For some PhD students attending conferences, research seminars and so on means getting a break from research and it means leaving the library or the lab. During the pandemic everyone has started working remotely and has become only virtually accessible. Cancelling planned face to face events to avoid social contact has made our life extremely quiet and isolated. However, this unusual situation has given me time to reflect on the importance of attending conferences, seminars and other events related to my field. Since the lockdown I have had the chance to attend webinars organized by SRHE. I was lucky to listen to talks on different topics and this opened new ways of thinking about a topic, giving me access to new ideas that I had previously never thought about. This blog reflects on a webinar I attended recently on ‘Undertaking Literature Reviews’ which took place on 29 April 2020, hosted by SRHE. Even though I had attended a seminar on Literature Reviews (LR) two years earlier, during my first year of study, I still had some remaining questions: What type of review did I carry out in my study? And, Where does my voice come into my review? Hoping to get answers to these questions from the presenter as well as from other researchers I was happy to attend the online webinar without wasting time travelling long distances.
Before the start of the webinar we were provided with slides and articles to discover different approaches to the literature review, which can either shape the chapter for the proposed study or provide a background for an academic article. The material suggested three broad approaches: narrative, systematic and theoretical. The Narrative approach is a review that tries to tell a story, reviewing the extant literature as a way of attempting to summarise what has been written on a particular topic. The systematic approach is a way of reviewing literature by using more objective criteria with a goal of summarising enormous amounts of research, scientifically tracking them for quality control. The theoretical approach is a review that covers the history of different meanings given to key terms in a study that has accumulated evidence in regard to concepts, theories or phenomena. The overall aim of the LR is to persuade other scholars in the field of your command of the relevant literature. My own original LR had been a narrative review in a more traditional way that most doctoral researchers tend to follow, mixing concepts and case studies, organising them under big themes followed by subthemes. I chose this approach to show the research committee what I know about my topic. This type of narrative LR helped me to understand my topic by focusing precisely on the context of my research and in establishing the theoretical framework of the study.
From the beginning of the seminar I noticed how the presenter warmly welcomed attendees, letting them introduce themselves by asking the reasons for attending this webinar and their expectations. Even though we were all connected online maintaining physical distance, by introducing ourselves and reflecting on the question ‘why we are attending this online seminar’ we softened the boundaries. Participants came from different backgrounds: experienced supervisors; university lecturers; PhD students like me; and people interested in pursuing a PhD in the future. They all had different reasons to join this online event; some of them had professional interests and wanted to get some suggestions for dealing with their own students` questions; some like myself were undertaking doctoral research of their own and were returning to LR in that context. The webinar description on the website was a clear prospectus: by attending this webinar we would be able to answer questions on the objectives of LR, examine epistemological assumptions about LR and engage in discussion by comparing the types of LR.
The facilitator of the webinar, Dr Michael Hammond (Warwick), started his talk by inviting participants to think about the question, ‘Why do we do LR?’ The answer to this question was a major theme that would guide us through the whole seminar. One answer was that it is a way of knowing where you fit in. The LR must not only demonstrate that I understand debates and conversations, but how my research will contribute to the field. In other words I should be able to create an argument as to why my work is relevant to my field by evaluating conversations surrounding my work describing their weaknesses and strengths.
We also discussed finding the gap that our research addresses, and the importance of finding models of methodology to orient oneself – in carrying out a literature review can you find a study that follows a methodology that you want to use? A literature review should be a critical examination of what has come earlier. I was inspired by thinking about the value and status of literature and we all got the chance to ask questions. One participant wanted to understand where the researcher’s voice comes in the review and shared her view that the voice of the researcher comes from what you choose to cite. Another participant raised the question of what to do if the researcher finds that an existing literature review has already covered the things that you want to discuss. The presenter explained you can re-present past reviews in ways that are more relevant for your particular research question but there was always the opportunity to update any review.
Later we were invited to discuss LR in groups. It was an enjoyable experience, with Zoom creating space for individuals to share their views and experiences of doing reviews. After a while we returned to our main group space. I felt because of this that online events could follow some of the processes common to face to face working. Thanks to the questions raised during the discussion and by sharing my own experience I gained more understanding of LR and had some answers to the questions that I had in my mind.
In conclusion the presenter showed us ways of organising the literature review by using different tools like Endnote and Mendeley. I noticed how the facilitator of the webinar could present his own thoughts, reflecting back again to the questions posed at the beginning of the seminar. As a doctoral researcher I had found answers to my own questions. This event helped me to reflect on my own literature review, carried out two years ago. When I return to it again I will have in the front of my mind the question of how my work will add to the knowledge in my field.
When I first started writing my LR I tried to briefly point out debates and conversations in what has been published about my topic. As my research is looking at the use of technologies in language teaching and learning I discussed the use of technologies chronologically, organizing them under themes, basically looking at the key ideas and theoretical approaches. However, after attending this webinar I have understood the importance of organizing the LR from the beginning around the key ideas and concepts or theoretical approaches. As the presenter explained, making an example of his students` work, organizing your LR from the beginning might be very useful in setting up a coding process of your interview analysis at the later stages of your proposed work.
Akmarzhan Nogaibayeva is a third-year PhD student at the University of Warwick, researching language teachers` ICT use through the lens of ecological theory, in higher education in Kazakhstan.
Space and place are too often the background and too rarely the central focus of higher education research. This was the argument of our symposium, which offered four ways of theorising the spatial in higher education. The conversation that began in this symposium extends far beyond the time allowed, and so we are continuing that conversation here, with each of the four symposium contributors summarising their use of the spatial in higher education research.
Kate Carruthers Thomas on Massey’s spatial concepts
I work with the spatial concepts of Doreen Massey to research and theorise higher education (HE). Massey was a radical geographer, bringing a feminist perspective to discussions of space, place and power and her understanding of space as plural, heterogeneous and fluid energises an analysis of dominant forms of space and power in HE. My SRHE 2019 paper drew on two research examples: Gender(s) at Work (2018) exploring ways gender shapes experiences of the workplace and career in a post-1992 UK university, and Dimensions of Belonging (2016) problematising a sector-wide reductive narrative of ‘student belonging’ in relation to part-time students.
Applying Massey’s spatial propositions to HE frames ‘the university’ as a product of social relations shaped by geographies of powersocially-coded masculine. Universities originate from monasteries: elite, male-dominated spaces of knowledge production. The contemporary university remains shaped by the power geometry of patriarchal disciplinary discourses, traditions and cultures as well as male-defined constructions of work and career success. Massey coins the term ‘power geometry’ to describe how individuals and groups are differently positioned in relation to flows of capital and culture, to different geographies of power in particular contexts. How they are positioned shapes how they experience the spaces they are in. Gender(s) at Work extends the notion of geography of power to gender, examining how gender operates as a geography of power to position individuals and groups in relation to the flows and connections (of prestige, reward, status) within that activity space.
I also use Massey’s device of ‘activity space’ – the spatial network of links and activities, of spatial connections, locations within which agents operate (2005: 55). This multiscalar tool enables a view of individual universities as activity spaces (shaped by their own geographies of power) and as nodes in the wider activity space of a stratified HE sector. Dimensions of Belonging theorises four English universities as sites in relationship with locality, economy and the HE sector, with each university campus a complex territory of power and inequality in which belonging is negotiated.
To capture lived experiences of university spaces, I created a methodology of spatial storytelling; one sensitised to ‘the social as inexorably also spatial’ (Massey 1993:80). This mobilises the idea of power geometry through combining narrative enquiry and visual mapping, disrupting and revealing spaces between organisational rhetoric/corporate narratives and lived experiences.
Working with Massey in researching and theorizing HE both energises my analyses of space, place and power and leaves room for complexity and contradiction. Spatial storytelling reveals ‘spaces between’ leaving ‘openings for something new’ (Massey 2005: 107).
Holly Henderson on de Certeau’s spatial stories
Higher education happens in places. It does not, however, happen in all places equally, and nor does it happen equally in any one place. The complexities of how higher education is understood and accessed in different places, and how places themselves are defined in relation to higher education, are multiple. In a previous project, which looked at students studying for degrees in post-industrial towns without universities, and in a current project, which looks at access to and experiences of higher education on small islands around the UK, I have used concepts from social geographies to try to get to grips with what it means to say that higher education happens (unequally) in places.
