Formation And Trans-Formation In Universities: Formative Influences On Teaching?

Author(s):

Ciaran Sugrue(presenting / submitting)Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke(presenting)Molly Sutphen Tomas Englund Andreas Bergh Michael Uljens

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 05 D, Academic Work and Professional Development

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-03

11:00-12:30

Room:

B019 Anfiteatro

Chair:

Aidan Seery

Contribution

This paper provides a critical analysis of three universities’ mission statements, values and strategies and suggest how these underlying priorities and strategies may impact on teaching within these research intensive institutions. It elaborates the investigation of, and initial analysis on, how four public universities in Europe and one in the US articulate their mission, values, and strategies (Solbrekke et al 2013). However, the focus here is narrowed to three institutions only (University of Oslo, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University College Dublin). These niversities have been selected in a purposive manner on the basis of earlier analysis (Solbrekke et al., 2013); positioned along a continuum from ‘traditional’ to ‘entrepreneurial’. Further analysis of these universities’ strategic plans will enable us to focus particularly on how policy rhetorics talk about teaching and the student experience that can be expected.

Key questions to be addressed therefore are:

How do these institutional strategic plans talk about teaching?
What logics and rationales are these teaching priorities and strategies based in?
What possible formative impact may the chosen strategies have on teaching within these institutions?

Theoretical framework

We bring a ‘formation’ perspective to the analysis. As research intensive universities grapple with global competitiveness, international league tables, internationalization, and a general tendency towards a reduction in public funding, and increasingly powerful demands to prepare students for ‘the world of work’, there is considerable risk that preparation for life, for citizenship, for service, for the public ‘good’ become marginalized (Gadamer, 1975/1989; Gardner, 2004, 2007, 2008; Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, & Damon, 2001). Considerable empirical work suggests moral aspects of formative experiences are being crowded out by increasing emphasis on specialization and expert knowledge. In such circumstances, we take the view that formation includes a sense of ‘moral compass’ and elite universities in particular have a particular responsibility to bring this more encompassing and less tangible dimensions of formation back in.

Against this general backdrop and intellectual stance, the key analytical terms deployed are ‘accountability’ and ‘professional responsibility’. The language and internal logics of each are summarized in table 1.

Table 1: The logics of professional responsibility and accountability

Professional Responsibility

Professional Accountability

based in professional mandate
situated judgement
trust
moral rationale
internal evaluation
negotiated standards
implicit language
framed by professions
relative autonomy and personally inescapable
proactive
defined by current governance
standardised by contract
control
economic/legal rationale
external auditing
predetermined indicators
transparent language
framed by political goals
compliance with employer’s/politicians’ decisions
reactive

(Adapted from Solbrekke & Englund, 2011, p. 855)

Through these analytical lens we interrogate the strategic plans of the three selected universities. Our particular focus is onstatements about teaching, its nature and substance and how these documents describes the ‘student experience’—their formation. Analysis of the text does not inform about what actually happens in practice, but these texts indicate the priorities and activities that are encouraged by the leaders of the institution.

Traditionally, research intensive universities have been granted considerable autonomy to define the goals and priorities. During the last 20-30 years, however, performing and fulfilling politically defined objectives has been promoted through NPM accountability regimes (Rinne, Jauhiainen, Koivula 2013). In Europe, quality assurance systems are deployed to determine “value for money” (Stensaker & Harvey 2011; Handal et al. in press). Consequently, some scholars (Solbrekke & Englund 2011) advocate for the classical research intensive university while others advocate the embrace of entrepreneurialism and close collaboration with the marketplace (Pinheiro & Stensaker 2013; Tomlinson 2012). In such circumstances, it is timely to ask: how universities (trans)form, and in what direction and in particular to interrogate the consequences of these competing and conflicting forces for teaching.

Method

The purpose of analysis is to garner the possible implications for teaching of strategic plans and priorities in three research intensive universities. How these are suggesting of particular approaches to teaching, the student experience—their formation—is our purpose. We undertake this critical analysis by interrogating the selected plans, through the anaytical lens of accountability and responsibility and attendant language preferences. Earlier analysis (Solbrekke et al. 2013) has been sufficiently encouraging to dig deeper into these texts as worthy of analysis in thier own right but for comparative purposes also. We worked collaboratively to ensure consistency in terms of coding texts, while being open also to emergent ’hybridities’. This abductive approach (Alvesson & Skoldberg 2001) is consistent also with our search for new and emerging forms of ‘formation’, of how universities seek to navigate the tensions between accountability and the structures of new public management, and the values, beliefs and dispositions that are shaped by disciplinary structures and traditions, academic identities, and the changing nature of university life. Elements of discousre analysis were threaded through this collaborative approach to document analysis with particular attention being paid to the language used, and its recurrence throughout the texts (Gee, 2011). The selected universities (Oslo, University College Dublin, and Chapel Hill) were selected in a purposive manner, as part of a progressive focusing design, thus selecting three universities that are positioned differently across a continuum from ’traditional’ to ’entrepreneurial’ while readily recognising that these are porous boundaries and that all strategic plans are likely to include elements across the spectrum, while nevertheless more likely to manifest some priorities more than others. This selection process, it was also anticipated, would be more likely to provide similarities and differences in a comparative and contrastive manner, thus enable us to identify particular formations of the teaching responsibility and what it entails. Nevertheless, despite more detailed analysis being confined to three institutions, we are conscious that the evidence does not indicate what actually happens in practice. However, we consider the analysis to be worthwhile as a means of identifying the connection between policy rhetorics, strategic priorities and to identify the languages and logics at play and thier consequences for the manner in which teaching is to be considered by those charged with its crafting.

