INNOVATIONS IN TEACHING AND LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
CONFERENCE PAPER:
The Challenges of Innovation
Harold Silver
[The History 2000 Conference, Bath Spa University College, 15 April 1999]
The project on which I shall draw for this discussion is a two-year project on Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, funded by the ESRC, HEFCE, the DfEE and the QAA. In the first year my two colleagues and I interviewed 221 people in 15 UK universities, in search of innovators and their experiences. The focus was on the teaching of undergraduates. We identified people who could be described as innovators from a variety of sources, directories of innovations by the Staff and Education Development Association and Enterprise in Higher Education, conference reports and other sources. The preparatory work we did told us of clusters of such people in various universities, but not in other institutions of higher education.
This gave us a wide though not a systematic curricular spread across the universities.
As it turned out, the discussions about kinds of innovations, their origins, purposes and life histories, did not normally acquire a subject focus. They had more to do with student numbers, perceptions of autonomous or student centred learning, modularisation, funding, support, attitudes, and so on. The discussion did, of course, also focus on the strategies adopted.
In the second year of the project we are looking at organisational cultures within which innovation is encouraged or inhibited, and are doing detailed case studies of five universities, four of which were in our first-year study, and one, the Open University, which was not. These five are intended to give us a spread of institutions that we saw as valuable for the project, but also as providing a range of universities judged by various criteria. We have not met many historians in the course of the project, and the ones we did meet, when the discussion turned to history, probably told us less about innovations in teaching and learning history than you know from your own experience of History 2000 and other projects and developments. This FDTL programme, after all, was intended to 'support the development and dissemination of particular good practices, innovations and initiatives by historians', with a good deal of flexibility within limits. Hence a disclaimer. I am not going to talk specifically about teaching and learning history. You may have work to do in interpreting my discussion of innovation in terms of your own discipline and experience, including experience of the History 2000 programme.
There are problems to mention before we get to the 'challenges' in my title, particularly in identifying what we might mean by 'innovation'. For the purposes of the project we have assumed that we are not necessarily talking about major, path breaking initiatives. We are talking about what people do that is new in their circumstances. Their innovations may be of many kinds, but what they have in common is that they are the products of individual, or possibly small group, initiatives. We recognise, secondly, that the recent history of innovation in teaching and learning has involved three overlapping phases in the predominant modes of innovation. First, there is what individuals have done and find it increasingly difficult to do in the new climate of higher education. Second, there was a phase, to some extent still with us in some institutions and particularly in the FDTL programmes, of 'guided' innovation, the encouragement or temptation to move in a particular direction on the basis of perhaps a departmental or faculty need, or the early stages of Enterprise or institutional innovations funding. This involves a framework within which there is some flexibility, and it is the approach that tends to be adopted by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Third, there is 'directed' innovation, in which you can have the funding and the support as long as it is part of an institutional policy or bidding process or the tight definitions of a national agency - for example, to develop the use of IT or work based learning or to incorporate skills into the curriculum. This, on the whole, relates to 'strong' institutional policies, and programmes funded, for example, by the DfEE when a precise area of investigation has been identified for funding.
Let us assume for the moment that we are talking about individuals who might think of taking an initiative of some kind in response to present circumstances. These might include increased student numbers, changes in the pattern of recruitment, student motivation, the pressures of traditional forms of assessment, or some other set of factors within the teaching situation or the wider teaching environment. This brings us to the challenges that seem to me to be emerging from the project.
1. There are obvious problems about what sort of innovation and the purposes, and as you well know what someone sees as an innovation to improve student learning may be seen by someone else as ideological or budget-cutting or a waste of time. The challenge here is what can be done, possibly because the old way is simply not working, or there has been a radical change in student background and diversity. The challenge is to us as individuals.
2. The second challenge is to know whether an innovation may be beneficial for students, particularly given changing student circumstances, constituencies and expectations. This is a difficult personal challenge because the judgment cannot be made on the basis of market research or any other research. The challenge is to translate a hunch or a hope or a conviction that students will benefit, though there may, of course, be resistance from some students to non-traditional methods.
