Why scholarship matters in higher education
Professor Belinda Probert
May 2014
Discussion Paper 2
Office for Learning and Teaching Discussion Paper Series
This report has been commissioned by the Australian Government Department of Education and
prepared by Professor Belinda Probert.
The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Education.
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This document must be attributed as Belinda Probert, Why scholarship matters in higher education,
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Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1
The importance of Boyer ........................................................................................................... 4
The scholarship of teaching and learning .................................................................................. 9
Building on Boyer ..................................................................................................................... 10
The formation of an academic ................................................................................................. 13
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 18
What may be done? ................................................................................................................. 20
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................... 21
References ............................................................................................................................... 22
Why scholarship matters in higher education i
This paper is part of a series of interrelated discussion papers being prepared for the Office
for Learning and Teaching (OLT) by Belinda Probert. The first discussion paper, Teaching
Focused Academic Appointments in Australian Universities (2013), raised the question of
how we should understand the requirement for all higher education teachers to
demonstrate scholarship, whether in a Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institute,
private college or university. This second discussion paper provides a critique of the way in
which ‘scholarship’ has come to be interpreted in Australian higher education, arguing for a
return to Boyer’s conception as a starting point. Forthcoming discussion papers for the OLT
will focus on the question of the PhD and its role in preparing graduates for teaching roles in
higher education, and on a review of current approaches to quality assurance and quality
improvement in higher education teaching and learning.
ii Office for Learning and Teaching
Why scholarship matters in higher education
Introduction
Higher education teachers are becoming an increasingly diverse group of professionals as
Australia moves to significantly raise the proportion of young people completing bachelor
level qualifications. Within universities we have seen the appearance of teaching focused
appointments alongside the traditional teaching and research academic staff; in the Tertiary
and Further Education (TAFE) sector, there are a growing number of higher education
teachers as some Institutes move to offer degree level programs; and the number of private
higher education providers and public-private partnerships continues to grow.1 Following
the Review of the Demand Driven Funding System2, it seems likely that teaching only
universities will be on the policy agenda.
These developments are provoking discussion about what is—or should be—distinctive
about higher education teaching, regardless of where it is occurring. Within universities, the
appointment of teaching focused academics raises questions about the relationship
between teaching and research. If these new kinds of staff are not undertaking disciplinary
research, creating new knowledge in their chosen fields, what makes their teaching
distinctively ‘higher’? How should they be selected and how should their work be evaluated
at different stages of their careers?
As TAFE institutes expand their offering of bachelor level degree programs and form
polytechnics in partnership with universities, a parallel debate is developing. How should
higher education teachers in TAFE prepare for this role, and what needs to be different from
their VET teacher colleagues? What are the qualities that should be common to all higher
education teachers, and what are the differences between a ‘lecturer’, a ‘teacher’ and an
‘academic’? For example, the PhD is now the entry-level qualification for most teaching and
research academics in Australian universities (even if it has to be completed on the job).
Should a PhD or equivalent research experience be the base level qualification for
appointment to any higher education teaching focused position?3
In the UK the rapid expansion of higher education provision through Further Education
Colleges has provoked a similar debate about what should be distinctive about higher
education, or what Lea and Simmons refer to as ‘HEness’.4
1
Swinburne Online, a partnership between Swinburne and Seek, expects to have 7000 students in 2014, its
third year of operation.
2 David Kemp and Andrew Norton, Review of the Demand Driven Funding System Report, Australian
Government, 2014, http://www.education.gov.au/report-review-demand-driven-funding-system.
3 This discussion relates primarily to those higher education teachers who continue to have responsibility for
course or subject content and design as well as teaching. The growth of many other more specialised
supportive roles (for example in instructional design, learning support, tutoring in the traditional sense, and so
on) raises other questions about relevant preparation and experience that need equal attention.
4 Jonathan Simmons and John Lea, Capturing an HE ethos in college higher education practice, Quality
Assurance Agency for Higher Education, 2013, p. 3.
Why scholarship matters in higher education 1
In recommending significant growth, the Bradley Review of higher education provided one
answer to these questions, albeit the rather abstract one that derives from von Humboldt’s
definition of what should be distinctive about German higher education in the early
nineteenth century. The Review panel accepted that some higher education providers
would not be involved in research (and for that reason should not be allowed to be called
universities). ‘Nevertheless teaching informed by scholarship is critical in any higher
education setting. Wherever a program is delivered in Australia it must be taught by people
who are scholars in their field. The panel sees teachers and institutions committed to
scholarship as a defining feature of higher education in this country.’5
This thinking was embedded in the Provider Category Standards to be applied by the
Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency (TEQSA). All providers with the title University
(including University College and University of Specialisation) must demonstrate ‘sustained
scholarship that informs teaching and learning in all fields in which courses of study are
offered’. Other higher education providers must employ academic staff who ‘are active in
scholarship that informs their teaching’.6 All higher education providers must ensure that
teaching staff ‘have a sound understanding of current scholarship and/or professional
practice in the discipline that they teach’.7
Despite the weight carried by the concept of scholarship in the current regulatory
framework, its meaning is unclear.8 The Bradley Review panel opted to define it in
opposition to research in order to ensure that the title of university could not be ‘diluted’ to
embrace teaching only institutions that did not undertake research. Thus research (the
creation of new knowledge) is distinguished from scholarship, with the latter being confined
to the ‘dissemination’ of knowledge and a ‘commitment to the development of teaching
practice’.9 Universities are therefore required to undertake research that leads to the
creation of new knowledge, while non-university providers are only required to ‘deliver
teaching and learning that engage with advanced knowledge and inquiry’. 10
Such a distinction does not sit easily with the approach being taken by The Higher Education
Academy (HEA) in the UK which acknowledges greater diversity in the research capacities of
different institutions, but argues nonetheless that ‘an understanding and valuing of
5
D. Bradley, P. Noonan, H. Nugent and B. Scales, Review of Australian Higher Education (The Bradley Review),
Australian Government, 2008, p. 125,
http://www.innovation.gov.au/highereducation/ResourcesAndPublications/ReviewOfAustralianHigherEducati
on/Pages/ReviewOfAustralianHigherEducationReport.aspx.
6 Higher Education Standards Framework (Threshold Standards) 2011, Australian Government, pp. 9–11.
7 Ibid., p. 16.
8 The consultation draft for a new Proposed Higher Education Standards Framework contains more specific
criteria for ‘Teaching Standards’, but continues to rely heavily on the concept of scholarship, Australian
Government 2014.
9 The Bradley Review, pp. 124–6.
10 HES Standards Framework, p. 9.
2 Office for Learning and Teaching
research, and to an extent the development of skills of doing research’ should be ‘central to
what all students should experience in higher education’.11
The distinction between different types of higher education provider is an important one,
regardless of what one thinks about whom should be allowed to call themselves a
university. However, the linking of ‘scholarship’ to dissemination or teaching in this way
does not build on any shared historical understanding of the concept within Australian
higher education. In fact, there is little evidence that the terms ‘scholar’ and ‘scholarship’
are used easily within Australian universities to describe distinctive values or qualities. With
its popular connotations of bespectacled professors in dusty libraries, newer higher
education providers also find it difficult to excite their teachers about its relevance.
