teaching and learning. If we think about our example of the student-teacher feedback interaction, then yes dialogue is important, but educators need to take time to look at the ingredients of effective dialogue rather than assuming that meaningful communication is simple and easy to achieve. As Elizabeth Ellsworth explained: ‘Acting as if our classroom were a safe space in which democratic dialogue was possible and happening did not make it so’ (1989, p315). Space, time, relational connections premised on openness and trust, shared understanding, all of these are the ingredients of effective communication. Yes, fostering student engagement is important, but educators need to look at the social and material contexts of the specific class or interaction in order to consider what practices to employ at that moment, and moreover, how to evolve such practices as situations change.

So what does education from scratch mean? It means thinking about:

  • The uncertainty, risk and complexity inherent in educational practices
  • Our own values as teachers and the impact of these values on our teaching
  • The specific sociomaterial environment we are working within, both disciplinary and at the level of the class and interaction. What might be the material or temporal constraints that impact upon our practice?
  • The particular learners that we are working with in that context. What matters to them?
  • How we can evolve our practice as situations change?

The second objection may be: but today’s teachers don’t have time to develop thoughtful, relational pedagogies! I agree that time is often short. Education from scratch might not be easy or quick. But a permanent diet of ready meals, pedagogies bleached of richness and complexity, would be too high a price to pay. Rather, we can learn from educational research, and from the ideas of colleagues, in order to gain insights that direct our own situated judgments. To develop ‘different ways to see’ (Biesta, 2020).

Fortunately, there is a great deal of fantastic, and thoughtful practice in our sector, but we need to continue and expand upon this, inspiring educators to have confidence to explore their own situated learning environments and to value those nuanced, micro-moments of learning and teaching. By broadening our understanding, we can explore a wider range of meaningful, critical and relational pedagogies, that we might be able to use to develop educational interactions that really matter.

References

Bayne, S, Evans, P,  Ewins, R. Knox, J, Lamb, J, Macleod, H, O’Shea, C, Ross, J, Sheail, P and Sinclair, C (2020) The Manifesto for Teaching Online Cambridge: MIT Press

Biesta, G (2007) ‘Why “What Works” Won’t Work: Evidence-based Practice and the Democratic Deficit in Educational Research’ Educational Theory 57: 1-22

Biesta, G  (2020) Educational Research: An Unorthodox Introduction London: Bloomsbury

Ellsworth, E (1989) ‘Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy’ Harvard Educational Review 59 (3)

Gravett, K (2022) ‘Feedback Literacies as Sociomaterial Practice’ Critical Studies in Education 63:2 261-274

Gravett, K (2023) Relational Pedagogies: Connections and Mattering in Higher Education London: Bloomsbury

Dr Karen Gravett is Senior Lecturer at the Surrey Institute of Education, where her research focuses on understanding learning and teaching in higher education, and explores the areas of student engagement, belonging, transition, and relational pedagogies. She is Director of the Language, Literacies and Learning research group, Co-convenor of the SRHE Learning, Teaching and Assessment network, and a member of the editorial board for Teaching in Higher Education. Her work has been funded by the Society for Research in Higher Education, the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education, the British Association for Applied Linguistics, the UK Literacy Association, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.


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Understanding the student experience better

by Phil Pilkington

The benefit of the SRHE and its Blog has been in providing a sense of community for those who have to and do think about the purpose, the benefits and the travails of higher education. There have been insights shared and arguments made. It is the stuff of academia.

My interest in the student experience has been accompanied by an enormous increase in research in this area. This increase can be quantified, should you wish, by the number of papers cited under the rubric ‘Students’ in the SRHE Research Abstracts. Thirty years ago, students were a marginal, barely visible interest relative to the concerns of ‘management’ and ‘governance’ which were brought about by the changes by Jarrett, Sir Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker and onwards. It has been suggested that with the ‘customer is king’ since 2010 there is a need to know about your customers, the students allegedly at the heart of things. Hence the growth in the research into the student experience. This narrative is, however, a misapprehension of the beginnings of the interest in the student experience and does SRHE a serious disservice. There are a number of prior claims for this growing interest.

