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This plenary presentation is, in part, autobiography. Certainly it will feature my academic journey and I trust yours.I long taught and researched within a discipline - geography. There I tried to reach out and bring back into the discipline, the practices and the scholarship that were being developed by educational developers who offered generic advice to those teaching any subject. More recently I became an educational developer. I now work with and meet many members of this 'academic tribe' in the UK and elsewhere. With these developers I often find myself trying to explain why they should value the concerns of staff whose preoccupations are with teaching 'their' subject, and suggesting strategies for 'our' practice as educational developers, which value these discipline based concerns.
Sometimes I think my skill as a go-between is improving. I, and 'we', are developing strategies that 'work'. However often I, and 'we', are sending messages that don't connect or produce derision, hurt or anger. Between us we have created recipes for failure.
More recently I have met another academic tribe - specialist researchers on higher education. At times their work seems to connect with the concerns of educational developers and the disparate concerns of discipline based staff. However at other times they seem to be in a world of their own. Recently I have also worked with institutional managers seeking to bring about institutional change and sought to connect their concerns with those of teaching and support staff and students.
As a presentation I will outline what I have learned so far about being an effective go-between. This will also be an interactive session and I shall ask you to contribute your academic autobiography, what you have learned, what you might add to change and challenge my story.
My 'immediate' request is that for this session you decide that your story is told from the perspective of you as a teacher of a discipline, you as an educational developer, you as an administrator or manager, or you as an educational researcher. If you identify yourself primarily as from another tribe (eg student!) please send me a clear but gentle message beforehand!
Remember how you loved taking our messages and making us happy... With every step I marvelled more at the extent of Marian's self deception.Why then was I moved by what she had said? Why did I half wish that I could see it all as she did? And why should I go on this preposterous errand? I hadn't promised to and I wasn't a child to be ordered about. L.P. Hartley (1953). The Go-Between, 279; 280.Hartley's novel The Go-Between tells the story of a young boy, Leo, who on a summer visit to a Norfolk country home carries messages between Marian, an upper class women who is seemingly destined to marry the future local squire, and Ted Burgess, a village labourer. At first Leo is excited and feels wanted and revels in the role of intermediary. However he is unaware of the nature and the significance of the messages he is carrying, and the impact they will have on those around him and himself. As the plot unfolds his world and theirs collapse around them.It is arguable that the disciplines are the life blood of higher education: alongside academic institutions they provide its main organising base and its main social framework... Such disciplinary groups can usefully be regarded as academic tribes each with their own set of intellectual values and their own patch of cognitive territory. Tony Becher (1994, 153)
The dilemmas include negotiating the plethora of roles academics face in teaching, research and administration, as they strive to find a suitable niche in a rapidly changing environment where all niches are temporary. McNaught and Beattie (1995, viii)
For myself, this novel is a story of sadness, of well meaning intentions coming adrift, as larger forces (class, gender and the impact of World War One) shape the world which the characters inhabit. The story is told from the perspective of Leo who some sixty years later goes back to revisit his past and once again meets Marian. This prompts him to look back and try to understand.
This gives me the title and theme for the opening plenary presentation. Here I want to set out my theme, to tell a story that will enable us all in the session to think how in our professional roles we can act effectively, and how to send and carry effective messages to people in other roles inside our institutions and elsewhere. This introduction and the presentation assume we are all in the same 'story', the world of higher education, the intent of which is to improve the quality of student learning. Our messages and our actions will be effective if they assist that process. But how are we to act effectively? How as a go-between are we to act?
My own sense of the story in which those of us working in higher education appear, is clearly shaped by my roles - of that more soon. But one interpretation of academia that shapes my understanding of my story - and yours? - is Tony Becher's (1989, 1994) work on academic tribes and territories. His work illuminates the distinctive cultures and value systems of the different disciplinary communities as revealed in their research. Others have extended that idea to consider how disciplinary cultures affect how the teachers teach and students experience particular disciplines - e.g. Colin Evans' work (1988 and 1993) on modern languages and English and Kim Thomas's (1990) study of how gender interacts and shapes teachers' and students' experience of English and Physics.
My own experience suggests that one can extend Becher's analogy of academics as a set of tribes, each with their distinctive practices and value systems, to recognise groupings additional to the disciplinary communities. Thus I would pick out educational developers and perhaps educational researchers and senior managers and administrators as having particular perspectives. Maybe you would recognise others and for this purpose more significantly identify yourself as from another tribal grouping - eg a librarian, a student.