I use spatial analysis in three ways. Firstly, using the concept of spatial stories (de Certeau, 1984), I see any place as defined narratively through layers of stories. These stories are the ways that a town or street comes to be known as a ‘kind of’ place. Often, we do not notice that we are telling or hearing them, but they are fundamental to the way we understand our surroundings. Secondly, I extend spatial analysis to the relationship between higher education and place. In the UK, and especially in England, the dominant story is of a particular mobility pattern, in which the 18-year old undergraduate leaves the place of the familial home and moves into university accommodation in a new place. Finally, I ask how individuals narrate their own stories in relation to these first two factors; do they see themselves as belonging to the place they are living in, and has that question of belonging affected their decision to move or stay in place for degree education? Does the place they feel they belong to require that they make a decision between staying without studying higher education, or leaving in order to study? And if the place they are living and studying in does not have the same history of providing higher education as that of a well-known university city or town, does higher education fit straightforwardly with the enduring narratives through which the place is defined? These questions, and others that stem from them, position place at the centre of higher education research.
Fadia Dakka on Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis
Prompted by Ron Barnett’s claim about the ‘ineradicability of rhythm in university time’ (2015), my reflection extends to the nature of time, place and change in contemporary academia. In keeping with the theme of the Symposium, I emphasise how making space in higher education research subsumes both making time and ‘dwelling’ in it. Therefore, rhythm does not simply refer to the pace of activities within the university, but also to its ontological, epistemological and ethical dimensions. Using rhythm as a critical lens and a pedagogical orientation, I have examined the production of time and space in the everyday life of a teaching-intensive university in the West Midlands (2017-18), drawing inspiration from Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (2004 [1991]) and Critique of Everyday Life (2014 [1947,1961, 1981]). I am particularly interested in the ethical and political implications that can be drawn from rhythmic analyses of ‘felt’ time and space (Wittman, 2017) in contemporary universities. On this basis, I have empirically explored notions of anticipation, dwelling, appropriation and presence within the contemporary university.
The analysis of the participants’ spatio-temporal experiences within the institution has revealed a plurality of academic rhythms that respond to radically different logics. The logic of accumulation, rooted in temporal linearity, exacerbates procedural anticipation, conflating quantification with educational progress. Within this logic, the emphasis on individual productivity and time-management produces an impoverished educational experience centred on constant adaptation and compliance. Spatially, this coincides with the abstract, conceived grid of institutional timetables, schedules and deadlines, the oppressive repetition of which reinforces a ‘pedagogy of domination’ (Middleton, 2014). On the other hand, the poetic logic, that translates Aristotle’s ‘poiesis’ as the human activity of bringing something new into the world, resonates with ideas of transformation, appropriation and dwelling which, in turn, reaffirm the centrality of imagination-relation-anticipation as a necessary condition for meaningful change.
Appropriation, dwelling and (anticipatory) presence have strong implications for how we inhabit the university space. For instance, the participants’ unorthodox production of space documented in the project epitomizes the Lefebvrian act of subversion whereby the perceived and lived spaces produced by the participants effectively disorientate the conceived space of the institution (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]). The participants’ refusal to inhabit the homogeneous yet fragmented space of the capitalist institution (Stanek, 2011) contrasts with their dwelling in pockets of autonomous, reflective space/time meticulously carved out in their everyday. These forms of spatio-temporal appropriation need to be increasingly performed as collective, liberating acts of quotidian resistance, in order to subvert the capitalist institution from within.
Sol Gamsu and Michael Donnelly on the relational construction of place
The moment of entry to higher education (HE) sees major patterns of internal migration within the UK. Accessing HE is, as we know, a process that is deeply implicated in the creation and reproduction of inequalities. Binding these basic points together in an analysis of flows of students between home or school and university allows us to show how the geography of education is central to core debates in geography. Like my colleagues, the work of Massey has been central to how I have conceptualized these processes. Place for Massey (2005: 139) forms ‘where the successions of meetings, the accumulation of weavings and encounters build up a history.’ Regional boundaries are formed through the concentration of particular social practices that become symbolically and spatially associated with certain boundaries and reflect and re-create divisions and hierarchies (Cooke, 1985; Paasi, 2011).
These patterns develop over time and are rooted in particular political economies with HE provision largely instigated, or at least largely financed, by the state. The historical and contemporary geographies of local and national state power, the spatial contexts of regional dominance within England, the relative autonomy of the Welsh, Scottish and (Northern) Irish systems of governance in relation to power of the Anglo-British state – HE has been a central field that has been shaped by and in turn reinforced the spatial hierarchies and divisions created through the state. Beyond these structural geographies though, cultural geographies of regional division are also reflected and created by individual mobilities created by daily or termly movements to and from university and home.
Our paper (Gamsu and Donnelly, forthcoming) explores these theoretical issues, using social network analysis (SNA) methods to highlight how recognizable regional and national boundaries are present in students’ mobility patterns. Taking the example of students moving from Northern Ireland to Liverpool we explore how student mobilities reflect historical patterns of migration across the Irish Sea. Using the same SNA approach, we examine the distinctive hierarchies of schools and universities present in school to university movements. We find a cluster of primarily English elite private and state schools and universities. Quantitative SNA methods are complemented by qualitative interviews and mapping techniques to allow us to show how student mobilities at the micro-level create, reflect and reinforce historical spatial boundaries and socio-spatial hierarchies of institutions.
In Conclusion
To draw these distinctive approaches together we briefly revisit the original aims of our symposium, the first of which was to highlight the often unseen ways that space and place structure higher education, and structure it unequally. Inequalities and difference underpin Henderson’s work with spatial stories working to understand ways in which higher education happens (unequally) in places, while Carruthers Thomas frames the university itself as a complex territory of power and inequality. Spatial analyses throw up difference and relationship in Dakka’s uncovering of a plurality of contradictory academic rhythms in the everyday life within a teaching-intensive university and, in analysing flows of students between home/school and university, Gamsu and Donnelly highlight the shaping of HE through local, regional and national differences reflecting historical and contemporary geographies of local and national state power.
The second aim of the symposium was to demonstrate different possibilities for the use of spatial theory in researching higher education, providing new insights into enduring debates. To this end, each of the four papers foreground particular spatial/temporal concepts or processes. By putting place at the centre of her research into island HE Henderson gains new insights into narratives of HE and belonging. Gamsu and Donnelly frame the moment of entry into HE as a pattern of internal migration, using social network analysis to highlight regional and national boundaries in student mobility patterns. Carruthers Thomas positions gender as a geography of power within the university as means of examining spaces between organisational rhetoric of equality and lived experience. Meanwhile Dakka introduces opposing logics – the logic of accumulation and poetic logic to challenge the privileging of individual productivity over reflective space/time carved out in the everyday.
Dr Kate Carruthers Thomas is a Senior Research Fellow and Athena SWAN Project Manager at Birmingham City University, UK. She specialises in interdisciplinary enquiry into contemporary higher education, inequalities and gender; in spatial methods and analyses. Kate also uses poetry and graphics as methods of disseminating her research in these fields.
Dr Holly Henderson is an Assistant Professor in Education at the University of Nottingham. She has previously held positions at the University of Birmingham and began her career teaching in Further Education in London. Her research and teaching focus broadly on sociological issues of inequality in education. In particular, she is interested in access to and experiences of post-compulsory and higher education. Her research is theoretically informed by social geographies, which enable analysis of the ways in which place, space and mobilities structure educational possibility. She is also interested in narrative and its relationship to subjectivity.
References
Barnett, R (2015) ‘The time of reason and the ecological university’, in Gibbs, P, Ylijoki, OH, Guzman-Valenzuela, C, Barnett, R (2015) Universities in the Flux of Time London: Routledge pp 121-134 Carruthers Thomas, K (2019) ‘Gender as a Geography of Power’ in Crimmins, G (ed) (2019) Strategies for Resisting Sexism in the Academy London: Palgrave Macmillan
Carruthers Thomas, K (2018) Rethinking Student Belonging in Higher Education: From Bourdieu to Borderlands London: Routledge
Cooke P (1985) ‘Class practices as regional markers: a contribution to labour geography’ in Gregory, D and Urry, J (eds) Social relations and spatial structures London: Macmillan, pp 213-241
De Certeau, M (1984) The practice of everyday life (S Randall trans.) California. University of Berkley Press Gamsu, S and Donnelly, M (Forthcoming) ‘Social network analysis methods and the geography of education: regional divides and elite circuits in the school to university transition in the UK’ Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie
Lefebvre, H (1991 [1974]) The Production of Space Oxford: Blackwells Publishers Ltd
Lefebvre, H (2004 [1991]) Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life London: Bloomsbury
Lefebvre, H (2014 [1947,1961,1981]) Critique of Everyday Life London: Verso
Massey, D (1993) ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’. In Bird, J, Curtis, B, Putnam, T, Robertson, G and Tuckner, L (eds) Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Chance. Abingdon: Routledge pp 59-69
Massey, D (2005) For space, London: Sage
Middleton, S (2014) Henri Lefebvre and Education. Space, History, Theory New York: Routledge
Paasi, A (2011) ‘The region, identity, and power’ Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences 14: 9-16
Stanek, L (2011) Henri Lefebvre on Space. Architecture, Urban Research and the Production of Theory Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press
Wittman, M (2017) Felt Time. The science of how we experience time. Cambridge: MIT Press
The Symposium was held at the 2019 SRHE Research Conference at Celtic Manor. I bet you’re sorry you missed it.
