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The missing middle ground between research-led and practice-led education

by Saeed Talebi and Nick Morton

A peer reviewer recently challenged our pedagogical approach. We had described embedding an industry-led research project on Digital Twin development into our built environment curriculum as ‘research-informed teaching’. The reviewer disagreed: this was ‘practice-led rather than research-informed,’ they argued, because students weren’t producing research outputs themselves.

The comment revealed a conceptual confusion we suspect is widespread in higher education. We often assume that if students aren’t producing original research, then any industry-focused teaching must simply be vocational training with academic window-dressing. This leaves practice-facing disciplines in an awkward position: industry engagement is essential to what we do, but it risks being dismissed as less scholarly. There is, however, a middle ground.

Healey and Jenkins’ (2009) model offers a useful way through this confusion. They identify four modes of engaging undergraduates with research: research-led (learning about current scholarship), research-oriented (learning research methods), research-based (undertaking inquiry), and research-tutored (engaging in research discussions). These are mapped across two dimensions: whether students are positioned as audience or participants, and whether the emphasis falls on research content or processes. The model’s key insight is that students can be meaningfully engaged with research even when they aren’t producing research outputs themselves. The question isn’t simply whether students are ‘doing research’, it’s whether they’re positioned as passive recipients of established knowledge or as active participants in scholarly inquiry.

Practice-led teaching operates on different logic, though that logic has a closer relationship to applied research than is sometimes acknowledged. Its primary aim is developing professional competence through authentic engagement with messy problems and competing stakeholder priorities. The distinction isn’t whether industry is involved – it can be present in both approaches. The distinction lies in how students are positioned in relation to knowledge. In practice-led education, knowledge tends to be treated as relatively settled. In research-informed education, knowledge is contested, evolving, and open to question. An opportunity arises when these approaches coincide without conscious design, and a risk emerges when they collapse into one another. Research-informed teaching can become performative, referencing staff publications without changing how students learn. Practice-led teaching can slip into employability theatre, where live briefs are added without interrogating what knowledge students are actually developing.

As Professor Hanifa Shah OBE recently argued in Times Higher Education, STEAM education at its best equips students to “move fluidly between analytical and imaginative modes of thinking“, asking critical questions, considering ethical implications, and bringing meaning to innovation. This is precisely the disposition that research-informed teaching seeks to develop. In STEAM disciplines, including architecture, built environment, computing and engineering, emerging technologies create spaces where research and practice intersect meaningfully. Digital Twins and real-time monitoring tools, for example, allow students to work with live systems while engaging critically with the assumptions and ethics embedded within them. Students aren’t merely applying research after the fact, nor mimicking professional routines. They’re learning to question how data is generated, how models simplify reality, and how decisions are shaped by both evidence and judgement. Practice becomes a site of inquiry.

There’s an institutional dimension here too. Across the sector, promotion frameworks, workload models, and teaching quality metrics often reward research visibility and industry engagement without asking how either is translated pedagogically. Academics are encouraged to ‘bring research into teaching’ and ‘embed employability’, yet rarely supported in doing the difficult design work that meaningful integration requires. Recent discussions within the sector have highlighted how delivery models shape the possibilities for integrating academic and workplace learning. These are sector-wide conversations, and they reflect shared challenges around diverse learner cohorts, blended delivery, and the risk of compliance overtaking genuine learning. As a result, many innovative practices remain dependent on individual effort rather than structural support.

None of this means practice-led and research-informed approaches are mutually exclusive. The most effective curricula often blend elements of both. But blending deliberately is quite different from conflating accidentally.

When designing industry-engaged teaching, it’s worth asking honest questions. Are students positioned as inquirers or executors? Are they engaging with contested knowledge or settled practice? Does assessment reward critical reflection or merely competent performance? Is the industry project a vehicle for scholarly inquiry, or is scholarly framing a veneer over vocational training?

The answers won’t always be clear-cut, and that’s fine. But asking the questions helps us design with intention rather than stumbling into confusion – and helps us articulate what we’re doing when a peer reviewer, a sceptical colleague, or a university committee asks us to justify our approach.