3. There is a challenge connected with the institution itself, the kind of institution it is. Institutional cultures, statuses and priorities are profoundly different, depending on their histories, the ways in which they have responded to the pressures and requirements of recent years, their place in 'the market'. Of course in some places there is no challenge at all, where traditional methods may remain intact or at least dominant and relatively unchallenged. The challenge is to judge the position of teaching and learning and of innovation within the institution as it has been or as it may be changing in the rapidly changing world of higher education.
4. There is a serious challenge to be faced, therefore, in terms of the priorities and plans of the institution or the faculty or the department. Does the innovation fit within the relevant rolling plans and the directions defined for supporting finance? Can it therefore be done? Even if innovation involves or may result in research on teaching and learning this is still part of the challenge, since such 'non-discipline' research is still rarely accepted as respectable, and admissible for the RAE.
5. There is also a challenge, therefore, to know what kind of support, if any, may be needed, what obstacles may need to be overcome. Is it available, likely to be forthcoming?
6. Thinking about innovation, should I be tempted by the available funding, which may determine the direction I can go. Since the early days of Enterprise this has become an increasing challenge, as institutions have themselves become more directive or prescriptive and the challenge may be in setting one sort of innovation, unfunded, against another that may attract resources. The challenge may be one of choices between what we wish to do, which may raise all kinds of difficulties, and what can more easily be done because there are signals of available support.
7. There is a personal challenge to do with recognition, including promotion. Not only innovation in teaching and learning, but an interest in teaching and learning as such may reduce promotion prospects. The increasing emphasis nationally and in institutions on equal recognition of teaching and research raises a major challenge that of judging how real such policies are in practice. [One interesting aspect of this that has surfaced in our project is that promotion on grounds of excellence in teaching may in some circumstances be helped by innovation, since some institutions find it difficult to know what evidence can be used to judge teaching, and an innovation is at least tangible evidence]. Nevertheless, our interviews on the project produced reactions that generally included comments such as: 'There is no policy for promotion on the basis of teaching and learning'; 'If there is such a policy I have never seen it'; 'I don't believe it'; 'Whatever the university may say, in this (department, school, faculty) it is research that counts'; 'I'll never get promotion of I'm seen to be taking teaching too seriously'; 'I'm going ahead with my commitment to teaching and learning in spite of everything'.
8. Finally, the challenge is to answer the question: Why should I bother?
The RAE lies ahead and I still have 3 articles to write.
Everyone in authority wants me to do something else.
I have too much administration to do and no time.
Innovation generally means an up-front investment of time, and though there may be sabbaticals for research, I won't get one for teaching and learning.
People think I'm eccentric.
These are salient issues for innovators or would-be innovators, and we have found them in one form or combination or another in all the institutions we have visited. Of course, some of these issues may not be challenges at all. For example, what an institution or faculty wants may be what I want, and I may have been consulted about the policy or the plan. I may persuade colleagues, and possibly the unit, to take teaching and learning initiatives along lines I have advocated. On the whole, however, we have found innovators and innovation projects relating to teaching and learning to be often isolated, low status, treated with suspicion. This is particularly true of research-driven universities, though we have found important exceptions, and universities that in many respects look similar may have very different approaches to the extent of support they wish to give, and be seen to give, to the enhancement of teaching and learning.
Some features of innovators in teaching and learning that have emerged in the project are these:
Innovators recognise the problems involved in taking initiatives, weigh the circumstances with care, have a powerful commitment to their students and their opportunities for effective learning, and undertake what they know may be something of a struggle.
The innovation is most likely to be successful if they have the support, whether moral support or resources or time, of the head of department or dean or other person to whom they are answerable or from whom they obtain authorisation or support.
