Ontology, identity formation and lifelong learning …...The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 1 Ontology, identity formation and lifelong learning outcomes Theorising the relationship

The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 1

Ontology, identity formation and lifelong learning outcomes Theorising the relationship between discipline-based research and teaching Melanie Walker


Contents

Executive summary p3

Background, context and literature p5

Discussion p16

(i) Conceptual work p16

(I) Contextual conditions p16

(II) What is education? p19

(III) Education through research? p21

(IV) Capabilities p26

(ii) Empirical application p32

(I) Lecturer conceptions of research in relation to pedagogical

approaches p34

(II) Student voices p41

(III) Theme one: epistemological knowing p42

(IV) Theme two: ontological being p46

(V) Quality in teaching and pedagogy p52

Results p55

Recommendations p56

Acknowledgements p57

References p58

Appendix p66


Executive summary

The overarching research question in this project was to ask how ought

engagement with research form students’ capabilities and enhance

multidimensional learning experiences for intelligent action, social

responsibility and agency to choose and plan a good life. The project aim

flowing from this was to theorise how undergraduates ought to be positively

transformed as persons by their learning experiences and knowledge

acquisition in discipline-based, research-rich teaching. Furthermore, it sought

to problematise the research element in the nexus where this is

unproblematically assumed to be inherently of value. The research was

primarily conceptual, exploring how the capability approach might expand

debates about the research/teaching nexus in the disciplines in new directions

that pay attention to the normative purposes of higher education, frameworks

of equality and social justice, and both epistemology and an ontological turn in

higher education. Theoretical resources drawn from development economics

and philosophy were illuminating. The project included the collection of a

small amount of illustrative qualitative data using semi-structured interviews

with nine lecturers and 21 students in three departments (History, Politics, and

Animal and Plant Sciences) in one research-intensive university. This

empirical data was then analysed for evidence of (i) capability formation; (ii)

acquisition of knowledge and learning through research-enhanced

pedagogies; and (iii) pedagogical and institutional conditions of quality in

relation to the research/teaching nexus.


The results include an account of theoretical development and of the analysis

of data. Together these indicate that research-enhanced pedagogies can

contribute substantially to students’ capability formation and their identities as

responsible, confident and critical agents. However, such effects are most

pronounced where lecturers are not only research-active themselves, but also

committed to students as persons as well as learners, and to enabling

pedagogies, supported by departmental conditions that recognise the

importance of teaching to student experiences.

The key recommendations from this project are that: (i) the research/teaching

nexus needs to be embedded in public debates about the normative purposes

of higher education; (ii) the concept of ‘research-enhanced pedagogies’ is

helpful but needs to pay attention to what is understood by ‘research’,

‘enhanced’ and ‘pedagogies’, and to what it means to be ‘educated’ through

research; (iii) ‘enhancing’ learning in the disciplines through research ought to

integrate the formation both of students’ epistemological and ontological

capabilities; and (iv) if both the research and teaching elements in the

research/teaching nexus do not inflect towards a more equal and just student

experience on the one hand, and a concern with the moral urgencies of our

society on the other, we might need to raise questions about what the point is

of so much concern with this nexus.


Ontology, identity formation and lifelong learning outcomes: theorising the

relationship between discipline-based research and teaching

MELANIE WALKER

Background: context and literature

This project emerged from and built on earlier work exploring the purposes of

higher education, higher education professionalism, and pedagogies (Walker,

2001, 2004, 2006). It sought to further interrogate the capability approach,

well-being and agency formation (Sen, 1992, 1999; Nussbaum, 2000) to

generate a rich, multidimensional capability-based perspective of individual

student learning for choosing and having a ‘good life’. It therefore theorised

how undergraduate students ought to be positively transformed as persons by

their learning experiences and knowledge acquisition in discipline-based,

research-rich teaching. This is seen to be pertinent in the light of increasing

numbers of universities nationally and internationally claiming to be both doing

research-led teaching, and also identifying teaching and learning outcomes

beyond knowledge and skill acquisition to include such attributes as ‘lifelong

learning’ and ‘global citizenship’. Such goals extend considerations of student

learning into arenas of identity formation, agency and social responsibility.

These are arguably important for higher education in an era of global conflict,

poverty and urgent environmental issues, but also important for the

navigational capability and future lives of students.


To take just two illustrative examples from research-intensive universities, the

first a UK university, which has as its mission “to discover and understand”

and states: “Our University works to improve the world by seeking to

understand it.” It aims to “offer academic programmes that change our

students' lives for the better, equipping graduates to make a difference in their

chosen field, profession or career and achieve personal fulfillment”. The

second university, in Australia, in its Teaching and Learning Enhancement

Plan of 2003 to 2007, under Goal 1, Research-based teaching and learning,

committed itself to: “develop research-based attributes in graduates which

encourage creativity and independence, critical thinking, effective

communication and ethical and social sensitivity”. Similar claims can be found

on other UK and international university websites. Fine and important as these

aspirations are, outside of an explication of the normative purposes of

universities, we are left asking: critical thinking, creativity, and so on, for what,

for whom and why? Nor can we assume that research is inherently

contributing to the common or human good. As Becher (1989) notes, “the

outcome of research must be rated as a mixed blessing to humanity” (p132).

The primary goal of the project, therefore, evolved into a theoretical and

conceptual exploration of the normative purposes of higher education and

how these are or might be taken up in relation to the research/teaching nexus.

The qualitative empirical data collected were illustrative, rather than

comprehensive.


By foregrounding the quality of undergraduate student learning outcomes, and

raising questions about what constitutes quality in learning through ‘research-

enhanced pedagogies’ (Brew, 2006, p53), the project explored how

academics in different discipline areas conceptualise, understand and develop

pedagogically the relationships between discipline-based research and

teaching. How engagement with research ought to enhance multidimensional

student learning experiences for intelligent action, social responsibility and

agency to choose and plan a good life, constituted an underlying question for

the research. Key objectives, therefore, were to conceptualise the relationship

between discipline-based research and teaching as one of ontology, identity

formation, agency and lifelong learning in order to generate a new

understanding of what research might bring to teaching and quality in

undergraduate student learning. There is the related need to consider the

research/teaching nexus with regard to what Barnett (2005a, 2007) and

Dall’Alba and Barnacle (2007) have all described as the need for an

ontological turn – becoming and being, and not just knowing – in evaluating

the quality of university teaching. Dall’Alba and Barnacle explain:

… knowing is always situated within a personal, social, historical and

cultural setting, and thus transforms the merely intellectual to something

inhabited and enacted: a way of thinking, making and acting. Indeed, a

way of being. (2007, p682)

It points, they argue, to both the educative and the social functions of higher

education and to higher education interrogating whether the ‘ways of being’

promoted by teaching, learning and research foster the kinds of desirable

outcomes and goals noted earlier.


Much of the literature on the relationship between research and teaching

focuses on whether or not researchers make better teachers (for example,

Jenkins et al., 2003; McLean and Barker, 2004). In some cases, the idea of

learning is presented as the pivot between research and teaching. However,

there is still a significant gap in the problematisation of the purposes and

values that underpin the research/teaching nexus, and the kind of learning

outcomes that are seen to be desirable. Pedagogy is also too often

conceptualised as a matter of ‘teaching’ or epistemology; yet it involves the

teachers’ interpersonal competencies and human relationships, and thus

should refer to the moral and ethical aspects of a teacher’s work with learners

(Davis, 2004). There are weak connections between learning and identity,

and little connection between research on the relationship between research

and teaching, and an emerging literature in higher education that explores

learning as identity formation, and as human capability and agency

development (Walker, 2006). Furthermore, there is in general a gap in the

espoused relationship between research and teaching and both the educative

and social functions of higher education. Yet as Boyer (1987, p283) argued in

his report on the undergraduate experience in North American universities,

higher learning involves more than competence. He called for greater

attention to the moral and civic purposes of higher education, saying that we

need to ask for what ends competence is acquired. Similarly, Kreber (2005)

calls for a critical scholarship of teaching and teaching practices aimed at the

emancipation and empowerment of students. Without both a critical function

and a research function, and strategies to link these through teaching and


learning, we might argue that the university loses both its own capacity for

self-critique and its ability to provide students with the capabilities for a vibrant

social and political life (Aronowitz, 2000).

More promising as a theoretical approach is the conceptualisation of self-

authorship by Baxter Magolda (2001). Her rich longitudinal study of the

lifelong impact of higher education generates narratives for ‘transforming’

higher education to promote ‘self-development’. Her conditions for promoting

self-authorship are that: knowledge is complex and socially constructed; self is

central to knowledge construction; and authority and expertise ought to be

shared in the mutual construction of knowledge among peers. It may be that

these assumptions lead naturally to particular normative assumptions about

higher education, and her emphasis on the need for attention to how students

are enabled to develop a sense of self is welcome. However, while her work

constitutes a rich resource, it is insufficiently robust to challenge the

contemporary direction of higher education; self-authorship could arguably be

comfortably accommodated alongside markets in higher education.

The idea, therefore, was to expand the existing literature on the

research/teaching nexus (see Barnett, 2005b; Brew, 2006; Centre for Higher

Education Quality, 2003; Healey, 2005; Jenkins et al., 2003; Jenkins et al.,

2007; Jenkins and Healey, 2006; Mclean and Barker, 2004; Zamorski, 2000)

in a new direction rather than simply to add to it within existing and often well-

rehearsed parameters. As Trowler and Wareham (2007) usefully point out in

their literature review on enhancing the research/teaching nexus, “much of the


literature is conceptually and theoretically underpowered” (p22). Nor is it

sufficient just to point to the variety of ways in which research, teaching and

learning might be productively linked (see Baldwin, 2005; Brew, 2006; Jenkins

and Healey, 2006). In a recent plenary address, Brighouse (2007) made the

important question explicit – we need, he argued a new normative account of

higher education, one that asks: “Whose interests is higher education

serving?” Similarly, Tisdell (2001) in advocating an ‘engaged pedagogy’ that

promotes social justice, argues that “higher education has a responsibility to

do its part in teaching for social change” (p162). Moreover, it is timely to raise

this question in the light of fine rhetorical statements that proliferate

internationally regarding university mission commitments to research-led

teaching. Coate et al. (2001) conclude their review of relationships between

research and teaching in higher education by suggesting that the way forward

might be to expend less effort on trying to establish that research enhances

teaching (or vice versa) “and more on understanding the ways in which

different relationships between research and teaching are shaped” (p173).