Expected Outcomes

We consider the concept of formation to be particularly generative, and entirely apposite to this particular enquiry at a time when universities in particular and higher education in general are being buffeted by major winds of change. In such circumstances, rethinking the role of universities in this changed landscape, with particular emphasis regarding student ‘formation’ is necessary while research in this area to date suggests that part of formation is the development of students’ moral imagination, articulation of their values as well as their life’s goals. Providing a critical analysis of thee prominent universities will provide a comparative tableau of evidence as to how formation is construed and this will enable us to make claims about the nature of formation that are warranted by the evidence. While our ultimate aim is to gain understanding of and insight into formation and how it occurs, the primary focus here is on teaching and how it is construed in this rapidly changing higher education landscape. While our analysis is confined to three universities only, all of a particular type, we consider that it has potential to inform the teaching of other comparable universities and higher education more generally. While research is increasingly highlighted as a priority within universities, and research-led teaching trumpeted repeatedly it is considerably less certain, how such configurations actually impact on teaching and the student experience of it. It is anticipated that the analysis to be reported here will shed light on this important topic. We anticipate also that our emergent analytical framework and coding may have more general application and appeal.

References

Alvesson, M. and Skölberg, K. (2000). Reflexive Methodology. New Vistas for Qualitative Research. London: Sage Publications. Bento, F.C. (2013). Organizational Complexity: Leadership and Change in Research-Intensive Academic Departments. Doctoral Thesis at NTNU 2013:19. Trondheim: NTNU Colby, A. & Sullivan, W,M. (2008) Formation of Professionalism and Purpose: Perspective from the Preparation for the Professions Program: University of St. Thomas Law Journal 5 U. St. Thomas L.J. 404 -427. Retrieved December 28 2012. Handal, G., Hofgaard Lycke, K., Skodvin, A., Solbrekke, T.D, Mårtensson, K. & Roxå, T. (2014) Transforming Bologna Regulations to a National and Institutional Context: The Role of Academic Developers. A case study based on the introduction of the European Qualification Framework in Norwegian Higher Education. To be published in International Journal for Academic Development. March 2014. Healey, M., Bradford, M., Roberts, C. & Knight, Y. (2013). Collaborative discipline-based curriculum change: applying Change Academy processes at department level. International Journal for Academic Development. Vol. 18 (1), 31-44. Pinheiro, R. & Stensaker, B. (2013). Designing the Entrepreneurial University:The Interpretation of a Global Idea. Public Organiz Rev . Published online. DOI 10.1007/s11115-013-0241-z Rinne,R., Jauhiainen, A., Koivula, J. (2013). Surviving in the Ruins of University: Lost autonomy and collapsed dreams in Finnish transition of university policies A paper for symposium “What is excellence? – Markets, the transnational turn and Nordic higher education policy” at Nordic Educational Research Association (NERA) Annual Conference 7th–9th March 2013, Reykjavík, Iceland. Solbrekke, T. & Englund, T. (2011): Bringing professional responsibility back in. Studies in Higher Education 36(7) 847-861. Solbrekke, T.D, Sugrue, C., Sutphen, M., de Lange, T. & Englund, T. (2013) Formation of Five Universities: A Critical Analysis of the Partraits, Plans and Re-presentations. Paper presented at European Conference Educational Research (ECER). EERA’s annual conference. Istanbul, Turkey, 10th-14th September 2013. Stensaker, B. (2004). The Transformation of Organisational Identities. Interpretations of policies concerning the quality of teaching and learning in Norwegian higher education. Doctoral dissertation, Universiteit Twente, The Netherlands. Stensaker, B. & Harvey, L. (2011). Accountability in Higher Education: Global Perspectives on Trust and Power, Abingdon, New York, Routledge Solbrekke, T.D. & Englund, T. (2011). Bringing Professional Responsibility Back In. Studies in Higher Education, 36(7), 847-861. Tomlinson, M. (2012). Graduate Employability: A review of Conceptual and Empirical Themes, Higher Education Policy 25, p. 407-431. Tremblay, K., Lalancette, D. & Roseveareet, D. 2013 Zelier, B. (2011). Making the University Matter. Abingdon: Routledge.

Author Information

Ciaran Sugrue (presenting / submitting)

University College Dublin, Ireland

Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke (presenting)

University of Oslo

Molly Sutphen

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Tomas Englund

University of Orebro

Andreas Bergh

University of Orebro

Michael Uljens

University of Abo Academy

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