INNOVATIONS IN TEACHING AND LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
CONFERENCE PAPER:
Key note address given at the conference on 'Managing Learning Innovation: The Challenges of the Changing Curriculum' held at Lincoln University Campus, University of Lincolnshire & Humberside, 1-2 September 1998.
Harold Silver
Visiting Professor of Higher Education, University of Plymouth and Co-Director of 'Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education', an ESRC research project in the Learning Society programme (award reference L123251071)
©Silver, 1998Change
The conference themes link the curriculum with the management of innovation, and the focus is on altering the curriculum. My current research (together with Andy Hannan and Sue English) is primarily concerned with innovation in teaching and learning, which in the first year of our project has been concerned with innovators' experiences of innovation, and which will in the second year explore relevant institutional frameworks and cultures. We have taken 'innovation' to mean simply what the people we have interviewed have perceived as a new departure in their circumstances. I will not be discussing our project directly, but innovation in teaching and learning shares with curriculum a range of issues concerning contexts of change and I will try to address some of these.The relationship been teaching and learning and the curriculum would be best seen in a Venn diagram, with overlapping circles covering what commentators in recent decades have often discussed in terms of a trilogy of curriculum, media and teaching innovation. The overlap is real, but so are the distinctions. Twenty seven years ago Norman Mackenzie, then Director of the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Sussex, concluded from his experience that:
If the institution itself is not prepared as a whole to look at its curricula, teaching methods and innovations in the allocation of resources, you are putting the 'innovators' in an absolutely impossible position vis-à-vis the rest of the institution (1).
Curriculum change, whatever its origins, is largely promoted or validated in formal institutional structures and is thereby in the market for the allocation of resources. However, this has been less true, or not true at all, in recent years in the case of teaching and learning. The 'institution itself' has in recent years in most cases not looked at innovations in curricula and teaching methods 'as a whole', their status has not been the same, and innovators in teaching and learning, as many of those we interviewed underlined, have indeed been put in 'an impossible position'.
Something may now be happening in this connection. The Dearing committee recommended as one of the three functions of the proposed Institute for Learning and Teaching that it should 'stimulate innovation' (2). Four years previously the Royal Society, for example, had also argued for innovative teaching practices and 'the need for research to guide innovation in teaching techniques'. Two years before that the Macfarlane report on Teaching and Learning in an Expanding Higher Education System had recommended a programme 'to stimulate innovation in teaching and learning' (3). The Higher Education Funding Council for England has now rediscovered teaching and learning. It has offered substantial sums to institutions to reward and improve teaching and learning and for subject support to do the same. Universities we have visited on the project have created or are creating professorships, fellowships or other forms of promotion and awards for good teaching, though this is not necessarily the same thing, of course, as innovation.
Three themesIn the past half century there seem to me to have been, mainly but not only in teaching and learning, three interlocking themes, which have to some extent been overlapping phases, in the history of innovation within institutions of higher education.
The first theme has a fairy tale beginning. Once upon a time, say after World War II, innovation within these institutions was conducted by small numbers of individuals or groups of like-minded individuals. They were enthusiasts for Skinner and programmed instruction (as the Americans called it), for audio-visual aids and ed tech. Institutions eventually created units for them to work in (Liverpool was the first university to do so in 1967), and what they did depended on market-available products. They exerted pressure on institutional policy and practice, and they had impacts though this was primarily in schools and teacher education. There were other characters in this story, and they experimented with small group teaching and other revolutionary ideas. In the 1950s, for example, they started the first real debate about the effectiveness of the 50-minute stand-up lecture.
By the 1960s there were other crucial innovations within the system, including the colleges of advanced technology, the Council for National Academic Awards and the polytechnics. The Society for Research into Higher Education, which followed on the heels of the Robbins committee, organised working parties and conferences on innovation from the late 1960s. At the level of the system there were new universities in green fields and clad in plate glass, and there was the Open University. The new green fields universities introduced structural and curricular changes, and these were often far-reaching. Innovations of this kind and also those in small group teaching or educational technology - met with some hostility and derision from vociferous people in what they thought of as 'real' universities. Attitudes have not entirely altered in later decades. Any innovation within the existing universities and colleges, however, was largely the product of individuals and constituted the first of these themes, a story called 'individual innovation'.