Despite, or perhaps because of this lack of clarity about its meaning, the word ‘scholar’ has
begun to appear in the titles being given to teaching focused academic appointments in
Australian universities, with the explicit intention of signalling their ‘higher’ status, and
protecting them from being seen as ‘teaching only’. For example, Teaching Scholar is the
title given to teaching focused appointments at Central Queensland (CQU) and Southern
Cross Universities; while Scholarly Teaching Fellow is the term chosen by the National
Tertiary Education Union to describe the junior teaching focused appointments being
created in the current round of enterprise bargaining to reduce reliance on sessional
teachers.
The mobilisation of the word ‘scholar’ in connection with teaching in the current context
reflects the tension that results from attempting to create more differentiated academic
roles within a culture that overwhelmingly privileges research over teaching. The addition of
the term scholar or scholarly to roles that might otherwise be seen as lower in status is
clearly intended to signal that higher education teachers do more than disseminate or
transmit knowledge. This becomes particularly clear in the case of CQU which has created
another category, alongside the teaching scholars, of ‘teaching focused’ appointments for
those who have ‘not met the expected requirements for either the teaching scholar or
research active scholar categories’.12 Curtin University, on the other hand, defines its
teaching focused appointments as staff who will spend 75 per cent of their time in ‘Teaching
Delivery and Teaching Related Duties’, more suggestive of ‘dissemination’ than
‘scholarship’.13
Some of the variations in appointment type across the sector can be seen as encouraging
signs of institutional and role differentiation within a mass higher education system.
However, the use of new position descriptors to mean very different things is not without
risk. If teaching focused can mean both ‘failed academic awaiting performance review’ and
‘respected leader of curriculum reform’, it is hard to see how everyone is going to know who
is in the sin-bin and who is a ‘scholar’ deserving of respect.
11
Alan Jenkins and Mick Healey, Institutional strategies to link teaching and research, The Higher Education
Academy, 2005, p. 7.
12 Central Queensland University, Academic Profiles Document, 5 June 2013.
13 Curtin University, Academic, professional and general staff enterprise agreement 2012-16.
Why scholarship matters in higher education 3
The linking of scholarship and teaching has another recent impetus, resulting from attempts
to codify and quantify teaching quality for the purposes of creating career paths based on
teaching excellence. This can be seen at its most extreme in Richlin’s influential definition of
a teaching hierarchy that moves from ‘good teaching’ to ‘scholarly teaching’ and finally to
‘undertaking scholarship of teaching’.14 Just to confuse matters further, Richlin’s approach,
which is widely shared among parts of the teaching and learning community, considers the
scholarship of teaching to be published research about teaching practices. In other words,
scholarship in this context is most definitely research rather than dissemination. It is not at
all clear why this kind of research designed to improve practice should be called
‘scholarship’ except in so far as all research is defined as scholarship. The difficulty derives
from the confusion that now exists not just about how we should use this key term, but
equally importantly, about what teaching focused academics or scholarly teachers should in
fact be doing, and how their careers should be defined. Should teaching focused academics
be moving along a continuum from good teaching to scholarly teaching, and finally to the
scholarship of learning and teaching—or SoTL as it has become known? Does it make sense,
as one Vice-Chancellor has suggested, to expect that the appointment of significant
numbers of Teaching Scholars at his university should lead to a major increase in their ERA
rankings in the field of education? And would this improve the learning of students at this
university?
Whatever the confusion between these different attempts to deploy the notion of
scholarship, they converge around the desire to define and preserve what should be
distinctive about higher education. We need to interrogate these claims carefully, precisely
because of their role in protecting what is ‘higher’ about higher education in an era of
universal participation.
The importance of Boyer
In the current debate about the need to create more differentiated academic roles Ernest
Boyer’s classic text, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, is
omnipresent.15 Back in 1990, Boyer challenged American universities with the question: ‘can
we, in fact, have a higher education system in this country that includes multiple models of
success?’.16 Boyer was motivated not by the current challenges of global competition and
universal participation rates, but rather by what he saw as the unfortunate dominance of
research over all other forms of scholarly activity. Boyer argued that universities ‘had a
restricted view of scholarship, one that limits it to a hierarchy of functions. Basic research
has come to be viewed as the first and most essential form of scholarly activity’. He worried
about the effect of ‘mission creep’ and the ‘uniformity of the pattern and the divisive
struggle on many campuses between “teaching” and “research”’.17
14
L. Richlin, ‘Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching’ in New Directions for Teaching and Learning
vol. 2001, 86, pp. 57–68.
15 Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, 1990.
16 Ibid., pp. 2–3.
17 Ibid., p. 55.
4 Office for Learning and Teaching
Despite the different context, the questions Boyer sought to answer in Scholarship
Reconsidered are the same ones that are now being asked about Australian universities.
What we are faced with, today, is the need to clarify campus missions and relate the
work of the academy more directly to the realities of contemporary life. We need
especially to ask how institutional diversity can be strengthened and how the rich
array of faculty talent in our colleges and universities might be more effectively used
and continuously renewed.18
Boyer proceeds to argue persuasively for a conceptualisation of academic work as being
made up of four, equally valuable kinds of scholarship—the scholarships of discovery,
integration, application and teaching.
Boyer’s thesis has been extremely influential in the way many observers write and talk
about universities in Australia, as well as the US and the UK. But in Australia it is the
scholarship of teaching that has received the lion’s share of attention, particularly in support
of the development of teaching focused appointments. Boyer’s work has been mobilised to
defend the status of these positions, leading to much talk about value of the scholarship of
teaching, but often with little reference to the way in which he mounted his argument.
Indeed, there has for the most part been a cherry-picking approach to his conceptual
framework and recommendations. As a result, the concept of ‘scholarship’ in relation to
teaching has been mobilised to describe research, and evaluation that focuses on successful
teaching, in the manner proposed by Richlin. The scholarship of teaching and learning has
become a major specialist field of its own. Yet this was not at the heart of Boyer’s
conception of the scholarship of teaching, and it fails to engage with what Boyer claimed
were the kinds of scholarly credentials and practice that all academics should embody.
It could be argued that despite widespread enthusiasm in Australia for Boyer’s insistence
that teaching is a scholarly activity which matters, the substance of his wider proposals has
been largely ignored. They are worth revisiting since he provides a coherent framework for
thinking about the full range of contemporary academic work, and the changes that need to
be made in the training and development of academics to ensure that these different types
of intellectual work reflect the distinctive characteristics of higher education—namely the
values of scholarship. His framework also provides a way of keeping the shared ‘higher’ part
of higher education provision at the forefront of debate about institutional differentiation.
