Getting the Skills to Pay the Bills

I’ve been thinking about skills: what skills students are supposed to acquire, why they’re supposed to have them, and how they’re supposed to get them. This is on my mind because of an article I just read from Arts & Humanities in Higher Education called 'The "Research-Teaching Nexus" and the Learning-Teaching Relationship: Who's in charge?', by Christopher Rowe and Eleanor O'Kell.

I like this piece a lot, but there was one passage near the end that disturbed me, and got me wondering about both the 'why' and 'how' of skills:

But now we need to ask the larger question: do we believe that Extended Projects and their HE analogue, dissertations, provide the kinds of skills that employers are supposed to be looking for, and that we therefore (presumably) owe it to our students to be offering them? (187).

First, the 'why' of education: is the aim of A-level and higher education really to 'provide the kinds of skills that employers are supposed to be looking for'? Personally, I don't think businesses are the ones who should dictate the profile of the ideal graduate, if only because what they will be looking for in three years is not necessarily what they want now (what traits, for example, was the Royal Bank of Scotland looking for from its future investment bankers in 2006, when this year's graduates started their degrees? Whatever they were looking for then, I hope they've changed their priorities during the course of the past year). Not only that, but a student who graduates in 2009 will probably be working until 2049 - so universities owe it to their students to take the long view, which doesn’t necessarily mean following the lead of today’s employers (think about the skills that businesses were looking for in 1969).

And now, the 'how' of education: the quote's phrasing assumes that educators can 'provide' students with 'skills', such as (to take a classic example) 'critical thinking'. But such power is not given to us: we can tell students about critical thinking, we can model it in our own practice, we can create circumstances that are conducive to it, and we can incentivise it, but we can't 'provide' it to anyone. Skills can be acquired by students, but they cannot be granted by teachers.

This might seem like a matter of semantics, but semantics often matter a great deal. Pretty much everybody talks about 'providing' skills to students (I know I've done it), so it's good to remind ourselves that it's not an act that anybody actually has the power to perform.

[Incidentally, if you want to know more about the Royal Bank of Scotland's problems, read John Lanchester's excellent article in the London Review of Books.]

Return to the Nexus

Having talked about jargon in my previous post, I'm now going to do my best to steer clear of it, and discuss current Higher Education research in such a way that anyone who works in HE (and indeed, anyone outside HE) will be able to follow what I'm talking about.

Right now, what I'm talking about is an article in the April 2009 issue of Teaching in Higher Education. It's called 'Re-conceptualising the concept of a nexus? A survey of 12 Scottish IS/IM
academics' perceptions of a nexus between teaching, research, scholarship and consultancy,' it's by Kevin Grant and Sonia J. Wakelin, and it's in Vol. 14, No. 2, April 2009 (pp. 133-146).

Before I go any further, 'IS' stands, in this article, for Information Systems, and 'IM' stands for Information Management.

Grant and Wakelin conducted 12 interview with IS/IM academics from one teaching-oriented university and one research-led university, both in Scotland. They found that for most of the interviewees, 'research-teaching' was less a nexus than a one-way street:most of the academics said their research informed their teaching, but no-one suggested that their teaching influenced their research.

They conclude by arguing that a 'process view' of the 'nexus' is more useful than a 'substantive view'. That is to say, focusing on 'process' rather than 'product' (two concepts that it is often difficult to disentangle when you're looking at academic practice).

Here's what they say about the 'substantive view':

This substantive view seems to suggest that when academics make/take gestures towards the nexus, for example, using a journal paper to teach a particular concept, then they assume that they can control and predict the impact of using that particular journal paper on the students’ learning and, indeed, on their teaching practice, a notion which may be inherently flawed (p. 141).

In place of this, they draw on Complex Adaptive Systems (CASs) to propose a model based on three parts: 'the set of considerations, the network definint the relationships between all elements and the set of outcomes or consequences of the processes' (p. 141). Here's what they suggest, on a practical level:

Academics should not try to control and ‘over plan’ for a nexus to emerge, but instead they should encourage themselves to engage with students in dialogue regarding the topic area and to use everybody’s experiences to support learning in themselves and within the class group. It is further advocated that, when seeking to create a nexus in class, academics should not focus solely on the actual products of academic processes, that is, a particular journal paper, and/or a consultancy experience. Rather, they should find ways to help students to make interconnections themselves, by giving students an insider’s view of the process of research and/or consultancy in their domain.

I think this product/process distinction is useful, and worth exploring further.

Incidentally, this article has a good literature review at the beginnig, so if you're trying to get a sense of the lay of the land in this field, you could do worse than read the first four pages.

Lost in the 'nexus'

First of all, I know that upon seeing the word 'nexus' (as in 'research-teaching nexus'), lots of people reach for the remote control (or their revolver - choose your metaphor according to the extent of your antipathy).

I think this is because it's jargon, and (at least in this instance) it's jargon associated with Higher Education policy, rather than with any particular discipline within higher education.

Now, discipline-specific jargon tends to annoy everybody outside its home-discipline, but it's no big deal because most academics are rarely forced to decipher jargon from from other peoples' disciplines because, well, it's somebody else's discipline, and if you really wanted to know what they were talking about, you would've got your degree in their field rather than yours.

But phrases like 'research-teaching nexus' concern EVERYONE in higher education, though not many people are conversant in HE jargon. Hence, it's both baffling and relevant - which is a combination that's guaranteed to raise hackles. Most people's immediate response to this sort of language is 'seeing as you're talking about what I do for a living, surely it's YOUR problem if I don't understand what you're talking about, not mine.'

Another way of putting it is that Higher Education research treats academics as practitioners rather than 'experts' (in the academic sense). And as a result, many people within academia respond to HE research the way that practitioners around the world respond to academics: with impatience and suspicion.

Co-production: useful for collecting rubbish, and for teaching!

There's an interesting article in the most recent issue Studies in Higher Education called 'The student as co-producer: learning from public administration about the student-university relationship' (Alistair McCulloch, Vol. 34, No. 2, March 2009, 171–183). McCulloch proposes that we start describing students as 'co-producers' rather than as 'consumers'. He gives a nice account of the history of the 'consumer model', and its appeal, before (rather convincingly) tearing it to shreds, drawing on McMillan and Cheney's 1996 article, 'The student as consumer: The implications and limitations of a metaphor' (Communication Education, vol. 45, No. 1, 1–15).

In place of the 'consumer model' he proposes 'co-production', which describes

a situation in which public services, which by definition involve the provision of public goods, are provided jointly by paid public sector actors with the voluntary involvement of the private actors who enjoy the output of the coproduction process (175).

Co-production was first applied to domestic waste collection (nobody pays you to wheel your bin to the curb once a week, you just do it because you benefit from 'the output of the coproduction process'). 'Curbside' rubbish collection was only introduced in the USA in the 1970s, and co-production was theorised based on this model (worryingly, one of the 'benefits' was that the city could reduce its rubbish-collection staff, but let's not dwell on that).

McCulloch plucks this concept from its unglamorous context and tries it out as a model for the student's role in higher education, leading to this rather stirring assertion:

If it is acknowledged that both teachers and students are engaged in the activity of knowledge development, dissemination and application, then the current wide gap between teaching and research begins to narrow and, for the undergraduate, learning involves explicit engagement with knowledge and the processes by which it is produced. For the university and the individual academic, it helps to bring a greater degree of consonance between, respectively, the various elements of mission and role (178).

I couldn't agree more. I'm going to stop lifting quotes from his article now, and recommend that you read it in its entirety.