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Оглавление1 The Accidental Scholar
While not the primary focus of this book, I feel it is necessary to outline my own position in relation to the investigation I undertook, and the context within which it took place. This is, in part, to acknowledge the contextualised and subjective nature of the study. As a participant as well as investigator in an ethnographic study this needs to be highlighted and recognised (Street, 1995: 51) whilst maintaining its relevance beyond the local. I also hope to provide some insights into the messy process of scholarship of learning and teaching, how it fits into the wider Higher Education landscape in the United Kingdom and to encourage other EAP practitioners who are considering or developing their own scholarship profiles.
The scholarship of learning and teaching has only recently become a focus of strategic attention, at least in the United Kingdom, in line, as I discuss later, with a greater focus on teaching as well as research excellence. This can be evidenced by the growth of centres for teaching excellence across the sector. These can take the form of either being centrally funded and cross-disciplinary or arranged around specific disciplinary concerns. For the increasing number of academic staff who are employed on teaching as opposed to research contracts engaging with this form of scholarship can be viewed as both an institutional expectation and a route to promotion. However, there can also be an assumption that those involved in the scholarship of learning and teaching in Higher Education will already know how to meet this expectation and that they have the skills required to undertake investigations that will provide insights into and enhance student education in an ethical, purposeful and rigorous manner. There is often little acknowledgement that for some, the move from disciplinary research into the scholarship of learning and teaching requires a complete epistemological shift and a different set of skills and dispositions, whilst others, employed for their professional practitioner expertise, have undergone little previous research training at all (Geertsema, 2016). For many of us, this move into scholarship is unplanned and accidental. In this chapter, I share my own rather haphazard journey into new territory in the hope that it might shed some light on the process for others who find themselves ‘accidental scholars’.
I begin this chapter by defining the scholarship of learning and teaching as distinct from (educational) research and placing it in the current context of the need to provide metrics and quantify teaching excellence in HE. This contextualisation adds explanatory power to my own personal journey, which is key to the development and trajectory of this book. I then provide an outline of how the project that is the main focus of this book developed in terms of methodology, data collection and analysis and how I worked to both theorise this process whilst working to maintain practical relevance throughout.
The Scholarship of Learning and Teaching
The Scholarship of Learning and Teaching (henceforth SoTL) movement began in the United States and its origins are widely attributed to the work of Ernst Boyer (Fanghanel et al., 2015). While SoTL remains ‘a relatively ill-defined concept’ (Fanghanel et al., 2015: 6), there are points of agreement as to what SoTL should involve. Shulman’s (2000) suggestion that scholarship should be made public and open to critique is now widely accepted and has since been built upon by Felten (2013) who suggests a 5-point framework for SoTL as ‘inquiry focussed on student learning; grounded in context; methodologically sound; conducted in partnership with students; appropriately public’. Essentially, SoTL is the ‘systematic study of teaching and learning, using established or validated criteria of scholarship, to understand how teaching (beliefs, behaviours, attitudes and values) can maximise learning, and/or develop a more accurate understanding of learning, resulting in products that are publicly shared for critique and use by an appropriate community’ (Potter & Kustra, 2011: 2). While this is the ‘norm’, it is also possible to view SoTL as going beyond this instrumentally narrow relationship to teaching and learning, where teaching is viewed as the cause, leaving an effect on students4. Here, SoTL becomes a reflexive examination of our own beliefs and practices in a way that ‘enables students’ voices and perspectives to be fully integrated into not only in problem solving scholarship but also wider educational discussions concerning ideas, theory, values and purposes’ (Ding, 2016: 15–16).
SoTL is alternatively referred to as pedagogical research and is largely seen as specific to those who work in Higher Education. It is distinct from, yet a branch of, educational research. The key differences being that educational research is conducted by those specifically research trained within the epistemological paradigms of educational research; it is often viewed as research on or about a particular area of inquiry. Those entering a SoTL ‘community of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991) do so from a wide range of disciplinary epistemologies and are required to both maintain this particular perspective and cross the ‘tribal’ boundaries of disciplines (Becher & Trowler, 2001) to develop scholarship projects that can be accepted as a worthwhile contribution to teaching and learning inquiry; it is generally viewed as being research for a specific group or community. By doing so, scholars open themselves up to the question posed by Kanuka (2011 in Fanghanel et al., 2015: 9): ‘Notwithstanding such small-scale efforts [i.e. inquiry on and for practice] may make contributions to one’s practices – but when they are made public, is this enough to be considered a scholarly contribution?’ In their SoTL Manifesto, Ding et al. (2018) argue that SoTL should be about impact, including ‘impact on people, policies and practices (assessments, concepts of syllabi and curricula, communities, community engagement, leadership, mentoring)’. By having impact beyond the individual teaching and learning context, they go on to suggest that ‘scholarship has the potential to enable language educators to actively shape their educational contexts rather than be shaped by circumstance, others and powerful ideologies and structures’ (2018: 58–59). This, I suggest, is the guiding principle of this book and should be a key guiding principle for all EAP scholarship and practice.
