Exploring Academic Identities and Practices in a Competitive Enhancement Context: a UK‐based case study

Abstract

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

Teaching with technology in higher education: understanding conceptual change and development in practice

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Finding time for quality teaching: an ethnographic study of academic workloads in the social sciences and their impact on teaching practices

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Conflicts and Configurations in a Liminal Space: SoTL Scholars' Identity Development

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