However, if such an exploration is not grounded in a simultaneous and critical

review of the normative purposes of higher education (and universities in

particular) it may be limited in what it has to say. This is further complicated by

the stratification and diversification of higher education in the UK, such that

student exposure to research and research-active teachers will vary and may

reinscribe inequality effects (Archer, 2007).

This project addresses Trowler and Wareham’s (2007) critique by developing

a new theoretical and conceptual approach to the research/teaching nexus


drawing on ideas from development economics and philosophy. The study is

aligned with Mclean and Barker’s (2004) project, which considered student

progress in undergraduate degrees, drawing on a case study from History to

argue that the research/teaching nexus is in need of re-engineering. While

they concede what is now largely accepted (Hattie and Marsh, 1996; Coate et

al., 2001), that there is no necessary or conclusive relationship between

lecturers being research-active in a discipline and the quality of teaching and

student learning, they nonetheless do suggest that lecturer engagement in

research is a “strong condition” (p416) for pursuing goals beyond a

mechanised and routinised general skills development model of educational

progress at university. They argue that even in the case of increasingly

popular notions of an enquiry-led curriculum, “it would need to be made

explicit how links between research and teaching result in critical, autonomous

and committed students” (p417). On balance, they argue for resisting the

separation of research and teaching as reinforcing stratification among

different kinds of higher education institutions and exacerbating inequalities.

At issue is the challenge of promoting a synergistic relationship between

teaching and research, because the normative purposes of universities are

best served by holding these activities together, rather than driving them

apart.

In her recent book, Brew (2006) does go some way towards to addressing the

broader purposes of higher education in so far as she considers the

relationship between research and teaching as integral to developing a ‘new’

higher education grounded in a pluralistic and ‘inclusive’ approach to


understanding the research/teaching relationship. Such a higher education,

argues Brew, would be enquiry-based and essential for unpredictable futures

and tackling “some of the world’s big problems” (pxiv), such as world poverty.

However, Brew relies heavily on an enquiry-based education to do this, as if

enquiry in and of itself will generate such commitments and concerns. Yet the

risk is that a philosophy of critical enquiry might as easily be one that

promotes individualism and market values, as the values and attitudes of

numerous highly educated graduates remind us. To be fair, Brew does

acknowledge in passing that teaching includes inculcating “attitudes of mind”

(p133) such as “showing concern and respect”. She supports “inclusive

scholarly knowledge-building communities” of students and academics in

partnership “in the challenging process of coming to understand the world

through systematic investigation and collaborative decision-making in the light

of evidence” (pp3-4). These are laudable aims for higher education; however,

they do not take us far enough if we do not at the same time articulate a

broader set of normative purposes about what coming to understand the world

is for and whose interests such understanding ought to serve. The skills of

enquiry could as easily lead to technicist forms of higher education and

change. There is no necessary link in this to a critical university, having its

own capacity for self-critique (Aronowitz, 2000).

Brew’s ideas are reformist rather than transformative, and it may be that this is

a more pragmatic and feasible programme for higher education in

contemporary times. However, it may also represent a missed opportunity,


such as that proposed by Kemmis when he argues for forms of education that

will encourage:

a revisionary self understanding of those we educate, so that they can

take responsibility for themselves, not just as recipients of the education

or schooling we gave them, but as free and equal subjects capable of

speech and action. And this can only be achieved if it is an equal part of

the role of education to demonstrate how they can be good citizens –

citizens who will participate in and exercise the citizen’s duty to sustain

the political life of just and good societies, in which freedoms of thought,

speech and association are guaranteed, and in which there is a

genuine enacted, shared commitment to the good of humankind. (2006,

p467)

Such a transformative discourse is arguably missing from much of the work on

the research/teaching nexus. In the light of this, Barnett’s argument that the

debate about the relationship between research and teaching is “already

becoming tired, if not tiresome” (2005b, p1) resonates. Certainly the terrain

feels well travelled. Barnett, rather more robustly than Brew’s call to move

beyond the research and teaching divide, therefore argues for “reshaping the

university”.

Brew, however, does raise a helpful question: “What aspects of higher

education are brought into focus when we think of research-enhanced

pedagogies, as opposed, for example, to any other kinds of innovation in

university teaching?” (p53). This question has proved useful for thinking

about the empirical data analysis in this project, when it is linked also to


Luke's (2006, p5) key question, “what pedagogies are for human being?” and

further framed by Barnett’s (2007, p153) deeply educative call for a student “to

stand differently in the world”.

It may also be that the best we can do under contemporary conditions of

market fundamentalism is to advocate a method of enquiry-based learning for

life in an enquiring society that we might hope to bring about in the future – a

Deweyian method of democratic fallible enquiry (Putnam, 2007) that aims to

expand a democratic ethos in teaching and learning – as the most useful

common experience higher education might offer its graduates. However, to

say this is not to eschew transformative purposes for higher education, or to

accept the divorce of the research/teaching nexus from broader ends.

Therefore, I explore in the conceptual work of this research project the

important idea of thinking about what it means then to be educated (rather

than ‘skilled’ or ‘trained’) through research (Simons, 2006), and what

theoretical frameworks might offer new perspectives on evaluating educative

processes and normative purposes.

This then leads me to the overarching research question and the project aims

and objectives:

Research question

How do research-enhanced pedagogies contribute to forming each student’s

capabilities and enhance multidimensional learning experiences for intelligent

action, social responsibility and agency to choose and plan a good life?

Project aim


To theorise how undergraduate students ought to be positively transformed as

persons by their learning experiences and knowledge acquisition in discipline-

based, research-rich teaching.

Project objectives

1. To conceptualise the relationship between discipline-based research and

teaching as one of ontology, identity formation, agency and lifelong

learning in order to generate a new understanding of what research might

bring to teaching and undergraduate student learning outcomes.

2. To analyse secondary literatures and relevant websites on research and

teaching relationships in higher education.

3. To consider student descriptions of their learning of a subject through

research-rich teaching.

4. To understand how selected lecturers engaged in research-rich teaching in

different disciplines, and how they conceptualise, develop and implement

the relationship between their research and teaching through curriculum

design and pedagogical approaches to foster expanded student learning

outcomes.

5. To generate a multidimensional capability-based perspective on

undergraduate learning outcomes, such as lifelong learning and global

citizenship, through research-rich teaching.


Discussion

(i) Conceptual work

This project sought to locate the research/teaching nexus as one in which

pedagogical processes, student experiences and learning achievements are a

matter both of individual and human development (Fukudo-Parr and Kumar,

2003); in short, to locate the nexus within the debates about the normative

purposes of higher education. Bruner (1996) reminds us that education is

always political, and that it develops skills, knowledge and ways of thinking,

feeling and speaking that graduates may ‘trade’ for ‘distinction’ in the markets

of society (economic, social, political).

(I) Contextual conditions

The research/teaching nexus is located within the life of higher education;

higher education is located within society and social change. What are the

contemporary conditions that enable or construct barriers to a

research/teaching nexus that inflects towards a culture of enquiry that is

genuinely educational? Central among these current conditions is that of

market fundamentalism – the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in

itself and a guide for all human action, including in education (Harvey, 2005).

In contemporary times, higher education has risen to the top of national policy

agendas for its central role in producing graduates to drive and service

knowledge economies (Kwiek, 2002). Neoliberal discourse normalises the


idea that higher education problems are best addressed by the market;

economic rationality, and corporate practices and values are now promoted

for the public sector. In higher education this means cost efficiency,

standardised testing and marketable skills for student-customers. Concerns

about human capital and employability skills and attributes have dislodged

other higher education purposes and outcomes in relation to the intrinsic

goods of learning and democratic citizenship. The currently popular notion of

‘inquiry learning’ in higher education teaching and learning in England ought

not to be assumed to be good in and of itself, but in relation to the contested

purposes of higher education and the formation of student identities and

futures.

Dominant human capital theory views education as merely instrumental – an

investment to improve productivity and the level and distribution of individual

earnings. This is exemplified in the recent UK White Paper on Higher

Education (2003), which is replete with economic discourse such as: valuing

economic well-being, skilling the nation, powering the economy, becoming

competitive, stimulating innovation, supporting productivity, benefiting society

and avoiding the unacceptable risk of economic decline (p10). The origin of

the idea of human capital goes back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations

(Little, 2003) and the idea that investment in physical capital (machines) might

have a parallel in investment in the productive capacity of human beings

(human capital) through education. The idea of investment in education for

economic growth was revived by economists Theodore Schultz and Howard

Becker in the early 1960s as a way to explain the puzzle of economic growth


that could not be accounted for by increases in physical capital.

Foreshadowing notions of a ‘knowledge economy’, attempts began from the

1960s to measure the economic costs and benefits of education as

investments in human capital, measuring the returns to education and

applying cost-benefit analysis to decisions about education expenditure in the

same way as rates of return are used to analyse the profitability of investment

in conventional physical capital (Little, 2003).

The assumption is that economic growth and development mean the same

thing, and that both equal well-being. Yet the burgeoning evidence from

economists is that doubling GDP in over 30 years in Britain has not made

people any happier (Gaspar, 2004). Nor does human capital theory explain

why people make decisions to invest in education, or more education, or

indeed to gainsay such investment (Little, 2003). Human capital cannot, as

Robeyns (2006) explains, account for any non-economic goods from

education, such as someone wanting to learn poetry for its own sake.

Nonetheless, the effect of human capital theory for higher education has been

to ascribe the primary value of higher education to the extent that investment

in individual students gives rise to increased economic productivity, higher

earnings and augmented national wealth (Tight, 1996).