Dr Saeed Talebi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at Birmingham City University and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). He has held a number of T&L leadership roles, including Departmental Lead, Course Leader, and Academic Lead for Teaching Excellence and Student Experience. He has a keen interest in pedagogy in higher education, with particular interest in research-informed teaching and the integration of emerging technologies and practice-led projects into built environment curricula to enhance student outcomes and experience. He has also led the delivery of large STEAM research projects.

Professor Nick Morton is the Academic Director of Partnerships and STEAM at Birmingham City University. A Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA), he was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in recognition of his track record in curriculum development. He has held a number of senior leadership roles at BCU, including Associate Dean for Teaching Education and Student Experience, overseeing Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment. He was elected Vice-Chair of the Council of Heads of the Built Environment (CHOBE) in 2012 and is a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (FRICS).


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Can folk pedagogies help us understand the limited impact of research on higher education?

by Alex Buckley

The SRHE conference is a great place to see our field in all its glory. From the sessions I attended in December 2025, one thing that was abundantly clear was the desire of so many HE researchers to change the world. A distinctive feature of contemporary HE research – reflecting the social sciences more broadly – is the focus on political and ethical issues, with avowedly political and ethical intentions. The improvement of society is often the explicit end, rather than the more humble improvement of our own part of the education system.

Despite this desire to make a difference, higher education research has for many years been held up as an area where the impact of those working in the field is not what it could be. As George Keller said in 1985, “hardly anyone in higher education pays attention to the research and scholarship about higher education”,

Asking the right questions?

There hasn’t been a lot of work on the gap between research and practice in HE – though there is a fair amount in the schools sector from which we can extrapolate, to a greater or lesser extent – but one issue that has received some attention is the fundamental one: are researchers actually asking the right questions?

Vivianne Robinson is a researcher who has laid a substantial amount of blame at the feet of researchers, who “have little to offer by way of alternative solutions, when the problems they have been studying are not those of the practitioner” (Robinson 1993). I have recently used Robinson’s model of Problem-Based Methodology to explore whether research about exams in higher education does engage sufficiently with the challenges that teachers take themselves to face. The results were not encouraging.

One of the more straightforward of Robinson’s criteria for impactful research is that researchers should be addressing teachers’ beliefs, and correcting them where they are erroneous. That’s important, but what if those beliefs are hard to shift? We all have stubborn hunches about how higher education works: good ways of motivating students, how to write feedback that will make students pay attention, how to clearly communicate complex ideas. What if there are teacher beliefs that are deeply embedded, so deeply that we don’t always know we have them, but that aren’t helping us and need to change?

One idea that has been explored in the school sector, but has largely passed us by, is the concept of ‘folk pedagogies’. This idea was developed in the 1990s as an extension of the more famous concept of ‘folk psychologies’: the tacit theories that we all have that allow us to make sense of people’s behaviour. For Jerome Bruner, a natural next step from folk psychologies was the idea that we have intuitive theories about how people learn.

“Watch any mother, any teacher, even any babysitter with a child and you’ll be struck by how much of what they do is steered by notions of ‘what children’s mind are like and how to help them learn,’ even though they may not be able to verbalise their pedagogical principles.” Bruner (1996)

There has been some research in the school sector about the implications of this idea, particularly in terms of how much difference research makes to educational practice. Folk pedagogies have two features that will make them a factor in the impact of education research: they interfere with the uptake of new research-based ideas and approaches, and they are stubborn. On the first point, the idea is that new ideas about higher education will have to replace the old if they are to influence teachers; and on the second, evidence suggests that even where trainee teachers have ostensibly internalised more scientific theories of learning, the folk pedagogies come creeping back.

