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The technical turn and what it means for higher education

by Tim Savage

When I began my career as a photography technician in higher education 25 years ago, the distinction between academic and technical work was clear and helpful. Academics were thought of as the ‘master practitioners’ who taught creative and professional practice, while technicians prepared facilities, maintained equipment, and helped students to use specialist resources safely. However, as my career progressed, I observed the boundaries between academic and technical roles and responsibilities becoming increasingly indistinct and porous.

In my most recent role, as Director of Technical Learning at a leading UK arts university, I led a technical team of 130 staff whose remits became deeply involved in teaching and learning; many gained teaching qualifications and sought professional recognition, and it became increasingly common for technicians to transition their careers into academia, particularly in disciplines driven by new and emerging technologies.

Technical duties at my institution evolved informally to include writing and delivering progressively developmental lesson plans aligned to module outcomes, devising innovative and differentiated ways of teaching advanced disciplinary skills, collaborating with students to define and solve complex problems without precedent, contributing to feedback and assessment, and helping students develop both the skills and mindsets to succeed in their studies and to flourish in their lives and careers beyond university.

The scale and impact of pre-planned technician-led teaching was evident in the timetable and in the quality of work presented for assessment, but remained much less visible during periods of self-directed study, when students sought personalised advice and guidance at the point of need, sometimes seeking assistance to realise an idea, or having reached the limits of their knowledge, or wanting to understand why something in their work had failed or resulted in an unanticipated outcome. Anecdotally, and through formal feedback channels, students consistently reported these unstructured exchanges with technicians as being among the most valuable and impactful pedagogies they experienced, both in terms of the quality of their outputs and in their confidence and abilities to enter their chosen careers.

The workforce, it seemed, was changing. Academic roles were becoming increasingly focused on theory, research, and curriculum development, while technicians took on more responsibility for teaching practical skills. In this new model, technicians increasingly found themselves positioned as the new ‘master practitioners’ holding specialist knowledge and occupying the pedagogic spaces their lecturer colleagues had previously held.

From my position within the university executive, I saw this change driven by role creep rather than strategy, and neither the operating model that funded it nor the structures or policies used to describe, manage, and quality-assure it kept pace. Furthermore, despite the clearly transformed roles and responsibilities, it remained problematic for technicians to claim that they teach.

My new book, Technical Teaching in Higher Education: Insights from the Creative Arts, examines and attempts to make sense of this shift, exploring the rich and textured pedagogies involved, and considering how institutions might use that understanding to improve teaching and learning.

Making sense of the technical turn

In my research, I describe the growing educational responsibilities of technicians as a ‘technical turn’. Within creative arts HE, I attribute this evolution to a combination of political, economic, social, and technological factors shaping the sector, accentuated by the incorporation and mergers of art schools and former polytechnics into universities.

Susan Orr theorises this shift in arts education as an ‘academic turn’ in which institutional missions and the hierarchies of knowledge taught and learned changed. Previously essential practical, tacit, and technical knowledge and skills became deprioritised in the curriculum, even as they remained central to student learning, experiences, and graduate outcomes. Jonathan Harwood’s concept of ‘academic drift’ offers a way of understanding these changes, which some critics associate with the loss of the traditional art school.

But neither the technical nor the academic turns, nor the role convergences they have enabled, are new or restricted to the creative arts. In 1997, the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education identified how the formerly clear distinctions between academic and non-academic roles were becoming increasingly blurred across the sector.

More recently, the UKRI-funded TALENT Commission on which I served provided evidence of the extent of technical involvement in teaching. Its national survey found that 95% of creative arts respondents were involved in teaching activities, compared with 75% of respondents from other disciplines. Subsequent studies have illuminated the scale and breadth of technician teaching across UK universities. These findings show that technical teaching extends across the sector, although how technicians understand and approach this work remains comparatively under-examined.