What counts as SoTL methods of inquiry is still an area for debate, and the lines between a pedagogical approach and a means of inquiry into teaching and learning can, at times, become blurred. SoTL is also tied in with continuous professional development, or learning (CPD/ CPL) (Geertsema, 2016). SoTL should take place within disciplinary contexts but can also be used to cross disciplinary boundaries, encourage educational development across disciplines and faculties and work to change institutional practices. Viewed in this way, that EAP practitioners should engage in SoTL seems obvious. There has been long standing consideration in language teaching research around how/whether practitioners engage in research (Borg, 2009, 2013; Hanks, 2019; Smith & Rebolledo, 2018), with a focus on Action Research, Exploratory Practice or Exploratory Action Research (for more comprehensive discussion of these areas of language practitioner research see, inter alia, Burns, 2010; Allwright & Hanks, 2009; Smith & Rebolledo, 2018, respectively) . The imperative for language teachers to do this remains unclear throughout much of this literature, other than a sense that it is desirable and could, in the case of Exploratory Practice, enhance ‘quality of life’ (Hanks, 2017). For those working as EAP practitioners in Higher Education, the imperative goes beyond this because ‘by withholding contributions to scholarship we are potentially limiting our own agency, limiting our ability to influence structural change and accepting of changes and practices defined and decided by others’ (Ding, 2016: 12). SoTL in EAP, while more ambiguous in terms of methodology, becomes an ‘attempt to shorten the gap between what is and what ought to be’ (Ding, 2016: 13), i.e. moving EAP practice from a liminal, marginal position to one with academic status and a central place within the academy.
In their review of SoTL literature for the HEA, Faghanel et al. (2015) outline the different contractual status with which people working in academic departments now find themselves. Within this, they suggest that there is an increasingly clear split between those on research focused contracts, with a requirement to submit to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and those on teaching only, or teaching and scholarship, contracts. One of the aims of SoTL is to redress the perceived imbalance in status between teaching and research in HE institutions, providing public evidence of excellence in learning and teaching and thus enabling those on teaching contracts to be rewarded and recognised in equal measure with those on more research focused contracts. This has now been extended to institutional level with the introduction of the TEF.
The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), introduced in 2016 aimed to place teaching in HE on a par with research. In the first round of TEF submissions, evidence was required at an institutional level only, with HEIs being able to create their own narrative around excellence in teaching and learning. Evidence of engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning, or pedagogical research, was a key part of many institutions’ submission. As Fanghanel et al. suggest (2015: 10):
SoTL has been utilised as:
• a means of demonstrating excellence with a view to raising the status of teaching in relation to that of research;
• a framework to evidence excellence in teaching and learning and assess teaching quality;
• a tool to develop academics and teaching practice.
In this way, SoTL is no longer only a movement of engaged practitioners moving towards evidence based teaching practices, working to legitimise, to share and go public with their investigations and do so in a rigorous and systematic manner. SoTL is now being used as evidence for individual promotion and also for evidence of institutional excellence.
There are, therefore, instrumental and external pushes for staff to engage with SoTL; UK HEIs are increasingly setting targets around how many of their teaching staff should have achieved Fellowship status through Advance HE, one requirement of which is engagement with SoTL literature and practice, and promotion criteria have been developed to encourage a route through student education and pedagogical research. Therefore, a number of academic teaching staff may find themselves being pushed into SoTL with little intrinsic motivation and understanding around how SoTL can feed into their student education practice and little sense of purpose or direction. Without this understanding, the usual considerations, particularly around ethics, that would take place when undertaking disciplinary research can sometimes be lost through a sense that SoTL is less rigorous, more personal and a part of ‘normal’ teaching practice.