In the case of higher education, what might these commonsense, intuitive theories look like? They might just be very general ideas about how people learn, applied to the particular context of higher education. Bruner identifies a range of broad folk pedagogical views, such as one which sees ‘children as knowers’, with a focus on the gathering and organising of facts. Perhaps one kind of folk psychology of higher education would be the application of that idea specifically to students in universities rather than other sectors: a focus on the selection, organisation and retention of propositional knowledge within degree programmes. Perhaps there are also specific intuitive theories about higher education that influence teachers’ practices. Perhaps there is a folk intuition that university students should not be spoon-fed – that they must take responsibility for their own learning and seek to develop their own views. Perhaps there is a folk intuition that students should encounter challenging views that encourage them to question their own certainties. In the absence of research, we can only speculate (and introspect).

Respecting the ‘folk’

The idea that teachers have deep intuitions about how students learn, that those intuitions can prevent them from acting on more evidence-based beliefs, and that those intuitions are hard to shake; none of those ideas are particularly earth-shattering. They are probably common sense among those researching and enhancing higher education. The value of the idea of ‘folk pedagogies’ lies instead in the way that it encourages us to take those intuitions seriously, both as an object of study and a powerful barrier to change.

Rather than dismissing intuitions about higher education – as ignorant beliefs and hide-bound traditions – we can study them. What are they? Where do they come from? How do they change? The idea of folk pedagogies is not pejorative. There’s no shame in having intuitions about how learning works. As with folk psychological theories, they are necessary parts of how we navigate the world, and something we can’t do without. There is also deep wisdom to be found in those intuitions, even if they are sometimes misleading. Research goes wrong by departing from common sense, at least as much as the other way around.

Acknowledging the existence of folk theories of higher education can help improve the impact of our research in all sorts of ways. We can research them, to understand why teachers and students (and others) do what they do, and the conditions in which deep intuitions can change. It can help us understand where – and why – research has departed so far from common sense as to be of little practical relevance.

It can also help us understand the scale of the challenge. In much of what we do, we’re seeking to modify what university teachers do, which very often means changing how they think. The reality is that we aren’t usually changing superficial, specific beliefs, at least not where the improvements we’re seeking are substantive. We’re changing deep beliefs picked up over a lifetime. Our model of improvement may then need to fit the old adage: if you’re not making progress at a snail’s pace, you’re not making progress. That’s a bit different from annual quality enhancement cycles or short-term strategic initiatives. We can change the world, but it will take time.

References

Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Harvard

Robinson, V. M. J. (1993). Problem-Based Methodology: Research for the Improvement of Practice. Pergamon Press

Dr Alex Buckley is an Associate Professor in the Learning & Teaching Academy at Heriot-Watt University, Scotland. His research is focused on conceptual aspects of research and practice in assessment and feedback.


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A new mission for higher education policy reviews

by Ellen Hazelkorn, Hamish Coates, Hans de Wit & Tessa Delaquil

Making research relevant to policy

In recent years there has been heightened attention being given to the importance of scholarly endeavour making a real impact on and for society. Yet, despite a five-fold increase in journal articles published on higher education in the last twenty years, the OECD warns of a serious “disconnect between education policy, research and practice”.

As higher education systems have grown and diversified, it appears with ever increasing frequency that policy is made on the slow, on the run, or not at all. Even in the most regulated systems, gone is the decades-long approach of lifetime civil servants advancing copperplate notes on papyrus through governmental machines designed to sustain flow and augment harmony. In the era of 24-hour deliberation, reporting and muddling through, it may seem that conceptually rooted analysis of policy and policymaking is on the nose or has been replaced by political expediency.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There has never been a more important time to analyse, design, evaluate, critique, integrate, compare and innovate higher education policy. Fast policy invokes a swift need for imaginative reflection. Light policy demands counterbalancing shovel loads of intellectual backfilling. Comparative analysis is solvent for parochial policy. Policy stasis, when it stalks, must be cured by ingenious, ironic, and incisive admonition.

Governments worldwide expect research to provide leaders and policymakers with evidence that will improve the quality of teaching and education, learning outcomes and skills development, regional innovation and knowledge diffusion, and help solve society’s problems. Yet, efforts to enhance the research-policy-practice nexus fall far short of this ambition.