Firstly, the growth in student numbers, especially in what was once the ‘public sector’ of polytechnics and FE colleges, with an actual reduction in university places in the short term (in the early 1980s) created a more diverse student population in terms of ethnicity and social classes, and challenged institutional practices, often by direct challenges from the students and their representatives. There are many examples of such challenges at a micro level: enrolling Sikhs without clan names and other antiracism practices; multi-religious communities and pastoral care; pedagogy for commuter students; childcare et al. Each subset of these practices brought with them, or borrowed from external practices, the knowledge of the changing sector. The growth from elite to mass and to a universal HE system meant the universities were no longer monocultural. (Some HEIs have taken longer than others to catch up with this; some have yet to do so and this in itself is a fresh research area. Stories of ‘class hatred’ at Durham and Bristol come to mind and prompt the question: do greater economic disparities bring about greater cultural changes and animosities? They do, but how and why?)

Secondly, there were a number of academic staff who were not only exercised by the lack of research on the increasing diversity and the increases tout court, of the student body, but were also finding alliances and partnerships with non-academic staff, support staff or professional services staff. Some of these relationships were at a local level, some encouraged by management and much of the research was influenced by practical local needs rather than publication. Much of the collaborative work on the student experience had an action-learning or ’activist’ character to it in challenging and proposing change to practices. Research into the student experience had often been for the purposes of campaigning for change (eg changing teaching and assessment practices for the disabled) and SRHE’s ‘community’ welcomed that too. Conversely, the conventional SRHE research was applied by the campaigners for changes to both practice and outlook, eg Mantz Yorke’s research on reasons for dropping out, dispelling myths of alcohol abuse as a cause and highlighting choice of course (and lack of clarity about the curriculum) as the primary cause of dropping out.

Thirdly, the growth in institutions’ student numbers also meant an increase in specialist staff whose focus was on supporting students. These staff often belonged to professional bodies and postgraduates in their disciplines (counselling, dyslexia testing). Their insights into student behaviours and experiences as generalised or generic were above the departmental and faculty limits of many academics which also challenged the traditional and now often dangerous practices and roles of personal tutors. An added factor in collaboration was the growth in specialist staff within students’ unions and NUS. The latter had a strong and broad-based research team, especially strong in areas of national interest such as housing and financial support and student debt. At the local level, students’ unions had the everyday experience of welfare cases and the shortcomings of teaching and learning practices; articulating the ‘student voice’ to the management. It was the interrelationship between local support services that would provide a holistic approach to the student experience: welfare and education were being understood as intimately connected at the individual cognitive and the structural levels.

These factors were all either in place or forming into working relationships for shared practice and research before the final step to the neoliberal misnomer of ‘customer is king’ by 2012/13. SRHE played an important part in this growth of interest and initiated much with the creation of the Student Experience Network and the related student experience conferences. The former is still thriving having merged with the Access Network.

It is a mark of considerable progress that students are no longer ‘the other’ as they were thirty years ago, although there are occasional manufactured ‘moral panics’ about plagiarism, grade inflation, cancel culture (wars) and the threats to the sector’s autonomy as a consequence of these alarums (fines, new powers of the OfS, et al). And may the progress continue. Attainment gaps, the socio-economic inequalities of access, the toxicity of league tables, the intellectual fragility of satisfaction surveys and more, all call for more work. But if there is a need to open up a new field of research, and there is, then may I make a modest proposal that the governance of the sector needs greater examination. The sector has over the last decade been confronted with challenges unique to the UK as an outlier, or as a pastiche of the US sector, which has forgotten its history: student debt (or write-off), the growth of the academic precariat, the subsidiarisation or outsourcing of all but the core of HEIs, the delusions of autonomy challenged by practice, and a simple view of causality of study to financial rewards belying the conditions of the hierarchy of the sector. It would be of some purpose for an added focus on not the new management models, which are of limited variety given the external challenges, but the infiltration of the governance of HEIs with the values of those agents who have brought about the challenges of the last ten years. SRHE would then be reaching out to the field of the political economy of higher education and there is perhaps a dearth of such research. And from the bottom up: some reflections on the actual experiences of those engaged in the practicalities of marshalling ‘free speech’, engaging with the everyday problems of plagiarism, etc.

SRHE’s contribution to the understanding of the student experience and its application to changing practices has been and continues to be valuable – of public good. It was much needed by all parties working in and experiencing the sector. There is a need for a historical narrative and new conceptual tools to describe where and what the sector is now in facing (and facing off?) the xenophobic populism that has put the sector in its current parlous position. As someone once said: we make our own history but not as we wish; or, it is that we don’t make history, we are made by history. Was that Marx or Martin Luther King Jr? Actually, it was both; King seems more Hegelian than Marx. Research on the student experience helped HEIs to understand the new landscape of a universal system. Help is needed to understand the forces and values which are changing the nature of academia and what counts as knowledge.