Together with Jeroen Huisman, I recently published an article in which we mapped the field of research on higher education. In a previous blogpost we reflected on some key findings, but only briefly mentioned the method we used to analyze the abstracts of 16,928 research articles (which totals to over 2 million words). Obviously we did not read all these texts ourselves. Instead, we applied automated text analysis. In the current blogpost, I will discuss this method to highlight its potential for higher education research.
Automated text
analysis holds tremendous potential for research into higher education. This because,
higher education institutions—ie our research subjects— ‘live’ in a world that
is dominated by the written word. Much of what happens in and around higher
education institutions eventually gets documented. Indeed, higher education
institutions produce an enormous amount and variety of texts, eg grant
proposals, peer reviews and rejection letters, academic articles and books,
course descriptions, mission statements, commission reports, evaluations of
departments and universities, policy reports, etc. Obviously, higher education researchers are aware of the value of
these documents and they have offered a lot of insightful case studies by closely
reading such documents. However, for some types of research questions, analysing
a small sample of texts just doesn’t do the job. When we want to analyse huge
amounts of text data, which are unfeasible for close reading by humans, automated
text analysis can help us.
There are various forms
of automated text analysis. One of the most popular techniques is topic
modelling. This machine learning technique is able to automatically extract
clusters of words (ie topics). A topic model analyses patterns of word
co-occurrence in documents to reveal latent themes. Two basic principles underlie
a topic model. The first is that each
document consists of a mixture of topics. So, imagine that we have a topic model
that differentiates two topics, then document A could consist of 20% topic 1 and
80% topic 2, while document B might consist of 50% topic 1 and 50% topic 2. The
second principle of topic modelling is that every
topic is a mixture of words. Imagine that we fit a topic model on every
edition of a newspaper over the last ten years. A first possible topic could
include words such as ‘goal’, ‘score, ‘match’, ‘competition’ and ‘injury’. A
second topic, then, could include words such as ‘stock’, ‘dow_jones, ‘investment,
‘stock_market’ and ‘wall_street’. The model can identify these clusters of
words, because they often co-occur in texts. That is, it is far more likely
that the word ‘goal’ co-occurs with the word ‘match’ in a document, then it is to
co-occur with the word ‘dow_jones’.
Topic models allow us to
reveal the structure of large amounts of textual data by identifying topics. Topics
are basically a set of words. More formally, topics are expressed as a set of
word probabilities. To learn what the latent theme is about we can order all
the words in decreasing probability. The two illustrative topics (see previous
paragraph) clearly deal with the general themes ‘sports’ and ‘financial
investments’. In this way, what topic models do with texts actually closely resembles
what exploratory factor analysis does with survey data, ie revealing latent dimensions
that structure the data. But how is the model able to find interpretable
topics? As David
Blei explains, and this may help to get a more
intuitive understanding of the method, topic models trade off two goals: (a)
the model tries to assign the words of each document to as few topics as
possible, and (b) the model tries, in each topic, to assign high probability to
as few words as possible. These goals are at odds. For example, if the model
allocates all the words of one document to one single topic, then (b) becomes
unrealistic. If, on the other hand, every topic consists of just a few words,
then (a) becomes unrealistic. It is by trading off both goals that the topic
model is able to find interpretable sets of tightly co-occurring words.
Topic models focus on
the co-occurrence of words in texts. That is, they model the probability that a
word co-occurs with another word anywherein a document. To the model, it does not matter if ‘score’ and ‘match’ are
used in the same sentence in a document or if one is used in the beginning of
the document while the other one is used at the end. This puts topic modelling
in the larger group of ‘bag-of-words approaches’, a group of methods that treat
documents as …well … bags of words. Ignoring word order is a way to simplify
and reduce the text, which yields various nice statistical properties. On the
other hand, this approach may result in the loss of meaning. For example, the
sentences ‘I love teaching, but I hate grading papers’ and ‘I hate teaching,
but I love grading papers’ obviously have different meanings, but this is
ignored by bag-of-words techniques.
So, while bag-of-word
techniques are very useful to classify texts and to understand what the texts are about, the results
will not tell us much about how
topics are discussed. Other methods from the larger set of methods of automated
text analysis are better equipped for this. For example, sentiment analysis allows
one to analyze opinions, evaluations and emotions. Another method, word
embedding, focusses on the context in which a word is embedded. More
specifically, the method finds words that share similar contexts. By subsequently
inspecting a words’ nearest neighbors — ie which are the words often occurring
in the neighborhood of our word of interest — we get an idea of what that word
means in the text. These are just a few examples of the wide range of existing methods
of automated text analysis and each of them has its pros and cons. Choosing
between them ultimately comes down to finding the optimal match between a
research question and a specific method.
More collections of electronic text are becoming available every day. These massive collections of texts present massive opportunities for research on higher education, but at the same time they present us with a problem: how can we analyze these? Methods of automated text analysis can help us to understand these large collections of documents. These techniques, however, do not replace humans and close reading. Rather, these methods are, as aptly phrased by Justin Grimmer and Brandon Stewart, ‘best thought of as amplifying and augmenting careful reading and thoughtful analysis’. When using automated text analysis in this way, the opportunities are endless and I hope to see higher education researchers embrace these opportunities (more) in the future.
Stijn Daenekindt is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Ghent University (Department of Sociology). He has a background in sociology and in statistics and has published in various fields of research. Currently, he works at the Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent. You can find an overview of his work at his Google Scholar page.
Parallel to the exponential growth of research on higher education, we see an increasing number of scientific contributions aiming to take stock of our field of research. Such stock-taking activities range from reflective and possibly somewhat impressionistic thoughts of seasoned scholars to in-depth reviews of salient higher education themes. Technological advancements (such as easy electronic access to research output and an increasingly broader set of analytical tools) obviously have made life easier for analysts. We recently embarked upon a project to explore the thematic diversity in the field of research in higher education. The results have recently been published in Higher Education. Our aim was to thematically map the field of research on higher education and to analyse how our field has evolved over time.
For this endeavour, we
wanted our analysis to be large-scale. We aimed at including a number of
articles that would do justice to the presumed variety in research into higher
education. We did not, however, want the scale of our analysis to jeopardize
the depth of our analysis. Therefore, we decided not to limit our analyses to,
for example, an analysis of citation patterns or of keywords. Finally, to
forestall bias (stemming from our personal knowledge about and experience in
the field), we applied an inductive approach. These criteria led us to collect 16,928
journal articles on higher education published between 1991 and 2018 and to
analyse each article’s abstract by applying topic modelling. Topic modelling is
a method of automated text analysis and a follow-up blogpost (also on
srheblog.com) will address the method. For now, it suffices to know that topic
modelling is a machine learning technique that automatically analyses the co-occurrence
of words to detect themes/topics and to find structure in a large collection of
text.
In this blogpost, we present
a glimpse of our findings and some additional thoughts for further discussion.
In our analysis, we differentiate 31 research topics which inductively emerged
from the data. For example, we found topics dealing with university ranking and
performance, sustainability, substance use of college students, research ethics,
etc. The bulk of these research topics were studied at the individual level (16
topics), with far fewer at the organisational (5) and system level (3). A final
set of topics related either clearly to disciplines (eg teaching psychology) or
to more generic themes (methods, academic writing, ethics). This evidences the
richness of research into higher education. Indeed, our field of research certainly
is not limited in terms of perspectives and unleashes “the whole shebang”
of possible perspectives to gain new insights into higher education.
The existence of
different perspectives also comprises potential dangers, however. Studies applying
a certain approach on higher education — say, a system-level approach — may suffer
from tunnel vision and lose sight of individual- and organization-level aspects
of higher education. This may be problematic as processes on the different
levels are obviously related to one another. In our analysis we find that
studies indeed tend to focus on one level. For example, system-level topics tend
to be exclusively combined with other system-level topics. This should not come
as a big surprise, but there is potential danger in this and it may hamper the
development of a more integrated field of research on higher education.