Under contemporary conditions of globalisation and new knowledge

economies (Delanty, 2001; Mclean, 2006; Peters, 2004), it is ideas from

neoliberalism that have come to dominate discourses and practices in higher

education; education discourse has been distorted for economic ends. Such


ideas normalise the domination of economic growth models and metaphors,

comparative national income and the importance of what can be measured,

predicted and quantified. They normalise the claim that problems are best

addressed by the market, and economic rationality and corporate practices

and values are promoted for public universities – cost efficiency, quantifiable

input-output measures and marketable skills. Human capital outcomes have

become the rationale for education; investment in human capital through

formal education is argued to yield a rate of economic return (Becker, 1993;

Sen, 2003). If a university education makes someone a better producer, able

to both earn more and contribute more to national income, then higher

education is deemed to be successful. Currently in the UK this human capital

direction is very explicit – universities are key drivers of a marketised

knowledge economy and the development of human capital for economic

productivity, and are therefore not to be left to their own devices (DfES, 2003).

(II) What is ‘education’?

We need therefore to be both clear and assertive about what we understand

by ‘education’ in universities. Following Maxine Greene, I take education in

universities normatively to involve something like:

engaging live human beings in activities of meaning-making, dialogue

and reflective understanding of a variety of texts, including the texts of

their social realities. Growing, becoming different, becoming informed

and articulate. (1992, p285)


Elsewhere Greene writes that education, “signifies an initiation into new ways

of seeing, hearing, feeling, moving. It signifies the nurture of a special kind of

reflectiveness and expressiveness, a reaching out for meanings, a learning to

learn” (2001, p7). “We are”, writes Greene, “interested in openings, in

unexplored possibilities, not in the predictable or the quantifiable” (2001, p7).

Education in universities, moreover, needs to respond to Bruner’s (2005)

challenge to think ahead about how to educate for a changing world. As

Bruner (2005, p1) explains it, the task is to educate for “the struggle between

the conventional and possible in the way we view the world”. In different ways,

Greene and Bruner emphasise intersubjectivity and social interaction. Bruner

(2005, p1) explains that human beings are “the most fanciful and searching of

species, as well as the most quarrelsome and unpredictable. We like

disagreement”; it is important that education takes into account the “import of

sharing notions of how things work. We depend on each other to have

common views”. Similarly, Barnett (1997) argues that in universities we ought

to educate for a critical consciousness by enabling pedagogical spaces in

which students experience the “challenge of open and critical inquiry …

testing their ideas in the critical company of others” (p110). More recently,

Barnett (2007) has argued for the significance of the formation of “the critical

spirit” (p153), that is not just developing a critical view of knowledge, but being

capable of being “other than that which one is” (p153). Education in

universities must then involve both epistemological access to knowledge and

ontology, ways of being and becoming. The research/teaching nexus ought,

then, to be located in the context of: what and who it is that students become


and are able to do; what higher education is; what it means to be educated;

and the integration of epistemology and ontology.

More interesting, then, is Barnett’s (2005a, p94) argument that not only is

research challenged by an uncertain and ‘supercomplex’ world, but teaching

too needs to be oriented to “the production of human capacities – qualities

and dispositions”. Teaching needs to take “an ontological turn” from

knowledge to being, in which teachers take account of students “as human

beings as distinct from knowing beings”, so that students have the possibility

opened up to “come into a new mode of being” (Barnett, 2007, p1). Ontology,

he suggests, trumps but does not displace epistemology. Both knowing and

being ought to be taken into account in university teaching. A world of

uncertainty and change, as Barnett argues, not only poses curriculum

challenges of knowing and of right action, but also crucially challenges us as

beings in the world. How do I understand myself? How do I orient myself?

How do I stand in relation to the world? Similarly, Smeyers and Hogan (2005,

p115) call attention to “what we become as human beings as a consequence

of what we experience as learners”. If the research/teaching nexus fails to

address just these kinds of questions we might want to ask what the point of

the debate is.

(III) Education through research?

The current concern with the link between research and teaching is part of the

economic drive in that research competencies are seen to enhance


employability in a knowledge economy by developing higher order

competencies (Simons, 2006). As Simons (2006) explains, in the European

context the starting point for policy is not the older Humboldtian perspective of

the edifying potential of academic enquiry, but the economic demands of

society. The policy aim is then to implement learning environments that

“make the mind-sets that are typical of the research activity salient in the

learning process” (Commission of the European Communities, 2002, p40,

quoted in Simons, 2006, p40). Research is then reframed as yet another

teaching ‘method’. However, to reframe education through research in this

way as a set of competencies to be achieved is, argues Simons, to diminish

scholarship and the pursuit or duty of truth.

A persuasive example of the potential capture and narrowing of the value of

the research/teaching nexus for student learning achievements is that of the

current importance given to students’ ‘communication skills’ (and we might

include communication as a research skill). To become better communicators

is seen to empower students to take control of their futures. Cameron

explains:

But what is called ‘empowerment’ in the discourse … has little to do

with liberating people from existing constraints on their agency and

freedom. In many cases it has more to do with teaching them to

discipline themselves so that they can operate more easily within those

constraints: become more flexible, more team-oriented, better at

resolving the conflicts and controlling the emotions that disrupt business

as usual. (2000, p179)


Rather, what is needed she argues, are forensic or rhetorical skills – the ability

to argue, to challenge and to persuade. To bring this back to the

research/teaching nexus would be to argue that we ought to judge the value

of the link not in relation to narrowly conceptualised skills (research or

otherwise) such as ‘communication’, but with regard to deeper capabilities. As

Simons (2006, p43) asks, is there is still “an academic duty or a normative

orientation in research that allows for a reflection upon ‘education through

research’ that is different from the reflection inaugurated by the needs of the

knowledge society and the operationalisation of research as a ‘teaching

method?’”.

Turning to a more specific pedagogical issue, ‘critical thinking’ is arguably the

core capability that higher education claims to develop in all its students.

Papestephanou and Angeli (2007) point to two different discourses that shape

critical thinking. On the one hand there is the skills paradigm (found in

discourses and practices of key skills, generic skills, transferable skills and

graduate attributes) embedded in Habermasian purposive rationality,

technicism and instrumentality, which is “relevant to the roles of the customer

of the state and consumer of services and goods, and not to the active

participant in the possible transformation of the public sphere” (p609). Under

neoliberalism, the dominant policy (and to some extent the pedagogical

vocabulary) emphasises skills, performativity and outcomes, and purposive

rationality (instrumental and strategic), which domesticates critique. The idea

is to optimise outcomes, in the case of UK higher education human capital

outcomes, but these are not open to critique: “the skills perspective identifies


uncritically with the criteriology of the sociopolitical system since it focuses so

much on successful performance” (pp605-6).

According to Critical Theory, Papestephanou and Angeli write, purposive

rationality “leads ultimately to an uncritical and complacent proclamation of

performativity as a universal and a historical value”, glorifying “effectiveness,

outcomes and performance” (p607). Ends and meaningfulness are not

questioned, nor goals revised; what matters is success in the task at hand. In

this way higher education, and its fundamental claim to foster critical thinking,

is captured by the neoliberal project, while ironically seeming still to serve its

own values and purposes to develop ‘higher order thinking’. Papestephanou

and Angeli further argue that “there is a surplus of critical thinking that cannot

be canalized in the skill talk” (p618). They employ Habermas’s concept of

communicative rationality, which is oriented to human potential and actions for

mutual understanding, formative dialogue, self-analysis and transformation of

ends. They explain:

The implication of this primacy of communicative rationality for our topic

is that goals are not there simply to be achieved or approximated, but

first and foremost to be checked in introspection, but more appropriately

in deliberation. Critical thinking and teaching cannot be solely

concerned with the achievement of goals, but with the ability to think

over and argue for or against their meaningfulness or moral pertinence.

(2007, p609)

The crucial missing dimension, they argue, is the role of goal revision; that is,

being able to critique the task and its ends. A communicative rationality view


of critical thinking would argue that, “a critical thinker cannot just be one who

carries out an action successfully, but chiefly one who considers and, when

necessary, questions the appropriateness or moral relevance of the action”

(Papestephanou and Angeli, 2007, p608).

The argument developed both by Papesthephanou and Angeli, and explicitly

in relation to the research/teaching nexus by Simons (2006, p47), is that

translating education through research into competencies, “tends to forget that

the edifying potential of research is always something that cannot (yet) be

mastered as a set of technical competencies”. It is more than instrumental or

purposive rationality. While it is not inherently a problem, of course, that

employers want graduates with the skills to undertake research (Jenkins and

Zetter, 2003), we need to understand this critically and understand why this

has rapidly risen up the agenda as a policy concern in the UK. The question is

not so much what is the link between research and teaching, or research and

good teaching, but rather what educational work – beyond skills – can and

does research do?

This means also attention to pedagogy in framing a ‘research-enhanced

pedagogy’ and what we understand this to mean. It ought to describe

practices that are rather more than ‘teaching’, and not quite the same as thin

marketised versions of ‘teaching and learning’. Instead, pedagogy means a

method of teaching only in the widest sense; that is, it extends beyond the role

of the lecturer or teacher. It involves not only who teaches, but also who is

taught (and, of course, is interwoven with what is taught – the curriculum), and


the contextual conditions and power relations under which such teaching and

learning takes place. Davis (2004) helpfully traces an etymology of

‘pedagogy’, which combines notions of didactics with pedagogy. He explains:

Didactics is roughly synonymous with instructional techniques or

methods, but is also used to refer to the teacher’s command of the

subject matter knowledge, ability to interpret student responses, and

other personal competencies. In complement, pedagogy, is more a

reference to the teacher’s interpersonal competencies, and is thus used

to refer to the moral and ethical – as opposed to the technical – aspects

of the teacher’s work with learners. (2004, pp143-4)

Pedagogy incorporates an ethical responsibility to learners in an interactive

and relational space between lecturers and students and students and

students, where knowledge is mediated, where power circulates, and social

and institutional structures penetrate. A research-enhanced pedagogy would

have such features or it is arguably not pedagogy but a teaching ‘method’, as

Simons (2006) argues. Thus the research/teaching nexus needs to be

conceptualised as a ‘thick’ pedagogical, and hence ethical, relationship.

