Leaders And Leadership In Universities: Macro, Messo And Micro Perspectives On The Leadership Roles And Responsibilities Of Academic Developers

Author(s):

Ciaran Sugrue(presenting / submitting)Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 11 A JS,

Joint Paper Session NW 22 and NW 26

Time:

2017-08-24

17:15-18:45

Room:

K5.04

Chair:

Katja Brøgger

Contribution

‘The times they are a changing’, and ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpter, n1943/2010) now seems to be at ‘full tide’; there is no escaping its disruptive and destabilising force harnessed and promoted by version of New Public Management (NPM), and fuelled by varying versions of Neo-liberal ideological assumptions, ‘refracted’ through national, regional and local policy traditions as they chameleon-like insinuate their way into thoughts and actions, the very fabric of peoples’ lives, work and institutional environments (Rudd & Goodson, 2017).

As the traditional mandate of public universities to uphold and promote the common good and to educate future citizens is challenged by competitiveness, international league tables, internationalisation and the perpetual scramble to secure research funding, such traditional missions and mandates are usurped by the need to ‘innovate and to be ‘entrepreneurial’ while these emerging responsibilities compete with the more ‘traditional’ and ‘scientific’ institutional identities, their various forms, as well as their onging ‘formation’ . (Ron Barnett, 2011; R. Barnett, 2016; Sutphen & de Lange, 2014).

Amidst the maelstrom created by the competing if not contradictory interests indicated above, leaders and leadership in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have the responsibility to fathom these tensions and to chart a course for their institutions, but as strategic planning has become a more substantial requirement, this has consequences for the entire institutional community, well beyond the individual Chancellor or Rektor . All are called on to ‘put their shoulder to the wheel’ even when uncertainties regarding their own value stances and institutional positioning remain, leading in some instances at least to personal crises, demoralisation or feeling compromised; pressured into supporting an institutional mission with which they have difficulty or do not subscribe. (Lynch, 2014; Lynch, Grummel, & Devine, 2012)

One such group in particular within the HE sector particularly caught up in these competing considerations is Academic Developers and their contribution to institutional formation, the formation of academic colleagues through their work, and therefore indirectly also on students as they seek to promote the transformation of pedagogies and assessment as integral elements of the ongoing reform of HE (Handal et al., 2014; Land, 2001; Roxa & Martensson, 2016).

As part of a larger research project entitled: ‘Formation and Competence building of University Academic Developers’ funded by the Norwegian Research Council with the University of Oslo as the lead partner, an integral element of the research has been to interview 5 leaders in each of five participating universities (Oslo (UiO), University of the Arctic (UiT), Uppsala (UU), Orebro (UO) and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNCH)). The leaders interviewed in each case have been positioned at the macro, messo and micro levels within each of the five universities. Thus, we interviewed the most senior leaders available to us at the macro and messo levels while the leader of the academic development centre or unit was the micro level leader interviewed in each case. The purpose of these interviews has been to gather the perspectives of each of these three categories of leader on the roles and responsibilities of Academic Developers to their respective institutional formation. The following questions therefore were our primary focus:

What are these different leaders’ perspectives on the roles and responsibilities of ADs as their contribution to the ongoing formation of the institution?
What are we learning about the roles, responsibilities and leadership contributions of ADs as they go about their work?
Arising from responses to both questions, what are we learning about ADs roles, responsibilities and leadership contributions and in what ways may their leadership and that of their institutions be understood and conceptualised through a distillation of such perspectives?

Method

Interviews were conducted in the offices of the interviewees during the months of March and April 2016 in English. Interview varied in length from 50-90 minutes. All interviews were semi-structured using a common interview guide informed by a substantial literature review (Sugrue, Englund, Solbrekke and Fossland, under review), and attention to the aims and objectives of the formation project (see http://www.uv.uio.no/iped/english/research/projects/solbrekke-formation-and-competence-building/), and consultation within the research team. It was necessary to garner interviewee’s sense of what ADs’ contributions had been over time, while the positioning of the unit or centre in which they worked was important also; focusing on how the role might evolve in the near future was also addressed. The purpose was to capture the perceived contribution in context in as much complexity as possible, while seeking clarity as to the dynamics of the contribution and how it is perceived. Interviews would be conducted by an outsider and insider. The same outsider conducted all of the interviews across the five universities, while they were conducted collaboratively with an insider so that context would be an active presence in the conduct of the interviews and subsequent data analysis. The outsider took the lead, with the insider playing a ‘sweeper’ role—whereby ‘gaps’ in the interviews due to questions being overlooked were addressed, or where the insider determined some additional elaboration was necessary to provide additional information on a contextual matter of significance, or where ‘language’ became a barrier due to a more technical translation issue necessitating some clarification. Coding data After considerable discussion among research team members, while re-acquainting ourselves with the purposes of the research project as well as the interview guide, there was agreement that it would be vital to undertake analysis between the five different context, thus the necessity to develop a common coding frame. An interview transcript was selected at random, printed and individually coded by the outsider and two ‘insider’ colleagues. Each presented their codes to the other two, and from this deliberative process, there was agreement to adopt 21 codes to be used in the coding of all of the data while leaving open the possibility of making additions to the list of codes if warranted by the data in an iterative abductive manner (Alvesson & Skolberg, 2000). Three codes were added, giving a total of 24, as the coding process progressed. Transcripts were coded in MAXQDA.