Phil Pilkington’s former roles include Chair of Middlesex University Students’ Union Board of Trustees, and CEO of Coventry University Students’ Union. He is an Honorary Teaching Fellow of Coventry University and a contributor to WonkHE. He chaired the SRHE Student Experience Network for several years and helped to organise events including the hugely successful 1995 SRHE annual conference on The Student Experience; its associated book of ‘Precedings’ was edited by Suzanne Hazelgrove for SRHE/Open University Press.


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Interdisciplinarity

by GR Evans

Historian GR Evans takes the long view of developments in interdisciplinary studies, with particular reference to experience at Cambridge, where progress may at times be slow but is also measured. Many institutions have in recent years developed new academic structures or other initiatives intended to promote interdisciplinary collaboration. We invite further blogs on the topic from other institutional, disciplinary, multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.

A recent Times Higher Education article explored ‘academic impostor syndrome’ from the point of view of an academic whose teaching and research crossed conventional subject boundaries. That seemed to have made the author feel herself a misfit. She has a point, but perhaps one with broader ramifications.  

There is still a requirement of specialist expertise in the qualification of academics. In its Registration Conditions for the grant of degree-awarding powers the Office for Students adopts a requirement which has been in used since the early 1990s. An institution which is an established applicant seeking full degree-awarding powers must still show that it has “A self-critical, cohesive academic community with a proven commitment to the assurance of standards supported by effective quality systems.”

A new applicant institution must show that it has “an emerging self-critical, cohesive academic community with a clear commitment to the assurance of standards supported by effective (in prospect) quality systems.” The evidence to be provided is firmly discipline-based: “A significant proportion (normally around a half as a minimum) of its academic staff are active and recognised contributors to at least one organisation such as a subject association, learned society or relevant professional body.” The contributions of these academic staff are: “expected to involve some form of public output or outcome, broadly defined, demonstrating the  research-related impact of academic staff on their discipline or sphere of research activity at a regional, national or international level.”

The establishment of a range of subjects identified as ‘disciplines’ suitable for study in higher education is not much more than a century old in Britain, arriving with the broadening of the university curriculum during the nineteenth century and the creation of new universities to add to Oxford and Cambridge and the existing Scottish universities. Until then the medieval curriculum adapted in the sixteenth century persisted, although Cambridge especially honoured a bent for Mathematics. ‘Research’, first in the natural sciences, then in all subjects, only slowly became an expectation. The higher doctorates did not become research degrees until late in the nineteenth century and the research PhD was not awarded in Britain until the beginning of the twentieth century, when US universities were beginning to offer doctorates and they were established as a competitive attraction in the UK .

The notion of ‘interdisciplinarity’ is even more recent. The new ‘disciplines’ gained ‘territories’ with the emergence of departments and faculties to specialise in them and supervise the teaching and examining of students choosing a particular subject. In this developing system in universities the academic who did not fully belong, or who made active connections between disciplines still in process of defining themselves, could indeed seem a misfit. The interdisciplinary was often disparaged as neither one discipline nor another and often regarded by mainstream specialists as inherently imperfect. Taking an interest in more than one field of research or teaching might perhaps be better described as ‘multi-disciplinary’ and requires a degree of cooperativeness among those in charge of the separate disciplines. But it is still not easy for an interdisciplinary combination to become a recognised intellectual whole in its own right, though ‘Biochemistry’ shows it can be done.

Research selectivity and interdisciplinarity

The ‘research selectivity’ exercises which began in the late 1980s evolved into the Research Assessment Exercises (1986, 1989, 1992, 1996, 2001, 2008), now the Research Excellence Framework. The RAE Panels were made up of established academics in the relevant discipline and by the late 1990s there were complaints that this disadvantaged interdisciplinary researchers. The Higher Education Funding Council for England and the other statutory funding bodies prompted a review, and in November 1997 the University of Cambridge received the consultation paper sent round by HEFCE. A letter in response from Cambridge’s Vice-Chancellor was published, giving answers to questions posed in the consultation paper. Essential, it was urged, were ‘clarity and uniformity of  application of criteria’. It suggested that: “… there should be greater interaction, consistency, and comparability between the panels than in 1996, especially in cognate subject areas. This would, inter alia, improve the assessment of interdisciplinary work.”

