Transcript A Topography of Educational Research in the UK

The Universities and ‘Education’
• Where are we?
• How did we get to be
where we are?
• Where might we/
should we be?
ESRC Demographic Review of the
Social Sciences
‘Education is the second largest discipline
under consideration and perhaps one of
the most complex. Structural, historical
and institutional factors affect all
disciplines in different ways but in
Education their impact has been quite
profound’
ESRC Demographic Review of the
Social Sciences
‘Education is the second largest discipline
under consideration and perhaps one of
the most complex. Structural, historical
and institutional factors affect all
disciplines in different ways but in
Education their impact has been quite
profound’
To begin…
• What’s a university
anyway?
• The ‘idea’ of a
university
• The contested nature
of knowledge
The universities and ‘Education’
– a fragile relationship
Individuals and institutions
Where are we now?
People
A story of second careers
People
ple People People People People People People People People P
Education – one of the largest
social sciences
Demography
Demography
Demography of UDEs
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Demography
Age
Permanent academic staff by subject and
proportion aged 50 or over
Year
1995-6
2000-1
2003-4
Total
2894
3214
3545
% over 50
35%
48%
50%
‘Education is the subject area with the largest proportion
of staff aged 50 and over (50 per cent)’ ESRC 2006
Gender
Permanent academic staff by subject and sex
Year
Total
%Female
1995-6
2894
46%
2000-1
3214
48%
2003-4
3545
56%
Education has one of the highest proportions of
female academics
Salary
2003/4
Median salary
% greater than £50,000
£35,370
4%
Education [with the exception of creative
arts] has the lowest proportion of staff on
high salaries
Nationality/ethnicity
2003/4
• Non-UK nationals 4%
Education has the lowest proportion – nearly
every other subject is in the mid teens
• Non white 4%
Education has the lowest proportion of nonwhite academics
Where
dodo
educational
Where
researchers
educationalcome
from?
researchers
come from?
Where do
educational
Where do educationalists
researchers
come from?
come from?
Shorter academic careers
‘Many academic
staff are on their
‘second career ’
making the
switch from the
teaching
profession mid
career’
Percentage of respondents
40.00
35.00
30.00
25.00
20.00
15.00
10.00
5.00
0.00
18-27
28-37
38-47
48-57
Approximate age started as a researcher
58+
ESRC (2006)
%age of academic and research
staff with PhDs
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Education
Psychology
Source HESA 2005/6
Importers and exporters
Import and export patterns within the social sciences. Field of
academic training (JACS) by fields of current employment (UoA) (HESA
2004/5)
100%
Academic studies in education
90%
Training teachers
80%
Finance
Management studies
70%
Business studies
Human & social geography
60%
Anthropology
Social work
50%
Social policy
40%
Sociology
Politics
30%
Economics
Planning (urban, rural & regional)
20%
Physical geography
Psychology
10%
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Institutions:
worlds of difference
100 university education
departments in England
The pre 1992 Sector
• The research elite
• The research
insecure
The post 1992 Sector
• Ex-polytechnics
• Ex-teachers’ colleges
– New entrepreneurs
– Teaching only
universities
Different institutional trajectories
Different ‘lived realities’ for staff and
students
Teaching
Where are we now?
What do we teach?
The pressure of instrumentalism?
Core teaching
• BEd
• PGCE
• CPD
Additional teaching
• Ed Psych, TEFL,
MSc, EdDs, PhDs
TDA insist on a market
of ‘multiple providers’
TDA defines
• Course structure
• Course content – standards
and competences
• Course inspection – Ofsted
• Course/institution league
tables
HE has no ‘essential’
contribution
cf Europe
Teaching - the balance sheet in our
main market – teacher education
Strengths
Weaknesses: The pressure of
instrumentalilsm
• Ofsted
• Students
• Recruitment
• On theory
• On research
• On topics – an over emphasis
on schools and classrooms
• On staffing
– Who is recruited
– Staff development
Research
Where are we now?
ESRC Demographic Review
‘There is much to be done to increase research capacity
in such a large discipline, and no quick-fix solutions.
