GUEST EDITORIAL

Innovative practice in theteaching and learning of human

resource developmentRick Holden and Vivienne Griggs

Leeds Business School, Leeds, UK

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an introduction to the special issue on the subjectof innovative practice in the teaching and learning of HRD.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper positions the special issue within a context of issuesand dilemmas facing those who teach and train HRD. Ten papers are introduced which reflect a wideranging and changing landscape of professional practice.

Findings – The paper introduces innovative practice within a context of a particular challenge facingteachers and trainers of HRD. There is a unique relationship between subject matter and the veryteaching learning and assessment strategies used to deliver such content.

Originality/value – There is limited published research into the teaching and learning of HRD. Thepaper provides a basis for the special issue’s contribution to an initial understanding of innovativepractice in teaching and learning of HRD and, importantly, in encouraging a higher profile for thediscussion of research and practice implications.

Keywords Human resource development, Teaching and training,Human resource management research

Paper type Viewpoint

IntroductionWe begin this editorial with a short story and a question. The story unfolds as follows:

The teaching team in a Business School in the UK, anxious to enhance their teaching of HRD,decide there is a case for change. Based on their own intuition and glimpses of practice relayedby students in the classroom, their aspiration is to engage with a critical HRD debate by raisingthe profile of the “politics of HRD” within the curriculum. The team embark upon a series ofinterviews with HRD practitioners in a range of organisations. Rich, insightful data on therealities of day-day, week-by-week practice is revealed, infused with a political dimension theteam suspected was a major feature of the reality of HRD practice in organisational life.Utilising their research-based interviews the team apply their findings to the curriculum.Changes include their approach (more dialogue), curriculum content (enhanced case material)and assessment (case based rather than exam based). The “politics of HRD” is not delivered as aspecific topic in one week of the programme. Rather it provides a perspective or windowthrough which a richer, more critical, understanding of HRD can be achieved.

And so to the question: is this an example of innovative practice in the teaching andlearning of HRD? One classic response to such a question is of course: “well it dependswhat is meant by innovative?” Clearly to claim something is innovative can becontentious. Judgement on this matter may depend on the starting point. What might

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be innovative for the teaching team in the story above may be “old hat” to a teachingteam in another Business School elsewhere in the world.

The story we have recounted is in fact our story. We introduced this change lastyear and have few qualms in claiming it as innovative. McLean (2005), discussinginnovation in the context of HRD, describes it as a process of developing andimplementing a new idea. This is the rationale upon which this special issue is based;we wanted contributors to address and review their efforts to introduce new ways ofteaching and learning for HRD.

HRD: the teaching and learning challengeAs the idea for this issue took shape we confess to feeling somewhat perplexed; a littlesurprised a special journal issue, of the character and focus here, had not beenpublished before now. Are not HRD professionals, we mused, the champions of allthings learning within a corporate context? Are HRD academics and researchers not atthe vanguard of the identification and dissemination of both leading edgeunderstanding about learning and development and its practice wherever thatpractice may be sited? As a subject, a discipline, HRD has seen a burgeoning literaturedevelop in the last 20 years. Yet despite this wide-ranging literature on the subject ofHRD and its growing prominence as a field of study, there is limited published researchinto the teaching and learning of HRD. Of course we must be careful of over statingsuch expectations and thereby ignoring the significance of contributions of other,closely related disciplines, to what is a wide, complex and contested terrain. This issueitself has a wider constituency than simply HRD academics and provides testimony tothis point. Nonetheless, it is somewhat paradoxical that a discipline which purports tobe concerned with “interventions in organisational and individual learning processes”(Stewart, 2007), has seemed somewhat reluctant to turn its attention to how it is itselftaught and learnt.

Of course this endeavour is hardly straightforward. If we assume, not unjustifiably,that the HRD teaching team at Leeds Business School are broadly representative ofsimilar groupings both in the UK and internationally, a fly on the wall could haveobserved discussions on any of the following issues which provide a flavour of thesorts of dilemmas facing the HRD tutor.

. Should we teach to a broad, inclusive, definition of HRD or one that is essentiallymore corporate focused?

. Do we regard our students as aspirant HRD professionals or aspirant managerswho may practice HRD?

. If HRD practitioners are custodians of learning in an organisation, is it ourresponsibility to equip them for this role and if so to what extent does this gobeyond a theoretical knowledge?