The letter also suggested “the creation of multidisciplinary sub-panels, drawn from the main panels” or at least that the membership of those panels should include those “capable of appreciating interdisciplinary research and ensuring appropriate consultation with other panels or outside experts as necessary”. Universities should also have some say, Cambridge suggested, about the choice of panel to consider an interdisciplinary submission. On the other hand Cambridge expressed “limited support for, and doubts about the practicality of, generic interdisciplinary criteria or a single interdisciplinary monitoring group”, although the problem was acknowledged.[1]

Interdisciplinary research centres

In 2000 Cambridge set up an interdisciplinary Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. In a Report proposing CRASSH the University’s General Board pointed to “a striking increase in the number and importance of research projects that cut across the boundaries of academic disciplines both within and outside the natural sciences”. It described these as wide-ranging topics on which work could “only be done at the high level they demand” in an institution which could “bring together leading workers from different disciplines and from around the world … thereby raising its reputation and making it more attractive to prospective staff, research students, funding agencies , and benefactors.”[2]

There have followed various Cambridge courses, papers and examinations using the term ‘interdisciplinary’, for example an Interdisciplinary Examination Paper in Natural Sciences. Acceptance of a Leverhulme Professorship of Neuroeconomics in the Faculty of Economics in 2022 was proposed on the grounds that “this appointment serves the Faculty’s strategy to expand its interdisciplinary profile in terms of research as well as teaching”.  It would also comply with “the strategic aims of the University and the Faculty … [and] create a bridge between Economics and Neuroscience and introduce a new interdisciplinary field of Neuroeconomics within the University”. However the relationship between interdisciplinarity in teaching and in research has still not been systematically addressed by Cambridge.

‘Interdisciplinary’ and ‘multidisciplinary’

A Government Report of 2006 moved uneasily between ‘multidisciplinary’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ in its use of vocabulary, with a number of institutional case studies. The University of Strathclyde and King’s College London (Case Study 2) described a “multidisciplinary research environment”. The then Research Councils UK (Case Study 5b) said its Academic Fellowship scheme provided “an important mechanism for building interdisciplinary bridges” and at least 2 HEIs had “created their own schemes analogous to the Academic Fellowship concept”.

In sum it said that all projects had been successful “in mobilising diverse groups of specialists to work in a multidisciplinary framework and have demonstrated the scope for collaboration across disciplinary boundaries”. Foresight projects, it concluded, had “succeeded in being regarded as a neutral interdisciplinary space in which forward thinking on science-based issues can take place”. But it also “criticised the RAE for … the extent to which it disincentivised interdisciplinary research”.  And it believed that Doctoral Training Projects still had a focus on discipline-specific funding, which was “out of step with the growth in interdisciplinary research environments and persistent calls for more connectivity and collaboration across the system to improve problem-solving and optimise existing capacity”.

Crossing paths: interdisciplinary institutions, careers, education and applications was published by the British Academy in 2016. It recognised that British higher education remained strongly ‘discipline-based’, and recognized the risks to a young researcher choosing to cross boundaries. Nevertheless, it quoted a number of assurances it had received from universities, saying that they were actively seeking to support or introduce the ‘interdisciplinary’. It provided a set of Institutional Case Studies. including Cambridge’s statement about CRASSH, as hosting a range of externally funded interdisciplinary projects. Crossing paths saw the ‘interdisciplinary’ as essentially bringing together existing disciplines in a cluster. It suggested “weaving, translating, convening and collaborating” as important skills needed by those venturing into work involving more than one discipline.  It did not attempt to explore the definition of interdisciplinarity or how it might differ from the multi-disciplinary.

Interdisciplinary teaching has been easier to experiment with, particularly at school level where subject-based boundaries may be less rigid. There seems to be room for further hard thought not only on the need for definitions but also on the notion of the interdisciplinary from the point of view of the division of provision for posts in – and custody of – individual disciplines in the financial and administrative arrangements of universities. This work-to-be-done is also made topical by Government and Office for Students pressure to subordinate or remove established disciplines which do not offer the student a well-paid professional job on graduation.

SRHE member GR Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge.

[1] Cambridge University Reporter, 22 April (1998).  

[2] Cambridge University Reporter, 25 October (2000).