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Teaching in higher education: Connected practice for changing times?

by Karen Gravett and Simon Lygo-Baker

Why does teaching matter, and how might we understand what it means to teach in higher education, in contemporary times? This blog introduces our new book Reconceptualising teaching in higher education, published by Routledge. The book is created from our own reading, research, ideas, and practice as two academics working in the field of higher education, where we have been teaching for over twenty years in universities in the UK, America and Australia. It was inspired by our thoughts and discussions surrounding what it means to teach and the joys, pleasures and challenges that accompany our role.

At present there are many questions regarding higher education, its purpose and possible futures. For teachers too, questions remain regarding the necessity and shape of teachers’ contributions in a marketised sector mediated by artificial intelligence and pinched by precarity. And yet, this book is underpinned by our continued belief that teaching matters. We believe that meaningful teaching matters for our students, for our own development and experiences as educators, and for the futures of universities themselves. We argue that teaching provides opportunities for meaningful learning which matters for personal growth and for the development of knowledge. We believe that meaningful learning matters for the creation of new opportunities and possibilities. As bell hooks (1994) explains, fundamentally, education is about ‘the practice of freedom’. In a world where perhaps the experiences we have, the products we purchase, and the information we consume may not always seem meaningful, we believe that the connections that happen when we learn and when we teach have a power that should be harnessed and celebrated. Education matters, because not only does it open doors, but it allows us to recognise them and frame them for ourselves, offering the opportunity to challenge and evolve.

The book is designed for anyone seeking to develop their role as teachers in contemporary universities. This includes new teachers as well as those of us who still have questions and are still keen to develop and respond to our changing times. Specifically, it asks us to rethink our role and the directions we typically follow and suggests the need to disrupt these and to rethink our role as teachers, to take a different path, talk to someone new, or see things a different way. Viewing higher education from new positions can help us to reimagine our role and discover or reclaim the pleasure of teaching. 

To do this, our book challenges the traditional view of teaching as an individual act. Instead, it frames teaching as a relational and situated practice, built on connections with others. Secondly, we explore teaching as an affirmative and emotional endeavour that can inspire others and lead to joyful and generative moments of connection. Lastly, the book positions teaching as a critical practice, where educators are encouraged to embrace uncertainty, question assumptions, and let their approaches evolve. These ideas are all interwoven with practical insights into contemporary areas of practice, including assessment, learning spaces, feedback, digital education, artificial intelligence, learning design, belonging and inclusion, to develop ethical and relational pedagogic approaches. Specifically, the last chapter examines a wide range of key issues, for example feedback frustrations or student engagement, in order to examine how as a reader you might be able to develop approaches and ideas that work for you in responding to some of these challenges. We hope that readers will find the book useful and look forward to continuing conversations around what it means to teach in changing times.

References

Gravett, K and Lygo-Baker, S (2026) Reconceptualising teaching in higher education: Connected practice for changing times Routledge

hooks, b (1994) Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom Routledge

Dr Karen Gravett is Associate Professor of Higher Education, and Head of the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focuses on the theory-practice of higher education. She is Executive Editor for the journal Teaching in Higher Education, and a member of the editorial board for Learning, Media and Technology. Karen’s latest books are: Gravett, K and Lygo-Baker, S (2026). Reconceptualising teaching in higher education: Connected practice for changing times, Gravett, K (2025) Critical Practice in Higher Education, and Gravett, K (2023) Relational Pedagogies: Connections and Mattering in Higher Education.

Simon Lygo-Baker works as a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Education at King’s College London and has previously worked in the University of Wisconsin, USA and the University of Surrey, UK. He has previously worked on developing curricula with refugees, asylum seekers and other socially excluded groups, as well as working for a number of years in academic development.

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SRHE News on teaching and learning

By Rob Cuthbert

One of the benefits of SRHE membership is exclusive access to the quarterly newsletter, SRHE News, archived at https://www.srhe.ac.uk/publications/. SRHE News typically contains a round-up of recent academic events and conferences, policy developments and new publications, written by editor Rob Cuthbert. To illustrate the contents, here is part of the January 2021 issue which covers Teaching and Learning.

Academic development and Pro VC roles can go together

Fiona Denney (Brunel) reported her research in International Journal of Academic Development (online 13 December 2020) based on interviews with four Pro VCs with academic development backgrounds: “Over the past two years, four research-intensive universities in the UK have appointed senior academic leaders from academic development backgrounds, a new phenomenon in this sector of UK higher education that may suggest a changing pattern. This study interviewed these four leaders to explore what the appointment means for their academic identity. The interviewees identified internal and external drivers for change and noted their backgrounds as academic developers made their routes into these senior roles different from their peers. For this reason, their ‘academic credibility’ was critical in order to implement culture change effectively.”

How metrics are changing academic development

Roni Bamber (Queen Margaret University) blogged for Wonkhe on 18 December 2020 about her monograph for SEDA, Our days are numbered. Great title, good read.

SoTL in action

The 2018 book edited by Nancy Chick was reviewed by Maik Arnold (University of Applied Sciences, Germany) for Arts and Humanities in Education (online 12 October 2020).

Innovations in Active Learning in Higher Education

The new book by SRHE members Simon Pratt-Adams, Uwe Richter and Mark Warnes (all Anglia Ruskin) grew out of an Active Learning conference at Anglia Ruskin University, leading to a book which, in the words of the foreword by Mike Sharples (Open University) “shows how to put active learning into practice with large cohorts of students and how to grow that practice over many years. The authors come from a variety of institutions and discipline areas … What they have in common is a desire to improve student engagement, experience and outcomes, through active learning approaches that work in practice and are scalable and sustainable.” Free to download from the publishers, Fulcrum.