In our analysis, we
also find a certain restraint to combine topics which are located at the same
level. For example, topics on teaching practices are very rarely combined with topics
on racial and ethnic minorities — even though both topics are situated at the
individual level. To us, this was surprising as the combination of ethnicity
and educational experiences is a blossoming field in the sociology of
education. The fact that topics at the same level are only rarely combined is
less understandable then the fact that topics on different levels are rarely
combined. We hope that our analysis aids others researchers to identify gaps in
the literature and that it motivates them to address these gaps.
A second finding we
wish to address here relates to specialisation. Our analysis suggests that
there is a trend of specialisation in our field of research. We looked at the
number of topics combined in articles and we see that topic diversity declines
over time. This is, on the one hand, not that surprising. Back in 1962, Kuhn already argued that
the system of modern science encourages researchers towards further specialisation.
So, it makes sense that over time, and parallel to the growth of the field of
research on higher education, researchers specialise more and demarcate their
own topic of expertise. On the other hand, it may be considered a problematic
evolution as it can hamper our field of research to develop towards further
maturity.
But what should we
think of the balance between healthy expansion and specialization, on the one
hand, and inefficient fragmentation, on the other? We lean towards evaluating
the current state of higher education research as moving towards fragmentation.
Other researchers, such as Malcom Tight, Bruce Macfarlane and Sue Clegg have similarly lamented
the fragmented nature of our field of research. Our analysis adds to this by
showing the trends over time: we observe more specialisation (not necessarily
bad), but there are also signs of disintegration over time (not good). Other analyses
we are currently carrying out also indicate thematic disintegration and suggest
clear methodological boundaries. It looks like many researchers focusing on the
same topic remain in their “comfort zone” and use a limited set of methods. For
sure, many methodological choices are functional (as in fit-for-purpose), but
the lack of diversity is striking. Moreover, we see that many higher education
researchers stick to rather traditional techniques (survey, interviews, case
studies) and that new methods hardly get picked up in our field. A final
observation is that we hardly see methodological debates in our field. In
related disciplines we often see healthy methodological discussions that
improve the available “toolkit” (for example here). In our field, it appears
that scholars shy away from such discussions and it suggests methodological
conservatism and/or methodological tunnel vision.
There are still many things to investigate to arrive at a full assessment of the state of the art. One important question is how our field compares to other fields or disciplines. But if we were to accept the idea of fragmentation, it is pertinent to start thinking how to combat this. Reversing this trend is obviously not straightforward. But here are a few ideas. Individual scholars could try to get out of their comfort zone by applying other perspectives to their favourite research object and/or by applying their favourite perspective to new research topics. Related, researchers should be encouraged to use techniques less commonly used in our field and see whether they yield different outcomes (vignettes, experimental designs, network analysis, QCA/fuzzy logic, [auto-]ethnography and – of course – topic models). In addition, journal editors could be more flexible and inclusive in terms of the format of the submissions they consider. For example, they could explicitly welcome submissions in the format of ‘commentaries/ a reply to’. This would stimulate debate and open up the floor for increased cross-fertilisation of research into higher education and, in general, signal the maturity of research into higher education. Finally, there is scope for alternative peer review processes. Currently, only editors (and sometimes peer reviewers seeing the outcome of a peer review process) gain full insight in feedback offered by peers. If we would make these processes more visible to a broader readership – e.g. through open peer review, which still can be double-blind – we would gain much more insight in methodological and theoretical debates, that would definitely support the healthy growth of our field.
In contrast to comparative education, whose history dates back to the beginning of the 19th century, comparative higher education is a relatively recent construct of research originating in the 1970-1980s. This early period gave us the first comparative instruments, still widely used today, as lenses to analyse national higher education systems. These include Clark’s triangle of coordination (1983), Altbach’s use of the concept of centre and periphery (1981) and Trow’s definition of elite, mass and universal systems (1973). Therefore, early on, comparative higher education proved very successful in increasing our understanding of higher education globally. But, since then, what has it accomplished?
While
there are many users of comparative higher education – that is, researchers
whose research could be considered comparative – there is still little written
critically on comparative higher education research. The debate is alive, led
by individual researchers, including Kosmützky, Bleiklie, and Valimaa. However,
there is little acknowledgment of their efforts by users of comparative
research, showing a clear divide between efforts to conceptualise and theorise
comparative research in higher education and actual research practice. As a
result, the field of comparative higher education is lacking rigour, as
exemplified by the lack of appropriate rationales for sampling choices – why
countries are included – in the vast majority of comparative papers (Kosmützky,
2016). This puts comparative higher education at odds with comparative studies
in other disciplines, that have been focused on the comparative method as a way
to reach causality or improve generalisation.
What
researchers in comparative higher education have failed to achieve in the past
40 years is to elevate comparative studies in higher education to a (sub-)field
of study. An academic field is built on the emergence of two dynamics: an
intellectual debate and an institutional structure (Manzon, 2018). The debate
around comparative higher education has been focused on proposing conceptual
and theoretical frameworks, but it remains marginal. Additionally, questions
that are still to be raised and answered include the objectives and purpose of comparative
higher education, as well as what unites researchers undertaking comparative projects.
At the same time, there is a lack of academic space for this debate to happen.
Comparative higher education lacks specific journals – with the exception of
the Journal of Comparative and International Higher Education, societies
and associated conferences, and research centres. Unlike comparative education,
it has not yet permeated into the teaching function of higher education, with
an absence of textbooks and dedicated degrees (although some courses do exist).
Comparative higher education therefore remains on the margins, a practice of
research that is still to be properly understood.
This
deficit of reflective and critical thinking on comparative higher education
matters. The use of comparative higher education for cross-country comparisons
remains essential in understanding higher education systems. It provides unique
settings to deepen our knowledge of higher education phenomena through the way
they manifest in different environments and in contact with different cultures.
This leads to improved theorisation of higher education phenomena that
transcends borders, helping to fight assumptions and opening new avenues for
conceptualising higher education. Consequently, it helps us understand our own
higher education system better, through knowledge of the ‘other’ and combatting
“comparative chauvinism” and “comparative humility” (Teichler, 2014). And
because comparative higher education is not limited to international
comparisons, it provides an opportunity to increase our knowledge of
within-system variations through tools to analyse both the local and the global
in higher education.
Comparative
higher education research is also of tremendous importance to evidence-based
policy. Higher education policies remain decided at the country (state) level
in most countries around the globe, which means that comparison is essential to
understand the consequences of different policies. Policy evaluation in higher
education needs comparative studies, internationally and historically in
particular. Understanding higher education policies beyond the national context
is also important in a world where policy-borrowing and lending is prevalent.
Knowledge of the ways different policies adapt in different environments helps
prevent the spread of seemingly successful policies that would have detrimental
consequences if translated elsewhere.
Finally,
higher education research already evolves in an international context. Higher
education stakeholders – students and faculty in particular – are mobile beyond
borders, while knowledge does not know national boundaries. As a result, the
vast majority of researchers in higher education have frames of reference that
extend beyond their national context. This means that most higher education
research might be unintentionally comparative. This is problematic in two ways.
First, the way you do research is important to recognise and understand to
reach research rigor. Second, researchers might not be acknowledging properly
their positionality and bias, by not reflecting on what they know and don’t
know about higher education globally.
After
40 years of existence, it might be time to stop and reflect on comparative
higher education research and decide what its mission is. To do so, we can rely
on endless research and debate in the field of comparative education, as well
as a robust literature on comparative studies, that would provide strong basis
for the construction of a field of comparative higher education. This
reflection will help strengthen the higher education research done
comparatively, leading to a tremendous increase in our knowledge of higher
education generally.
References
Altbach,
PG (1981) ‘The university as center and periphery’ Teachers College Record,
82(4): 601-621
Clark,
B (1983) The higher education system : Academic organization in
cross-national perspective Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
Kosmützky,
A (2016) ‘The precision and rigor of international comparative studies in
higher education’ in Theory and Method in Higher Education Research (pp
199-221) Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Manzon,
M (2018) ‘Origins and traditions in comparative education:
challenging some assumptions’, Comparative Education, 54(1): 1-9
Teichler,
U (2014) ‘Opportunities and problems of comparative higher education research:
The daily life of research’ Higher Education,67(4): 393-408
Trow, M (1973) Problems in the transition from elite to mass higher education Berkeley, CA: Carnegie Commission on Higher Education
Ariane de Gayardon is a Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Global Higher Education at the UCL Institute of Education and is Assistant Editor of the Journal of Studies in International Education
The research around university learning and teaching shows that didactic teaching and passive reception do not result in deep, lasting or meaningful learning for most students. It is curious, then, that despite knowing this, we persist with lecturing at students in large groups in most universities. Worse, one of the most common lecturing practices is to ‘stand and deliver’ notes and/or PowerPoint slides.
