What do connections between research and teaching look like?

What do connections

between research and

teaching look like?

Martin Oliver & Lesley GourlayCulture, Communication & MediaUCL Institute of Education

[email protected]; [email protected]/MartinOliverioe.academia.edu/LesleyGourlay

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UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Connected Curriulum –

“Moving from research-led to research-based

teaching”

What does this look like?

How will we know it when we see it?

What might stop it happening?

13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015

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The research-

teaching nexus

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“An enduring myth”; Universities recommended

to pursue:

improvement of the nexus between research and

teaching... to increase the circumstances in which teaching and research have occasion to meet

(Hattie & Marsh, 1996: 533)


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Variation across disciplines

Undergraduate students are more likely to have

opportunities to work as, for example, a research

assistant on a research project in a biology laboratory, than to work alongside, say, an English

professor interpreting a play.

(Healey, 2005)


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Likely to be affected by codification of the

knowledge base (Griffiths, 2004)

Harder where ‘narrow’, specialised approaches to

research dominate, rather than ‘broad’, critical,

interdisciplinary or applied approaches

(Interestingly, suggests the opposite pattern to

Healey)

Again, a purely social framing

Discussion of links to “working on ‘real-world’

problems”, but in terms of employability, not sites,

nor the tools & technologies needed


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“Disciplinary spaces”

A phrase used by Healey, apparently as a

metaphor

No evidence of literal examples

Disciplinary work envisaged as consisting purely of social practices

Are there more literal spaces, too?


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Sociomateriality

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If you can, with a straight face, maintain that

hitting a nail with and without a hammer, boiling

water with and without a kettle... are exactly the

same activities, that the introduction of these

mundane implements change 'nothing important' to the realisation of tasks, then you are ready to

transmigrate to the Far Land of the Social and

disappear from this lowly one.

(Latour 2005: 71)


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Spaces of knowledge

production

Humans, and what they take to be their learning

and social processes, do not float, distinct, in

container-like contexts of education, such as

classrooms or community sites, that can be

conceptualised and dismissed as simply a wash of material stuff and spaces. The things that assemble

these contexts, and incidentally the actions and

bodies including human ones that are part of these

assemblages, are continuously acting upon each

other to bring forth and distribute, as well as to

obscure and deny, knowledge.

(Fenwick et al, 2011: vii)


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The materiality of research

Ethnographically-informed work within Science and Technology Studies has traced heterogeneous networks involved in the production of scientific knowledge

Successful laboratory work requires the coordination of tissue samples, graphs, papers and desks (Latour & Woolgar, 1979)

Practices of knowing as material engagements that (re)configuring the world (Barad, 2007)

The ‘ontological politics’ of medical diagnosis shaped by stories, tissue samples, procedures, etc. (Mol, 2002)


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Enacting spaces

We recognise space as the product of

interrelations; as constituted through interactions,

from the immensity of the global to the intimately

tiny. […] We recognise space as always under

construction. Precisely because space on this reading is a product of relations-between, relations

which are necessarily embedded in material

practices which have to be carried out, it is always

in the process of being made. It is never finished;

never closed. Perhaps we could imagine space as

a simultaneity of stories-so-far.

(Massey, 2005: 9)


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The campus is best thought of not simply as a

constraint but, to borrow Brown and Duguid’s

phrase, as a ‘resourceful constraint’ […] The

campus – or more generally, the co-location of

learners, teachers, labs, class-rooms, lecture theatres, libraries and so on – refuses to lie down

and die.

(Cornford & Pollock, 2005: 181)


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Studying material

connections

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Previous work at UCL

Studies with medics highlighted the importance

of material resources in their teaching, including

"potted specimens, x-ray displays, posters with

clinical topics on, videos, plastic models, and

then of course computers" (Plewes & Issroff, 2002)

Practical advice from Cain (2010) on the

implementation of object-based teaching


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Digital Literacies as a

Postgraduate Attribute?

JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme

http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/

Design Studio: http://tinyurl.com/q92jhzh

iGraduate survey / Focus groups / multimodal journalling in year 1

Case studies across three areas in year 2:

Academic Writing Centre

Learning Technologies Unit

Library

(More information in Gourlay & Oliver, 2013)

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http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/

http://tinyurl.com/q92jhzh

Journaling

12 students recruited from the focus groups

3 from each of the four groups (PGCE, taught masters,

taught masters at a distance, Phd)

Distance students interviewed via Skype

Given iPod touch

4 Members of staff

Interviews took place over 9-12 month period

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Knowledge work is

extensively mediated

Office tools (primarily Microsoft, plus Google docs and Prezi)

Institutional VLEs (Moodle and Blackboard)

Email (institutional, personal and work-based)

Synchronous conferencing services (Skype, Elluminate)

Calendars (iCal, Google)

Search engines and databases (including Google, Google Scholar, library databases, professional databases such as Medline, etc),

Social networking sites (Facebook, Academia.edu, LinkedIn) and services(Twitter)

Image editing software (photoshop, lightbox)

Endnote

Reference works (Wikipedia, online dictionaries and social bookmarking sites such as Mendeley)

GPS services

Devices (PCs at the institution and at home, laptops including MacBooks, iPhones, iPads, Blackberries and E-book readers).


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Juan’s sense of place

Where I live it could be, you could be in a town sort of anywhere and you wouldn’t really necessarily notice. Whereas you come in here and you come over the Waterloo Bridge and you see St Pauls and the Houses of Parliament, you know, you’re in London, you’re doing something again. You know, this is where people do important things and that, kind of, thing and it gives it a reality. […] It focuses me a little bit on that.

(Juan, Interview 3)

Also talked about international fieldwork to create a new data set


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Juan’s essay writing journey


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“The bathroom is a good

place to read”


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Conclusions

The research-teaching nexus is about more than social practices

Attending to the material and spatial element of practice is important in understanding the success (or otherwise) of connections

Questions remain to explore

When do these resources cross boundaries between research and teaching practice (Bowker & Star, 2000)?

What variations exist across disciplines, and why?

What can ‘following’ mundane things tell us about connections between research and teaching?


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References

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Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum

physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000) Sorting things out:

Classification and its consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT

press.

Cain, J. (2010) Practical concerns when implementing object-

based teaching in higher education. Available online:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/teaching-learning-

methods/object-based-learning/obladvice.pdf

Cornford, J. & Pollock, N. (2005) The University Campus as a

‘resourceful constraint’: process and practice in the

construction of the virtual university. In Lea, M. & Nicoll, K.

(Eds), Distributed Learning: Social and cultural approaches to

practice, London: RoutledgeFalmer, 170-181.

Fenwick, T., Edwards, R., & Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging

approaches to educational research: Tracing the socio-

material. London: Routledge.


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http://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/teaching-learning-methods/object-based-learning/obladvice.pdf

Gourlay, L. & Oliver, M. (2013) Beyond 'the social': digital

literacies as sociomaterial practice. In Goodfellow, R. & Lea,

M. (Eds), Literacy in the Digital University: Critical Perspectives

on Learning, Scholarship and Technology, 79-94. London:

Routledge.

Griffiths, R. (2004) Knowledge Production and the research-

teaching nexus: the case of the built environment disciplines.

Studies in Higher Education, 29 (6), 709-726.

Hattie, J. & Marsh, H. W. (1996) The relationship between

research and teaching - a metaanalysis. Review of

Educational Research, 66, 507–542.

Healey, M. (2005). Linking research and teaching exploring

disciplinary spaces and the role of inquiry-based learning. In

Barnett, R. (ed), Reshaping the University: New Relationships

between Research, Scholarship and Teaching, 67-78.

Buckingham: McGraw Hill / Open University Press. Available

online:

http://delta.wisc.edu/events/bbb%20balance%20healey.pdf


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http://delta.wisc.edu/events/bbb balance healey.pdf

Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to

Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979) Laboratory life: The social

construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills: Sage.

Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage.

Mol, A. (2002) The body multiple: Ontology in medical

practice. Durham: Duke University Press

Plewes, L., & Issroff, K. (2002) Academic staff attitudes towards

the use and production of networked learning resources. In

Banks, et al, Proceedings of the Third Networked Learning

Conference. University of Sheffield. Available online:

http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc20

02/proceedings/papers/29.htm


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http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc2002/proceedings/papers/29.htm