. If we start a teaching programme with an underpinning in learning theory, towhat extent do we have an obligation to build our teaching model to play to themost effective way our students learn?

. How do we most appropriately respond to expectations that our teaching reflectsthe latest in online and mobile technologies?

. How best might we encourage a critical examination of HRD and does thisrequire us to reflect a similar level of criticality in our own professional practice?

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This list is not exhaustive but it demonstrates the breadth and complexity of issuesfacing those teaching HRD. Such dilemmas, though, are to a greater or lesser extent a subset of a more fundamental challenge; and one that goes to the very heart of the raisond’etre of this special issue. The challenge is this: if the subject matter, broadly put, islearning, both conceptually and in all its multifarious individual and organisationalmanifestations, then teachers and trainers of HRD must acknowledge that they face auniquely different relationship with their subject matter than conventionally is the caseelsewhere in the world of teaching and training and education.

At its simplest this may behove the teacher of HRD to ‘practice what they preach’; toembellish in their teaching and learning strategies the very issues, concepts andprinciples which are the at the focus of their teaching, training or education of HRD. Anexample may help to clarify the point being made. E-learning is claimed by many tohave led a revolution in training and development over recent years. Whatever themerits of such claims it is surely a topic to include in any HRD curriculum? We haveboth sat through lectures on e-learning, with much sound content, yet which aredelivered “traditionally” via lecture/power point. The HRD/HRM textbook chapter one-learning is usually much the same. But, it seems a nonsense to us that any attempt tointroduce students of HRD to e-learning should follow such a pathway. Our positionwould be that such a strategy should incorporate a sizeable chunk of actual e-learning,(i.e. using e-learning to teach e-learning) thus enabling an appropriate and fit forpurpose insight and critique to be generated on the topic.

The same is true, we would argue, for a much more difficult and contentious aspectof the curriculum, namely the teaching of “critical HRD”. We would argue that itbehoves the HRD tutor not just to talk about critical HRD but to practice critical HRDin their teaching and learning strategies.

We suggest, therefore, that in terms of the teaching and learning of HRD there is aunique relationship between the subject matter itself and the process of itscommunication and dissemination in a teaching and learning context. As we noteabove this presents a teaching and learning challenge. But we would go a step furtherand suggest that it implies a responsibility for the HRD tutor to operate at two levels.First, and conventionally, identifying and determining how best to meet the aims andobjectives of a curriculum, much as any professional tutor would whether their subjectbe medieval english literature or cybernetics. The second level comes into play for theHRD tutor because they need to be acutely conscious that what they are doing is at oneand the same time what they are teaching.

For some this challenge and the responsibility it implies, might be a recipe for inertia!For others, though, it is surely a driver for change, for trying something different; inshort for innovation. We locate ourselves firmly in this category, as indeed we would soclassify all the contributors to this special issue. Taking some action to reflect upon andchange our management and delivery of the curriculum, whether small or more radical,is part and parcel of being true to our own HRD community of practice. Corley and Eades(2007, p. 141) capture the point well when they argue “HRD practitioners need to be ableto lay open their own practice in order to support and develop the learners ability to dolikewise”. As HRD teachers or trainers, this unique relationship with our subject matterbecomes a fundamental part of our own critical professional development.

It is the exercise of this responsibility, which is at heart of our contributions, setwithin the context of change and curriculum enhancement in HRD and closely related

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disciplines. This special issue of JEIT seeks to address innovation in teaching andlearning in HRD. It is about considering, and changing, what we teach and how we teachHRD and crucially, about changing the fundamental inter-relationship between the two.

The papersThe selection of papers included in this issue provides an illustration of teaching andlearning practice in HRD and HRD related educational programmes. They convey theauthors’ attempts to engage with students in novel ways and challenge the traditionalpedagogy of HRD. The opening paper emphasises the importance of the contributionsdue to a lack of published research in this area. In this article Sambrook and Stewartreport the findings of a research project into teaching, learning and assessment practicein HRD educational programmes, in which they found a “dearth of research” or at leastresearch that is published.

Armitage, in the second paper, proposes an approach to the teaching and delivery ofHRD which challenges what he calls “the modernist orthodoxy of contemporaryorganisational life”. He discusses the creation of a critical HRD pedagogy and drawingon illustrations of classroom practice identifies dialogue as central to this approach.The implications of adopting this approach are examined.