The ethics of SoTL
The ethics of SoTL, as with SoTL itself, remain undefined and a somewhat grey area. By attempting to define itself as different to traditional research, and separate from Educational Research, it is tempting for scholars to proceed without the same rigorous consideration for ethics as is now required before conducting research. This is exacerbated because many SoTL projects are localised and, by definition, should be part of normal teaching and learning practices. However, as MacLean and Poole argue: ‘Teachers who act also as scholars of teaching and learning in the practice of their discipline must consider the ethics of their dual roles in situations in which their students are also their subjects of research’ (MacLean & Poole, 2010: 1).
Most exploration of the ethics of SoTL has focused on this dual role in relation to students. Martin (2013) emphasises the need to consider students as ‘human subjects’. In the same article, Martin reproduces a statement of ethics for SoTL created and presented by Gurung et al. at the 2007 ISSOTL conference in Sydney, Australia. In this they outline three major principles. These are:
• Respect for Persons: Students (the research participants) should be treated with autonomy and must be free to decide whether or not to participate in a research study unless archival data are being used or if results are not to be presented publicly.
• Beneficence: Instructors (researchers) must recognise the need to ‘maximise possible benefits and minimise possible harm’.
• Justice: Students (research participants) should be the people who most benefit from the research. It would be unethical to research a particular group in excess if that group is not the group that will benefit from the knowledge generated through the research.
(Gurung et al., 2007 in Martin, 2013: 62–63).
The British Educational Research Association (BERA) have also produced a comprehensive guidance document around the ethics of educational research (2018). While wider ranging in scope, it does also encompass more localised practitioner research, and follows similar principles of respect for all involved. However, whilst comprehensive in areas to consider and principles to follow, it works on the assumption that those engaged in this type of research are epistemologically social scientists, and that their local ethics approval committee will also be accustomed to consideration of ethics from this standpoint. As Martin (2013) points out, this is not necessarily the case for those involved in SoTL, where their Faculty ethics committee may be more accustomed to consideration of, for example, medical ethical research principles.
Within SoTL and BERA’s guidance, the main focus for potential benefit and harm is on the students as research participants. However, once a project extends beyond the researcher’s own classroom, it is also necessary to pay attention to the potential benefit and harm to colleagues and an institution. As a colleague, it is important to consider the impact different relationships might have on the data gathered, and that comments from peer participants may be more unguarded than with an unknown researcher. In addressing an issue that is potentially problematic for many colleagues, a SoTL project is likely to result in some data that is difficult to report whilst remaining collegial and supportive. Here, I would argue, it is necessary to carefully follow the second of BERA’s principles, that a researcher ‘should respect the privacy, autonomy, diversity, values and dignity of individuals, groups and communities’ (BERA, 2018: 4).
Most importantly, the ethical goal of any SoTL project, as with any other form of research, is ‘to maximise benefit and minimise harm’ for all involved. Within my own project, I always strove to work towards these principles. All participants were volunteers and were fully informed of the aims and purpose of the project. Written consent was obtained for use of all non-public documents (for example student work; class materials and assessments) as well as for the use of interview transcripts. On occasion, participants asked for certain comments to be ‘off the record’; this request has been respected at all times. Finally, the interactions I had with participants were approached as opportunities for benefit to all, maintaining a sense of investigator-participant reciprocity.
There were multiple occasions, however, when I needed to wrestle with my conscience and question where my own ethics lay. It quickly became clear that my investigation was not benign; that there were a range of tensions and emotions at play. There were conflicts around whether my actions might harm students in protecting staff or vice versa. I hope I have navigated these tensions with sensitivity and given a representative voice to competing perspectives without causing undue harm in the process.
My journey into scholarship
I have provided this background context to situate myself within the wider UK higher education landscape. As an EAP practitioner, ‘operating on the edge of academia’ (Ding & Bruce, 2017), there is no one clear route into ‘the academy’, and scholarship or practitioner research, at least in terms of going public, has not ranked highly in the commitments of most practitioners to date. Reasons for this are myriad, but largely connected to teaching workload; qualifications; precarity and structural conditions (see Ding & Bruce, 2017; Hadley, 2015 for further discussion).
My own route into scholarship perhaps exemplifies this position, and maps onto the changing landscape of UK HE in terms of measures of teaching and excellence as outlined above.