(IV) Capabilities

To now further develop the principled basis of my argument, I turned to the

concepts of human development, well-being and dignity (Sen, 1992, 1999,

2003; Nussbaum, 1997, 2000, 2002) from outside education to argue for and

insert the language of human capabilities into the space of research and

teaching. It complements calls for an ontological turn in teaching – what we


become as human beings as a result of what we learn and experience as

learners (Barnett, 2005a, 2007; Dall’Alba and Barnacle, 2007). This includes

how we come to understand and judge ourselves in some ways rather than

others; how we come to understand and judge others and their significance;

and how we come to understand and judge the merits of our own learning.

Such learning is reflexive and lifelong, rather than adaptive. It is to ask: in

what ways are students transformed as persons by their engagement with

research and knowledge, mediated pedagogically by their teachers?

Having education is important for development economist Amartya Sen (1999,

2003) because it affects the development and expansion of other capabilities,

or human freedoms. Sen argues that, “the ability to exercise freedom may, to

a considerable extent, be directly dependent on the education we have

received, and thus the development of the educational sector may have a

foundational connection with the capability-based approach” (2003, p12). He

elaborates both intrinsic and instrumental dimensions to education. Having

education is then a valuable achievement in itself; but education is also

instrumental. Education helps a person to do many other things that are also

valuable, such as getting a job; it enhances freedom to achieve a range of

valued functionings that may follow from earning an income. However, in the

capability approach, a human capital basis for education is useful, but limited.

Sen (2003) does not reject human capital outright; indeed he sees synergies

in so far as human capital and the capability approach are both concerned

with the role, agency and abilities of human beings. However, a focus on

economic growth, Sen argues, does not tell us why economic growth is


important or what wealth is for. Thus education ought not to focus only on

human capital and the ‘usefulness’ of human beings to the exclusion of

valuable non-economic ends and more expansive understandings of what is

valuable in human lives. The direction of education policy in the UK would

therefore be problematic for Sen, as would a research/teaching nexus in

which valuable lives were not debated.

Capabilities for Sen (1992, 1999) comprise the real and actual opportunities,

that is substantive freedoms, that people have to do and be what they value

being and doing. Capability “reflects a person’s freedom to choose between

different ways of living” (Sen, 2003a, p5). Development then consists in

expanding the capability set from which each student makes life and career

choices, through “the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave

people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned

agency” (Sen, 1999, pxii). Valuable beings and doings, or ‘functionings’, are

constitutive of human well-being; a capability is a potential functioning.

Functionings might include taking part in discussions with peers, thinking

critically about society, being knowledgeable, having an ethical disposition,

having good friendships, being able to understand a plurality of perspectives

on an issue and so on. Educational development in such terms means the

widening of human capability:

The capability set represents a person’s freedom to achieve various

functioning combinations. If freedom is intrinsically important, then the

alternative combinations available for choice are all relevant for judging


a person’s advantage, even though he or she will eventually choose

only an alternative. (Sen, 2003, p8)

Such choosing from among genuine alternatives is itself “a valuable

feature of a person’s life” (Sen, 2003, p8). The focus is on what matters to

people, on “the central and important things in life that people can actually

do and be … [and] each person’s real freedom to formulate and pursue

their own objectives” (Burchardt and Vizard, 2006, p7). Various

capabilities might constitute an individual’s capability set, and such

valuable capabilities might be formed through research-enhanced

pedagogies (for example, the capability of critical thinking, or the capability

of imagination, or the capability of voice). However, it is important to

understand that capabilities do not mean skills or internal capacities. This

shifts the focus to individual success or failure, whereas the capability

approach points to the social arrangements – for example, pedagogical

conditions or normative purposes of universities – that enable or diminish

capability formation

Martha Nussbaum (2000) has developed the idea of ‘capabilities’, deepening

the philosophical basis of Sen’s approach. In her view: “Education is a key to

all human capabilities” (2006, p322). In higher education, she advocates an

education that develops each person’s capacity “to be fully human” (2002,

p290). Following Seneca, this means someone who is: “self-aware, self-

governing, and capable of recognising and respecting the humanity of all our

fellow human beings, no matter where they are born, no matter what social


class they inhabit, no matter what their gender or ethnic origin” (2002, p290).

She (1997) defends a Socratic view of education, which places the examined

life at its centre, Aristotle’s notion of reflective citizenship, and the Stoic view

of education as that which frees us from habit and custom to function with

sensitivity and awareness in the world. She therefore advocates three core

capabilities for the ‘cultivation of humanity’: critical self-examination, the ideal

of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination. More

recently, she has written more explicitly about education and democratic

citizenship (2006a), and linked capabilities and quality education. Her three-

part model to develop young people’s (especially girls and young women)

capabilities through education is substantially similar to that outlined in

Cultivating Humanity: critical thinking, world citizenship, and imaginative

understanding. Nussbaum therefore declares that: “People who have never

learned to use reason and imagination to enter a broader world of cultures,

groups and ideas are impoverished personally and politically, however

successful their vocational preparation” (2002, p297).

Sen and Nussbaum have a shared and deep concern with equality, and

indeed Sen’s formulation of the capability approach was in response to what

he saw as inadequate approaches to evaluating inequality. The capability

approach, then, directs us to evaluate capability formation as a matter also of

equality in higher education. If some students are better able to develop

valuable capabilities than others, we need to investigate. If the

research/teaching nexus is particularly valuable for developing capabilities

such as those Nussbaum (1997) argues are core to liberal higher education,


then we need to think well about the implications for a stratified higher

education system and for policy. We might then argue that research-

enhanced pedagogies ought to be evaluated with regard to whether the

substantive freedoms that students have are expanded so that they are able

to become and to be strong evaluators, having the capabilities to make well-

reasoned, critical and reflective choices about what makes life good for them

in an uncertain world.

Finally, Taylor’s (1985) concept of ‘strong evaluation’ is helpful for aligning

human development and capability, the purposes of higher education and

individual learning. Taylor argues that humans are self-interpreting beings

and that strong evaluations are a necessary element of self-understandings.

He means by strong evaluation, “that a background of distinctions between

things which are recognised as of categoric or unconditioned or higher

importance or worth, and things which lack this or are of lesser value” (1985,

p3). To be a strong evaluator is to evaluate some ethical values or ideals or

goods to be more important than others. These self-understandings constitute

who we are. To develop students’ capability as strong evaluators is to develop

them as subjects able to reflect on and to be able to re-examine their valued

ends, when challenged to do so. They reflect on what is of more or less

ethical significance in the narrative interpretation of their lives. Sen (1992,

1999) and Nussbaum’s (2000) overlapping conceptualisations of capability

forms the bridge between a research/teaching nexus, pedagogy and students’

formation as ‘strong evaluators’, because at the heart of the capability

approach is the idea that each person is able to develop their understanding


of ‘valued beings and doings’, and that through education individuals might

explore their own conceptions of what it is they have reason to value. This

suggests a transformative discourse rather than the more reformist question

as to how a culture of enquiry is fostered or how enquiry learning or active

learning might be developed. Quality in student learning would require

integrating learning the subject and developing reflexive judgement about

what makes life good for that person; that is, their well-being. Crucially, each

and every student would matter in the capability approach’s concern for the

moral worth of each person.

(ii) Empirical application

I now turn to an empirical operationalisation of these principled ideas about

evaluating research-enhanced pedagogies with regard to the formation of the

capability to become and be a ‘strong evaluator’, within a specific context of a

rebalancing of the purposes of university education.

A method of semi-structured qualitative interviews was used. A schedule of

questions and ‘probes’ was developed to explore lecturer and student

conceptions of research, and lecturer approaches to teaching and student

learning in relation to three core higher education purposes and outcomes:

having economic opportunities, becoming democratic citizens and having

personal fulfillment (see Appendices A and B). In total, 21 final-year

undergraduate students and nine research-active lecturers were interviewed

from three departments in the period from February to April 2007.


Healey and Jenkins (2006) suggest a number of approaches for linking

research and teaching in the undergraduate curriculum, not all of which are

included in my own investigation: course content is informed by faculty

research; students learn about research methods; faculty use teaching

methods that adopt a research-based approach (e.g. enquiry learning,

problem-based learning, community service learning); student undertake their

own research projects, individually or in teams; students assist faculty with

their research projects; students gain experience of applied

research/consultancy through work-based placements; faculty undertake

pedagogic research, which benefits the quality of their teaching; students are

introduced to the research of faculty during recruitment, orientation or through

‘Teaching and Research Awareness’ events.

The research/teaching nexus, as it emerged in this project, is understood to

mean a lecturer who is producing original knowledge through research in his

or her discipline, and whose curriculum and pedagogy is shaped by his or her

own research activity, what counts as knowledge, how knowledge is produced

and what research skills are needed to do research. Students encountered

research in the disciplines in different ways: a curriculum based on the

lecturer’s own area of expertise; transmission of research knowledge in

lectures; reading papers written by the lecturer; going to a seminar given by

their lecturer; enquiry learning of research skills; and undertaking their own

research project, sometimes in the lecturer’s field of expertise, sometimes in a

related area. Such encounters with research were shaped by the level of


learning, whether in the first, second or third year of an undergraduate degree.

In all the interviews, the emphasis tended to be on final-year experiences

where direct engagement with research was more developed than in the first

or second year.

(I) Lecturer conceptions of research in relation to pedagogical

approaches

Although not a key focus of this research, it was helpful to establish how

lecturers understood research and how, based on that understanding, they

had developed their pedagogical approaches because this shapes

students’ capability formation. I offer illustrative examples from each of the

discipline areas, in which each lecturer first explains how they go about

research and then how this is applied in teaching and learning:

History: Professor Robert Young

What’s my conception of research? There are two dimensions to it.

