Globally, Higher Education has undergone fundamental changes through massification, globalisation and marketization (Hil, 2014), and more recently through the impact of COVID 19. We have also seen an emergence of the discourse of quality teaching through various compliance and monitoring regulations (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, 2015; Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, 2021). Although in spite of these requirements (Bormann et al. 2021), we have seen trust related to quality, accountability and scholarship within higher educational intuitions suffer. For example while promoted in the academy as good practice, opportunities for academics to interrogate, discuss and reflect on praxis (their practices related to teaching and learning and theoretical aspects that inform these) can be problematic for a number of reasons (Mackay & Tymon, 2013).   

Along with the aforementioned forces of change and regulation impacting teaching and learning in Higher Education, the perpetual emergence of new, more complex technologies and the disruptive innovation that can result from these technologies has also colonised the field of education and learning (Christensen et al., 2008). Similarly, it is also apparent that teaching academics have diverse levels of skills and familiarities in digital pedagogies creating a digital divide between those who are comfortable or uncomfortable in an online setting (Marioni et al., 2020).

In light of these challenges and shifts, our aim was to explore how learning and teaching approaches are changing in the current higher education climate from the perspective of those who are involved in this work. We engaged with academic staff, who work in a faculty of education in a creative process to explore and share understandings about their prior, current and imagined future approaches to learning and teaching.  The following research questions were adopted to guide our project.

• In what ways have academics involved in teaching in a HE setting approached learning and teaching in the past?
• What are the current learning and teaching approaches being enacted in one HE setting?
• What do academics envisage as approaches to teaching and learning that will be practised in three years’ time?
• How do academics’ small narratives, produced and shared via text and image, relate to the meta narratives about pedagogical work in HE?

In addition, we included the following methodological question based on our experimental approach:

• How effective are arts- based and participatory approaches in opening up new possibilities for academics to collaborate and to consider complex notions of identity and collegiality within an academic community?

We draw on Brookfield’s (2017) perspectives and lenses related to critical reflection to interrogate assumptions about our practice, in combination with Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus (the ingrained skills, habits, and dispositions we possess due to our life experiences) and field (arenas of practice that have distinct knowledges and rules) as ‘bundles of relations’ (Bourdieu & Waquant, 1992) to focus on what we can learn about the practices of teaching in higher education.   In this presentation, habitus helps us to understand the developments and changes in practice and relationships in teaching through analysing the data and reflections of the participant. Habitus provides a way of understanding how the relationality and understanding of students and teaching context inform teaching through teaching relationships, as well as the course of a teaching career.

Our project is situated within a supercomplexity paradigm, where reality is seen as dynamic, frames of reference are shifting, conflicted and requires embracing fragility, insecurity, the unknown and strangeness, it involves problematizing and disturbing existing understandings (Ling & Ling, 2020). This paradigm sits well with the reflexive phenomenological approach we adopted for this project to provide participants with opportunities to reflect and adapt their practices. By drawing on a theoretical perspective that recognises the importance of people’s own interpretations of their experiences, our research recognises that participants’ experiences with the same phenomenon are informed by that person’s individual circumstances and worldview, including their pedagogical priorities and values. After obtaining appropriate ethics approval from our university, we invited all teaching academics in the faculty, via a personalised email with a plain language statement attached and posters located in strategic locations, to become involved in the research. Their willingness to participate was obtained through a brief online (Qualtrics) survey which asked for some rudimentary data such as how long they had been teaching in the faculty. A follow up online survey was sent out approximately three weeks later that included three stem prompts that related to their approaches to teaching and learning; (a) pre-covid (about two years ago); (b) what they currently do; and (c)what they might be like in three years’ time. They were asked to provide a short textual response (no more than 40 words) and an image (they had self-made or sourced from the web) for each of the stem prompts. In total we had 27 colleagues respond to the prompts. The inclusion of visual imagery as a data source to understand complex circumstances is well established in areas such as arts-based research (Leavy, 20150), visual phenomenology and photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) to elicit creative multi modal responses from participants. Bourdieu also espouses the benefits of imagery/ photography to illuminate aspects of habitus. (Bourdieu, 1990). The data (both image and text) were analysed by the three researchers and involved using inductive approaches to identify emergent themes. The process involved analysing each type of data separately to ascertain if there were themes within the text only, as well as sorting images by content and form to identify groupings and then together, with images and text collated in the form of a poster, to explore the relationships between text and images.

The images and text that the participants provided vividly reveal the impact and a/effects of the changed work/life circumstances and how particular dispositions of habitus inform practice over a period of massive disruption. Reflecting on past/present while engaging with explicit conceptualisation on what their teaching may be in the future, highlight aspects of Brookfield’s four critically reflective lenses of autobiographical analysis; student perspectives, conversations with colleagues; and educational literature. From the data we were able to identify themes that positioned reflexivity around educational and pedagogical theories, a concern and care for their students, the significance of relationality and the increased presence of technologies. Participants used imagery in a range of ways to provide literal representations of their text response for example images of classrooms and people or blank zoom screens to emphasize the importance of interaction or as metaphorical depictions that show sunsets and patterns to capture the ‘bundles of relations’ and disruptions in practice that represent a particular temporal moment in a way that may not so easily be captured in words. In many of the responses we also see representations shift from images of togetherness, often represented by interaction either of human or non-human objects, to the present where the machine, screen and tensions were depicted, while in considering the future participants emphasized aspects of growth, reconciliation and integration of past practices with technologies to that have either emerged or are yet to emerge. By encouraging academics to share experiences related to their teaching we have illuminated both individual and shared narratives about pedagogic work in higher education. Their representations also traverse a spectrum of metaphorical and literal perspectives that capture the nuances involved, while also providing opportunities for academics to develop reflexive practice and agency in relation to their own and their colleagues’ praxis.

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