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.