Literature on the research-teaching nexus has highlighted the potential benefits of close relations between research, teaching and students’ learning (Jenkins and Healey 2005; Brew 2006). This literature highlights the ways in which both teaching and learning in universities can be more closely related to the production of knowledge through academic research.

Bernstein’s (2000) notion of the pedagogic device offers a potentially fruitful way of thinking about this process for two reasons. First it brings together the contexts in which knowledge is produced (distribution rules), made ready for transmission through the recontextualising of that knowledge into curriculum (recontextualising rules), and is reproduced through teaching-learning practices (evaluation rules). In this way, pedagogic device can be seen to highlight three different forms of disciplinary knowledge: knowledge-as-research, knowledge-as-curriculum, and knowledge-as-student-understanding (Ashwin et al. 2012). Second, what Bernstein (2000) makes clear is that the transformation of knowledge as it moves from each of these contexts is not simply based on the logic of knowledge itself. Rather these transformations are the sites of struggle in which different voices seek to impose particular versions of legitimate knowledge, curriculum and student understanding.

This way of viewing knowledge raises particular questions about the research-teaching nexus, because it emphasises the differences between the knowledge that is produced in academic research and the understandings that student develop through engaging with the curriculum. It also emphasises the struggles that occur in trying to link knowledge-as-research with knowledge-as-student-understanding.

The papers in this symposium attempt to address these questions in different ways. Verachtert and Roseaux’s paper outlines the validation of an instrument for mapping the research-teaching nexus in different disciplines. This offers a way of understanding the relations between knowledge-as-research, knowledge-as-curriculum and knowledge-as-student-understanding in different disciplines.

Vereijken and van der Rijst’s paper examines the effectiveness of a research-based learning curriculum and a discipline-based curriculum in terms of students’ understanding of research and their learning outcomes. In this way it examines the relations between knowledge-as-curriculum and knowledge-as-student understanding.

Ashwin, Abbas, and McLean’s paper examines the relations between students’ accounts of sociological knowledge and the ways in which they report the research process in their undergraduate dissertations. In doing it examines the ways in which knowledge-as-student- understanding informs students own practices as they attempt to engage in knowledge-as-research.

In summary, this symposium will deepen understanding of the research-teaching nexus by using Bernstein’s framework to pose new questions about the ways in which closer ties between research, teaching and learning can help students to develop more critical relationships with the knowledge they engage with in higher education.