Five conceptions of technical teaching

My doctoral research addressed a related question: how do visual arts technicians understand and approach their teaching? Using phenomenography, I explored variation in participants’ conceptions of their pedagogies. I interviewed technicians across the UK in different kinds of institutions, spanning art, craft, design, and media disciplines. I examined what participants believed they taught, how they taught it, and why. I identified five approaches: Demonstrator, Instructor, Consultant, Collaborator, and Transformer. Each describes a different way of understanding and approaching teaching, and participants drew on several of these approaches depending on the learner and the context.

Demonstrators see their role as introducing learners to safe and competent practice. Their teaching makes equipment, materials, software, and specialist environments accessible through clear explanations and repeatable processes. They use didactic methods, while prioritising the clear understanding of foundations and conventions from which students can begin to work independently.

Instructors help students acquire, develop and apply skills in unique and personalised ways. Their emphasis moves towards adapting techniques to different purposes and developing the practical judgement needed to use them. Learning how to operate a camera, for example, becomes less about controls and functions, and more about understanding how its use can serve a photographic intention.

Consultants see themselves as subject authorities, whose role is to respond to a learner’s particular problem or ambition. A student may arrive with an unsuccessful process, a technical problem, or an idea they cannot realise. Teaching involves diagnostic assessment, questioning, and advice that help the learner evaluate possible solutions, evaluate risks and benefits, and make informed decisions.

Collaborators work alongside students, sharing in their processes of exploration and discovery. Knowledge develops through dialogue, experimentation, iteration, and encounters with materials or processes. These interactions and exchanges can take both student and technician beyond their existing understanding, supporting unknown and uncertain outcomes.

Transformers focus on changes in how learners understand their practice and themselves as practitioners. Their aim is to challenge and expand what students believe they can do, how they approach their work, and to broaden their ambitions and move beyond perceived limits. Transformative pedagogies were also found to influence curricula, more effectively integrate with academia, and inform institutional approaches to practical learning.

These five qualitatively distinct conceptions span a spectrum from teacher-centred content delivery to student-centred, transformative learning. They describe ways of understanding technical teaching, and an individual may adopt different pedagogies at different times. The range was broadly comparable with that identified in research on academics’ conceptions of teaching.


Putting the framework to use

The taxonomy’s practical value lies in making these different educational approaches and purposes more explicit. For individual technicians and their managers, it can provide language to reflect on practice, discuss teaching with peers, and identify development needs. It can also help educational developers connect teaching qualifications, mentoring, and professional recognition, such as Advance HE Fellowships, using authentic technical teaching and learning scenarios and case studies.

For curriculum teams, the framework can help identify where technical learning can be deployed most effectively within a programme and aligned with learning outcomes and assessment criteria. An equipment induction may prepare students to enter a workshop, but subsequent projects may depend on consultation, experimentation, and feedback.

Quality assurance and enhancement follow the same logic. Peer observation, student feedback, and shared reflection could help teams understand how technical pedagogies contribute to learning and where they need improvement.

For senior leaders, a clearer understanding of who teaches the curriculum and how is essential to linking strategy and operations. The academic/technical polarisation of the workforce is becoming increasingly unsustainable, prompting legitimate but challenging questions about workload planning, staffing structures and cost, and curriculum development. Such debates are likely to become more urgent as universities increasingly describe technician pedagogies as evidence of institutional teaching excellence, prioritise technical expertise and skills teaching, and place both at the centre of graduate outcomes and employability agendas.

The framework offers an evidence-based starting point for these conversations at a sector level; for institutions, it can help improve the integration of academic theory and technical practice within a constructively aligned curriculum, strengthen collaboration and understanding across role boundaries and break down longstanding silos in support of student education, experiences, and outcomes.