For Boyer, scholarship ‘is at the heart of what the profession is all about’. The conceptual
distinction between the scholarships of discovery, integration, application and teaching is
widely recognised as a result of his writing. But there is a risk in using these distinctions
directly to justify role or institutional specialisation if it is not also recognised that ‘some
dimensions of scholarship are universal – mandates that apply to all’.19 For Boyer, all
academics should ‘establish their credentials as researchers’. They may not go on to focus
on specialised investigative work, but they ‘must demonstrate the capacity to do original
research, study a serious intellectual problem’, and submit the results to their peers.
18
19
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., p. 27.
Why scholarship matters in higher education 5
‘Indeed, this is what the dissertation or a comparable piece of creative work, is all about.’20
By attempting to create new knowledge the epistemological basis of the discipline or field is
mastered, and its contingent nature understood. The universal focus on discipline specific
research methods as part of this training plays an essential role. This might the basis for
asserting that a PhD, or an equivalent level of deep disciplinary engagement, should be the
expected foundation for the careers of all higher education teachers, whether they teach in
research-intensive universities, or TAFE institutes specialising in the scholarship of
application, or in polytechnics and teaching focused colleges.
The shape and content of the contemporary PhD and its dominance in the higher education
qualification hierarchy needs, however, to be viewed with a critical and historical eye. It
could be argued that its evolution into an increasingly specialised and narrow kind of
training makes it less and less relevant to the educational purposes of a university, and
particularly to the development of the scholarships of integration and application as well as
teaching.21 In its original medieval form, the masters degree was of equal status to the
doctoral qualification, and ‘located the value of discipline specific knowledge not in its
inherent pursuit but in the “transferable skills” it provided for living one’s life.’22 In recent
years the research masters degree has been reduced to a stepping-stone towards a PhD,
with increasing numbers jumping directly from honours to PhD qualifications.23 Coursework
masters programs in professional disciplines now dominate this level of study in Australia.
The current TEQSA requirement that teachers should possess a qualification at least one
level above the students for whom they are responsible24 is not a sufficiently sophisticated
indicator in this environment, particularly with the increased blurring of the sectoral divide
as TAFEs and private providers move into the provision of bachelor level programs. There is
something qualitatively different about higher education teaching and learning that needs
to be respected wherever it is offered—and which is not necessarily developed through
masters coursework study. As Wheelahan et al. conclude in their review of higher education
teaching in TAFE, a commitment to high quality offerings means that these higher education
teachers need more time to engage in disciplinary scholarship, and to experience the
culture of scholarship.25
20
Ibid.
The role of the PhD in preparing individuals for higher education teaching will be more fully considered in a
forthcoming Office for Learning and Teaching Discussion Paper.
22 Steve Fuller, ‘Deviant interdisciplinarity as philosophical practice: prolegomena to deep intellectual history’,
Synthese, 190, pp. 1899–1916, 2013.
23 These points are made in the excellent recent publication by Mick Healey, Alan Jenkins and John Lea,
Developing research-based curricula in college-based higher education, The Higher Education Academy, 2014.
24 4.2 of the Provider Course Accreditation Standards states that the higher education provider ensures that
staff who teach students ‘are appropriately qualified in the relevant discipline for their level of teaching
(qualified to at least one AQF qualification level higher than the course of study being taught or with
equivalent professional experience)’.
25 Stephen Billett, Ann Kelly, Gavin Moodie, Leesa Wheelahan, Higher Education in TAFE, National Centre for
Vocational Education Research, 2009, p. 39.
21
6 Office for Learning and Teaching
The second universal dimension of scholarship according to Boyer is the requirement that all
academics ‘stay in touch with developments in their fields and stay professionally alive’.26
The rhetoric of the teaching-research nexus has been taken, by some academics, to mean
that there could be no such thing as a ‘ teaching focused academic’, since it is doing
research that is the key to being professionally alive. Some of this resistance is deeply selfinterested and reflects the preference of academics for time away from students; there are
also those who, less self-interestedly, fear that academics not directly involved in the
creation of new disciplinary knowledge will inevitably become out of date. Yet the idea that
each individual academic should embody a direct link between their research work and their
teaching is a curious one, at least as far as large parts of the undergraduate curriculum are
concerned, in which there is little place for the highly specialised research areas of individual
academics. In science disciplines, some academics hang on with grim determination to the
later year small subjects where they can teach about their research, not because it is
necessarily of value to the curriculum, but because it is the only way they can groom the
future postgraduate research students who are critical to their research ambitions. It also
reflects the view that teaching is essentially designed round individual subjects or units,
owned by particular academics—a view against which many program coordinators and
curriculum experts fight long and hard.
The requirement to be fully aware of the changing frontiers of your discipline is,
nonetheless, an essential one. If this is our objective then why not, as Boyer suggests,
‘assume that staying in touch with one’s field means just that – reading the literature and
keeping well informed about consequential trends and patterns’?27 The evidence for this
might be created through the process of staying in touch itself rather than through an
annual tick box performance management approach or a teaching portfolio. Boyer suggests
that academics for whom the scholarship of discovery is not their focus might, from time to
time, prepare a paper in which they select two or three of the most important new
developments or articles in their fields, and then present the reasons for their choices. This
is not intended as a one-on-one performance management task, nor as a submission for
promotion, but as part of the way in which disciplines and fields of study should collaborate
within their workplaces on a daily basis, crossing the boundaries of teaching and research.
In discussing the scholarship of teaching, Boyer again emphasises the importance of deep
knowledge of the relevant discipline or field that is to be taught. His list of performance
indicators for teaching would begin with evidence that those who teach are, above all,
‘steeped in the knowledge of their fields’.28 As experts in the field of university teaching,
Paul Ramsden and Ken Bain have both suggested excellent teachers are also likely to be
interested in the history of their fields or disciplines.29 This wider perspective is something
that Boyer sees as central to scholarly teaching, and it, in turn, relies strongly on the
scholarship of integration. Rather than seeing this as a radically different kind of work from
the other scholarships, the capacity to integrate is central to teaching since it is about
26
Boyer, op. cit., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 28.
28 Ibid., p. 23.
29 Paul Ramsden, ‘No thinkable alternative’, Times Higher Education, 5 August 2010; Ken Bain, What the Best
College Teachers Do, Harvard University Press, 2004.