One is working within a paradigm in a particular subject that one is

trying to develop, asking questions within and against the existing

historiography of my particular subject. The other is working outside of

the paradigm and that is coming up with completely new ways of

thinking about a particular subject or indeed a new subject … the

essential starting point is familiarity with the subject’s historiography.

Working backwards from the most recent interventions, around a

particular debate, working backwards to make sure that I’m familiar with


every single permutation of that debate or range of interpretations.

From there, I would then work successively through published primary

sources … working progressively into more and more detail through the

papers of individuals, government departments and so on. So working

from existing interpretation, through successive layers of detail and, of

course, recognising at every point that these different layers of

evidence and interpretation constantly interrogate each other … What

qualities do you need? Well, concentration, enthusiasm, hard work,

obsessiveness and willingness to recognise where you’ve gone wrong

or suddenly realise that some of the assumptions and connections

which you’ve been making have been misplaced and to know when to

stop or rethink your starting point … I realise that implicitly the structure

and organisation of courses turn on providing students with as wide a

range and an accumulative range of interpretations as possible, inviting

them always to think about who has a particular axe to grind, why this

should be so, when a particular book or article was being written and

then perhaps, always allowing students to realise that there is never a

single correct answer. There are a range of perspectives and that what

they are learning to do is to think critically and comprehensively about

that range of perspectives, and that when they assemble them with the

idea of answering a particular question, they must proceed not by

assertion but by demonstrating their familiarity with a wide range of

interpretation and showing their examiner or reader of their essay how

and why it is that they’ve come to a particular set of conclusions … I

use a devil’s advocate approach in seminars to encourage students to


critically think and rethink the positions they are advocating in relation to

the knowledge being studied, much as I challenge myself in my own

research. (Interview 5 March 2007)

Politics: Dr Martha Scott

I would identify a problem, something I was interested in, I would read

around the literature to see what other people have said about it, kind of

make notes in terms of, ok, if someone said that, what about this, why

haven’t they considered that and come up with a problem, what’s

interesting, why am I actually interested in this? And then in my case I

conduct field work and that needs planning and particular kinds of skills

in interviewing … It’s important to have a theoretical framework, I think,

being able to take a lot of information, but not to read it as being, ok,

this is just all factual stuff. You have to get the bigger picture and be

able to actually fit things together into a framework would be the way

that I think is essential for doing good research … I ask students to deal

with problems, you’re setting them interesting things, you’re trying to do,

in my particular case I’m trying to get across theory, facts and then an

ability to kind of think critically about problems and discuss and debate

them with others. (Interview 5 March 2007)

Animal and Plant Sciences: Professor Mike Smith

Identifying the research problem, that is very much in my area curiosity-

driven … and intellectually interesting … and then by reading the

literature of what people have already done in that area, talking with


colleagues, actually around the world, you can identify particular areas

that you know that you yourself are interested in and other people are

interested in and then trying to devise novel ways, novel experiments,

by which you can hope to tackle that particular problem. I guess that’s

how the initial area of research is identified by an individual … So that’s

where there’s a matter of experience, logic and there probably is an

element of intuition after a while … There’s a certain level of factual

knowledge that students have to have to understand the topic, that’s

clear and has to be true for any field and then what you’re looking for

from the undergraduates are those who are motivated, clearly that’s

vitally important, and an ability to think logically about a problem and to

ask questions leading on from that which demonstrate that they actually

understand the biological processes, not just regurgitating facts. A

certain level of that is required, but on top of that, an ability to

understand a problem and to read about the topic, gain ideas, put them

together in a logical fashion and as a result, draw conclusions and

therefore ask questions about the topic … Being research-active is

important for my teaching. I was at a meeting last week in Switzerland, I

thought it was a very exciting meeting where they’re combining Biology

with Physics and Maths which is an area in which there are no courses

at universities that do that, or very few courses and yet I could imagine

that in a year or so’s time, I may be able to bring some of those ideas

into my teaching and that would benefit the undergraduates because I

also know that outside academia, it’s actually a very important area for,


say, drug companies, pharmaceutical companies are moving into that

area. (Interview 2 March 2007)

In all three disciplines, lecturers understood knowledge to be partial and

revisable and open to contestation, and this is important in so far as they

expect and hope that their students will develop critical faculties and learn to

interrogate knowledge and ideas. Explaining that knowledge is revisable in an

example from Animal and Plant Sciences, Mike Smith comments:

Is there a final truth? Of course not. I guess that one starts off with a

perception of what the problem is and then you design experiments

which hopefully will solve or at least provide evidence whether a

particular hypothesis is correct or incorrect and sometimes things are

very linear and it works perhaps as you would expect. I imagine

actually some of the most exciting insights actually come from someone

doing an experiment aimed at a problem and then they see something

happening or not happening and the skill or the luck, depending on how

you judge those things, is to notice those things and to think “Actually

that might be quite interesting, that’s informative”.

Peter Otto in History explains that finding your own voice, “that’s the most

difficult thing”. He comments in relation to his own teaching why voice and

a critical understanding of knowledge, self and self in the world (Barnett,

1997, 2007) is important in contemporary times:

I’m not telling them what they should be, Left or Right, I mean I have my

preferences but that’s not my task and as a teacher it’s not my job and I

shouldn’t say, “This is the right perspective on the world”. What I rather


try to teach them is “Look, it’s difficult and sometimes there are

contradictions which can’t easily be solved and you have to make a

decision, but you have to make a decision based on choices and each

decision has moral implications and you have to know that and you

can’t just say the way I live is the best way to live and it’s the only way

to live and therefore it’s a great way to live and I’m not responsible for

the consequences”.

He then explains how the research process shapes his teaching:

What I think is the very process of research and the very process of

teaching in a way which parallels the research action, shows that there

is no item of truth out there … I’d say a teacher who is not doing

research-led teaching would probably say “Look, there is no truth out

there” but the trick is, which I’ve found is not to tell them because they

would say “Oh, postmodern” but to find out and then sort of engage in

discussion and say “Look, but he’s saying this and he’s saying this and

they are contradictory and both have good arguments, so what do we

do now?” … I don’t want to tell them what the truth is, I want them to

figure it out for themselves that it’s slightly more complicated than that.

(Interview 26 April 2007)

Of course it does not follow that ‘research knowledge’ (understanding

knowledge as revisable and placing an emphasis on critical approaches)

translates into good teaching, but it does seem necessary, if not sufficient, for

research-enhanced pedagogies.


Lecturer explication of desirable skills and qualities outcomes from

research

Across all of the interviews, the skills and qualities for and from research,

identified by lecturers were:

History: building an argument, testing counter-arguments; working with

evidence; writing, presentations; having your own voice, being able to

challenge authorities; interpreting texts; information literacy (finding and

processing information, presenting it, challenging it); thinking for yourself;

working independently; citizenship, social awareness; moral awareness;

truth/knowledge as revisable; identity of an expert in some aspect of History;

dialogue and discussion (listening, commenting, criticising); knowing the world

is not simple; honesty in producing historical knowledge; confidence.

Politics: developing a theoretical framework; organisational abilities;

interacting with people (fieldwork); thinking on your feet; being adaptable;

honesty in producing knowledge; scepticism; confidence in own ideas and

arguments; awareness of other cultures; thinking for yourself; team/group

work; identifying interesting questions; synthesising material; tenacity and

stamina; intellectual curiosity; information literacy.

Animal and Plant Sciences: curiosity and question posing; global

conversations with scientists; design and do experiments; reading and

synthesising literature; knowledge is revisable; knowledge is contested;

problem solving; intuition; determination; imagination; judging truth claims;

logic; being able to converse with experts and ask intelligent questions; ethical

awareness; communication and discussion in groups; intrinsic love of

learning; confidence to critique others’ views; honesty.


How then did research-enhanced pedagogies and an explication of

desirable research skills contribute to students’ capability formation to

choose a life that is good for them?

(II) Student voices

I therefore now turn to the voices of selected students from each department

to illustrate how experiences of research-enhanced pedagogy enable these

students to shape and reshape what it is they have reason to value, to

become what Taylor (1985) describes as ‘strong evaluators’. Students

demonstrated a strong awareness of how research in the subject was

undertaken; the dynamic nature of the knowledge generated and the kinds of

skills required; and what they had learned and achieved, and how this had

expanded their choices and opportunities whether in relation to economic

opportunities, personal fulfillment and the likelihood of lifelong learning, or

their role as critical, educated citizens. I found evidence of: ‘thick’ practical

reasoning (that is being able to reason about and choose a ‘good’ life), critical

awareness of knowledge, alternative perspectives and society, and notions of

human solidarity, developed individually and intersubjectively, and supported

by good teaching that fosters confidence, voice, participation and

achievement. We might describe these using Sen’s language as ‘functional

capabilities’ that support a process of becoming and being strong evaluators.

While these capabilities are neither developed to the same depth and degree


nor look the same for each student in each of the three disciplines, they,

nonetheless, do emerge in some way as valuable for each of the students.

I have prioritised two significant themes arising from all the student voice

data, but drawn from a small subset of the student data to enable a richer

appreciation of these students’ learning. Similar evidence can be found

across the whole dataset. The first theme I have called ‘epistemological

knowing’, which involves students’ critical engagement with knowledge and

knowing, and the second ‘ontological being’, which involves reflexive

reasoning about the self and the ‘becoming and being’ self in the world.

The first is crucial for the second, but the second arguably stands prior to

epistemology (Barnett, 2007) – we are human beings before we are

students or learners, but as human beings can be transformed by knowing

and knowledge. Ontological being is indicative of the formation of the

capability to be a strong evaluator in ways that advance personal well-

being; that is, what makes a life go well for that person, their quality of life

at this point in time, and potentially also in the future.

