Robert Ready New to Teaching Residential: Social Sciences Wrexham, 24-25 July 2012

1. Research-informed teaching:what is the relationship between research, professional/industrial experience, teaching, and the quality of the student experience? Robert Ready New to Teaching Residential: Social Sciences Wrexham, 24-25 July 2012

2. 5 reasons why the ‘research’ argument is overplayed in relation to high quality teaching • Most of the time, most of you will be teaching undergraduates: the ‘research’ angle will be interesting, yes, but by no means the key to success. • The body of established knowledge and interpretative stances is so wide and deep that it demands full and proper attention of you and your learners (even you as a teacher have significant ‘lacunae’). • Who is paying for you to do your research? Externally and explicitly funded, then that’s fine… otherwise, I just don’t see how a student funded HE system can let you take money and do that with it.

3. 5 reasons why the ‘research’ argument is overplayed in relation to high quality teaching • Too often, the researching lecturer is a distracted lecturer. Alone, at home, in the library, locked in an office, pursuing personal goals. The view is taken that students and teaching are getting in the way. • The 1992 name change didn’t remove the need for ‘polytechnic’ education. If you are funded to do research in a research-based institution, good luck to you. Otherwise, join the rest of us in preparing the next generation of creatives, skilled workers, professionals and leaders. ‘Research’ will have a small part to play in this, but we need to rebalance.

4. …and here’s another ‘counter-cultural’ view (counter to what the academic community often thinks, anyway) • If you have desire, opportunity and time to do research, then the focus for this (given the nature of your day job as a teaching academic) might well be the investigation of effective learning and teaching within your discipline. • See earlier point about ‘who pays?’. Students may well see the value of such research and be happy to pay for you to do it. In fact, they may be suspicious of an institution or a department that isn’t working to improve in this way.

5. Your turn…we are not mere teachers, we are teaching academics! • Working in groups of 4 • Resist and refute my arguments • Develop and agree a statement regarding the importance of research in university teaching and the student experience. • Working together • We will look at some statements and discuss • We will display all statements (with your permission) • We will look at the literature….

6. All rise for healey & jenkins(they won the argument years ago!) • Research-informed teaching …teaching informed by pedagogic research • Research-led teaching …learning about others' research (often transmissive) • Research-oriented teaching …learning to do research / learning research methods • Research-based (or inquiry-based) teaching …when students learn the course content as researchers

7. references The Research/Teaching Nexus can be followed up via HEA webpages: • http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/hca/themes/practice/rtnexus …including a publication from Healey and Jenkins regarding institutional strategies for linking research and teaching. The bibliographic links on the above webpage are excellent, particularly Mick Healey’s own bibliographies available via the CeAL link on the page.