27
Why scholarship matters in higher education 7
making connections, placing specialisms in a larger context, ‘illuminating data in a revealing
way, often educating non-specialists too’.30 Teaching, as Connell argues, involves
‘interpretation’, the capacity to fit individual knowledge into larger intellectual patterns. 31
The scholarship of integration is also the best way to describe the kind of discovery that
occurs at the edge of disciplines or where fields converge in new ways. Boyer argues that
‘those who help shape a core curriculum or prepare a cross-disciplinary seminar surely are
engaged in the scholarship of integration and, again such activity should be acknowledged
and rewarded’.32 Good teaching is not simply about transmitting or disseminating
knowledge, but ‘about transforming and extending it as well’.33 In Alfred North Whitehead’s
memorable words:
Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge
of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow or other it must come to the
students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of immediate
importance.34
This too is a form of scholarly engagement, albeit one that is hard to capture in standards
statements.
Whitehead’s interest in the importance of student engagement also challenges any
approach to higher education that invokes images of ‘teachers disseminating’ and students
‘consuming’. Two centuries ago von Humboldt insisted: ‘The relationship between teacher
and learner is…completely different in higher education from what it is in schools. At the
higher level, the teacher is not there for the sake of the student, both have their justification
in the service of scholarship’.35 Today these exhortations resonate strongly in an
environment where there is such widespread recognition of the need to develop pedagogies
centred on uncertainty and what is not known as much as what is known. In von Humboldt’s
words, ‘universities should treat learning as consisting of not yet wholly solved problems
and hence always in a research mode’.36
The idea of a partnership between teachers and students remains central to most
conceptions of higher education. In current debates as Ramsden argues: ‘The vision of
learner as passive consumer is inimical to a view of students as partners with their teachers
in a search for understanding – one of the defining features of higher education from both
academic and student perspectives’.37 This in turn suggests that debate about the scholarly
30
Boyer, op. cit., p. 18.
R. Connell, ‘Good teachers on dangerous ground: towards a new view of teacher quality and
professionalism’, Critical Studies in Education, 50, 3, 2013, p. 224.
32 Boyer, op. cit., p. 36.
33 Ibid., p. 25.
34 Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, The Free Press, 1929, p. 97.
35 W. von Humboldt (1810) ‘On the spirit and organisational framework of intellectual institutions in Berlin’
reprinted in Minerva, 8, 1970, pp. 242–267.
36 Ibid.
37 Paul Ramsden, ‘The future of higher education: teaching and the student experience’, Report presented to
the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills’ Debate on the Future of Higher Education, UK, 2008,
p. 16.
31
8 Office for Learning and Teaching
essence of higher education ‘unnecessarily focuses on staff scholarly activity, at the expense
of student scholarly activity’.38 It has been argued in the UK that a scholarly form of higher
education would require that ‘[A]ll undergraduate students in all higher education
institutions should experience learning through, and about, research and inquiry’. 39 From
this perspective, the curriculum rather than the academic qualifications of individual
teachers moves to the centre of the scholarly stage.
The scholarship of teaching and learning
The importance of understanding how Boyer’s four kinds of scholarship relate to each other
cannot be overstated almost 25 years after he proposed them, at a time when there is so
much selective use of his work and his words, in particular the ‘scholarship of teaching’
(SoTL). It is almost as though the dominance of research over all other forms of scholarship
has managed even to ensure the co-option of Boyer’s rich insights. Teaching focused
position descriptions have come to concentrate overwhelmingly on pedagogy, and often
general rather than discipline specific, or the pedagogical content knowledge that enables
teachers to make ideas accessible to others.40 The suggestion that teaching focused
academics should be engaged with the scholarship of integration, for example, is invisible.
And a scholarly basis to teaching has been buried under the category ‘Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning’ which, to all intents and purposes, has become a new area of
specialised research in which excellent teachers are expected to be active if they wish to be
promoted.
Boyer chose not to distinguish between scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching,
but his Carnegie Foundation colleagues have subsequently argued for the importance of the
distinction. In defending the value of SoTL today, Hutchings et al. point out how work on
pedagogy has made its way into the category of ‘research’ for promotion and tenure
purposes. They see the field has having a particular value at a time when many colleges and
universities are making teaching only appointments, in which they see the danger of a yet
further separation between the roles of teaching and research. ‘We believe that the
scholarship of teaching and learning is the best way for institutions to keep the
interconnections between these intellectual functions alive for individual faculty.’41 Within
the existing academic culture, it could be argued that their logic is impeccable. The status of
teaching focused academics is to be protected by giving them research standing, even if the
link to better learning for students is tenuous. It is also not irrelevant that these arguments
are being promoted by those whose discipline is higher education teaching and learning.
There are a number of paradoxes here. First, if an academic decides to make scholarly
teaching their priority in the development of their career, then they are choosing to devote
more time to becoming an excellent teacher rather than to publishing in specialist research
38
Healey et al., op. cit., p. 10.
Ibid., p. 9.
40 Lee Shulman, ‘Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the New Reform’, Harvard Educational
Review, 1987, 57 (1), pp. 1–22.
41 Pat Hutchings, Mary Taylor Huber and Anthony Ciccone, The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact, Jossey-Bass, 2011, pp. 19–20.
39
Why scholarship matters in higher education 9
journals. If, as is often currently the case, they have been encouraged in this direction
because of their failure to meet research targets in their discipline, does it make sense to set
new research targets in an area in which they have little or no specialist preparation? If they
have chosen this direction because of their passions, how might the emerging field of SoTL
avoid the pressure to become yet another specialised area of competitive research
endeavour? The paradoxes are nicely captured in Graham Gibb’s reflections on forty years
as an academic developer.
I am sceptical about the value of the rush to scholasticism. Most teachers in the
universities I have worked in have never read any of my refereed journal articles,
though many thousands have read my practical manuals and guides and come up to
me when I give talks in out of the way places to tell me how important these
pragmatic publications have been in their teaching lives. I have both citation
evidence and a long record of requests for copyright clearance, to confirm that it is
not, in the main, my scholarly work that has been influential. It is possible to gain
high levels of academic credibility, and develop a stellar career, but to have only little
useful function as an educational developer. It is also possible to be scholarly, but to
write accessibly and for a non-specialist audience…
I regret the loss of focus on the affect and the lack of acknowledgement of the roles
of passion, fear and pride in teaching. Some of the ‘rush to scholasticism’ seems to
me to be a flight from feelings. Accounts by prize-winning teachers about why they
teach in the way they do are full of emotion but commonly lack any reference to
educational literature whatsoever. Can they be wrong and still be recognised as the
best teachers? 42
Building on Boyer
The selective use of Boyer’s work should not be allowed to detract from its inherent value.
For example, Coates and Goedegebuure believe that the dominant conceptualisation of
academic work is now untenable, but that it is essential to move beyond the ‘crude
differentiation of academics as “research active” or “non-active” to more nuanced
conceptualisations referenced to the true complexity of an academic’s role’.43 To do this,
they turn to Boyer’s full typology of academic work to offer a useful matrix of possible
academic career profiles, adding a fifth category defined as ‘management and leadership’.