Dr Tim Savage is a consultant, author, and trainer specialising in technical learning, technicians, and institutional change in higher education. He previously served as Director of Technical Learning at the University for the Creative Arts and is a Principal Fellow of Advance HE, recognised for sustained strategic leadership in technical learning and teaching. His latest book, based on his doctoral research, is Technical Teaching in Higher Education: Insights from the Creative Arts (Routledge, 2026)


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Navigating research culture(s) in HE: Pracademia and professional identity

by Monika Foster, Jill Dickinson and Debbie Rigby

The intensification of the research agenda across higher education (HE) has sharpened questions about who participates in research, on what terms, and with what support. This is perhaps most prominent in post-1992 institutions whose applied agenda historically called for professionals to join academia to enhance knowledge-practice links, but who are recently experiencing a shift in research intensification. Academics with practitioner experience, commonly referred to as pracademics (Volpe and Chandler, 1999), have the potential to occupy an increasingly significant, yet under-recognised position within this landscape. Entering academia from professional practice, they must simultaneously navigate unfamiliar research cultures, renegotiate their professional identities, and reconcile competing demands from the worlds of practice and scholarship (Huey and Mitchell, 2016).

In this blog, we focus on a British Academy/Leverhulme funded project (Leeds Beckett University, 2026) that explored how pracademics might renegotiate their identities as they operate within, and move between, the different working contexts presented by practice and academia (Johnson and Ellis, 2023; Huey and Mitchell, 2016). We reflect on the findings that highlight the gaps that exist within both the literature and university practices to support pracademics who work within post-1992 institutions in renegotiating their identities as they navigate the research culture within HE.

Understanding research: the practitioner-academic identity and research divide

The literature suggests that pracademics can complement a diverse faculty (Dickinson and Griffiths, 2023) by transgressing boundaries, serving as network brokers between academia and industry, and creating new channels to enhance cooperation and communication across the academic-practitioner divide (Powell et al, 2018; Panda, 2014). However, an emerging pracademic identity may take time to adjust as practitioners might simultaneously hold on to their practitioner identities whilst developing new skills and connections in academia. Institutions and external partners that achieve higher levels of practitioner-academic collaboration are more likely to be more successful (Hughes et al, 2011; Posner, 2009). Organisations with the strongest academic networks and research capacities are likely to produce wider social, community and policy impacts as well as the benefits for business (Nicolaou and Birley, 2003; Siegel et al, 2007).

Against this backdrop, we sought to explore the following three questions: What do pracademics understand by the phrase ‘research within HE’? To what extent do pracademics perceive themselves as able to engage in, and navigate, the research within HE? And What other factors do pracademics perceive as either supporting or inhibiting their potential to contribute to the research within HE?

Practitioner-academic identity and research culture

We have purposively sampled institutions that are likely to employ a significant number of pracademics and that are developing their research agenda alongside their teaching offer. Post-1992 institutions (granted university status through the Further and Higher Education Act 1992) have traditionally recruited more pracademics (Obembe, 2023) and are increasingly focused on strengthening their research alongside their teaching provision (Guthrie and Neumann, 2007). Through an online survey completed by forty-five pracademics working in post-1992 universities, we intended to build an initial picture of pracademics’ experiences by exploring understandings of research culture, confidence in engaging in research, and professional identity, which helped identify key issues for further exploration.

The survey results highlighted no single understanding or definition of what research culture meant and participants consistently described it as much more than simply undertaking research. Factors perceived to support engagement with research culture included: supportive colleagues, mentoring, collaboration, opportunities for informal knowledge exchange and access to research development opportunities. In contrast, competing workload demands, limited time, unclear pathways into research, unfamiliar academic processes, and a lack of confidence seem to inhibit engagement.

Based on the survey outcomes, we explored further pracademics’ professional identity, how they navigate research culture, what they value in research, and how they experience the changing expectations of higher education in focus groups. Focus groups’ participants were from a range of disciplines including education, business, law, social work and policy. The focus group discussions were analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006), and four interconnected themes emerged that capture pracademics’ journey and transition, starting with their professional identities, making sense of research culture, practitioners’ values, and how these values and experiences sit within a changing higher education landscape.

