This article examines recent UK policy initiatives to enhance teaching and learning in higher education in the UK, and the quality of the student experience there. The Higher Education Academy has recently begun to work in this area and the Higher Education Bill (2004) has passed into law. A reflective review of previous initiatives is therefore very timely. The article shows that, while these different initiatives have been explicitly addressed at different levels of analysis, the meso level-a particularly significant one-has been largely forgotten. Meanwhile these interventions have been based on contrasting underlying theories of change and development. One hegemonic theory relates to the notion of the reflective practitioner, which addresses itself to the micro (individual) level of analysis. It sees reflective practitioners as potential change agents. Another relates to the theory of the learning organization, which addresses the macro level of analysis and sees change as stemming from alterations in organizational routines, values and practices. A third is based on a theory of epistemological determinism and sees the discipline as the salient level of analysis for change. Meanwhile, other higher education policies exist alongside those mentioned above, not overtly connected to the enhancement of teaching and learning but impinging upon it in very significant ways in a bundle of disjointed strategies and tacit theories. Of particular relevance here are policies on funding, on research and on widening participation, all implemented in an increasingly managerialist environment in which work intensification and degradation of resources are occurring. Missing in all this is coherence across the policies, and their underlying theories, at the different analytical levels. Because there is disjointedness in various government and other agencies, higher education policies they have tended to obstruct rather than complement each other. Hence our use of a metaphor from Eastern philosophy-the notion of blocked chi. Also missing is a robust theory of change and associated set of policies at the meso level of analysis-the departmental level. We suggest ways in which the latter omission might be rectified, thus freeing the 'chi of change'.

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A Changed Academic Function in UK Universities at the Turn of the CenturyThe 'teaching' function in European universities has remained largely unproblematised until relatively recently, although calls to modernise and professionalise university teaching go back a long way (Skelton, 2005, p. 129). In the UK, over the past two decades the government's targets for increasing access to higher education, the inescapable anchoring into a 'mass' system of higher education (Trow, 1989), and advances of technologies have triggered a series of initiatives aimed at dealing with issues related to teaching more students of increasingly diverse backgrounds and increasingly diverse levels of skills and competence. Resulting questions about the nature of the academic role, the efficiency of 'delivery' methods and the role of technologies in facilitating the renewed agenda for HE teachers have generated an interest in teaching and learning as an object of science and a new emphasis on the teaching dimension of the academic role. The latter remains problematic in its articulation with the well-established and highly valued research dimension.In the UK (and to a large extent the rest of the English-speaking world), this context has generated a strong agenda for teaching and learning which aims to: a) improve teaching performance for the benefit of students, and b) situate teaching as a function able to compete for excellence with research.We examine next the emergence of this agenda, which has generated a re-conceptualisation of teaching practices often couched in a discourse of excellence and innovation.Following the integration of colleges and polytechnics into mainstream UK higher education in the early 1990s and the renewed widening participation ambitions deployed by the government of the time (with targets -now revisedof 50% of young people engaged in higher education by 2010), attention has become increasingly focused on the teaching function. The need for universities to attract more students, to ensure retention, and be 'efficient' has been strategically underpinned by gradual reductions since the 1980s in government subsidies for teaching through the general funding stream, and parallel incentives aimed at diversifying the profile of universities whilst enhancing the quality of the teaching provision. From the mid-90s onwards, with the creation of the Quality Assurance

In this paper, I discuss SoTL as a methodology for the professional development of academics. I propose that as an agentic form of inquiry that focuses on processes, boundary-crossing, and making pub lic its findings, SoTL is a sophisticated methodology that brings the activities of teaching and research in close alignment, and contributes to developing an approach to inquiry that differs from what I have called "managed" research. I propose that, as a methodology for professional development, SoTL provides a space for dialogic critique of singular investigations into practice that contribute to advancing in di vidual and collective knowledge of the field of higher education. I argue that in a context where approaches to practice have become driven by competitivity and international rankings that rely on objectivist understandings of practice for their judgments, SoTL presents an alternative, rich model of practice.

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