This reflects a widespread move in Australian universities to more formally acknowledge the
importance of leadership, including distributed leadership, in contributions to teaching and
learning.44 There is, nonetheless, a danger that the category ‘management and leadership’
42
Graham Gibbs, ‘Reflections on the changing nature of educational development’, International Journal for
Academic Development, 18, 1, 2013, p. 12.
43 H.Coates and L. Goedegebuure, ‘Recasting the academic workforce: why the attractiveness of the academic
profession needs to be increased and eight possible strategies for how to go about this from an Australian
perspective’, Higher Education, 64 (6), p. 880.
44 See for example the Report of the Central Confirmation and Promotions Committee on University
Community Feedback from a Teaching Focussed Discussion Paper, University of Queensland, 2013.
Recommendation 2, p. 5.
10 Office for Learning and Teaching
will become detached from scholarly activity altogether. Academic managers and leaders
are now career roles as opposed to being collegial requirements for service (doing it
because it is your turn). While budgets and strategic plans dominate their diaries, academic
leadership needs to be judged as the development and leadership of scholarly activity—
discovery, application, integration or teaching—rather than academic administration.
Indeed, some would still argue that academic leaders and managers should continue to
engage in some type of scholarly activity themselves.45
At different stages of what is generally a long career, an academic might spend very
different proportions of his or her time focused on discovery, integration, teaching,
application and management/leadership, depending on the type of university or higher
education provider and its mission, and both individual enthusiasm and performance. This is
a far cry from the industrial model utilised in university enterprise bargaining with its basic
premise of 40:40:20, and it captures much of the complexity of community expectations
about what universities should be doing.
Boyer’s conceptualisation of the importance and value of different kinds of academic work
is widely seen as providing a compelling case for raising the status of teaching, yet there has
been relatively little change in the academic culture in Australia as yet. It would seem that
Boyer, like many others, underestimated how difficult it would be to raise the status of
university teaching and the scholarships of integration and teaching which underpin it.46 A
large-scale international survey undertaken in 2007, and covering twenty countries,
provides comparative evidence about academics’ attitudes to their work, including their
attitudes to teaching and research. What is striking about the Australian data is that far
fewer Australian academics report a primary interest in teaching than their international
counterparts, with only Norwegian academics expressing less interest.47 An estimated 64
per cent of those academics classified as teaching and research say they are more interested
in research than teaching, while only 35 per cent prefer teaching.48 American academics, by
contrast, are among the most interested in teaching.
The next generation of academics does not show any sign of feeling differently about these
aspects of the job. A recent large national survey of higher degree research students found
that 60 per cent of those hoping for an academic career see research as ‘very’ attractive,
while only 37 per cent see teaching as ‘very’ attractive.49
These attitude surveys are reflections of a deeply embedded professional culture in
Australian universities in which research matters most; and every time a university signals
that the penalty for research inactivity is more teaching, the culture is reinforced. In this
context individual measures to identify and reward good teaching may have little impact on
45
I am grateful for comments about this issue from Stephen Marshall, and also Alan Robson.
The ability of universities to resist change is discussed by Robert Zemsky in Making Reform Work: The Case
for Transforming American Higher Education, Rutgers University Press, 2009.
47 Universities UK, The changing academic profession in the UK and beyond, Research Report, [no date], p. 14.
48 E. Bexley, R. James and S. Arkoudis, The Australian academic profession in transition, Centre for the Study of
Higher Education, University of Melbourne, 2011, p. 15.
49 Daniel Edwards, Emmaline Bexley and Sarah Richardson, Regenerating the Academic Workforce: the
careers, intentions and motivations of higher degree research students in Australia, ACER, 2011, p. 34.
46
Why scholarship matters in higher education 11
the broader culture and attitudes of most academics. A recent major report to the European
Commission on improving teaching in European universities acknowledges the challenge:
A first step is to create the conditions in which the higher education sector gives
parity of esteem to both teaching and research, so that the higher education teacher
knows that he or she has to invest not simply in a command of his or her discipline,
whether it is law, literature or science, but must invest in being a good teacher and
will be rewarded appropriately for doing so.50
Perhaps the operative word in this aspirational statement is ‘knows’. Many universities have
adjusted their promotions policies to reflect the importance of teaching contributions, but
equally most academics still do not believe that this is how things really work. Indeed, they
were less likely to believe teaching is rewarded with promotion in 2010 than 1999.51 Hence
the importance of the first two benchmarks from the HEA’s good practice framework for
promoting teaching, which ask whether university plans and policies ‘reflect a commitment
to parity of esteem between teaching achievements and other achievements in promotion’.
In their book Turnaround Leadership for Higher Education, Fullan and Scott argue that
‘teaching and learning must become the integrator of the traditional university triumvirate
of research, teaching and service and engagement…Trying to do all three independent of
each other is a recipe for fragmentation and failure. Research has the natural upper hand.
Teaching and community engagement and service, if attempted in silo fashion, will always
be mediocre.’52 Vice-Chancellors who believe that officiating at ceremonies to award prizes
to the ‘best’ teachers in their university will change the culture are not serious about this
challenge. The US has produced a number of eminent university leaders, often from
prestigious institutions, willing and able to write about the way universities are failing to
focus on student learning. 53 There is little equivalent leadership in Australia as yet.
How, then, might Boyer’s different scholarships be recognised, and the scholarship of
teaching be given at least equal status with research, if not the central place so many seem
to think it deserves? The review of UK university policies and practices designed to reward
teaching undertaken by the HEA concluded that any progress will require clearer, agreed
standards against which teaching can be evaluated. Yet, without strong leadership at the
institutional level which articulates the value placed on the scholarship of teaching in the
rich sense intended by Boyer, the increasing focus on defining performance measurement
indicators for teaching are likely to be seen as yet another example of individualist
managerialism, rather than a serious challenge to the dominant culture.
50
High Level Group on the Modernisation of Higher Education, Improving the quality of teaching and learning
in Europe’s higher education institutions, Report to the European Commission, June 2013, p. 19.
51 Bexley et al., op. cit., p .25.
52 Michael Fullan and Geoff Scott, Turnaround Leadership for Higher Education, Jossey-Bass, 2009, p. 55.
53 See for example Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, Princeton University Press, 2006; Harry R. Lewis,
Excellence without a Soul, Public Affairs, NY, 2006; Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring’s account of Kim
Clark at Brigham Young University in The Innovative University, Jossey-Bass, 2011; Robert Zemsky, Making
Reform Work: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education, Rutgers University Press, 2009.
12 Office for Learning and Teaching
The introduction of clear indicators for research performance, and their use to reward or
reclassify academic staff, is leading to increasing role differentiation along the research
continuum. There is, however, no simple analogy for teaching and learning. Without first
providing clarity about the career-long development of relevant teaching knowledge and
expertise that acknowledges the collaborative and team-based requirements of good
practice, performance management is likely to be seen as part of an ever growing apparatus
of control, rather than a logical part of an integrated approach to improving teaching and
learning.