I see my own academic life as in part a acting as a go-between within and in particular between some of these tribal groupings. Much of my early experience was of confusion, not understanding that was my role and then later a very inadequate understanding of how to act effectively. Far too often the messages I carried were ignored, derided or brought those receiving them to anger. With time I became more aware of the role, aware of how to act effectively in it and in my particular roles I took on as geographer, educational developer. ...I think now I can make sense of my version of the story.
In the presentation at the conference I want to share what I think I have learned about acting as a go-between. How in our particular academic tribal groupings can we best act and reach out effectively to others in the same and in different professional roles? What are the strategies for success - but also what are the recipes for failure? The session will be interactive. I will ask you, using the metaphor of a go-between and academia as a set of partly coupled tribal groupings, to develop and add your perspective to what I present. It will ask you to contribute your story.
For the purpose of the session I ask you to decide whether your story is told from the perspective of you as a teacher of a discipline, yourself as an administrator or manager, as an educational developer, as an educational researcher or the role that you think appropriate. (If you could give me a gentle warning beforehand of that role that might help - but if so it would need to reach me here in the UK by June 22. It's not that important you warn me.) It is essential you decide your role before the session formally starts.
For you to better appreciate the perspective I bring to the conference session and why I have chosen it as my theme I ask you to read my professional story. However I want you to put against / alongside it your story. Maybe an analogy that may help here is Christine Edzard's brilliant film of Little Dorrit. That story is told by two films - shown in sequence - from the very different perspective of two characters. The first film tells a dark and sombre story. The second is light and joyous. This is my (dark) version. As you read it, read against it your perspective, your story. Using the analogies of a go-between and academia as a set of loosely coupled academic tribes, what do you consider are the strategies for success and the recipes for failure?
Re-reading the above account of myself as a geographer it reads as a coherent, linear and perhaps self-satisfied statement. Well the journey was not planned nor did it often feel coherent! It also misses so much of the feeling of failing to connect, of not understanding what I was learning and eventually felt that I had to say to others. It totally omits the anger that at times my well meaning 'messages' produced and how often I felt I just wasn't getting them through. For example, so often in those early days, at professional meetings the sessions on teaching geography were attended by a small band of like minded staff, all of us not particularly well known in the discipline, many of us in low ranking institutions... (Perhaps it's different in Australia and New Zealand?) Also I remember the early reactions and reviews of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education that this was a journal for those in Colleges of Education interested in improving school geography. In its title and in many other ways we had tried to communicate that this was a journal aimed at university level teachers and that it was for the broad mass of staff not just a few consenting adults who identified themselves as geographic educators.
Also as an editorial board, as we learned more about how we felt articles on discipline based pedagogy should be written we had the difficulty of sending messages to authors (many of whom were justly far more recognised in the discipline than ourselves) that their articles were not accepted for publication. Generally this was because their writing on pedagogy failed to recognise that teaching was a problematic activity to which they should bring all the critical acumen and scholarship that they would when writing and researching the discipline. At worst some sent us an outline of their lectures. Even to get authors to rewrite having read (or even just cite!) the educational literature wasn't easy. At times we felt we would be left printing blank pages! That would have been some message.
In taking on this new role I have learned much. Much of what I have learned is about pain, anger, a sense of loss and about a failure to communicate. Perhaps because this is recent and /or current experience, images and messages come quickly to my mind. I have had many encounters where people in the disciplines (eg. history) or cross disciplinary groupings (eg. environmental studies) have questioned and / or attacked what educational developers have to offer them. Perhaps more often they have ignored us or considered we may have something to offer people at the beginnings of their career and whenever they are threatened by external quality reviews. Sometimes it feels as if senior management shares these views of us. In the last year or so there have been very strong pressures from some managers and staff to close down the educational development unit in which I work. That has certainly happened to colleagues elsewhere.
No doubt my own experience has been shaped by the fact that having long worked in the institution many staff knew me as a geographer. I have many close friends who teach a wide range of subjects. At times I feel they consider I have betrayed them and that I have certainly moved away from them. As one friend recently said to me over lunch - 'you are no longer an academic now'. That hurt - and made me angry - for I think of my professional identity as being an academic. Clearly for many staff, educational developers generic concerns for issues re teaching and learning fail to connect with their concerns and careers which are clearly seen as in, and perhaps bounded by the disciplines. To give but one example from many, I and Graham Gibbs recently organised at Brookes a symposium on 'Using research to improve student learning' One colleague I tried to persuade to attend for I knew her as an excellent teacher and with research interests that could be readily applied to her teaching. Her letter explaining why she would probably not attend conveyed views that echo that of many other encounters I have had recently with staff in a whole range of disciplines. It included this message:
I am extremely politically incorrect; my allegiance being to my discipline, the teaching of my discipline, the community of [here she refers to her particular specialism in that discipline] and my local institution in that order.But do I feel at home in this tribe? Do I want to send their messages?