My second theme or overlapping phase might be called 'guided innovation'. Until the late 1970s innovation was still largely the result of individual enthusiasm and effort. From then on the contents, practice and understanding of innovation changed, under the impact of institutional structural changes, themselves in response to change in the wider system of higher education and government policy, including accountability pressures. Powerful searchlights were being turned on all aspects of higher education. New structures, including those for staff and educational development, were being put in place. Innovation, among other things, was being increasingly institutionalised. Quality control and assurance machineries (not called that), once a feature only of the Council for National Academic Awards and its polytechnics and colleges, were suddenly reinvented by the Council of Vice-Chancellors and Principals and with varying degrees of willingness or success entered the universities.
New institutional maps were being drawn also in response to the use of computers and new technologies. In the mid-1960s educational computing was only just beginning its journey into higher education, but by the end of the 1970s it was one of the driving forces of policy making. In 1985 one of the educational technology activists reflected on the changes of the previous two decades:
We no longer worship at the altar of 16 mm films, or linear teaching machines, or multi-media approaches, or feedback classrooms: now it is the computer and its flamboyant half-brother, interactive video (4).
What I am calling 'guided innovation' now often meant 'guided new technology development'. Innovation was rapidly becoming contextualised in institutional policy formulation. If it existed, it was expected to become strategic. Governments were becoming increasingly involved. Between 1966 and 1969 the American government, for example, invested more than $2.5 billion in experimentation and research with 'instructional technology' (5). From film to programmed instruction, overhead projectors to computers, 'waves of experimentation', as one American called them, were 'inundating campuses' (6). This was true in Britain as well as the United States. The process was accelerated nationally in the 1970s and 1980s for economic reasons, and the 'waves of experimentation' became more and more centrally generated.
Enterprise in Higher Education was at the frontier of the development, a cascading model of change that did, however, meet with strong counter-reactions, producing a range of innovations which originated with individuals or the teaching-oriented units of institutions. These included curricular developments but also addressed equal opportunities issues and promoted student-centred initiatives. The importance of EHE in this period of 'guided innovation' was considerable, and its messages have still not been properly heard.
Later national programmes to promote the use of communication and information technologies were more prescriptive as to projects and outcomes. EHE paradoxically offered opportunities but also profoundly influenced the trend towards policy-driving frameworks for innovation, which was to close off or discourage individually determined directions.
'Guided innovation' was being rapidly merged into forms of my third theme -'directed innovation'. Incentives to innovate were more and more located in the 1990s within national government policy and funding frameworks, interpreted by institutional management, and hemmed in by their priorities regarding, for example, research policy. For these and other reasons there was also resistance among both teachers and students to moving away from traditional teaching methods. Within the powerful new policy and reward frameworks there remained, perhaps even intensified, a need perceived by a variety of people to innovate in new circumstances. The old forms of lecture and seminar were not working. Numbers and diversity challenged the efficacy of old forms of assessment. Modular and semesterised courses were having an effect on teaching and learning styles as well as on curricular structures. The outcomes of higher education were coming under various kinds of critique. There have been new pressures for staff development, new applications of the technologies, new reasons to recognise the importance not only of good teaching but also of changes in teaching to match changes in student needs (and sometimes impress visitors). It may be that such incentives and other developments, in spite of the strongly directive environment, point to our being in an emergent 'post-directed' or at least differently directed period.
Where now?
There seem to me to be three important questions regarding where we are now.
First, how are institutions organised for change? They have adapted in response to expansion, new shapes of national policies, funding, accountability, the labour market and more. But has their adaptation been more than accretion, or new ways of managing as much as possible of the status quo? Universities were once, to one extent or another, what Cohen and March in their wonderful 25-year old analysis of American universities, discussed as 'organized anarchies' (7). Arguably, in Britain also, they still are? American universities were also described by Burton Clark as a collection of subject-based departments which 'encourage their departmental representatives to turn nominally unitary universities and colleges into confederative gatherings' (8). Derek Bok, from his vantage point as President of Harvard, described universities a decade ago as 'large, decentralized, informal organizations with little hierarchical authority over teaching and research'. They therefore provided an opportunity for random innovations that are not generalised because 'academic administrators do not have the power to insist that faculties adopt new techniques, new courses, or new curricula' (9).
That all portrays our own higher education of what in some ways seems a long time ago (in the case of the former polytechnics it never was the case). In a sense universities have reorganised and centralised themselves to respond to the requirements and pressures for change, but what they have generally done is impose new structures on a residual pattern of what these Americans have described. The phrases still sound familiar. Mission statements, policies, new committees for development, quality assurance or teaching and learning, and hierarchical authority and direction have in most institutions not entirely concealed our own versions of organised anarchy and confederative gatherings. The powers of departments have changed but have not disappeared. It is their format that has changed. HEFCE's proposal to help to improve teaching and learning via subjects and their networks is the most potent reminder of that. Ron Barnett has warned us of the instability of subjects, but the HEFCE proposal and emphasis are nevertheless important given the solidity of departmental structures.