The biggest lever for change so far has been academic promotions policies, and in some
institutions these now allow a wide range of contributions to be considered as evidence of
performance, even if staff remain sceptical.54 These are also policies that are debated widely
by academics themselves, generally owned by academic boards rather than management
lines of authority. They are seen as central to the integrity of the profession. For Boyer, the
move to recognise careers based on teaching was not something to be imposed by
university ‘management’. On the contrary, ‘faculty themselves must assume primary
responsibility for giving scholarship a richer, more vital meaning. Professors are, or should
be, keepers of the academic gates … Only as faculty help shape their purposes and engage
actively in policy formulation will a broader view of scholarship be authentically
embraced’.55 This appeal seemed, however, to fall largely on deaf ears, despite changes to
promotions criteria. In a recent article about the importance of ‘professional identity’ in
achieving ‘pedagogical reform’ in the biological sciences, the authors echo Boyer. ‘[W]e
need to keep in mind that we as scientists ourselves are the ones responsible for the current
state of our professional identities.…We have created and contributed to a culture of
science in which research generally has higher status than teaching.’56
The formation of an academic
The one point of intervention singled out explicitly for action by Boyer, was doctoral
education, as this is ‘where professional attitudes and values of the professoriate are most
firmly shaped; it is here that changes are most urgent if the new scholarship is to become a
reality’.57 Like other commentators, Boyer realised that graduate education and the
dissertation would need to be reformed to produce academics who cared as much about
the scholarship of application, the scholarship of integration and the scholarship of teaching
as the scholarship of discovery.
It might be argued that changing doctoral education is, in reality, likely to be very difficult
given its independence from most lines of managerial or strategic control. Historical
resistance within many Australian university academic boards to the introduction of
professional doctorates, for example, suggests that this is an area of conservative
54
See Belinda Probert, Teaching-Focused Academic Appointments in Australian Universities, Department of
Education Office for Learning and Teaching, 2013, for a longer review of promotion policies.
55 Boyer, op. cit., pp. 78–9.
56 Sara E. Bronwell and Kimberly D. Tanner, ‘Barriers to Faculty Pedagogical Change: Lack of Training, Time,
Incentives, and…Tensions with Professional Identity?’, CBE – Life Sciences Education, 11, Winter 2012, p. 344.
57 Boyer, op. cit., p. 68.
Why scholarship matters in higher education 13
professional influence. It is, nonetheless, a topic raised by a significant number of writers
interested in the professional preparation of the contemporary academic workforce.
Boyer suggests several changes to US doctoral programs.58 First, he suggests that alongside
specialist research, an integrative component should be included, requiring all candidates to
‘put their special area of study in historical perspective’.59 In a similar vein Bain reports on a
proposal that every dissertation should include a chapter on how to teach the subject of
that particular study.60 Boyer also suggests that graduate education should pay attention to
the scholarship of application, encouraging doctoral students to think about the usefulness
of knowledge, and ‘to reflect on the social consequences of their work’.61 In terms of
preparing graduates for academic life, however, Boyer argues that graduate schools should
give priority to teaching. This is a position that is strongly endorsed by many other observers
of US higher education.62 Boyer does not, however, believe that a parallel qualification in
teaching is the way to proceed. The models he recommends all require graduates to learn
about teaching within their disciplines, ideally mentored by senior colleagues who are
recognised for the quality of their teaching. Added to this mix, Boyer suggests the
participation of a colleague with particular knowledge and expertise about how students
learn. In these ways not only does the graduate learn most effectively, but the process
stimulates wider discussion about teaching where it is most needed—namely within the
department or discipline. While their impact is difficult to measure, there is clear evidence
that departmental cultures affect the quality of education on offer, particularly the amount
of collegial discussion about how to solve teaching problems, and whether educational
effectiveness is the subject of serious scholarly evaluation.63
In one Australian university a model that reflects much that Boyer proposed has been in
place for over a decade, called the postgraduate Teaching Internship Scheme. This is based
on an explicit valuing of disciplinary expertise and mentoring, and professional principles of
self-regulation and autonomy.64 But in order to establish its desirable and prestigious status,
the scheme has always been selective and competitive, rather than a requirement for all
PhD students who aspire to academic careers. The introduction of programs such as this
depends on the support, both intellectual and financial, of institutional leaders. Their rarity
suggests that such support is in short supply.
58
In recognition of the importance of these proposals for change the Carnegie Foundation launched a major
‘Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate’ in 2001, leading to many publications including George E. Walker, Chris
M. Golde, Laura Jones, Andrea Conklin Bueschel,& Pat Hutchings, The Formation of Scholars: Re-thinking
Doctoral Education for the 21st Century, Jossey-Bass, 2008; and Chris Goldie and George Walker (eds.),
Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline - Carnegie Essays on the
Doctorate, Jossey-Bass, 2006.
59
Boyer, op. cit., p. 68
60 Ibid., p. 177.
61 Ibid., p. 69.
62 See, for example, Stanley Katz ‘What has happened to the professoriate?’, The Chronicle of Higher
Education, October 6 2006.
63 Graham Gibbs, Christopher Knapper, Sergio Piccinin, Departmental Leadership of Teaching in ResearchIntensive Environments, Final Report for Leadership Foundation for Higher Education 2009; Gibbs, Dimensions
of Quality, The Higher Education Academy, 2010, pp. 47–8.
64 The University of Western Australia program was awarded an Australian Learning and Teaching Council
national Award for Programs that Enhance Learning in 2008.
14 Office for Learning and Teaching
Given that the Australian PhD is awarded on the basis of the submitted thesis alone, it is
perhaps hard to imagine how this might be changed to include the kind of wider
considerations proposed by Boyer and Bain. In the US the advanced coursework elements of
doctoral study create a space for innovation and the scholarship of teaching.
It is possible that a more powerful point of intervention in Australia is in the candidate
selection process for relatively junior positions. For appointment to teaching and research
positions it has been common to provide extremely clear selection criteria about the kind of
research track record that is expected. A completed PhD is almost universally required,
together with varied quantities of publications and evidence of grant winning potential,
depending on the level of appointment. The second requirement is generally familiarity with
that part of the curriculum that the appointee will be expected to teach, and the third
requirement is, increasingly, some experience of teaching. On the whole the process is
relatively unsophisticated, primarily because the senior academics with the power to make
appointments are unlikely to feel confident about how evidence of teaching potential might
be gathered, apart from student feedback survey data, or a prize awarded through some
independent process. Rarely, if ever, would applicants be asked to talk about their approach
to the graduate capabilities to which the institution is committed.