Education, more so than all other disciplines, is
vulnerable to changes in policy legislations, affecting
schools and Higher Education alike.’ (p45)
Funding
Funding
Funding
Funding
Funding
Funding
Funding
Funding
Total funding: £70-75 million
• Three times more likely to be funded by
government than by research councils
• Less likely to receive funds from industry
and EU
• Very good chance of receiving charities
funding
Where does the money go?
A highly differentiated system
While there are at least
100 separate institutions
conducting educational
research, 80 per cent of
the funding from
government, charities and
Research Councils goes
to 22 institutions (OECD)
A mid range of institutions
(graded 4 or below in
2001)… with a substantial
community of research
active staff… are finding it
virtually impossible to
attract significant funding
for research’ (ESRC)
Where does the money go?
A highly differentiated system
While there are at least
100 separate institutions
conducting educational
research, 80 per cent of
the funding from
government, charities and
Research Councils goes
to 22 institutions (OECD)
A mid range of institutions
(graded 4 or below in
2001)… with a substantial
community of research
active staff… are finding it
virtually impossible to
attract significant funding
for research’ (ESRC)
Where does the money go?
A highly differentiated system
While there are at least
100 separate institutions
conducting educational
research, 80 per cent of
the funding from
government, charities and
Research Councils goes
to 22 institutions (OECD)
A mid range of institutions
(graded 4 or below in
2001)… with a substantial
community of research
active staff… are finding it
virtually impossible to
attract significant funding
for research’ (ESRC)
1996-2005 ESRC Awards
1.London IOE
2. Bristol
3. Oxford
4. Exeter
5. Edinburgh
6. London KCL
7. Sussex
8. Bath
9. Cardiff
10. Lancaster
Awards graded by income
What is good educational
research?
Differentiated in relation to:
Vulnerable to:
• Methodology – from RCTs to
action research
• Theory – from atheoretical
positivism to post modernism
• Purposes
• critique
• fashion and
• government
intervention
– policy
– applied and practice based work
– blue skies
Education: a field not a discipline
Research – the balance sheet
Strengths
Weaknesses
• Examples of
– excellent academic work
– excellent policy work
• Established institutions with
profile as good as many social
sciences
• TLRP – largest ESRC
programme ever
• 11/17th success rate in ESRC
funding
• Good profile internationally
from ISI data
• 1400 academics in grade 4 or
above departments
•
•
•
•
•
•
Success in relation to size
The recruitment base
Training opportunities
Quality of some work
Limited methodologies
Major emphasis on schools
and classrooms
• Questions not asked
• Growing separation from
other disciplines
Who is missing?
Think tanks
Who is missing?
Consultancy companies
Why are we where we are?
Higher education and ‘global
marketisation’
‘As higher education and
science became increasingly
important instruments of
national economic policy… the
relationships between higher
education and the state were
redefined. Higher education
institutions and their members
were subject to unprecedented
government steerage and
scrutiny but also had to locate
themselves and compete in
various forms of market’ (Henkel
2005)
The neo-liberal university
Coming together of
human
capital theory
+
economic rationalism
‘Driving these changes is a
redefined internal economy in
which under-funding drives a
‘pseudo-market’ in fee
incomes, soft budget
allocations for special
purposes and contested
earnings for new enrolments
and research grants’
Neo-liberal research policy
2. Harnessing research for
1. Massification of Higher
Education
– insufficient funding
– government not convinced
that research is essential
for Higher Education
teaching
– RAE – 20 years of
progressive differentiation
– 2006 – the first ‘teaching
only’ universities appear
global competitiveness
– The ‘new social contract’ for
research
– More money
– Government defined issues
and methodologies
– Increased accountability
3. Mode 2 knowledge
production
– research carried out ‘in the
context of application’ should
become the norm
Higher education funding
paradox
‘The paradox of this new openness to outside
funding and competition is a process of
‘isomorphic closure’ through which universities
with diverse histories choose from an
increasingly restricted menu of commercial
options and strategies’ (Marginson, 2007)
Alternative markets provide
positional advantage
• Non ITT undergraduate
teaching
• The international postgraduate market
But
• TDA remains
the dominant
market
Universities become
vulnerable to a highly
assertive government
Teaching and the new
professionalism
• Schools too are now part of
the national drive for
international competitiveness
• And competitive institutions in
a quasi-market
• Schooling is now too important
to be left to individual teachers
or educationalists
• The collapse of confidence in
individual professionalism –
from the Conservatives to new
Labour
Michael Apple ‘The
move towards a small
strong state that is
increasingly guided by
market needs seems
inevitably to bring with it
reduced professional
power and status’
Marilyn Cochran Smith
• The ‘ends’ question – debates
about the purposes of teaching
and learning in school is
closed
• In contrast, at the heart of
teacher education from a more
critical perspective is
continuous problematizing of
the ends question:
Many people, myself
included, have argued for
years that good teacher
education focuses on an
expansive rather than
narrow notion of practice.