(III) Theme one: epistemological knowing

Students’ ability to reflect critically on their lives and their futures is

grounded in research-enhanced pedagogies that enable access to

knowledge, an understanding of knowledge as provisional and contested,

and a ‘coming to know’ (which includes engaging with a plurality of views


among their own peers in classes). This is a complex capability. For their

part, students identified having come to critical understandings through

exposure to different points of view, their fellow students and to academic

texts. They said things like:

Lily (Plant and Animal Sciences): Seeing how people’s opinions do differ,

like treading your way between what you believe and what you don’t

believe does help quite a lot … I think it really does considering how you

live in a world full of lots of different people who obviously might not think

the same, who might not agree on the same things that you do and it is

really important to not get particularly riled up about that, it does perhaps

make you get on better with people. (Interview 26 March 2007)

Lorna (Plant and Animal Sciences): It does help you to understand things in

a better way and see that there are other points of view, there are other

people’s opinions and all research is just evidence for a certain thing and

there’s maybe disagreement. So yeah, it definitely helps in life. (Interview

20 April 2007)

Paula (History): I think I’ve learnt how to look at texts and take them

beyond face value. I think the one thing I’ve definitely noticed is the

importance of language, I never really thought about it before, but just the

certain words you use to describe something, certain metaphors you draw,

the way you write about something can tell you something about yourself

and I think when I’m writing I’m now much more aware of what words I use.

(Interview 2 April 2007)


Narend (History): What we often do is compare different perspectives on

certain events … nothing is accepted at face value in the seminars, [the

lecturer] always makes us look for the quirks and the omissions as well in

pieces. I think he’s very good at doing that, he’s very good at making you

look for what’s not there in source material. (Interview 5 March 2007)

Stella (History): I think … young people especially want to know the

answers or to seek out answers in life and to feel, “I know my view on

capitalism, I know my views on socialism and therefore I’ve made up my

mind”, and you seek that because you want to feel certain in the world that

you have an opinion that’s worth listening to, but actually being destabilised

… being continually introduced to new ideas is very much a reflection of

everyday life, that people’s opinions change, you’re introduced to new

information, you might change your mind about what you feel about certain

events … it’s a very good attribute of a tutor to be able to continually

remind you that you don’t have the answers and that it is unrealistic to

expect that you ever will have the answer but all we can ever do is engage

with new information and argue from that. Yeah, that’s very much a life

skill I think rather than a history skill. (Interview 21 February 2007)

Patricia (Politics): Well I think with politics almost everything is revisable …

so much of it is different people’s theories and it is different analysis, so I

think, you’re never really going to have a set perfect definition of anything

within politics, it’s all quite fluid and it’s all going to change quite a lot, but it

is quite important to have all these different theories because then it helps

each person to develop it a bit further because you’ve got all these different

things that you can look at in different ways, that you can understand


things. It almost brings you closer to your own understanding of certain

things … I think I’m much better than I was when I started at university,

firstly because I’ve got more knowledge to back up my argument and

secondly because you just kind of learn to take in what other people are

saying more, especially through having three years of seminars and be sat

in a group, you kind of have to listen to what everyone else says before you

can formulate your argument, whereas before, I thought I knew what I knew

and I’d just argue the point, whereas you do find that you’ll be sitting in a

group situation and you’ll find different points of view coming in and you

can understand partly what people are saying and that then shapes my

argument that I’m going to give in response. (Interview 19 March 2007)

Bruner (2005) argues for the importance of “cultivating the possible”, that is

being open to different interpretations of knowledge and social arrangements.

Nussbaum (2006) advocates the development of critical thinking as

foundational to democratic life. In these students, we have compelling

evidence of how research-enhanced pedagogies have enabled them to

develop such capability, and that they value this intrinsically, regardless of

whether or not it leads instrumentally to economic opportunities or income

generation in the future. We have evidence that these young people are

asking questions, not taking arguments at face value, showing respect for the

views of others, and, in the case of History and Politics in particular, thinking

imaginatively about lives very different from their own. In a compelling

example, Patricia discusses her learning from a dissertation that looked at the

Rwandan genocide:


I don’t know, it’s quite difficult because I don’t want to go into anything even

related to politics once I’ve finished university, so it almost seems a bit like,

“Well will it ever be valuable to me?” but then I think you can never discount

knowledge, I think it’s never going to be something that you will never come

across again, kind of thing, but I think particularly because my dissertation

does look at kind of human nature and like actions which are quite in some

ways inexplicable. I think, well I think it will be quite valuable to me in that I

just have a better understanding firstly of world events and what’s

happened but also why things have happened.

(IV) Theme two: ontological being

Patricia’s comments show how critical and imaginative knowing is crucial to

being. This core capability supports a process of thick practical reasoning, of

subjecting goals and values to reasoned scrutiny, and questioning those same

goals and values as students identify and choose what they value being and

doing. This is constitutive of becoming a strong evaluator. Convincing

evidence is to be found in the students’ comments on being educated through

research.

Narend offers a slightly complicated account; on the one hand his course on

liberation struggles in Southern Africa has, “made me very pessimistic on the

ability of individuals to really work against the kind of tide”. I then ask: “has it

made your life worse rather than better having this knowledge?” He

responds:


No because I’d rather be, I wouldn’t want to be ignorant of this. I think, I’m

not saying things are hopeless, I think you need, the best way I can

describe it is with an analogy, it’s like saying if you had cancer and you had

six weeks to live, would you rather know or would you rather not? I’d say

I’d rather know because then I could plan out what I was going to do and

make sure I say goodbye to everyone. So I think once you realise the

constraints then you can kind of work within it, then you can try and do little

things that can make a difference. I just think the idea that if I didn’t know

about this then it would make my life better, I strongly disagree, I think it

would probably make my life worse … I think that’s kind of the price you

have to kind of pay for knowledge. I’m hoping that the module has

enhanced my ability to argue and to analyse material and I believe it’s

improved my general knowledge of the area. I guess just studying

something I’m interested in all along, it’s made me decide that if I’m going

to have a career, I want to do something I enjoy and something that’s

relevant to me and I feel that there’s no point, I feel that I’m quite good at

what I do and I think why should I just do something like banking if I’d

rather, I think it’s made me want to sort of follow my ambitions rather than

just kind of go after money, so to speak.

Paula describes some of her valued functionings:

… it made me more aware of looking at my own viewpoint and the way I

look at news stories and things like that and the assumptions I make,

because I come from a very white middle-class background, I come from a

town that’s, you know, there’s not racial tension because there are only

white people really and things like that, so it’s very easy to make


assumptions or hold views that you never have to test because you are

only surrounded by sort of the same kind of people as you and I think

maybe that’s part of coming to uni as well, but this course has made me

reassess and think about my own prejudices and my own stereotypes and

stuff. I think this has given me more confidence in a certain kind of debate.

Debate was always quite big at my school, but everyone held the same

opinion … That said, I have no idea what I want to do … so, it could be

difficult matching my ideals against the reality of the world, I’m not sure….I

think the way it’s made me reassess my prejudices because that’s very

much, I mean, your judgements and your prejudices make you, very much

characterise the way you deal with the world and deal with people, read

things, interpret things, things like that and by having to look at that and

challenge, those being challenged, I don’t think I’ve changed in any

dramatic sense, but it’s made me just more aware of the way I look at the

world … I think it is something that could, you know, if you choose the right

thing, I don’t know, maybe make a difference, I’m not sure.

Lorna talks about what has been valuable for her from learning research skills

and doing research:

Definitely more confident, more adept at coming into new situations as well

and circumstances that are unusual to you … It’s not a normal situation

when you first start university and they do throw you in at the deep end and

when you’re doing a project, that’s completely new to you, so that’s helped

with when I started [part-time] work as well ‘cos that was a new situation.

So coming to university helped me, like put myself out to go to the hospital

and get a job, yeah, new circumstances, that’s helped … Confidence.


Presentation skills which I’d never really done before, that was something I

got from coming here. Organisation, a hundred times better than when I

first started and planning out my work and my time. Time management,

golly, I wouldn’t have coped in the first year if I’d this amount of work …

you’re surprised at what you do know when you think about it. You think

three years ago, I knew none of that and that’s all I know now, I’m sure I

must know everything about oxin now. Yeah, definitely twice the

knowledge that I came with, it feels like I’ve learnt absolute loads in three

years. And, yeah, just going out into a general place, you think, it does

make you more optimistic that if there’s other people, you don’t feel like,

you feel like you’re in par with them, you don’t feel that they’re so much

better than me, they’ve done this, they’ve done that. You’ve been to

university, you’ve learnt all the things, you’re just as good as them. You can

hold your own.

Lily explains her career choice and how research-enhanced pedagogy has

helped her reflect and decide on what she hopes to do:

I guess I just like the process of thinking of questions, thinking of ways to

answer those questions. It is very important because it can be related to,

not necessarily scientific endeavours, you can relate it to other things,

generally like projects and stuff, not necessarily to do with science

completely, I think, maybe … it’s because, let’s say, you know, it’s to do

with having a problem and trying to think of a way to solve it and thinking of

a logical and streamlined way of doing it and how it could be related to, I

don’t know, doing projects in the community, for example, or something like

that … Because I’m not necessarily going on to do a PhD or anything like


that, I’ll probably go into the real world and stuff and how it could be quite

relevant to that kind of thing … I also want to do things on a conservation

slant but just generally to do with the environment, so that’s why I was

thinking that that would be a good route to go in and I was thinking to

myself that I really have to go and do a course or whatever in project

development … it wasn’t something which had occurred to me, I did fourth

year because I wasn’t very sure whether I wanted to do a PhD or not and

that’s why I’m slanting more towards conservation now.

Finally, Stella explains:

I think a good life is a life with choices and job satisfaction and I think

that this course has certainly helped me to think of a job that I will be

satisfied in and it has helped me to, yeah, to have choice over my

profession. That sounds very wishy-washy, but what I mean by that is

to feel empowered that I don’t have to be a generic History graduate

and work for Marks and Spencers on a graduate scheme or whatever.

That I can, that a good life is, having learnt the things I’ve learnt from

my degree, using them in a way that means I can continually engage

with those issues. So even if I don’t end up being a campaign manager

or working for an NGO, that I will continue to be compassionate and

have a role and relationship with Southern Africa and I think that’s

important, that I have learned that that’s important to me. It’s kind of a

self, a growth thing. When you find that you’re really good at hockey or

whatever, that suddenly changes everything, that you then factor

hockey in your life, for the rest of your life because you enjoy it so much

and although I can’t do degree, after degree, after degree, I can


certainly continue to engage with the [southern African] region and that

is important to me. It’s been an awakening to what I’m interested in.