It is important to acknowledge that
lectures probably worked as a form of teaching for many academics – who were,
as students, particularly intellectually able, intrinsically motivated and
keenly focused and clear on their educational and vocational goals, that is, to
continue to pursue knowledge throughout their career through research and
teaching. But it is equally important to acknowledge that this approach is not
effective for the majority of students, who go on to fill other roles and
pursuits outside of academia. The challenge
is that the lecture persists and is assumed to be the basis of effective
teaching practice when it may or may not be, depending on the student and
context.
If you doubt my argument, take the time to
stand at the back of a typical lecture theatre (if many – or any – students
have turned up at all past Week 5) and scan the students’ screens. You’ll see
Facebook, Messenger and other social media channels getting a good workout,
along with search engines and search terms that may or may not be related to
the lecture topic. That kind of workout happens much less often in smaller
classes where the teaching is interactive and the students are co-creating
their learning through being engaged and active.
It should be said that not all lecturing
is bad. A lecture hall can be led by a gifted, enthusiastic, well organised
teacher with outstanding communication skills, who builds and maintains
rapport, shows respect for students and their learning, engages all present in
activities and critical thinking, enables collaborative approaches to problem
solving within the class, provides stimulus for deep thinking during and after
the lecture, makes concepts come alive through examples and the use of various
media, provides ‘aha’ moments for those in the room, and so on.
The challenge is that the vast majority of
lecturing is not like that, which is why students generally don’t bother coming
and instead either watch it online (at double speed – ask a current student) or
skip the class altogether.
At Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne,
Australia, we are acutely aware of the massification of higher education, the
worldwide widening participation movement and the increased student diversity
that this brings. We know that students’ lives are increasingly characterised
by multiple and competing priorities in a distracting and at times
overwhelming digital context. We understand that students want personalised,
flexible learning opportunities that enable them to manage their multiple
work, family, social and other commitments outside of university,
while getting the most out of the financial and time investments they have made
in study.
With all of this in mind, VU has radically
and successfully reimagined our approach to learning and teaching
by drawing on the evidence base of what works. We have,
therefore, done away with large, passive lectures in first and
second year and will do the same in third year in 2020. We have replaced semester-long units of
study with a structure where students focus on and study one unit at a
time over an intensive four-week period, in small classes of no more than 30
students, and through active, engaged, collaborative and deep learning with
their teacher and fellow students. This is supplemented by both high quality
online materials and wrap around, just in time, study and learning support. We call this The
VU Way.
The focus is on the individual learner and
their success. The impact has been extraordinary, with pass rates, grade
distributions and retention dramatically improving in the units where this
model has been introduced in both first and second year. This approach helps us address both our
promise to be the University of Opportunity and Success,
and the increasing accountability inherent in measurements of teaching and
learning and in performance-based funding being introduced in Australian higher
education. We hope that
this approach and its extraordinary successes in terms of learning will
continue to help us be competitive in a global tertiary education marketplace
where transnational and globalised approaches to education are growing.
As the Australian economy moves, albeit
very slowly, from a reliance on mining and manufacturing, to a new era in which
new knowledge and ideas are precious commodities, universities have a critical
role to play. Internationally, the role of universities is even more important
as innovation, the transformation of businesses, technology and access to
knowledge and education take place amid prevailing inequalities, political
tensions, environmental challenges and huge economic changes.
While we tend to revere research that
creates new knowledge in universities – and there is good reason to do so – we
are significantly less enthusiastic about sharing that new (and existing)
knowledge through our other core business of teaching. We need to be cognisant
of the tendency to chase the prestige of research at the cost of effort and
resource being put into university teaching quality and into university
teachers.
Sharing knowledge more effectively
Many universities will be hesitant to move
away from traditional modes of learning and teaching. Institutional culture, an
undervaluing of teaching compared to research and the effort and the volume and
breadth of the resources required to make a major transformational change in
learning and teaching all probably play a part in the sector’s reluctance to
significantly change teaching practices.
Of course, there are many alternatives to
didactic, PowerPoint-driven stand-and-deliver lecturing that are currently used
across the sector to great effect by individual teachers and teaching teams,
including:
Blended learning, incorporating the integration
of modern and interactive eLearning;
Flipped classrooms;
Problem-based learning;
Work-integrated and work-based learning of a wide
range of types;
Simulations and other opportunities to
develop practical skills; and
Collaborative approaches to constructing and sharing
knowledge, incorporating multidisciplinary contributions from: internal
colleagues (‘peeragogy’); external MOOCs; industry educational offerings; and
formal recognition of prior and concurrent student real-life learning outside
the classroom.
Much of what I have listed in this
incomplete list will be familiar to many. There is, of course, significant
innovation and outstanding teaching practice going on in pockets of the sector
by individuals and small and larger teams. However, VU is the only tertiary
institution in Australia to completely throw out the old way – including
lectures – and truly transform university teaching and learning.
The VU Way won’t suit all institutions,
and for those who would benefit from using it, the change may simply be too
hard (it is certainly very hard).
What is important is that the approaches to teaching used in universities must
align and keep pace with the disrupted and changing contexts in which
university education takes place and with the changing needs and preferences of
students.
The lecture has never been recognised as
the best way for the modern university student cohorts to learn. As the global,
digital and societal upheavals we are experiencing continue, and we begin to
see more examples of ‘the student-free lecture’ where no-one but the
well-meaning, well-prepared lecturer turns up, the lecture as the staple
approach to university teaching should probably start to go the way of the once
ubiquitous handwritten overhead transparency. Both have probably had their day.
Professor Marcia
Devlin is Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Victoria University, Australia and aFellow of SRHE. An earlier version of this article appeared
in Campus
Review in September, 2019.
The call for papers for the SRHE 2019 Conference slid into my inbox not so long ago, marking the point in the year when the mind must focus in the short-term, in order to benefit from all things Celtic Manor in the longer term! The conference theme: Creativity, Criticality and Conformity in Higher Education invites debate on transcending the traditional and building an innovative research culture. The theme is timely in view of my own recent experiments involving graphics and poetry in social sciences research.
One year ago, I sat with a mass of rich qualitative
data I’d collected for Gender(s) At Work,
a research project investigating gendered experiences of work and career
trajectory in higher education (HE). I’d interviewed 50 members of staff,
identifying as female, male and gender non-binary, working in academic and
professional services roles within one UK university. I set about analysing the
data using Massey’s theory of geographies of power operating within space. I
wanted to explore ways in which gender operates as a ‘geography of power’ within
HE and the extent to which participants’ diverse and complex lived experiences
trouble the prevailing career narrative of linear, upward trajectory.
Clear space soon emerged
between the rhetoric of gender equality and lived experiences in the workplace
and throughout working lives. Despite decades of equal opportunities
legislation and institutional equality policies, the glass ceiling remains a
feature of our sector. Elements of less familiar career archetypes: the glass cliff
(Ryan and Haslam, 2005; Bruckmuller et al,
2014); the glass escalator (Williams, 2013; Budig, 2002) and the glass closet (Merriam-Webster,
2018) also surfaced in the transcripts. These
metaphors, archetypal and architectural – were something of a gift to a
researcher concerned with the relationship between space and power. I found
myself experimenting – you might call it doodling – with visual representations
of the glass ceiling, escalator, cliff and closet.
Using the visual was not completely new territory
for me; as a doctoral student I had employed visual mapping as a research tool (Carruthers
Thomas, 2018a) and tentatively used abstract diagrams as aids to explaining my
theoretical framework and findings (Thomas, 2016), but I hadn’t picked up a
pencil with intent since school art lessons. Nevertheless, four cartoon characters
emerged from my doodles; embodiments of gendered dis/advantage in the HE
workplace.
Throughout the Gender(s) At Work project, I had been disseminating emerging findings through conference papers and PowerPoint presentations. I had written a chapter about my research methodology (Carruthers Thomas, 2019a). As academics we anticipate and reproduce such formats; they keep the academic wheels turning and form the building blocks of academic credibility. With data collection complete however, I was unsure that the temporal and structural constraints of these conventions were going to do justice to the volume of complex personal narratives entrusted to me by research participants. I was also becoming increasingly drawn towards McLure’s argument for
immersion in and entanglement with the
minutiae of the data … an experimentation or crafting … a very different kind
of engagement with data from the distanced contemplation of the table that is
the arrested result of the process.
(McLure, 2013: 174-175).