Teaching and learning, and innovative approaches to them, have fared badly within the confederation. The question is whether our institutions are really organised to encourage and implement change in teaching and learning or the curriculum. Can they encourage and benefit from innovation as well as make decisions to guide and direct? There are industrial firms around the world that can do both.
Second, what future, then, is there for innovators? They do exist, sometimes in attics and basements, out of sight, pursuing new ideas and practices often with little or no support or recognition. We have met many of these on our project visits. If institutions are planning to reward innovation in teaching and learning, the people we met were on the whole sceptical about this effort and its outcomes. They were not sure about the criteria for recognising them or about the committees that operate the procedures, suspecting that these would be dominated by research-oriented senior staff and institutional priorities. They are amused at having been occasionally wheeled out of their corners by their department to adorn a presentation for teaching quality assessment, and they do appreciate being quietly given a grant by sympathisers on some development fund committee. But for any effective role, for their work to be taken up more widely, often even within the department, they have to change their identity and become change agents for the institution, implementing, and possibly to some extent modifying, institutional policy and action plans.
That is a dark and possibly a pessimistic picture. It does not, however, fit all the institutions we visited, and there are places we did not visit where the picture is different. Even the most active and respected innovators, however, tend to have little impact on the overall culture of their institutions. The future for innovators may be mainly within 'directed' policy frameworks.
I have a vivid recollection of an interview in a distinguished university with a fairly senior scientist who was an innovator and knew he was. At the end of the interview when I had closed my notebook and switched off the tape recorder, he asked me: 'How are you going to report on your project?' I explained the mechanisms and time-table for reporting, but that was not what he meant. He said:
'I hope you're not just going to report on all the good things you find and tell your funding body and the government that all's well. There are good things, but they're underfunded and undervalued.'
I suppose my question is whether it matters that this may generally be the case. Are there features of the present picture that could suggest a different future?
Third, has all the effort that has been expended on analysing the relationships between higher education and the outside world, notably government and industry, shown what the central lessons are for higher education institutions? The clearest area is no doubt the ways in which the substantial changes in the economy and the employment market have affected the curriculum. The ways in which this relationship has influenced how teachers teach and students learn has also been a live issue. I am not sure, however, that we have learned enough in terms of practice, for example, from the experience of EHE; from the skills and competences research, debate and activity; or from the growing and changing provision of staff and educational development.
There is also a rhetoric about how little industrial experience of innovation can transfer to the very different institutional cultures of higher education. The experience and analysis of corporate culture do seem to have significant messages about the transmission of innovation in different directions in different kinds of enterprise, the relationship between empowerment and individual and collective development, or between individual and team vision and planning. What we know about some of these issues in higher education is still to a large extent picked up randomly within our own private world.
This discussion has focused mainly on teaching and learning but with implications for curriculum change also. It is possible that in present circumstances innovation may be being reinvented and there may just be greater opportunities taking shape ahead. What is not clear is whether we will in the future be talking about 'innovation' and 'innovators', or simply about 'innovation strategies' by governments, national agencies, institutions and departments. The two things are very different.
References
(1) Norman Mackenzie, 'Educational technology the next quinquennium', in Colin Flood Page and Harriet Greenaway, Innovation in Higher Education, London, Society for Research into Higher Education, 1972 (report of a conference in December 1971), p. 16.
(2) National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, Higher Education in the Learning Society (Dearing report), London, HMSO, 1997, p. 128.
(3) The Royal Society, Higher Education Futures, London, Royal Society, 1993, p. 27; Committee of Scottish University Principals (Macfarlane report), Edinburgh, CSUP, 1992, p. 42.
(4) Derick Unwin, 'The cyclical nature of educational technology', PLET: Programmed Learning and Educational Technology, 22 (1), 1985, p.65.
(5) Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, The Fourth Revolution: Instructional Technology in Higher Education, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1972 (citing Molnar).
(6) James W. Thornton, Jr. and James W. Brown (eds) New Media and College Teaching, Washington, D.C., National Education Association, 1968, p. 46.
(7) Michael D. Cohen and James G. March, Leadership and Ambiguity: the American College President, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1974, chapter 3.
(8) Burton R. Clark, The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds, Princeton NJ, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, p. 147.
(9) Derek Bok, Higher Learning, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 176.
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