More than any other piece of data Stella’s voice captures what it means to

have formed the capability to be a strong evaluator and “to stand differently in

the world” (Barnett, 2007, p153).

These are hopeful stories of identity formation, which point to being human as

a rich and complex thing, and to human flourishing and well-being. Not all of

the students whose voices are represented here are the same: they include

middle- and working-class students, male and female students, and minority

ethnic students. What their voices show is that what it means to be educated

though research is something more complex than the acquisition of discrete

research skills for employability, or enquiry learning in which student learning

opportunities to be educated are somewhat vaguely described. At the same

time, knowledge and knowing has been mediated by lecturers who are

committed both to epistemology and ontology, to teaching and student

learning, and to facilitating pedagogical intersubjectivity, which enables rather

than disables students’ voices and confidence. Such research-enhanced

pedagogies resist the “miniaturization” (Sen, 2006) of student identities and

challenge research-intensive universities’ marketised interpretations of lifelong

learning, being world citizens, and graduate skills and attributes.

Conceptualising research-enhanced pedagogies, student identity formation

and teaching in the language of capability, strong evaluators and a human

development paradigm not only counters dominant human capital language, it


also provides a framework for reimagining the research/teaching nexus with

regard to well-being and quality of life in university teaching and learning.

(V) Quality in teaching and pedagogies

What became clear from the data, however, even though a focus on whether

good researchers make good teachers had not been intended, is that lecturer

commitments to student learning and good teaching are inescapably an issue

in any thick description of a research-enhanced pedagogy. Perhaps not

surprisingly, because the lecturers interviewed had been recommended by

heads of departments as both good researchers and good teachers, or were

known to me as such through personal contacts, commitments to teaching

students well was common to all nine whom I interviewed. There is then the

argument that for students to develop as persons there is a “need for an

ontological turn on the part of teaching staff” (Barnett, 2007, p109). Lecturers,

as much as students, would need themselves to form their own capabilities

about what makes life good for them.

However, forming professional identities in this way confronts unhelpful

systemic and institutional barriers. Thus it was also the case that in one of the

departments, commitments to its research profile outweighed teaching

arrangements. Individual teachers still expressed teaching commitments, but

these were shaped also by departmental arrangements that curtailed contact

between research-active staff and undergraduate students. To take one

example: in the History department, the third-year special subject ran over two


semesters for four hours each week; in the Politics department, special

subject options ran for only one semester for two hours a week. Thus Martha

Scott complained that it was difficult to develop students’ research skills in a

12-week course.

Nonetheless, all the lecturers I interviewed indicated strong commitments to

research, teaching and student learning. Following the capability approach,

we might say that committed, research-active teaching is constitutive of the

social arrangements that enable learning. At the same time, lecturers struggle

in the context of a policy and institutional environment that was rather less

conducive to such efforts with the overwhelming emphasis on research

productivity to enhance individual and university reputation, with far less

reward and recognition for quality teaching. Working against this grain to

teach well and enthusiastically and be research-active is rather admirable

under these contemporary conditions.

However, not all their colleagues could be described in the same way. Helen,

a joint History and Politics honours student remarked:

I’ve walked past lecturers in the street and they wouldn’t recognise me

because why would they, there’s so many … also occasionally I have

got the feeling that by coming to lecture to us, we’re interrupting their

personal research schedule. That might just be me being cynical, but in

them having to break up their day to come in and do a lecture, they’re

being interrupted when they would rather be away studying … If we

have a problem in Politics and we ask our seminar tutor, they usually


have to refer back to the lecturer anyway, but then if we go and speak

to the lecturer, they’re not going to know who we are, so it’s quite

impersonal and usually people don’t bother. I think there’s something

good if you can go and speak to your lecturer and they know you and

they know who you are … the Politics department is one of the best in

the country, they’ve got a lot of lecturers there who have written

countless books and they have a big cabinet with all their books in, but

it means nothing if they’re not giving these skills to the students which

isn’t happening. You don’t get that from an hour a week. (Interview 21

February 2007)

This underlines that it is lecturers’ pedagogical approaches that bridge the

research and teaching divide, and that they do it well or less well. Being

research-active is, then, necessary but not sufficient.

Allan Luke (2006, pp5-6) reminds us that: “As we face the social and cultural,

political and economic challenges of this new millennium … the remaking of

knowledge and pedagogy is the key to educational change and to

reawakening the transformative and generative capacity of educational

systems.” Such attention to critical pedagogies directs us to “the normative

questions of which pedagogies can and should be developed for human

beings” (p5). Capabilities introduces a language of flourishing (Nussbaum,

2000) and of equalities. Moreover, universities and higher education in the UK

is still for the most part based in public institutions, which ought to be built

around the defence of the notion of the public interest that they serve and of

‘education’. At the very least, there is still a debate to be had, even in the face


of market ideology, about the normative purposes and outcomes of

universities; capability theorising offers robust tools for such dialogue.

Alternatively, we can go ahead with producing graduates from higher

education with technological, scientific, vocational and research skills, who are

at the same time lacking critical faculties and imagination and an openness to

participation in democratic public life.

Results

The results from this project differ from more typically traditional research

projects. They need to encompass knowledge generated through both its

major theoretical element and the empirical data. The results then are:

1. An original theorisation of the research/teaching nexus as a matter of

students’ ‘capability formation’, understood as each student’s

substantive freedom to do and be what they value doing and being.

2. Pedagogical approaches need to pay attention to ‘human being’,

including: students’ acquisition of critical perspectives on research

knowledge through texts, practices and participatory debates with their

lecturers and their peers; each student developing confidence in their

ability to publicly debate, defend and even change their epistemological

positions; developing respect and understanding for different

perspectives; and fostering students’ capability to become ‘strong

evaluators’.

3. While it may be mundane and is certainly not original, it bears

repeating that this project, as with many others, found that teaching


well needs the support of departments and institutions and message

systems that value and reward quality pedagogies.

4. Research methodologies that include student voices, and diverse

student voices, as well as lecturer voices enable richer understanding

of student learning experiences and outcomes.

5. Debating the normative purposes of higher education in the context of

concerns for human development, equalities and the ‘moral urgencies’

that confront societies in the 21st century ought to be integral to the

research/teaching nexus and not an optional add-on.

Recommendations

The key recommendations for higher education, for understanding the

research/teaching nexus, and for quality in teaching and learning are that: (i)

the research/teaching nexus needs to be embedded in the debates about the

normative purposes of higher education; (ii) the concept of ‘research-

enhanced pedagogies’ is helpful, but needs to pay attention to what is

understood by ‘research’, ‘enhanced’ and ‘pedagogies’ and to what it means

to be ‘educated’ through research; (iii) ‘enhancing’ learning in the disciplines

through research ought to integrate the formation both of students’

epistemological and ontological capabilities; and (iv) if both the research and

teaching elements in the research/teaching nexus do not inflect towards a

more equal and just student experience on the one hand, and a concern with

the moral urgencies of our society on the other, we need to raise serious

questions about what the point is of the nexus. Yet to do this we also need


assertively to acknowledge and reward lecturers’ whose teaching approaches

and commitments form students’ capabilities through a practice of research-

enhanced pedagogies.

Higher education, and research-intensive universities in particular, ought then

to debate these kinds of questions:

1. What normative purposes for higher education flow from

conceptualising the research/teaching nexus as (a) being educated

through research, and (b) as capability formation?

2. How through research/teaching can we help students to form valuable

capabilities during their undergraduate years so that higher education

supports each student in having the substantive freedom to live in ways

that they have reason to value and to choose?

3. How might the concept of ‘capability’ serve as a catalyst for

pedagogically driven change in higher education and a critical

scholarship of teaching?

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the lecturers and students who gave of their time to be

interviewed, the anonymous referee of the draft report for further stimulating

my thinking about ontology, and my colleague at the University of Nottingham,

Monica McLean, for the gift of our challenging dialogues.


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Appendix A: Methodology and methods

This project comprised two related parts. The review phase of conceptualising

and theory generation was the key component of the research. The idea was

not to generate an extensive new empirical database, but rather to explore the

capability and related literature, and consult information available on websites

and in secondary publications. In addition, a small amount of original

qualitative data from a single institution was collected as a check on the

emergent theorisation. A theory-data analytical ‘conversation’ was therefore

envisaged. From September 2006, a conceptual and critical review phase was

begun to enhance understanding of the research/teaching relationship as both

ontological and epistemological, in relation to the quality of student learning

experiences and teaching practices. This phase continued through the project

and took account of: (i) the existing (and well-known) literature on the

research/teaching nexus; (ii) websites of relevant Centres for Excellence in

Teaching and Learning (CETLs) at the universities of Manchester, Reading

and Sheffield; (iii) UK higher education policy and the concept of knowledge

economies; and (iv) the capability approach in relation to higher education. In

general, because the CETLs were at an early stage of development and had a

primary focus on undergraduate research and enquiry learning as methods,

these were not found to be particularly helpful conceptually, although it is

envisaged that they will become more so over time as the CETL projects

unfold and the results of their own research is made public. Additionally,

comprehensive websites on the research/teaching nexus developed at the


universities of Melbourne (www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/) and Sydney

(www.itl.usyd.edu.au/tandlresearch/itlresearch.htm) were consulted.

Supplementing the review and providing empirical data to interrogate the

emerging analysis and theorisations, qualitative data were collected in one

research-intensive university in England. This utilised a narrative, voice-

based methodology to elicit the perspectives of a limited number of students

and lecturers. The method drew on Polkinghorne’s (1998, p11) concept of

narrative as “a scheme by means of which human beings give meaning to

their experience of temporality and personal actions”, together with Ochs and

Capps’ (2001, p2) notion of storytelling as “social exchanges in which

interlocutors build accounts of life events [as] a tool for collaboratively

reflecting upon specific situations and their place in the general scheme of

life”. The idea was to identify a small number of articulate respondents. This

narrative-analytic approach is intended to reveal how student learning

identities are formed at the nexus of teaching and learning practices, and

embedded in larger ideological influences (for example, educational values).