Where Education
should/might be?
‘Re-tooling’ Education
‘Re-tooling’ Professional Education
Rebuilding from
below
Learning for an uncertain
world
– Technology
– Knowledge
– Society – mobility, values,
conflict
More than ever before, we need to
educate young people to think
critically about knowledge and about
values, to recognise differences in
interpretation, to develop the skills
needed to form their own judgments
in a rapidly changing world
The implications for professional
education
•
•
•
•
If those who teach are to be ‘critical educators’
then part of their own professional education
must be based on the same approach to
teaching and learning.
We also need high quality practical training
relevant to institutional and national need.
The University is a key contributor but not as
before. Complementary partnerships with
schools as institutions are essential.
This will be highly challenging to schools and
to universities.
Implications for universities
• We must maintain our commitment to ‘the
contestability of knowledge’ in all our teaching.
That means:
• Every lecturer must be a participant in a
‘scholarly culture’ – able to contribute to the
‘conversations at the forefront of their discipline’.
• Personal research as ONE key strategy for
maintaining a ‘scholarly culture’.
‘Re-tooling’ for new forms of
knowledge production
•
•
Knowledge transfer as an
essential part of university
life
Growing numbers of
institutions, including
educational institutions, that
can and do manage without
us
• The development of new Web
2.00 and social media is
pushing this process forward
at a dramatic rate
• What universities have to offer
• Education as a field has not
responded well – apart from
action research
• A not-for-profit organisation,
we work in partnership with
others to:
• incubate new ideas, taking
them from the lab to the
classroom
• share hard evidence and
practical advice to support
the design and use of
innovative learning tools
• communicate the latest
thinking and practice in
educational ICT
• provide the space for
experimentation and the
exchange of ideas between
the creative, technology and
education sectors.
• Partners
• Futurelab is a consortium
comprising some of the top
players in the software, hardware
and creative industries. Our
partnerships are diverse: we work
with individuals and large
corporations, practising teachers
and Government bodies,
academics and venture
capitalists.
• Policy - details about our key
strategic partnerships
• Industry - a list of all our industry
members and project partners
• Education research - our
academic project partners
• Education practice - a list of all the
schools involved with our R&D
work
‘Re-tooling’ for research
We need:
HODs insisting that:
•
All programmes
demonstrate a commitment
to ‘the contestability of
knowledge’
•
Research is essential for
higher education teaching
As a community
•
to get better at doing
research – across the full
range of methods now
demanded
Well resourced, privileged
institutions:
• To take responsibility for the
future of the foundation
disciplines
• In return, those in the
disciplines to maintain their
commitment to the field of
education
To broaden our research agenda
• Getting better at collaborations
Broadening our research agenda
Religion
Social equality
Social change
The economy
Poverty
Global warming
Finally
1. For good interdisciplinary work to
We must not lose sight of
take place …
what we are and what we are
not...
Two things follow:
2. Our job … teaching, research
and scholarship that puts the
contestability of knowledge at its
heart.
This is our truth and we need to
remain true to it in all that we do.
Putting the U back in UCET