In 1995, Lee Shulman offered up three ‘pedagogical colloquium models’ designed to help
the hiring department indicate how it would like applicants ‘to demonstrate their
understanding of the teaching of their discipline’.65 The first is a course narrative or course
argument model, in which the focus is on explaining how a proposed course/unit would be
experienced by both the teachers and the students, some of the problems involved in
teaching such a course, and why it is important to teach. The second model is a colloquium
centred on an essential idea or concept that students find hard to learn, such as ‘theme’ in
English. The third model is the dilemma-centred colloquium, in which the focus is on some
aspect of teaching that is inherently problematic for their discipline, such as the use of
group work and the challenge of holding individual students accountable for their work.
There are, as Shulman acknowledged, other possible models, and they should be adapted to
different disciplines, settings and purposes. But the underlying philosophy is the same.
The benefit of Schulman’s approach is not simply that better, more rounded, hiring
decisions could be made.66 It is also relatively simple and un-bureaucratic. The approach
would also send signals back to graduate programs about the importance of teaching, and it
would require significant cultural change at the department or discipline level.
For starters, if four or five candidates for a position each give a pedagogical
colloquium, the department needs to evaluate what it has seen. This means that it
would be the responsibility of those conducting such evaluative discussions to get
beyond the purely technical (“she told good jokes” or “he didn’t turn his back to the
65
Lee S. Shulman, ‘Faculty hiring: the pedagogical colloquium: three models’, American Association for Higher
Education Bulletin, 49, pp. 6–9.
66 The addition of this kind of requirement to hiring practices in no sense implies that the skills and personal
attributes that make a good teacher are different from those that make a good researcher.
Why scholarship matters in higher education 15
audience for more than eleven minutes at a time”) to the substance of what each
candidate said. Such discussions around hiring can become the seedbed, the
rehearsals, for comparable conversations among colleagues within a department, as
we move toward the peer review of teaching as an aspect of departmental culture.67
Accounts of different attempts to implement this approach in faculty hiring processes
provide great insight into the ways in which the basic ideas could be adapted to different
circumstances, both at Stanford and other US universities. The history department, for
example, rejected the term ‘pedagogical colloquium’ in favour of the less formal ‘discussion
about teaching and curriculum’ because, some members felt ‘that they themselves did not
have a clearly defined theory of teaching or pedagogy, and that there was no way they
could ask freshly minted PhDs to lay out their philosophy of teaching in formal, theoretical
terms’.68
While the benefits of this kind of approach can quite easily be identified, it is disheartening
to note that Australian university leaders do not believe that teaching preparation is a
valuable element of doctoral training, arguing that teaching expertise can be picked up once
graduates are working as an academic. As employers of new teaching and research
academics, they value research skills more highly than teaching skills. Only research
publications are seen as very important. 69
While the Schulman approach raises a number of issues about the setting of reasonable
expectations, making fair and appropriate judgments, and knowing how to value different
kinds of evidence, Hutchings is probably right in his evaluation:
What will move us ahead in the short run is neither a checklist of criteria (almost
certain to be reductive) nor an expectation that faculty will have extensive grounding
in the literature of pedagogical theory and practice (nice, but not likely in most
settings). What’s needed, rather, and what the pedagogical colloquium can help
provide, is the chance for faculty to be part of a community of discourse in which
they can, over time, develop increasingly sophisticated capacities for expert
judgment.70
A very similar approach to developing discipline and department-based evaluations of
teaching is put forward by Ken Bain. Bain suggests that the increasingly popular ‘teaching
portfolio’ should take the form of ‘a kind of scholarly argument about the quality of
teaching.’ This is in contrast to what he calls the ‘performance-based model’ that judges
teachers on whether and how often they exhibit certain behaviours of the kind that are
listed in professional standards documents.71 His argument is that these may be good
67
Lee S. Shulman, ‘The pedagogical colloquium – three models’, Chapter 13 in Teaching as Community
Property, Essays on Higher Education, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2004, p 189.
68 Stanford University Newsletter on Teaching, ‘Promoting a Culture of Teaching: The Pedagogical Colloquium’,
Speaking of Teaching, vol. 8, 3, 1997, p. 2.
69 Edwards et al., op. cit., p. xi, p. 81.
70 Pat Hutchings, ‘The pedagogical colloquium: taking teaching seriously in the faculty hiring process’, in
D. DeZure (ed.), To Improve the Academy, vol. 16, 1997, p. 285.
71 Bain, op. cit., p. 163.
16 Office for Learning and Teaching
practices but they focus on what the lecturer does rather than on what students learn. Bain
argues that the best teachers are always evaluating themselves by asking four basic
questions: Is the material worth learning? Are my students learning what the course is
supposedly teaching? Am I helping and encouraging them to learn or are they learning
despite me? Have I harmed my students (by failing to understand their diverse needs, or by
fostering short-term learning, for example)?
The teaching portfolio might then be seen as a ‘scholarly case’, providing evidence and
conclusions that answer questions. The appropriate evidence will depend on the questions
being asked. Any good process should rely on appropriate sources of data, which are
interpreted. Student feedback or peer review may or may not be relevant; particular
teaching methods can only be judged in relation to discipline specific contexts and
objectives and different student cohorts.
In short, a teacher should think about teaching (in a single session or an entire
course) as a serious intellectual act, a kind of scholarship, a creation; he or she
should then develop a case, complete with evidence, exploring the intellectual (and
perhaps artistic) meaning and qualities of that teaching. Each case would lay out the
argument in an essay. The narrative would explain the qualities of the learning
objectives, what the professor has done to foster their achievement, and how the
instructor has measured progress.72
In this model, the evaluation of teaching would be based on an assessment of the argument.
The case becomes ‘the pedagogical equivalent of the scholarly paper, a paper designed to
capture the scholarship of teaching’, allowing for individual freedom and creativity. The
practice of teaching becomes available for the peer review, which is essential to scholarly
claims.
As with Shulman’s approach, this would require all departments and schools to increase
their knowledge about the science of human learning, and to spend more time talking about
their approaches to teaching. This is already well established in some disciplines, but in
others it would require the involvement of experts. For Bain, such an approach can help
overcome the dichotomy between research and teaching. ‘We can begin to think of
ourselves as a learning university concerned with the learning of both faculty (research) and
students (teaching) and the ways in which the learning of one can benefit the other.’73
72
73
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid., p. 175.
Why scholarship matters in higher education 17
Conclusion
The growth of higher education—from elite to mass, and now universal levels of
participation—is transforming the profile of higher education teachers. Differentiation in
preparation, qualifications, roles and titles is increasing, and arguments in favour of more
teaching focused academic appointments are being made on a number of grounds.74 These
changes have been largely pragmatic and ad hoc: reactions to research ranking pressures,
cost pressures and competition from new higher education providers among other things.