In addition, the idea of student voice is held to be particularly important in

generating rich accounts of student learning and experiences (Flutter and

Rudduck, 2004; Rudduck and Flutter, 2003). Student voices on learning have

the potential to explicate the deep structures of higher education teaching and

learning and point to that which pedagogically driven change (Elliott, 2000)

ought to pay attention. Moreover, as Rudduck and Flutter (2003) have argued,

students’ perspectives on learning and teaching, combined with their

experiences of [higher] education, suggest important directions for


improvement both at an institutional level and on a day-to-day basis in

classes.

There is no claim made that any of these voices of lecturers or students are

either representative or comprehensive, simply that we need to take student

voices in particular, and also lecturer voices, into account in understanding

learning outcomes at the research/teaching nexus. The interest here is not in

a representative group or sample across all disciplines, but an approach that

recognises that we can learn from what students say about their experiences

of learning and transformation about what practices sustain their learning, and

what dispositions and identities have to be achieved for multidimensional

learning outcomes that include ‘knowing’ and ‘being’. Nonetheless, the

limitations of these ‘snapshot’ data are also acknowledged; learning is

recursive rather than linear, dynamic and changing over time.

For this reason, the emphasis is on the data as illustrative rather than

representative or comprehensive, and on the capacity even of small-scale

fieldwork data on lived experiences to complement and interrogate theory

development in a dialectic of theory and data as a form of grounded theory

(Strauss and Corbin, 1997). Moreover, this approach places the researcher’s

“capacity to make meaning of data at the heart of the theorizing process”

(Piantanida et al., 2004, p332), to bring a conceptual perspective to bear on

individual voice ‘texts’ and to establish plausible relationships among concepts

through a process of coding data (Piantanida et al., 2004) so that: “The

creation of a conceptual mosaic is the core of the theorizing process”


(Piantanida et al., 2004, p340). The methodological questions we then ask of

ourselves are:

… does the portrayal of the inquiry provide evidence that the research

was conducted in a rigorous and ethical manner and does the

substantive theory have a coherent conceptual integrity; does it ring

true, does it offer useful insights; does it have the vitality and aesthetic

richness to be persuasive? (Piantanida et al., 2004, p341)

Three subject departments, all with high Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA)

and 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) scores were chosen, to

include an arts (History), social science (Politics) and science (Animal and

Plant Sciences) discipline. On each department’s website, specific reference

was made to that department’s excellence in teaching and in research.

Identifying a small number of respondents in each department proved more

difficult than had been anticipated. Directors of Learning and Teaching offered

suggestions, heads of departments were helpful, and personal contacts were

also mobilised. An email invitation went out to lecturers and students

explaining that I was conducting a research project that explores the link

between research, teaching and quality in student learning, and that I hoped

to interview people whose teaching was shaped and informed by their own

research, with positive learning outcomes for their students. In the case of

students in these same departments, I hoped to interview those who felt they

had had positive learning experiences through encounters or involvement in

‘research-rich teaching’ in the department, at any stage during their


undergraduate degree. I explained that I had made no assumptions regarding

one best or right way to forge links between research and teaching. I did,

however, make the assumption that research practices such as critical

enquiry, intellectual openness and curiosity, collaboration, intellectual grasp

and passion for the subject, communication skills and ethical sensitivity would

feature in some way or form in the variety of teaching and learning

approaches. I made clear that the project was not intended to explore whether

the quality of teaching and learning is better when lecturers are active

researchers (and hence implicitly evaluate individual lecturer’s practices). I

was particularly interested in what students had to say about good

experiences of learning where their lecturers are also active researchers. A

short project outline was also attached and contact telephone and email

details provided. Interviews took place between February and April 2007 on

the university campus. In all nine lecturers and 21 final-year undergraduates

were interviewed:

• History: four lecturers and ten students

• Politics: three lecturers and four students

• Animal and Plant Sciences: two lecturers and seven students

A semi-structured interview schedule, grounded in the conceptual exploration

of the project (see Appendices B and C), was developed. Some considerable

time was spent developing the interview schedules so that they were

sufficiently robust to capture the conceptual themes, while also allowing for

the unexpected.


The lecturers included men and women, with a range of experience from

lecturer to professor. No assumption was made that senior academics would

be better or worse teachers than junior staff, and this was not a focus of this

research. The students included men and women from diverse backgrounds,

including middle-class and working-class students, one international student

from North America, and two minority ethnic students. Initially, it was planned

to interviews 30 students in pairs over 15 interviews, but this proved

problematic so both students and academics were interviewed individually.

Only 21 students volunteered in the end. In particular, it proved difficult to

contact volunteers who were satisfied with their experiences of research-led

teaching in Politics and this dataset is the least satisfactory. Interviews lasted

on average an hour, were tape-recorded, with the permission of the

participants, and fully transcribed. Interview transcripts were read and coded

for research/teaching nexus and capability themes. During the data analysis,

a further organising concept in Taylor’s (1985) idea of ‘strong evaluators’

emerged.

The project was approved through university-recognised ethics review

process and adhered further to British Educational Research Association

(BERA) ethical guidelines. Lecturers and students in the empirical phase were

all volunteers, and the University and interviewees have been anonymised.

It had been planned to establish a critical advisory group of five colleagues,

but this also proved difficult to organise and instead I relied on informal

feedback with colleagues who would have been part of such a group,


feedback to a presentation at the University of Nottingham, and papers

delivered at various conferences between July and December 2007 (Appendix

D).


Appendix B: Interview schedule – lecturers

1) What is your conception of research? What does a researcher in your

subject actually do? Which values and abilities sit at very heart of your

own discipline?

2) How then does research shape your teaching of the subject? What

exactly is it that you do? Please give concrete examples from your

module/s. How do students experience or come to know about your

research or know that you are research-active?

3) What then is your conception of ‘research-led teaching’? [The

University describes it as: a curriculum and teaching/learning process

of creating and deepening knowledge by engaging students in learning

activities that mirror the process and activities of research.] What for

you would constitute quality in research-led teaching in your subject?

4) What kind of learning outcomes or student development do you aim

for/think happens because you are research-active?

5) [If not discussed]: Which of these features of a research-intensive

environment are significant in your own teaching: critical knowledge

and critical thinking; critical information literacy; problem-solving;

collaboration, self confidence, intellectual grasp and passion for the

subject; effective communication; ethical sensitivity, responsible

citizenship; ability to deal with risk and multiple perspectives? Would

you want to emphasise the importance of any one? Why? Is there

anything missing that you would want to add?


6) What in your view does student exposure to/engagement with research

and enquiry through your teaching contribute to one or more of the key

purposes of higher education (Having individual economic opportunities

for employability, and also contributing to economic growth; becoming

educated citizens; having personal fulfilment)? How and in what way?

What about current notions of lifelong learning and global/world

citizenship, are they relevant at all to research-led teaching in your

discipline and subject?

7) This project has a concern with not just what knowledge students might

acquire, but also what they might become as persons – the intellectual

and social resources they might acquire as a result of what they learn

and experience as learners for planning and choosing a good life for

themselves. How do you respond to this? Do you see developing

student agency and well-being as significant at all?

8) Is there anything else you would like to add or say about your own

research-led teaching?


Appendix C: Interview schedule – students

1) Please discuss modules during your degree studies in which you feel

you experienced ‘research-led teaching’. [The University describes it

as: a curriculum and teaching/learning process of creating and

deepening knowledge by engaging students in learning activities that

mirror the process and activities of research.]

2) Why in your view were these modules research-led? [What do you

think a researcher actually does when researching his/her subject?] For

example, how did the lecturer/s incorporate their research into

approaches to teaching in these module/s? Can you give specific

examples of what they did? (Did they talk about their own research?

Did they get you to do your own research? Did they encourage critical

discussions etc?)

3) What do you feel you have learned or gained (i) in general, but also (ii)

what specific skills and abilities, have you acquired through research-

led teaching? (For example, critical reasoning, openness to ideas,

ethical understanding, communication etc). Would you agree with the

argument by Charlie Leadbetter that cultures of creative dissent,

dispute, disrespect for authority, diversity and experimentation are key

to contemporary knowledge economies?

4) How (if at all) has your involvement in research through research-led

teaching helped you in: having economic opportunities; becoming an

educated citizen; having personal fulfilment? What about becoming a

lifelong learner and a global or world citizen?


5) What is the most valuable learning you have gained through your

encounters with research in research-led teaching? Why do you value

this? What difference does it make to your life? How does it improve

or enrich your life now and in the future?

6) How, if at all, have you been changed as a person in ways which you

value by these experiences and learning? (For example, are you more

confident, curious, or creative, or compassionate, or responsible etc?)

7) What, if anything, from these experiences and learning will help you in

planning, choosing and having a ‘good’ life, now and in the future?

Have these experiences increased your agency and well-being in any

way?

8) Is there anything else you would like to add about your experiences of

research-led teaching?


Appendix D: Conference papers from the project

1) Walker, M. (2007) ‘Strong Evaluators’: Research-Enhanced Pedagogy

and Student Capability. Paper presented at the international ISSOTL

conference, Sydney, 2-5 July 2007.

2) Walker, M. (2007) Perspectives on valued student learning

achievements at the research/teaching nexus. Paper presented at the

conference ‘Learning Together - Reshaping higher education in a

global age’, London, 22-24 July 2007.

3) Walker, M. (2007) The normative purposes of universities, and

pedagogy at the research/teaching nexus. Paper presented in the

symposium ‘Perspectives in the Research/Teaching Nexus’, annual

conference of the Society for Research in Higher Education, Brighton,

11-13 December 2007.

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Ontology, identity formation and lifelong learning …...The Higher Education Academy – June 2008 1 Ontology, identity formation and lifelong learning outcomes Theorising the relationship