Now that’s what I call a publishing event

The new book by Keith Trigwell (Sydney) and Mike Prosser (Melbourne) Exploring University Teaching and Learning: Experience and Context, was launched on 10 December 2020, more than 20 years since Understanding Learning and Teaching appeared in 1999. The book focuses on university teachers’ experience of teaching and learning, discussing the qualitative variation in approaches to university teaching, the factors associated with that variation, and how different ways of teaching are related to differences in student experiences of teaching and learning. The authors extend the discussions of teaching into new areas, including emotions in teaching, leadership of teaching, growth as a university teacher and the contentious field of relations between teaching and research.

Psychological contract profiling for managing the learning experience of higher education students

László Horváth (ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) used a service marketing approach for his article in the European Journal of Higher Education (online 27 January 2020): “Combining … six factors for expectations (personalization, development of soft skills, competent teachers, labour market preparedness, support, flexibility) and three factors of obligations (performance and activity, preciseness and punctuality, obedience and respect), we created Psychological Contract Profile Clusters (outcome-centred, teacher-centred, learner-centred, learning-centred, content-centred and self-centred students).”

“Grade inflation remains ‘a significant and pressing issue’”

That was how the OfS chose to present its analysis of degree outcomes published on 19 November 2020, quoting OfS chief executive Nicola Dandridge. The report itself said the rate of increase in ‘grade inflation’ had slowed in 2018-2019, and buried in the text was this: “It is not possible to deduce from this analysis what factors not included in the modelling (such as improvements in teaching quality, more diligent students or changes to assessment approaches) are driving the observed changes in degree attainment.” No recognition by OfS of the research by Calvin Jephcote (Leicester), SRHE members Emma Medland and Robin Lygo-Baker (both Surrey) published in Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, which concluded: “The results suggest a much more positive and proactive picture of a higher education system that is engaged in a process of continuous enhancement. The unexplained variables, rather than automatically being labelled as grade inflation, should instead point to a need to investigate further the local institutional contextual factors that inform grade distribution. The deficit lens through which ‘grade inflation’ is often perceived is a damaging and unhelpful distraction.” Perhaps Nicola Dandridge was auditioning for Queen of Hearts in the OfS Christmas panto: “Sentence first, verdict afterwards”.

Jephcote, Medland and Lygo-Baker had also blogged for Wonkhe on 14 October 2020 about their research: “Evidence for why grades are trending upwards, or the less loaded phrase of grade improvement, reveal a complex landscape. According to our recent research, the most influential determinants of grade improvement were shown to be the geographic location of an institution, research output quality and the increasing quality of student cohorts – although even this variable was determined on grade entry points, which the recent A Level debacle in the UK has pulled into question. … What this evidence reveals is that a combination of student aptitude, and changes to the structure and quality of UK higher education, appear to be largely accountable for graduates attaining higher grades. It also, importantly, points to the problems associated with our criterion-referenced approaches to assessment being critiqued using a norm-referenced rationale.”

Peer review of teaching in Australian HE: a systematic review

The article by Alexandra L Johnston, Chi Baik and Andrea Chester (all Melbourne) was in Higher Education Research and Development (online 18 November 2020) “A thematic synthesis revealed teaching development outcomes gained through peer review of teaching span factors at organisational … program … and individual … levels. Organisational factors included disciplinary context, program sustainability, collegiality and leadership. Program factors included framework, program design, basis of participation, observation, feedback and reflective practice. Factors at the individual level included prior experience and participants’ perceived development requirements.”

What do undergraduate students understand by excellent teaching?

SRHE member Mike Mimirinis (West London) published the results of his SRHE-funded research in Higher Education Research and Development (online 21 November 2020): “This article explores undergraduate students’ conceptions of what constitutes excellent teaching. … semi-structured interviews with students at two English universities yields five qualitatively different conceptions of excellent teaching. In contrast to the current intense policy focus on outcome factors (eg graduate employability), students predominantly discern process factors as conducive to excellent teaching: how the subject matter is presented, what the lecturer brings to the teaching process, how students’ personal understanding is supported, and to what extent the questioning and transformation of disciplinary knowledge is facilitated. More importantly, this study demonstrates that an expansion of students’ awareness of the nature of teaching is internally related to the expansion of their awareness of the nature of disciplinary knowledge.”

The German sense of humour

The article in Studies in Higher Education (online 3 June 2019, issue 2020:12) was based on two large surveys of how teachers used humour in their teaching, and how students responded. It seems to come down to what the teachers meant by using humour. The research was by Martin Daumiller and three other colleagues at Augsburg.

Teaching in lifelong learning: A guide to theory and practice

The third edition was published in 2019, edited by James Avis, Roy Fisher and Ron Thompson (all Huddersfield).

A conceptual framework to enhance student learning and engagement

Alice Brown, Jill Lawrence, Marita Basson and Petrea Redmond (all Southern Queensland) had an article in Higher Education Research and Development (online 28 December 2020) about using course learning analytics (CLA) and nudging strategies, based on “a 12-month research project, as well as by the theoretical perspectives presented by communication and critical literacies. These perspectives were applied to develop a conceptual framework which the authors designed to prioritise expectation management and engagement principles for both students and academics. The article explains the development of the framework as well as the elements and key communication strategies it embodies. The framework contributes to practice by explaining and justifying the accessible, time-efficient, student-focused approaches that can be integrated simply into each course’s online learning pedagogy to support both academics’ and students’ engagement.”

Rob Cuthbert is the editor of SRHE News and Blog, 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. He is current chair of the SRHE Publications Committee.