Policy influencers are more likely to be ministerial advisory boards and commissioned reports than journal articles and monographs, exactly opposite to what incentivizes academics. Rankings haven’t helped, measuring ‘impact’ in terms of discredited citation scores despite lots of research and efforts to the contrary.

Academics continue to argue the purpose of academic research is to produce ‘pure’ fundamental research, rather than undertake public-funded research. And despite universities promoting impactful research of public value, scholars complain of many barriers to entry.

The policy reviews solution

Policy Reviews in Higher Education (PRiHE) aims to push out the boundaries and encourage scholars to explore a wide range of policy themes. Despite higher education sitting within a complex knowledge-research-innovation ecosystem, touching on all elements from macro-economic to foreign policy to environmental policy, our research lens and interests are far too narrow. We seem to be asking the same questions. But the policy and public lens is changing.

Concerns are less about elites and building ‘world-class universities’ for a tiny minority, and much more about pressing social issues such as: regional disparities and ‘left-behind communities’, technical and vocational education and training, non-university pathways, skills and skills mismatch, flexible learning opportunities given new demographies, sustainable regional development, funding and efficiency, and technological capability and artificial intelligence. Of course, all of this carries implications for governance and system design, an area in which much more evidence-based research is required.

As joint editors we are especially keen to encourage submissions which can help address such issues, and to draw on research to produce solutions rather than simply critique. We encourage potential authors to ask questions outside the box, and explore how these different issues play out in different countries, and accordingly discuss the experiences, the lessons, and the implications from which others can learn.

Solutions for policy reviews

Coming into its ninth year, PRiHE is platform for people in and around government to learn about the sector they govern, for professionals in the sector to keep abreast of genuinely relevant developments, and for interested people around the world to learn about what is often (including for insiders!) a genuinely opaque and complex and certainly sui generis environment.

As our above remarks contend, the nature of contemporary higher education politics, policy and practice cannot be simplified or taken for granted. Journal topics, contributions, and interlocutors must also change and keep pace. Indeed, the very idea of an ‘academic journal’ must itself be reconsidered within a truly global and fully online education and research environment. Rightly, therefore, PRiHE keeps moving.

With renewed vim and vigour, the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) has refreshed the Editorial Office and Editorial Board, and charged PRiHE to grow even more into a world-leading journal of mark and impact. Many further improvements have been made. For instance, the Editorial Office has worked with SRHE and the publisher Taylor and Francis to make several enhancements to editorial and journal processes and content.

We encourage people to submit research articles or proposals for an article – which will be reviewed by the Editors and feedback provided in return. We also encourage people to submit commentary and book reviews – where the authors have sought to interrogate and discuss a key issue through a policy-oriented lens. See the ‘instructions for authors’ for details.

Read, engage, and contribute

This second bumper 2024 issue provides six intellectual slices into ideas, data and practices relevant to higher education policy. We smartly and optimistically advise that you download and perhaps even print out all papers, power off computers and phones, and spend a few hours reading these wonderful contributions. We particularly recommend this to aspiring policy researchers, researchers and consultants in the midst of their careers, and perhaps most especially to civil servants and related experts embedded in the world of policy itself.

SRHE and the Editorial Office are looking ahead to a vibrant and strong future period of growth for PRiHE. A raft of direct and public promotion activities are planned. PRiHE is a journal designed to make a difference to policy and practice. The most important forms of academic engagement, of course, include reading, writing and reviewing. We welcome your contribution in these and other ways to the global PRiHE community.

This blog is based on the editorial published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education (online 16 November 2024) A new mission for higher education policy reviews

Professor Ellen Hazelkorn is Joint Managing Partner, BH Associates. She is Professor Emeritus, Technological University Dublin.

Hamish Coates is professor of public policy, director of the Higher Education Futures Lab, and global tertiary education expert.

Hans de Wit is Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education, Senior Fellow of the international Association of Universities.

Tessa DeLaquil is postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Education at University College Dublin.