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Academic Practice Network
Convenors:
Professor Joëlle Fanghanel
Email: joelle.fanghanel@tvu.ac.uk
Professor Paul Blackmore
Email: p.blackmore@kcl.ac.uk
While the phrase 'academic practice' is increasingly used within higher education, a shared intellectual meaning should not be assumed. Therefore, this network is important in developing an understanding both of the changing nature of academic practice and its effects on students and wider society. There are a range of research interests and perspectives reflected by the network. These include colleagues with an interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning, socio-cultural aspects of academic work, and the complex nature of academic identity. The shifting nature of 'academic practice' means that the network also includes a number of colleagues in learning support roles. Regular events are a feature of the network in providing opportunities for discussion, dissemination and networking.
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Problematising the relations between students’ pasts, presents and futures in higher education |
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Using Habermas to evaluate pedagogic justice
Dr Monica McLean, Reader in Higher Education, School of Education, University of Nottingham
Drawing on Jurgen Habermas’ critical theory, Monica will present a conceptualisation of university pedagogy, which constructs students as future citizens and emphasises the development of ‘communicative reason’ as a goal of university teaching . She will then discuss whether such a conceptualization has any resonance with student perceptions of teaching and learning in university sociology departments, which are the focus of an ESRC-funded project ‘Quality and Inequality in university undergraduate degrees’.
Conceptualising the first year student experience: the dominance of the ‘transitions’ metaphor
Dr Paul Ashwin, Lecturer in Post-compulsory Education, Lancaster University
In this seminar, Paul will argue that the literature on the first year experience in higher education has tended to conceptualise the first year experience in terms of the transition to higher education. Whilst this conceptualisation has obvious strengths, he argues that it tends to separate students’ experiences within higher education from their experiences prior to higher education. He will show how the choice of lens that it used to characterise particular educational processes can have significant implications for the outcomes of research and the focus of recommendations for policy and practice that are made on the basis of this research. |
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Venue - SRHE 44 Bedford Row, London, WC1R 4LL |
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Date - Wednesday, 22/09/2010, 1pm - 4pm |
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Network - Academic Practice |
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Attend - To attend this event please download details and book as appropriate |
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Symposium: ‘Academic practices, literacies and identities’ |
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This symposium focuses on an emerging area of HE research and practice – an area built on connections between academic practice and academic literacies. The two areas of activity share a number of common interests, but it is only recently that attempts have been made to build on these potentialities to generate new insights into the practices and identities of higher education lecturers. The research projects featured in the symposium are examples of recent work in this emerging area. The symposium is also an opportunity for colleagues to discuss the implications and future development of the area in relation to both research and practice.
Literacies and identities: Assessing academic professional practice – Mary R. Lea (Open University)
This presentation will explore issues of writer identity on a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice for HE teachers. It will examine how emergent genres of writing on this course index literacy practices around academic and professional identities. It will raise questions about the inherent tension between professional practice-based knowledge and theorised written assessment of that knowledge as these are negotiated and contested by different participants, both teachers and ‘students’. Their values about writing in relation to their own professional identity and the models of writing associated with their professional field – in addition to their own disciplinary identities – all suggest a contested space for developing academic practice.
Literacy artefacts, symbolic objects and emergent identities – Lesley Gourlay (Coventry University)
This presentation will describe a ‘Preparing for Academic Practice’ CETL study into the transition experiences of new lecturers in a UK post-92 university, entering from established careers in professional or clinical practice. It will focus on their orientations towards HE literacy practices and objects, and accounts of the dominant working practices, values and ideologies of their original professional contexts. It will argue that the perceived mismatch of values between the two render scholarship and academic writing a site of intense struggle, centred not only on participation in the valorised practices of higher education, but also on fragile emergent academic identities.
Changing academic identities in changing academic workplaces: learning from academics’ everyday professional writing practices - Mary R. Lea (Open University) & Barry Stierer (University of Westminster)
In analysing interviews with university lecturers, focused on their everyday workplace writing practices, we were struck by the disjunctions between the notions of identity emerging from the analysis, and some of the conceptions of identity informing much of the available research and scholarship into academic identities. We have consequently been drawn to bodies of work that frame identity as pluralistic, context-specific and fluid, and more specifically in terms of textual practice. The presentation will consider three main themes emerging from this analysis: ‘reconstructing academic identities in a shifting academic workplace’; ‘considering new articulations of disciplinarity’; and ‘moving on from “golden age” narratives’. |
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Venue - SRHE, 44 Bedford Row, London |
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Date - Wednesday, 10/11/2010, 10.30am – 3.00pm |
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Network - Academic Practice |
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Attend - To attend this event please download details and book as appropriate |
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Archive
29th April 2010
The challenges of collaboration in the Academy |
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This seminar consisted of two presentations addressing the challenges of collaborative work, and offering strategies to make this a reality of academic life. Addressing division within the academy: A model of collaborative working for higher education, Lorraine Walsh, University of Dundee and Peter Kahn, University of Liverpool
Lorraine and Peter presented a model, detailed at length in Walsh and Kahn (2009), which was developed through a theoretical synthesis of perspectives from a body of literature and experience on collaborative working. The work draws on critical realist perspectives, including Bhaskar’s (1998) notions of stratification in social reality. The presentation focused on professional dialogue and social structures with a view to stimulating discussion around the role of collaborative working as an informed and meaningful approach in addressing the current challenges to cohesion of academic practice.
"Living on the ceiling": how and why interdisciplinarity turns everything upside down, Jason Davies, University College London
Jason’s talk gave a sketch of the dynamics specific to interdisciplinary work and evoked the way that disciplinary norms are (completely) inverted, leading to enormous difficulties in collaboration. The talk outlined ways that `the disciplined' can work together to survive in -- or even thrive in - interdisciplinary settings. |
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Living on the Ceiling Jason Davies University College London |
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Addressing division within the academy Peter Kahn, University of Liverpool, Lorraine Walsh University of Dundee |
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