In March 2018, the Sociological Review explicitly
invited unconventional contributions to its conference: Undisciplining: Conversations from the Edges. Still enjoying my
experimentation with cartooning, I decided to explore the possibilities of
communicating my research findings through a ‘graphic essay’ entitled My Brilliant Career? An Investigation.
This would be in the format of a large-scale, hand-drawn comic strip conforming
to the structural conventions of an essay or article. My proposal was accepted
and the work began! The learning curve was precipitous!
In June 2018, I exhibited My Brilliant Career? An Investigation at Undisciplining (Carruthers Thomas, 2018b) in the impressive
surroundings of BALTIC Gateshead. The four A2-sized panels remained on display throughout
the three days of the conference. It was strikingly different, communicating my
research this way rather than hothousing it in a 20 minute Powerpoint presentation.
Many delegates returned to the exhibit several times to look, bring colleagues,
take photographs, ask questions. I engaged in discussions not only about the
medium, but about the research process and findings too. And I myself engaged
anew with the work, as an exhibit, rather than a cherished work in progress. I later
translated the four panels into an A1-sized academic poster, displayed at the
SRHE 2018 Annual Conference.
Meanwhile, another call for unconventional conference
contributions in the form of poetic and performative work, had come from the Art
of Management and Organisation (AoMO). This triggered a second experiment in
creative criticality resulting in Glass,
a long poem also based on the Gender(s)
At Work data. Unlike graphic art, in poetry I do have a track record (Carruthers
Thomas, 2018c), but had not considered blurring the boundary between poetry and
academia until this call. Yet, as an academic my research practice involves
collecting, analysing, distilling and presenting data. My research is a form of
enquiry seeking enhanced intelligence and evidence to advocate organisational,
structural and cultural change. As a poet, I follow a similar process to create
a poem. More, or less, consciously I collect data: ideas, questions, emotions,
sense phenomena, then manipulate language and sound to distil the data into
poetic form. Glass brings these
practices together.
To write it, I returned yet again to the interview
transcripts, creating a poem comprising four sections – ceiling, escalator, closet and cliff
– using participants’ words and a narrative framework featuring the
researcher’s voice, using original poetry. Glass
was deliberately written as a piece to be performed, another first, as I
had only previously written poems for the page.
Even now, even now in my meetings
I’m still faced with wall to wall suits.
And I still hear my colleagues repeating
the proposal I tried to get through weeks ago
Great idea!
(extract from Cliff, Glass 2018)
Glass and
My Brilliant Career were created
independently of one another, in different media but they draw on the same
research data. This is not all they share. Both involved an extended process of
analysis and representation; repeated revisiting of the data and work in
painstaking detail. Both explicitly draw on and draw in, the affective,
bringing the potential for surprise, humour, anger and pain into the room
without apology. Finally, both also required me to allow myself to be
vulnerable to audience resistance, discomfort, critiques on multiple levels and
questions of academic validity.
Largely positive responses to the graphic essay and
the research poem at those conferences set me thinking about ways to signpost
the potential of creative approaches in social science research more widely and
led to another experiment in academic practice.
I designed a multi-modal dissemination programme to take the findings of
Gender(s) At Work out to UK
universities and research institutes.
The programme featured six ‘options’ from which host institutions could
select, mix and match: the exhibit My
Brilliant Career? An Investigation; the research poem Glass; a conventional Powerpoint presentation of the research
findings: The Workplace Glassed and
Gendered and another giving an illustrated account of my emerging graphic
social science practice: The Accidental
Cartoonist. Building on both the research findings and visual methods, I also
designed two participative workshops. Mapping
Career challenged participants to develop meaningful visual alternatives to
the reductive metaphors of career ladder and pipeline and On The Page explored the way simple visual and graphic methods might
be used in research and teaching. I publicised the programme via email across
the UK HE sector.
The response was extraordinary. Since November 2018
I’ve visited universities and research institutes from Edinburgh to London;
Cambridge to Bangor. Audiences have included academics in all disciplines,
professional services staff, senior management, conference delegates, Athena
SWAN teams, women’s networks and mentoring groups, postgraduate and
undergraduate students. I called the initiative the ‘gword tour’ after my blog the g word (that’s g for gender).
Six months, 30 ‘gigs’ – all that’s missing is the T-shirt!
One day I might be discussing Gender(s) At Work aims, research methods and findings to Athena SWAN
leads and women’s networks; on another I’ll be delivering the Mapping Career workshop at a staff
conference. I’ve presented The Accidental
Cartoonist to academic developers and EdD students and encouraged academics
to experiment with visual methods in their research and teaching practices in
the On The Page workshop. Glass has been performed at some
unlikely venues, including the Wellcome Sanger Genome Campus, the Stansted
Airport Novotel – and to audiences somewhat larger than those at the average
poetry reading!
How will you crack the glass enclosing some,
exposing some, blinding others
to their privilege?
Reflect on it.
(extract
from Epilogue, Glass 2018)
Throughout the gword tour I have diligently handed
out structured feedback forms (in return for a free postcard), providing me
with a continuous feedback loop and resulting in adaptation and tweaking of
individual sessions throughout. Now the tour has concluded, a large pile of
completed forms await me and I’m looking forward to getting the bigger picture.
Meanwhile I’m already musing on two questions which have arisen throughout the
past year. Firstly, whether and how addressing familiar topics through
unfamiliar media can disrupt audience expectations and dislodge habitual
responses to tricky subjects such as gender equality; secondly, whether what I
have described in this blog constitutes being ‘differently academic’.
By ‘differently academic’ I mean taking the
opportunity to sit with our data for longer, deliberately to approach it from
different angles, to explore its creative dimensions. I mean bringing data to
diverse audiences, in diverse ways over an extended period, a process which has
only further energised and deepened my engagement in the original research questions.
Audience after audience has grilled me on my research rationale, process,
findings, limitations and implications. Each time, their questions, comments
and challenges have pushed my analyses further and opened new lines of enquiry.
I fully intend to
publish my reflections on these questions in conventional academic formats: papers,
articles and chapters.It may be that
creative, critical work in our field can only
gain academic legitimacy through this route.Meanwhile, other opportunities have arisen. Glass was published in the Sociological
Fiction Zine in May 2019 (Carruthers Thomas, 2019b). I am currently working
on a set of visuals for a new academic research centre and will be
poet-in-residence at an academic conference in November 2019. The SRHE call for
papers defines creativity as ‘transcending traditional ideas, rules, patterns,
relationships’. I hope to continue to be creative and critical in my academic
work, not for transcending’s sake, but ‘to create meaningful new ideas, forms,
methods, and interpretations’.
Bruckmüller, S, Ryan, M, Rink, F and
Haslam, SA (2014) ‘Beyond the Glass Ceiling: The Glass Cliff and its Lessons
for Organizational Policy’, Social Issues
and Policy Review, 8(1): 202-232
Budig, M (2002) ‘Male Advantage and
the Gender Composition of Jobs: Who Rides the Glass Escalator?’, Social Problems 49(2): 258-277
Carruthers Thomas, K (2018a) Rethinking Student Belonging in Higher Education:
From Bourdieu to Borderlands, Abingdon: Routledge
Carruthers Thomas, K (2018b) My Brilliant Career? An Investigation. Graphic
Essay exhibited at Undisciplining:
Conversations from the Edges Sociological Review, Gateshead, BALTIC. June 2018
Carruthers Thomas, K (2018c) Navigation, Blaenau Ffestiniog, Cinnamon
Press.
Carruthers Thomas, K (2019a) ‘Gender as a Geography of Power’ in G
Crimmins (ed) Resisting Sexism in the Academy: Higher Education, Gender and
Intersectionality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
McLure, M (2013) ‘Classification or
Wonder? Coding as an Analytic Practice in Qualitative Research’, In Coleman, R
and Ringrose, J (eds) Deleuze and
Research Methodologies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Chapter 9. pp.164-183.
Ryan, M and Haslam, A. (2005) The
Glass Cliff: Evidence that Women are Over-Represented in Precarious Leadership
Positions, British Journal of Management,
16(2): 81-90
Thomas, K (2016). Dimensions of belonging: rethinking retention for mature, part-time
undergraduates in English higher education, PhD thesis, Birkbeck,
University of London
Williams, M (2013) ‘The Glass
Escalator, Revisited. Gender Inequality in Neoliberal Times’, Gender &
Society 27 (5): 609–629
Reflections on a workshop hosted by the SRHE Academic Practice Network
At a workshop on 8
May 2019 in the SRHE offices Jennifer Bain and Juliet Sprake (Goldsmiths
University) shared their emerging conceptualisations of a ‘pragmatic critical
pedagogy’. Their ground-breaking approach comes about as a way to grapple
positively with the tensions and affective dissonance that critical pedagogues
encounter in the contemporary HE landscape, characterised as it is by
neoliberal definitions of learning as consumption and the relentless emphasis
on ‘student satisfaction’. What do we do with the uneasiness we feel? How do we
move from our experiences of discomfort? Bain and Sprake shared in this
workshop the spaces that they have created as a response to these questions,
and, in particular, innovations emerging through a research and teaching
project that they have conducted with partners in the Philippines.
