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Research intentions!

Papers currently working on:

Submitted, awaiting review:'''

(solo-authored) 'Academic perceptions of dialogue, research-teaching linkages and inter-subjectivity in the Humanities'

Target journals: (2nd)Higher Education

Pending submission Summer 2011:

(solo authored) 'The idea of the University, research-teaching linkages and Equality and Diversity Imperatives: Just where should academic developers being going?'

Target journals: 1. International Journal of Academic Development

Pending submission Summer 2011:

(solo-authored) ' Wissenschaftsideologie through a post-modern lens? European university history, academic development and the search for research-teaching linkages in the contemporary Academy. '

Target journal: Higher Education

Pending submission summer 2011:

'Graduate Attributes for the 21st Century: Outcomes of a student-led, enquiry-based project - institutional research for enhancement'

Target journal: likely to be Studies in Continuing Education

Previous lectures / seminars

Research paper: The idea of the University, research-teaching linkages and Equality and Diversity Imperatives: Just where should academic developers being going?

Edinburgh TLA Seminar, February 2009.

The relationship between education and research in universities has gained renewed interest in Higher Education in recent years. Educational developers in European (as they tackle the changes heralded by both funding structures and the Bologna Agreement) and Australian universities have played a particular role in raising the quality and quantity of debate. In Scotland this renewed interest has most clearly been seen through the Quality Assurance Framework theme: Research-teaching linkages: Enhancing Graduate Attributes. This, and its associated debate about the role of the universities, has influenced academic development initiatives designed to enhance the range of attributes developed by undergraduate students. Additionally, recent Equality and Diversity legislation has required universities look closely at how inclusive their learning and teaching environments are. This preliminary ‘ideas’ paper will explore the intersections between educationalists’ assumptions (often based on history) about the role of the university, research-teaching linkages, and the drive to engage with equality and diversity imperatives.

Research seminar: Wissenschaftsideologie through a post-modern lens? European university history, academic development and the search for research-teaching linkages. KU Leuven, Belgium, October 2008

The current context of higher education in Europe seems to be one of considerable change, notable more for an exhausting constant flux rather than any sense of restful long term stability. Directives about the role of research, work-related learning, inclusivity and internationalisation, within the undergraduate experience in particular, fill the email inboxes of university administrators and academic heads of department alike. Amidst these arguments rhetoric is deployed to help academic developers articulate the best way forward for the academics they serve. Phrases such as ‘stakeholder consultation’, ‘enhanced independent learning for the life-cycle’ and the ‘development of graduate attributes which represent a civic and democratic ethos’ have become de riguer in certain higher educationalist circles. There is a pervasive sense amongst some commentators that these initiatives represent a separation of the present from the past, a separation that is found wanting when one revisits the heights of the ideals of wissenschaft as elaborated in the nineteenth century.

Accordingly, by buying into an apparently ‘new’ pragmatism concerning regional and global economies our universities have ‘sold out’ and created an ethos driven by the markets and industry rather than the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The Bologna Agreement arguably attempted to undermine this vocational imperative with its clarion call to recognize the value of each regional culture. Alongside this has been the rising phoenix of a moral justification of academic freedom as related directly to the benefits its research-culture brings to undergraduates through research-teaching linkages.

All of these perceptions, of course, are gross over-simplifications of a far more complex situation. This discussion paper seeks to review some of the assumptions concerning research-teaching linkages from the perspective of higher education historiography – focussing particularly on answering the question:

What does the history of European Higher Education offer academic developers attempting to understand the role of the research-teaching nexus and its relationship to the broader roles of Higher Education Institutions?

To do this it takes as its framework:

• How do academic developers employ history to understand the role of research-teaching linkages? • What do historians suggest about such memorializing? • Having explored these questions, is the concept of wissenschaft or, for that matter, any previous ideology of higher education, a useful heuristic for academic developers to use or just ones more likely to confuse?