Innovators generally understand that their individual innovation is a signal of commitment to teaching and learning, and if they are judged to be too enthusiastic in this direction and if it competes with their research commitment, it may affect their promotion and career.
There are ambiguities in innovators' perceptions of their institution and the sub-unit to which they belong. Innovation in teaching and learning is likely most often to have a subject origin, and if the institution is too demanding or unsupportive, they may find a more congenial environment in disciplinary networks, in subject-based gatherings such as this one.
Within these complex challenges, therefore, there is an interesting question about whether anything is now changing. That there have been profound changes affecting innovation over the past decade is beyond doubt, given the changes in funding and accountability and quality machineries, the greater centralisation of decision making, a new managerialism, the loss of community and collegiality all of which and related vocabularies have been regularly used by those we have interviewed. It is important to note that critical comments of this kind are sometimes accompanied by recognition that the real problem lies with policies and pressures coming from outside the institution. But the question is whether we are now on a plateau, or whether there are real prospects of change?
Teaching and learning are being talked about and made the subject of national and institutional policies, and obviously the Dearing report and responses to it have played a part. We have found, for example, staff development strategies, the location of staff within departments or faculties with a remit to promote an interest in teaching and learning, quality assurance mechanisms that are levers of increased attention to teaching and learning.
Structures to support teaching and learning are in place in most of the institutions we visited. These include the appointment of pro-vice chancellors responsible for teaching and learning, committees for teaching and learning at institutional or faculty or other level, and so on, and though structures do not necessarily tell us a great deal, they do indicate significant changes of emphases in the recent past. People who do the teaching, however, often see these as without relevance or impact.
The Higher Education Funding Council for England has seen the need to put more, albeit still relatively modest, funds into subject support for teaching and learning (modest by comparison with the funding of research). This is probably the most important pointer to change in the status of teaching and learning in the system, and of the position of innovation.
The Institute for Learning and Teaching is about to become operational, and has met with a reassuring chorus of disapproval of its current membership proposals.
The ESRC has launched the first phase of its initially £11 million Teaching and Learning Programme, an ambitious and potentially valuable programme with significant opportunities for links to innovation. This is not a programme purely for higher education, and there is much that is positive in that fact given the opportunities for linking teaching and learning in higher education and in the remainder of the formal education system, as well as in all the other locations of the 'learning society' where teaching and learning take place.
It is an interesting challenge to know whether this accumulation of developments means a real shift in the environment for innovation in teaching and learning, or whether it is just a temporary recoil from the excesses of the RAE and the growth of research cultures.
There is an important final reflection. The different kinds of innovation and levels of decision making for innovation will continue to raise the question of whose innovation we are talking about. All of these recent and current moves could end up with more institutional or system-wide innovation, not necessarily with any greater opportunity for individual initiatives. I am not opposed to either institutional or system-wide innovation. There is an argument that it is essential to harness the energies of individual innovators for wider, possibly institutional initiatives, given the difficulty of individuals disseminating their work. Such recruitment of individual energies for wider, planned innovation and dissemination has a great deal to commend it, as in this conference you are certainly aware. But it would be good to think that the individual innovator and the individual initiative will nevertheless be able to survive.
A summary of my argument and the experience on which it draws would centre round four questions relating to the challenges faced in the promotion of innovation in teaching and learning.
1. Challenges to whom?
To the individual teacher, to make difficult decisions
To the department or other unit, to support individual and/or collective initiatives
To the institution to balance its policies on its needs and the experience of its members
To students to understand the purposes of innovation2. About what?
Teaching and learning (in competition with research, in relation to career opportunities)
Everyone's priorities
The meaning of 'higher education'3. From where?
The whole context of higher education
The nature of institutional policy and funding
The demands of the discipline
Personal dilemmas4. To do what?
Nothing
Be tempted in another direction
Go ahead and do it.That, broadly speaking, is my own interpretation of what people engaged in innovation or committed to improving teaching and learning, in many disciplines and different types of university, seemed mostly to be saying to us about the challenges.
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