However as I have got to know the values and practices of these educational and staff developers there have been times when I doubted whether I really belonged with them and that in no way did I want to carry their messages. There has certainly been occasions when I felt they (we?) were sending out the wrong messages, and when my attempts to convey what I had learned about working with discipline based staff were ignored and met with anger. I have been in meetings where the concerns of staff for their discipline has been derided or attacked. I have heard whole groups of staff described as being from the 'dark continents'. These were disciplinary groups who espoused a discipline teacher centred pedagogy and failed to value our student centred concerns. A very frequent view is to see staff's concern for their discipline as a problem/as an obstacle to be overcome.
However that is but part of the story and deflects the causes elsewhere from my own responsibility. The anger and the confusion was in part because we were conveying messages about the importance of student employability that many staff didn't want to hear. Also there were many instances when it became clear to me that there was a massive gap of mistrust between senior managers and teaching staff. Relatedly I realised that my position of a go-between was one where I could be distrusted by both sides. Indeed it is from this experience that I started to look back at my career and the roles we all carry on in higher education through the prism of the 'go-between.' As an analogy it resonated even further because those of developing this institutional policy on generic skills had journeyed to Alverno College, Milwaukee and came back enthused with its ability-based curriculum (Alverno College Faculty 1994). Our messages were at first treated with derision, contempt and anger. For how could a small, Catholic, women-only, teaching only institution - and even more questionable, an American one - have useful messages for higher education institutions in the UK, particularly those like Oxford Brookes that was moving to a more research and postgraduate orientation. If we were to succeed we had to find ways that conveyed our messages in ways that resonated, or at least were acceptable to teaching staff, managers, students... We had to be effective go-betweens.
Also this paper is not to be seen as completed. It is but a preface. It has been written to lead into the conference session. As I look back at it, it is I think strong on problems and implicitly on recipes for failure. Elsewhere I have started to set out some strategies for success in linking the concerns of educational developers with discipline-based staff (Jenkins, 1996). One way to consider this paper is to see it like Christine Edzard's Part 1 - Nobody's Fault. It has been written in my freezing office on wet dark English spring days. Between us we will make Part 2. Little Dorrit's Story.
In Perth, under warm bright Australian skies we will concentrate on strategies for success! But first decide upon what role - manager, educational developer, discipline-based staff... you will play. See you there.
Becher, T. (1989). Academic Tribes and Territories. Milton Keynes, Open University Press.
Becher, T. (1994). The significance of disciplinary differences. Studies in Higher Education, 19(2), 151-161.
Evans, C. (1988). Language People: The Experience of Teaching and Learning Modern Languages in British Universities. Milton Keynes, Open University Press.
Evans, C. (1993). The Experience of Teaching and Learning English in British Universities. Milton Keynes, Open University Press.
Gold, J.R., Jenkins, A., Lee, R., Monk, J., Riley, J., Shepherd, I. & Unwin, J. (1991). Teaching Geography in Higher Education. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, Institute of British Geographers.
Hartley L.P. (1953). The Go-Between. London, Hamish Hamilton. (The quotations here are from the 1958 Penguin edition.)
Jenkins, A (1996). Discipline-based staff developments. The International Journal of Educational and Staff Development, 1(1) (forthcoming).
Jenkins, A., Scurry, D. & Turner, D. (1994). Using profiling to integrate skill development in a large modular course. In Jenkins, A. and Walker, L. (Eds), Developing Student Capability Though Modular Courses. London, Kogan Page.
McNaught, C. & Beattie, K. (Eds) (1995). Research into Higher Education: Dilemmas, Directions and Diversions. Melbourne, HERDSA.
Thomas, K. (1990). Gender and Subject in Higher Education. Buckingham, Open University Press.
| Author: Alan Jenkins, Oxford Centre for Educational and Staff Development, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford OX3 OBP, United Kingdom. Fax (UK) 01865 483759 Email alanjenkins@brookes.ac.uk
Please cite as: Jenkins, A. (1996). The Go-Between: Strategies for success and recipes for failure. Different Approaches: Theory and Practice in Higher Education. Proceedings HERDSA Conference 1996. Perth, Western Australia, 8-12 July. http://www.herdsa.org.au/confs/1996/jenkins.html |