The approach
presented in the workshop hinges on the infusion of critical pedagogies with
principles and processes that are essential to design education. Bain and
Sprake argue that working with design mindsets and methods can enable us to
find and make the micro-adjustments to practice that allow critical pedagogies
to flourish in a potentially stifling wider climate. Through design, we can
grapple with the contradictions and complexities we encounter as researchers
and teachers without falling into a pit of despair. Through the design process,
we identify responsive actions to the disjunctions and the dissonance. As we
move against and around dominant neoliberal discourses of ‘learning as
consumption’, the design process can inspire us to move on to the ‘what next’.
As participants in
the workshop, we had the opportunity to try out for ourselves the design
infused critical pedagogy that Bain and Sprake advocate. What Bain and Sprake
call ‘pragmatic critical pedagogy’ was put to work in small groups where we
decided on a particular problem statement relating to the research-practice
culture of universities; statements such as ‘collaboration is time-consuming’
or ‘teaching-led research is undervalued’. We were then prompted through a
series of design-focused questions to see the opportunities for design at work
in the statement. We applied particular design mindsets (such as ‘optimism’ or
‘empathy’) to find new ways of seeing the problem. The point was not to ‘unsee’
the contradictions, tensions and frictions, but rather to see them from a
different perspective, inviting new avenues for action.
Reactions to the
task were enthusiastic. Discussion after the activity suggested that
participants appreciated how the design nature of the task invited participants
to launch into genuine and open dialogues with each other. At the same time, as
you would expect, new points of tension emerged. What does the design process
do to the affective dimensions of
critical pedagogy? Do design mindsets (such as ‘optimism’) override
affective dimensions that might be a vital part of critical pedagogy? What
happens to the anger, what Freire calls the ‘just ire’ (Freire, 2004), that
comes with disjunction and dissonance? What happens when we push beyond despair
to occupy an artificially induced space of optimism? How much of the design
approach privileges working within the constraints and conditions of our
situation (designing for an audience and to a brief), and therefore enables
micro-adjustments that align with, rather than challenge, the status quo?
It is exciting to
see that Bain and Sprake are currently extending their research, with support
from the British Council, to look at how pragmatic critical pedagogies might
play out on digital platforms. As they observed in the workshop, digital
learning tends to be designed around behaviourist principles of learning,
rather than tuning into the foundations of critical pedagogy. It will be
fascinating to see how their explorations as part of the project ‘A Sustainable
Framework for Design Thinking in Education’ might begin to unsettle the
dominant models of digital learning and help to move the sector forward.
SRHE member Emily Henderson (Warwick) runs the ConferenceInference blog with Jamie Burford (La Trobe), offering a unique gateway to research about HE conferences. Her recent post is adapted and reblogged with permission here.
Conferences are highly exclusionary spaces for
all manner of reasons. They are also vital sites for learning, knowledge production and
dissemination, career development, and the formation of collaborations and
partnerships for publications and research projects, sites where jobs are
directly and indirectly advertised and secured, and sites of friendship,
mentoring and all kinds of relationships. Conferences are recognised in
research on academic careers as important sites which have a plethora of indirect benefits.
Furthermore, attending, organising and being invited to speak at conferences
are also expectations which are included in many promotions criteria and also
in some hiring criteria (particularly for early career scholars who may not yet
have a publication record). The role of conferences is often downplayed in
practice and in research; amassing research and evidence on the impact of
conferences on careers has resulted in a clear and irrefutable
conclusion: missing out on
conferences disadvantages academics in multiple regards.
While
the role of conferences continues to be downplayed – often by those for whom it
is easiest to attend – there will continue to be hidden inequalities which
contribute to overall inequalities in the academic profession and which cannot
be addressed until fully acknowledged.
Based on some initial
understanding of this problem from my doctoral work on knowledge production
about gender at Women’s Studies conferences, and from personal experiences, I
decided to explore the exclusionary nature of conferences – with a particular
focus on caring responsibilities. The particular features of the stance taken
in this project were: (i) a wide
definition of care, to include partners, children, other relatives,
pets, friends and kin; (ii) a focus on how care interacts with both access to conferences and participation in conferences while
there.
In December 2016, I won internal
funding from the University of Warwick Research Development Fund for a
small-scale project on the relationship between conference participation and
caring responsibilities. This was originally intended as a ‘pilot study’ for a
larger project, but it touched a nerve and became much more than a pilot study –
producing important findings and provoking widespread interest, including
several invitations to present the research at events on inequalities and on
care in the academic profession. The discussions in turn highlighted the need
for further discussions – and for concrete outputs to influence the actions of
those involved in organising, funding and participation in conferences. To
develop the project’s trajectory further, in 2017 I applied for funding from
Warwick’s Institute for Advanced Studies and embarked upon the production of a
range of outputs for different audiences.
The project was assisted by
Julie Mansuy in the first phase and Xuemeng Cao in the second phase, and I
offer my sincere gratitude to them for their assistance with the logistics and
implementation of this project. The outputs from the project, ‘In Two Places at
Once: the Impact of Caring Responsibilities on Academics’ Conference
Participation’, can all be downloaded or viewed from links included here (see
also the events and outputs page on the
project website).
The Conference
Inference blog has already told parts of the story. ‘Conferences and caring
responsibilities – individual delegates, multiple lives‘, explained how the
project stemmed from the realisation that conferences are often designed for
unencumbered delegates, and much conferences research (and indeed HE research
in general) constructs an individualised academic subject who has no ties. The
project explored conferences in their own right as sites which contribute to
the development of knowledge, careers and collaborations, but also as a lens
through which the academic profession as a whole can be viewed, given that
conferences are both representative of and resistant to the institutional norms
of academia (see Henderson, 2015).
‘Overwhelming care: reflections on
recruiting for the “In Two Places at Once Research Project”‘, marked the moment
where I realised that the project had touched a nerve. I was inundated with
requests to participate – messages flooded in with enthusiasm and relief that
someone was finally researching this – with snapshots of the complexity of
academics’ lives, juggling care and academic work. The project research used a diary-interview
method with 20 academics; a further 9 participants just filled in the diary. ‘Conferences and complex care
constellations‘ revealed early findings, showing the range and complexity of
different care constellations. This included temporary and long-term caring,
shifting and dynamic care needs, hands-on and virtual caring, and a variety of
different caring responsibilities.
The project has since produced a
number of different outputs for different audiences, which all emerge from the
study, with inflections from various discussions with colleagues, the
project’s stakeholder group, reactions to the project I have received,
and questions and comments from the various events at which I have presented
the research.
Output 1: Recommendations briefing for conference
organisers (view)
This briefing, produced
in collaboration with Leigh Walker and the Impact Services team in the Warwick
Social Sciences Faculty, outlines how conference organisers can facilitate
access to and participation in conferences for academics with a variety of
caring responsibilities. Many considerations can be implemented at little or no
cost (eg indicating evening social events in advance, or ensuring the wifi is
easily accessible), but with significant impact. Care provision at a conference
does not amount to providing a creche (see also Briony Lipton’s post,
‘Baby’s first conference‘). The briefing is
targeted at both larger association conferences and smaller one-off events,
which are often hosted in HEIs but tend to fly under the radar of institutional
equalities policies.
Output 2: Recommendations postcard for Higher
Education Institutions (Human Resources, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
personnel, Department Chairs) (view)
This is a short set of
priorities for HEIs as a reminder that institutions expect their academics to
attend conferences, but do not necessarily take responsibility for ensuring
that academics are able to do so. While conferences are often portrayed as
something like leisure – an optional extra (see ‘Conferences are (not) holidays‘), HEIs have a
responsibility in this regard as long as academic promotions and hirings
include conferences and the indirect outcomes of conferences such as
publications and collaborative research projects – as well as ‘esteem’ and
‘reputation’ indicators. The postcard highlights the role of HR/EDI
professionals in drawing together different relevant policies (eg relating to
expenses claims, right to childcare, travel bursaries – see also the post about La Trobe’s carers’
travel fund) and the role of department chairs in being aware of and
implementing policies.