Theme 1: “It’s the synergy between the two”. Constructing a pracademic identity

Who am I becoming as a pracademic? Across the focus groups, we noted a recurring theme of professional identities, bringing established professional knowledge, values and experience into HE, drawing upon different aspects of themselves depending on the context. For many, their practitioner and academic identities were not experienced as separate or competing, but as closely connected. This is captured well in the words of one of the focus groups participants: “it’s the synergy between the two that makes it really interesting”, explaining that “sometimes it’s the practice that’s doing the heavy lifting and sometimes it’s the academic bit that’s doing the heavy lifting.”

Theme 2: “Learning the rules of a different game”. Navigating the hidden cultures of higher education

How do I learn to navigate the academic world? Although the research participants entered HE with substantial professional expertise, many reported feeling unexpectedly like novices when trying to grasp research culture. Research culture was described differently across the focus groups. Some participants described it as the environment in which research happens, whilst others reflected on arriving in HE with little understanding of where to begin “a little bit daunting on arrival”.These discussions suggest that engaging with research culture involves much more than learning research skills; it involves learning the language, expectations and culture of HE itself.

Theme 3: “Working with people rather than on people”. Practitioner values shaping research

What values do pracademics bring? Participants described research through the values they brought with them from professional practice. Research was described as most valuable when it remained connected to the communities and professions it sought to serve. Across the focus groups, participants consistently described their practitioner experience as shaping not only the research they wanted to undertake, but also how they understood impact. Research was valued for its ability to improve practice, support students and contribute to professional communities, research is not as an activity separate from practice, but as an extension of it.

Theme 4: When pracademic values meet institutional realities. Negotiating value within contemporary HE

What happens when those values encounter the realities of contemporary higher education? Whilst there was a strong commitment to research across the focus groups, participants also described becoming increasingly aware of what appeared to be recognised, rewarded and made visible within contemporary universities. Research outputs, funding applications and academic progression were often interpreted as indicators of what institutions value. A recurring thread throughout these discussions was participants’ growing awareness that research culture is changing, has research culture become “an empty signifier for ‘how many articles are you getting published in four-star journals?'”, whilst also asking where professional expertise, leadership and knowledge exchange fitted within this changing landscape.

Navigating research culture in a changing HE landscape

Overall, our study has shone a light on how pracademics navigate research culture within a changing HE landscape. Beyond simply identifying barriers to engagement, we explored how they establish professional identities and shape participants’ understandings of meaningful research, academic identity and the changing expectations of contemporary universities. The findings from the project suggest that these pracademics do not experience becoming academics as leaving their practitioner identities behind. They consistently describe building upon their professional knowledge, skills and values. Their practitioner identities remain central to how they understand themselves and the contribution they make within HE.

It is apparent that pracademics move between practitioner and academic perspectives depending on the context in which they are working. This flexibility strengthens their teaching, shapes the research questions they ask, and enables them to connect with students, colleagues and professional communities reflecting both worlds. Given the richness of contributions that pracademics can make in research and practice in universities, we hope that these findings might inform a broad range of stakeholders, including: policymakers, HE-related charities, senior university leadership, human resources and organisational development, research development, those who self-identify as pracademics, and those who have taken more traditional career paths.

Monika Foster is Professor of Business Education and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor International and Educational Partnerships at Northumbria University, National Teaching Fellow and PFHEA, her research interests include leadership and change management, cross-cultural management and social capital development.

Jill Dickinson is Professor of Law and Professional Development at Leeds Law School, Leeds Beckett University, PFHEA, an Executive Coach (L7) and Solicitor (non-practising), and her research draws on creative methods to explore professional development and place-making.

Debbie Rigby is a PhD researcher at Leeds Beckett University and a former secondary school science teacher, Assistant Headteacher and teacher educator with a particular interest in research culture and professional identity in higher education.