I’ve been quiet for a few weeks because I’ve been wandering around the UK collecting data and transcribing interviews. I’ve still got a few more to do, but there are some themes beginning to emerge. Perhaps the most surprising one is that educational developers are a lot more optimistic than I’d expected.  (Maybe, it’s just that I’m a natural pessimist!) The EDU is, it seems becoming a well established feature of the HE scene and is interacting with quite a lot of staff. It’s perhaps debateable whether this is because it’s often the gatekeeper for additional funding.  One slight ootential worry is that there’s relatively little direct interaction with students, although that isn’t universal. Some EDUs do far more than others here. 

I think I’m finding evidence that developers in general tend to incline towards a “teaching” model of the University, but are also very aware of the research agenda. There’s also a degree of scepticism about technology, or at least about over enthusiasm for it which is a little surprising. (But I haven’t yet done a comprehensive and rigourous analysis of the data, so that can’t be anything more than a subjective impression at this stage.) Other themes are that the unit is often a locus for responding to national initiatives like PDP and the Professional Standards Framework. So that raises questions about whether this is something that universities should think about “beefing up”. Of course, that depends on the number and relevance of such initiatives.

What else. Well, there is the question of putting in funding bids, which seems quite common, and then managing projects. There’s also quite a lot of involvement in teaching award type schemes. But I suppose, if you’re going to do that you have to have a separate unit to avoid questions of fairness. Anyway, I have a few days before my next interview, so I’ll finish transcribing the most recent one and then get my Nvivo hat on to start a more rigorous analysis.

At last! Access to one of my research sites. Haven’t heard from the second yet, and the response to my request gave the impresssion that they hadn’t quite understood what I’d asked for, but still, let’s not get carried away. I can’t do too much too soon, and an “in” is an “in”. So I’m grateful for what I’ve got. Now of course I must knuckle down to designing my research protocol and really getting the questions I want to ask off pat.

Interesting response to my research questions particularly around the behavioural models I . One supervisor advised me just to drop them, the other agreed that I could but that in doing so I was confining myself to an “objectivist, modernist, masculine, centrist viewpoint”.   That seems to me a fair criticism, but if those are the characteristics of the dominant models of universities, why wouldn’t I base my research around them? What, for example would a subjectivist, post-modernist, feminist, and dispersed university look like. I can see how I might begin to imagine one, but I’m not aware that any actually exist! I’m a little bit nervous about basing my research around an imaginary conceptual framework.

Anyway, I need to get the letters sent off today. The biggest hurdle of all – getting access to the field sites.

But sooo busy. Still, on the bright side the thesis writing is going reasonably well. I’ve got a strategy of sorts, which is just to write and write and write, and it seems to be working . I’ve got the first two and a half chapters in the can, so I’m nearly ready to start the actual data collection. Well, there’s the huge obstacle of organising the site visits, which I’m looking to do in early May, (Might be ready a bit before then, with any luck) but once that’s done, I can then get on with the data analysis part of the project, and ultimately writing up. Might even be finished by Christmas! Still, let’s not tempt fate!

Well. I’ve been asked to do a seminar in our “Thinking Aloud” Series. This is a series of seminars that is meant to reinvigorate the intellectual life of the University. I haven’t, of course, got the time to do it, (Regular readers, if I have any, will have noticed that this page has been a bit quiet of late.)

Anyway, I thought I’d have a look at how the history of the University impacted on a) our perceptions of the University, and b) beliefs about what the Educational Development Unit might actually do. So I had a little re-read of Pedersen’s “The first universities” Funny what re-reading can do. I hadn’t really got a clear idea of his argument in my head before, but I think I can trace three separate intellectual strands, a sort of vocational training, arising out of the high status of the scribal class in Babylonian, Egyptian and Sumerian training, a much more scientific and philosophical strand of enquiry arising out of Greek thinking, and the codification of law and order arising out of Roman attitudes to knowledge and learning. That’s a massive oversimplification of the picture, but I think it does rather support my argument that Universities (and schools) are not the ivory tower, remote from their societies that they are sometimes portrayed as being.

Nor do they have their origins in the monasteries of the middle ages. The monasteries were the only places where learning could continue (in the West, anyway) after the collapse of the Roman Empire. And even so, they were at a huge disadvantage, because the lack of a Greek speaking Roman elite, meant that much of the Greek world of learning was lost to them. Much monastic scholarship appears to have been concerned with the collection and copying of books – which did help preserve the tradition of learning. But there’s no real concept of empirical research in the monastic tradition. (In fact that appears to have been limited to the Hellenistic concept of learning – The Romans seemed to concentrate much more on practical knowledge too, going in for encyclopaedias and Handbooks. There is no concept of a “museion” (A place in which objects for research and study are collected) as there is in Aristotle’s Lykeion

But I suppose the question now, is how do we get from the Monasteries to the studia generales of the later middle ages, and from there to the Universities of today. And what influence exactly does Islamic scholarship have on all this. And what does it tell us about the modern perspectives of the University and indeed the EDU? But before going there, I’ve just had a little thought. I think there is a perception that Universities remain in the business of producing elites, even though in the UK at least, there are targets about 50% of the population undergoing HE. Like it or not, in marketing terms, exclusivity remains an important dimension to our product. Aren’t we just now talking about bigger elites? And have we really come all that far from the Babylonians? Did we ever say “Come to University and get a big advantage in life?” I think we probably did. But are we now having to say “Come to University so you won’t be disadvantaged?” I think that’s more a shift of emphasis, than a change of policy. Nevertheless, it might lead to an EDU changing its priorities from, say, developing technological enhancements to the curriculum, to say, redeveloping the curriculum to make it more attractive to a wider constituency.

Just a few thoughts really. There’s much more to go at here. I think I’m going to be in some trouble if I am to keep my seminar down to 25 mins!

Haven’t posted for a while, but I have been desperately busy with my real job. I’ve got a sort of chapter 1 in some sort of shape, but it still needs some work. So, now I’m beginning to think about writing the literature review. Now, I’m not short of literature! There are two skips full of photocopied articles in my attic, nearly 300 references in my Refworks database. But, one thing that struck me was that there wasn’t much on “educational development”. I did another search though and turned up an article that kept talking about “academic development”. So I did a search on that.

Uh oh! There were hundreds of articles, books, chapters, although, a cursory glance at the literature, still suggests more interest in legitmising the profession of academic development, than in how units actually do interact with their host university, Of course, legitimising the profession, inevitably strengthens the position of a unit, but it looks like I am going to have to rethink my research questions a bit. I did find some interesting arguments. One article (by Lynn McAlpine) actually proposed that development units be situated within the disciplines to reduce the danger of top down initiatives being foisted on academics who weren’t interested. (Presumably they’d be based within faculties) Admittedly I think there was a bit of Devil’s advocacy going on there. But, another think piece (by Angela Brew) quoted another doctoral dissertation which argued that developers operated in a sort of liminal environment (neither one thing nor the other. But quite definitely something!) I can’t see how a faculty based unit can occupy a zone of liminality for very long.

I did like McAlpine’s critique of the “fixing the teacher” model which she says informed educational development. Actually, I think that model is still quite powerful in some quarters, although perhaps not in educational development itself. (I guess there are probably still poor teachers around…) I much prefer the idea of jointly developing and evaluating innovative ideas with teaching colleagues.

I’ve got to read all these articles in a lot more detail over the holidays and begin to answer some of the questions I have about what the literature is actually saying about educational development units.