The creation of an uncapped market in Commonwealth funded undergraduate places and
the encouragement of new private providers of higher education has inevitably raised
questions about how the quality of teaching and learning can be assured. 75
The concept of scholarship carries considerable weight in TEQSA’s current Higher Education
Standards Framework as a defining characteristic of higher education, and while Australian
academics are less comfortable with the term than their US counterparts, most would agree
that what it signifies is indeed central to higher education. They would, for the most part,
feel happy with Boyer’s claim that ‘scholarship is at the heart of what the profession is all
about’.76 What is distinctive—and scholarly—about the way universities ‘grow knowledge’ is
that it is intellectual work that is made public, has been subjected to peer review by
members of the relevant intellectual or professional community, and can be cited,
challenged, refuted, or built upon.
However, the enthusiastic adoption of the term ‘scholarship’ by the teaching and learning
community creates both confusion and some real dangers, particularly when Boyer is
claimed as authority without any acknowledgement of his wider argument. For those who
teach in higher education, the primary scholarly attribute must relate to a deep engagement
with their discipline or field of study. The question of defining how this should be
manifested in an increasingly differentiated higher education workforce is a priority not just
for TEQSA but for the profession itself. What role should doctoral level study have, and how
might it need to adapt to reflect the growing importance of the scholarship of application,
for example? How might higher education teachers working outside universities, for TAFE
and private providers, experience the kind of scholarly apprenticeship that has
characterised the traditional academic workforce? Is it the case, as Healey et al. argue, that
the non-university sector ‘can help enact not only the vision of Boyer in trying to develop a
more rounded picture of scholarship in higher education but also, stretching further back,
help recapture and place centre stage the importance of the curriculum in higher education
(Newman 1854) and the thoroughly scholarly nature of higher education as a pedagogical
experience (von Humboldt 1810)’?77
74
See, for example, Andrew Norton’s proposal for 2,500 teaching focused new appointments in 12 Australian
universities in Taking university teaching seriously, Grattan Institute, 2013.
75 Kemp and Norton, op. cit., pp. 77–80.
76 See Bexley et al., op. cit., Chapter 3, ‘Core academic values’.
77 Healey et al., op. cit., p. 13.
18 Office for Learning and Teaching
Arguing for the usefulness of the complete Boyer model of scholarship is not to belittle the
scholarship of learning and teaching. On the contrary, one of the most important changes in
Australian higher education of the last decade has been the adoption of scholarly
approaches to the practice of teaching. It is not clear that the American academic’s sense of
teaching as a vocation has been shared by Australian academics. Lee Shulman’s definition of
academic professionalism would surprise many.
Each of us in higher education is a member of at least two professions: that of our
discipline, interdiscipline or professional field (e.g., history, women’s studies,
accounting) as well as our profession as an educator. In both of these intersecting
domains, we bear the responsibilities of scholars – to discover, to connect, to apply
and to teach.78
If our primary aim is to consider ways in which Australian academics as a whole come to see
themselves as professional educators, then the words scholarship and teaching need to be
used in what Hutchings et al. call a ‘big tent’ approach. Rather than signalling the
development of a new narrow field of publication, the ‘big tent advocates’ have far more to
offer, looking not only to conventional academic research but also to ‘a wider range of work
(documentation, reflection, inquiry) in greater or lesser degrees of polish, made public in
forums with nearer or farther reach’ and thus ‘more hospitable to teachers who want to
participate if only occasionally or in modest ways’.79
There are many forces at work against the kinds of changes that Boyer proposed almost a
quarter of a century ago. The ongoing references to his plea for recognising the value of all
four kinds of scholarship tell us about the continued relevance of his work. Yet many of the
current attempts to acknowledge the importance of teaching through the development of
generic performance frameworks and individual rewards do little to change the academic
culture, or the formation of new generations of academics.
Within Australian universities the differentiation of roles along a continuum from research
only to teaching only is well advanced, with the traditional teaching and research academics
now making up less than half the academic workforce in several Group of Eight universities.
The growth of teaching focused higher education roles, both within existing universities and
new providers, carries with it the potential to see institutional diversity strengthened, and
‘the rich array of faculty talent…more effectively used and continuously renewed’.80 But it
also carries at least two dangers. The first is that that teaching is increasingly identified with
dissemination as opposed to scholarship—or with dead fish, as Whitehead might have said.
The second is that scholarly teaching is seen as the preserve of specialist educational
researchers. Boyer would not have approved of either development.
78
Lee S. Shulman, ‘From Minsk to Pinsk: Why a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?’, The Journal of
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, p. 49.
79 Ibid., p. 9.
80 Boyer, op. cit., p. 13.
Why scholarship matters in higher education 19
What may be done?
There are no simple solutions to the questions raised in this discussion paper. Nor is there
one obvious locus of responsibility for leading change. Indeed, as the academic profession
becomes more fragmented and differentiated, and management authority displaces
academic authority, it becomes harder to imagine the kind of shared reflection that might
help shape a more coherent and integrated approach to defining what scholarship should
mean.
At the individual level, the academic apprenticeship relies overwhelmingly on a narrow
program of research training undertaken within departments and disciplines led by
academics who have generally undertaken their own research training in institutions that
value research above all else. The increasingly competitive pressure generated by the
structure of research funding and the role of international rankings is only likely to increase
in the future. The need for a sector wide debate about the PhD and its role in preparing the
higher education workforce of the future is obvious (and will be the focus of a forthcoming
OLT discussion paper).
The increasing focus on the individual performance management of university teachers
should also be interrogated from the perspectives outlined in this paper if the goal is to
create a scholarly culture around teaching, as opposed to an essentially reductionist
checklist of behaviours.
At the institutional level, the challenge of creating parity of esteem between the work of
teaching and research is one for vice-chancellors, deans, heads of school and department
and professors of the discipline just as much as those in teaching and learning roles. At
some universities, reviews of academic promotion policies, and the creation of clear career
paths based on teaching excellence, have begun to shift the culture away from the norm
under which individual status is linked to disciplinary research success. At others there is
little sign of any such cultural change. Institutional leadership that places student learning at
the centre of an institution’s priorities would have a dramatic impact.81
Finally, at the level of the sector as a whole, the government is currently proposing that not
only should government supported student places remain uncapped, but that they should
be available to a wider range of providers, with no cap on the fees that students may be
charged. In this context the development of an appropriate regulatory framework to ensure
the quality of teaching and learning becomes critically important. If a PhD is intended to
prepare academics to become guardians of their discipline, then now is the time for those
guardians to engage with Boyer’s ideas about scholarship.
81
See Robert Zemsky, op. cit., chapter 10, ‘Were learning to matter’.
20 Office for Learning and Teaching
Acknowledgments
I am most grateful to a number of wise people who read and commented on various
versions of this argument, particularly Sharon Bell, Richard James, Stephen Marshall, Alan
Robson and Judyth Sachs, as well as eagle-eyed readings from within the OLT and Higher
Education and Support Group. I am also grateful for the continued support and hospitality
of La Trobe University. Meanwhile, Suzi Hewlett and Nicci Riley have made my secondment
to the OLT a pleasure.
Why scholarship matters in higher education 21
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22 Office for Learning and Teaching
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