Output 3: ‘Juggling Conferences and Caring
Responsibilities’ short film (view)
This short film, freely
accessed on Youtube, aims to raise awareness of how conference attendance and
participation are affected by the challenges of managing caring
responsibilities. The film, produced by Mindsweep Media, includes reactions to
‘In Two Places at Once’ from: an EDI professional; a higher education and
equity researcher; and academics with caring responsibilities (including a
doctoral researcher with a young child, a dual career couple with a young
child, and an academic who had cared for her elderly parents). Academics with
caring responsibilities benefit from knowing that this is a shared issue and the
film can be shown in training sessions and meetings for senior decision-makers.
Output 4: ‘In Two Places at Once: the Impact of
Caring Responsibilities on Academics’ Conference Participation – Final Report’
(view)
Henderson,
EF, Cao, X, Mansuy, J (2018) In Two Places at Once: The Impact of Caring
Responsibilities on Academics’ Conference Participation: Final Project Report,
Coventry: Centre for Education Studies, University of Warwick. DOI: 10.31273/CES.06.2018.001
The project report is a more
comprehensive but accessible resource, with recommendations for action by
different parties, including EDI and HR professionals and people involved in
the ATHENA Swan process or other equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives.
The report is also an academic resource for research in the areas of care,
higher education, gender and the academic profession.
Next steps
A chapter focusing on the diary data was published in Accessibility, Diversity and Inclusion in Critical Events Studies (Routledge, 2019), with two journal articles and a conference presentation planned. I am developing a broader research agenda focusing on intersectional issues of access to and participation in conferences. Updates will be reported at Conference Inference, on Twitter (#I2PO), on the project website, or email me (e.henderson@warwick.ac.uk) to join the project mailing list.
Follow Emily Henderson on Twitter @EmilyFrascatore.
This is a long overdue blog on my keynote Higher Education Research: A Personal Reflection on Policy and Practice at the 2017 SRHE Newer Researchers Conference (available on the SRHE website as well as a post-Keynote interview). In my defence, I was 8 months pregnant at the time and am starting a new job at Imperial College London. Which means that I have been reflecting on these insights myself, and in relation to colleagues (including those newer and emerging in their higher education careers as well as some very well-established).
Develop skill sets
Personal skills: A research career always starts with your personal skills.
Through hundreds of interviews with academics and professional leaders, I have
learned that research careers are hard work. A journal publication is akin to
the tip of an iceberg of activity. Research requires tenacity, perseverance and
loads of patience (from delayed trains to waiting for reviews to come back).
Good public speaking requires a lot of practice (and do not read from your
slides).
Collaboration
skills: Find
ways to work with those within your institution. This may be on projects
related to your job or be more practical in nature. To progress you will need
to work across institutions. This may be strategically for multi-institutional projects
or to leverage resources. International collaborations are vital for niche
expertise and comparative research. As you narrow your research specialism you
will find there are usually a handful of people exploring similar topics. And
working internationally does not need to entail a massive budget—I have
long-term collaborators I have only met via Skype. Tip: this is a great website to find time zones to connect.
Methodological
skills: Develop
your methodological toolkit. This means going beyond a simplistic
quantitative/qualitative divide. The methods should follow from the research
questions and the best way to address them. I use various quantitative and
qualitative analyses as appropriate, as well as concept mapping (and developed concept-map
mediated interviewing), cognitive interviewing techniques, focus groups (I am a
fan of 4-6 people, more than that and voices get lost) as well as interviews.
Even more creative methods are being used – from photo elicitation to dance and
Lego (which I personally get enough of at home). Tip: distinctive methods can
go a long way in selling a research bid.
Writing
skills for different audiences: There is no point in doing research if you cannot
communicate the findings. There are very different writing styles for different
audiences. Academic writing can be heavily referenced and jargon-heavy. The
practitioner audience wants to hear the ‘so what’ answered. Writing for
policymakers is tough, but at least is always brief. The public is a whole other
beast – if your work has public interest I recommend professional media
training, it really helped me with live radio broadcasts when you get five
minutes to prepare. And when writing for students, it helps to “show your
work”, not just the conclusion. I am still working on the skill of taking one
piece of research and ‘translating’ it for different audiences (hence a massive
pile of rejected journal articles from policy-oriented research projects).
Building a career
Be strategic: Be creative in approaches to roles and
responsibilities to build longer term success. Can you turn an internal project
evaluation into a research project? Can you repeat a pedagogical intervention
each term to build up a longitudinal dataset? Or have a colleague to the same
and work together?
Be green: Re-use resources and recycle your data.
Within ethical boundaries, you can continually mine your own data. I managed to
draw out the theme of ‘creativity’ for a journal special issue from a large dataset on leadership.
Be free: You do not need external funding to
do HE research (although it helps!). If you do not have, or are in between,
funded projects, carry on small
bits of longitudinal research or pet projects. I have seen full professors
present on research they did ‘on the side’ over 5-10 years.
Be you: Develop your own strand or niche
within a larger project. This may be within a professional position or a funded
research project. You will always be assigned some roles, but seek out related
activities that allow you some freedom to pursue your own interests.
Be savvy: This is not for novices, but if
you start early it is a lot easier. Conducting a meta-analysis across projects
and strands of research allows you to inform policy and have high impact. This
can start with high-quality literature reviews or cataloguing studies in your
research area.
Research impact
It used to be ‘publish or perish’. For better or
worse, impact is the new name of the game now. Think of multiple audiences and
what aspects of your research they may be interested in – this may differ for students,
academics, institutions, government policy and the wider public. A
straightforward way to have research impact is to bid for commissioned research
projects: an eager audience already awaits.
Impact means getting your boots dirty – hit the
rails, the road, the sky. You need to get your message out there. A tip for
research bids – set aside plenty of funding to support dissemination. In
addition to the SRHE blog,
use Twitter
to get your findings out, Wonkhe
is great for policy, Times
Higher Education has
a wide readership and University World News has international reach.
Forging your own path
In the absence of large
student cohorts, there are very few ‘traditional’ academic jobs in higher
education studies; exceptions are the Master’s in Higher Education courses in
the US or a few large-scale doctoral programmes. That means most higher
education researchers have their own unique career path, often in hybrid roles
with a mix of academic, professional services and managerial responsibilities.
To keep moving ahead in your
career, build research networks across institutions and countries. If you do
not know where to start, ask questions about someone’s research. Develop broad
networks, including for professional work, research, across the sector, as well
as policy influencers.
Get off your phone and email
and be present and active at conferences; develop a public profile; request
coffee chats with those whose work you like. Draw others in to your area of
interest. I suggest informal mentors and champions as I have never found a
formal scheme that seemed to work out. Find commonalities with others in
related and semi-related areas (methods is always a good start). Tip: Write half
an article then ask for collaborators rather than starting from scratch.
Challenges and opportunities
Sustaining a research career is not easy. You may
encounter research and policy fads. There are endless calls for accountability
and the resulting need to translate outputs to meet targets for your
institution, REF and impact. It is also a lot easier to publish some kinds of
research than others. Building networks can be daunting, and you will encounter
tribes and territories and the intimidating disciplinary ‘old guard’ or ‘Mean
Girls’-style cliques.
I know several colleagues who have built up
professional and research expertise in a niche area or in a specific
institutional context, and then feel stuck or are afraid to let go of what they
have achieved to move on.
There is also the challenge of positional power in
higher education. You might know more than your VC about access, but best not
tell her that. Expertise and knowledge can be threatening to those above and
around you – academia is not immune to the cry of “enough of experts”. Your
research will always be more respected outside your institution.
However, chin up, as they say. Keep the big picture
in mind and play the long game. Keep multiple strands of work going. Build
supportive networks. Play to your strengths and build on your weaknesses. I
need to force myself to stop and write instead of chasing the next grant
sometimes. When tensions get tight, speak to facts. And be humble (at least on
the outside).
Final points of wisdom
Your specialism will only ever be part of what your
day job is; every HE role has its “bread and butter” elements (what pays your
salary). Keep your career goals in mind (do you want to be a REF star? Do you
want to have policy impact? Or institutional impact? Do you love teaching?
Don’t pull up the ladder behind you, build new ones to drop down. Provide and pass on opportunities to others. Some activities pay your salary, some offer generous or pitiful compensation, others offer prestige, networking, goodwill or, if lucky, a cup of tea and some biscuits. And a random one to finish, never put a country name or a discipline in a title (it is a turn-off to everyone else).
SRHE member Camille Kandiko Howson is Associate Professor of Education in the Centre for Higher Education Research & Scholarship at Imperial College London. Camille is also a member of the SRHE Research & Development Committee