Expected Outcomes

Our literature review mentioned above indicates a more public and visible role for ADs within universities. Consequently, their roles and responsibilities have extended beyond more traditional and often low key contributions on teaching and learning to extend to leadership, assessment, quality assurance etc (Taylor, 2005; Trowler, 2013; Wilcocks, 2009; Wouters, 2014). Similarly also, various form of leadership have been identified and advocated for and particularly prevalent among these has been ‘transformative’ (Leithwood, 1996) while more recently ‘distributed’ forms of leadership have been identified and described (J. Spillane, 2006; J. Spillane & Orlina, 2005) while these and other approaches may signal a more authoritarian rather than a more democratic leadership style. It is within these competing conceptions of leadership and what it entails that the roles and responsibilities of ADs is considered in this paper. We anticipate a layering of leadership, thus rather than identifying a particular leadership style within these universities, it is more likely that different styles may exist at the various levels. These layers of leadership may be flat rather than hierarchical, while strategic planning and ADs roles, responsibilities and leadership within it may render less visible the power dynamics at play. We anticipate also that as ADs work becomes more visible, its leadership potentially more powerful, here too there is potential also for being compromised. Consequently, such tensions bring into high relief the importance of values, beliefs and dispositions and how these are traded in the ongoing ‘formation’ of universities their various leaders and their respective leadership contributions to their own and colleagues formation as well as potentially trans-forming their organisation while seeking compromise rather than being compromise. We look forward to unravelling this Gordian knot more thoroughly and to discussing our findings.

References

Alvesson, M., & Skolberg, K. (2000). Reflexive Methodology. New Vistas for Qualitative Research. London Sage. Barnett, R. (2011). Being a University. London & New York: Routledge. Barnett, R. (2016). Understanding the University Institution, Idea, Possibilities. London & New York Routledge. Handal, G., Hofgaard Lycke, K., Martensson, K., Torgny, R., Skodvin, A., & Solbrekke, T. D. (2014). The role of academic developers in transforming Bologna regulations to a national institutional context. International Journal for Academic Development, 19(1), 12-25. Land, R. (2001). Agency, context and change in academic development. International Journal of Academic Development, 6(1), 4-20. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13601440110033715 Leithwood, K., Chapman, J., Corson, D., Hallinger, P. and Hart, A. (Ed.) (1996). International Handbook of Educational Leadership and Administration. Dordrecth/ Boston/ London: Kluwer. Lynch, K. (2014). Control by numbers: new managerialism and ranking in higher education Critical Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2014.949811. Lynch, K., Grummel, B., & Devine, D. (2012). New Managerialism in Education Commercialization, Carelessness and Gender. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roxa, T., & Martensson, K. (2016). Agency and structure in academic development practices: are we liberating acadfemic teachers or are we part of a machinery supressing them? International Journal of Academic Development. Rudd, T., & Goodson, I. F. (2017). Negotiataing Neoliberal Education In T. Rudd & I. F. Goodson (Eds.), Negotiating Neoliberalism Developing Alternative Educational Visions (pp. 1-12). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers Schumpter, J. A. (n1943/2010). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (The second edition text). Eastford CT: Martino Fine Books. Spillane, J. (2006). Distributed Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Spillane, J., & Orlina, E. C. (2005). Investigating Leadership Practice: Exploring the Entailments of Taking a Distributed Perspective. Paper presented at the AERA, Montreal. Sutphen, M., & de Lange, T. (2014). What is Formation? A Conceptual Discussion. Higher Education Research and Development, 34(2), 411-419. Taylor, K. 2005. “Academic development as institutional leadership: An interplay of person, role, strategy and institution.” International Journal for Academic Development, 10 (1):31-46, DOI: 10.1080/13601440500099985 Trowler, V. 2013. “Leadership practices for student engagement in challenging conditions.” Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 17 (3): 91-95, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2013.789455 Wilcox, S. 2009. “Transformative educational development scholarship: beginning with ourselves.” International Journal for Academic Development, 14 (2): 123-132, DOI: 10.1080/13601440902970007 Wouters, P. Clement, M. Frenay, M. Buelens, H. & Gilis, A. 2014. “Avoiding compliance and resistance through collaboration? A Belgian teaching portfolio case.” International Journal for Academic Development, 19 (2): 26-36, DOI:10.1080/1360144X.2013.848359

Author Information

Ciaran Sugrue (presenting / submitting)

University College Dublin

Dublin

Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke (presenting)

University of Oslo

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