The next set of papers (Anderson and Gilmore; Butler and Reddy; McKinlay,Grogan, Sedakat and McKinlay) report on endeavours to “move the learner centrestage” (McKinlay et al.). Anderson and Gilmore report on the outcomes andexperienced emotions of tutors and students when a student led dimension wasintroduced to their HRD curriculum. Butler and Reddy discuss how flexible forms ofstudy place greater emphasis on helping students and lecturers acquire knowledge ofhow to learn based on their enquiry based learning model. McKinlay et al. address asimilar participative approach but within the context of assessment. The illustrativecontent of these three papers provide a valuable insight to the student voice.

The two contributions that follow (Shaw and Ogilvie; Mavor, Sadler-Smith andGray) relate experiences of innovations in contemporary HRD practices. Shaw andOgilvie adopt an original approach to work place learning utilising existing part-timejobs of undergraduate students. Mavor et al. question how intuition may beincorporated into the coaching curriculum.

The final set of papers (Wootton and Stone; Morse; Callahan) highlight the potentialand complexity of teaching online. Wootton and Stone consider the adoption of aClinical Legal Education approach in a Virtual Learning environment. Morse providesa reflexive account of appraisal training in a computer-based simulated environment.For the final contribution we invited a reflection on the implications of technology forHRD educators. In this article Callahan argues that the push for online learning is atodds with much of what the field of HRD stands for. Her paper offers a fitting close tothe special issue; a reflection on the critical relationship between the subject matter ofHRD and its teaching and learning within the context of assumptions about what is“cutting edge innovation”.

ConclusionWe noted earlier some perplexity as to the relative paucity of published research intothis aspect of HRD practice. Reflection on the papers in this special issue provides noneat explanation for this but it does strengthen the case for a sustained development of

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discussion and debate in relation to the teaching and learning of HRD and to which wehope this special issue provides some stimulus. Taken as a whole these contributionslay testimony to the significance of research and practice, which is being undertaken inand around the teaching and learning of HRD. Importantly this is not the preserve ofwhat might be termed mainstream HRD academia. Of course, the contributions to thisissue of JEIT can only provide a snapshot of what is, by its very nature, a changinglandscape. Nonetheless, they provide an important “sounding”; a basis, we suggest, formore focused research and debate and for bringing this to the forefront of the HRDagenda – surely its rightful location.

References

Corley, A. and Eades, E. (2004), “Becoming critically reflective practitioners: academics andstudents’ reflections on the issues involved”, Human Resource Development International,Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 137-44.

McLean, L.D. (2005), “Organisational culture’s influence on creativity and innovation: a review ofthe literature and implications for Human Resource Development”, Advances in DevelopingHuman Resources, Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 226-46.

Stewart, J. (2007), “The ethics of HRD”, in Rigg, C., Stewart, J. and Trehan, K. (Eds), CriticalHuman Resource Development: Beyond Orthodoxy, Prentice Hall, Harlow.

About the authorsRick Holden is currently Principal Lecturer (Research) based at the Human ResourceDevelopment and Leadership (HRDL) Research Unit at Leeds Business School. Before movinginto higher education Rick worked for Cadbury Schweppes in Personnel and Training. His mainteaching responsibilities include human resource development, skills development and researchaward supervision. His principal research interests revolve around aspects of the graduate labourmarket and the teaching and learning of HRD and skills. He has completed research projects for arange of public and private organisations; most recently for the National Council for GraduateEntrepreneurship and the Yorkshire & Humberside Regional Development Authority. Between1990 and 2010 Rick was Editor of the Emerald journal Education þ Training. He is Vice Chair ofthe University Forum for HRD Research Committee. Rick Holden is the corresponding authorand can be contacted at: R.Holden@leedsmet.ac.uk

Vivienne Griggs is a Senior Lecturer in HRM based at the Human Resource Development andLeadership (HRDL) Research Unit at Leeds Business School, teaching on a range ofundergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Prior to joining Leeds Met Vivienne worked as aHR Manager for BT. Current teaching responsibilities include personal development andlearning and development modules. Her principal research interests are focused on practiceinformed teaching, most recently the teaching of reflective learning and HRD in the voluntarysector. Vivienne is also a trustee for Home-Start Leeds and an Employment Tribunal Member.

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