I became an EAP practitioner in 2000, during the first real boom phase in international student recruitment to UK HEIs. I was recruited because of my qualifications and experience as an English language teacher, having worked for a number of years in private language schools in a variety of countries. These qualifications are typical of those requested for entry into teaching EAP – a Diploma in English Language Teaching (DELTA) – with little or no focus on EAP specifically. I was initially employed on an hourly paid contract. In order to qualify for a more permanent position, I studied for a post-graduate degree in language teaching. However, there was, and remains, no requirement to demonstrate expertise or understanding of EAP specifically. There is an assumption that this is something that is developed ‘on the job’ (see Ding & Campion, 2016; Campion, 2016).
Beyond completion of my Masters degree, my scholarship was desk based in terms of reading the research of others around the teaching and learning of EAP, and then attempting to apply this research to my own classroom practice. As my Centre grew in size, I was asked to take on programme leadership responsibilities, so was able to expand my understanding of EAP beyond my own classroom. From there I also developed an interest in supporting others in their own professional learning. Other than a few presentations at one-day conferences, the impact of my scholarship was internal and was largely entered into in order to prevent a personal feeling of becoming stale and stuck in the cycle of four-term, year-round teaching (Bond, 2017a).
In general, then, my journey into scholarship is the result of volunteering to take up new opportunities in order to prevent boredom, but without expecting to be successful. It is, in fact, one of constant surprise and of permanent imposter syndrome – of not feeling I was worthy or intellectually capable of being accepted or taken seriously within an academic context. This is both personal but also structural – as an EAP practitioner, there is very little precedence for being accepted by the wider academy. In fact, the mythology around not being able to gain access is close to doctrine. As John Swales wrote recently:
Of course, we rarely have the time and the opportunity to be true ethnographers of researchers, disciplines or departments; perhaps the only people in our field with that kind of luxury would be those engaging in doctoral-level research or those fortunate enough to have generous sabbatical leave arrangements. (Swales, 2019: 11)
The suggestion here being that this is true of almost nobody in the field.
It was therefore by accident rather than design that I found myself in a position of being afforded the luxury described by Swales. The project within this book is the result of applying for the first round of fellowship support within the newly established Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence. The most difficult question in the interview was ‘how will doing this project impact on the next five years of your career?’ This was almost impossible to answer as there was no parallel to measure against. By applying to take on this project, I found myself placed in the position of being an ‘accidental scholar’ with no real research training within any epistemological or ontological paradigm and, as an EAP practitioner, no real firmly agreed knowledge base upon which to build my project. The accidental nature of my scholarship is important to bear in mind as it defined, indeed dictated, the exploratory nature of the process I engaged in. It also explains the lack of one clear theory within which my work is located. Rather I became magpie like, borrowing theories from the disciplines I had contact with and through the discussions I had with students and colleagues, selecting when I felt resonance. My work was, and remains, incredibly ‘messy’ (Law, 2004). However, over time, I have begun to see my understanding as fitting broadly within a Critical Realist paradigm where there are no specific methods and the philosophy of which ‘justifies methodological pluralism’ (Porpora, 2015: 64). Both Critical Realism, SoTL and the broadly ethnographic approach I took demand that the reality of a local context is studied and that a voice is given to the participants involved. SoTL is generally understood as localised learning, aimed at development within that context. However, it is also a social movement aimed at transforming higher education when individuals talk about new things in new ways and others pay attention and learn from these stories, applying whatever they find as relevant to their own contexts.
The Project
Given my very clear identity as an EAP teacher and latterly scholar, as opposed to researcher, I preferred to frame my questions as ‘project’ questions rather than research questions. This connected to my sense that the investigation was one of reflexive, exploratory praxis. I was not aiming to find answers or solutions to problems, but rather to ‘work towards understanding’ (Allwright & Hanks, 2009) that would enhance my own student education practice. I began with the belief that this understanding may or may not lead to concrete recommendations beyond my own specific teaching context; if it did, the project would develop into a form of Action Research (Kemmis & Smith, 2008; Kemmis, 2009), where the impact of the recommendations would then need to be assessed and scrutinised. Whatever the outcome, it would undoubtedly lead to more questions.
However, working within a newly established centre for teaching excellence, as one of its first Fellows, I was also working within certain expectations and under a spotlight of institutional scrutiny. Whatever my own limited expectations of my work, the institutional ones were that I should feed into developments around institutional teaching practice and policy, make recommendations and suggest changes. SoTL is, after all, about impact. This institutional push felt, at times, to come too early and I was persuaded to go public via blogs and online videos before I felt I had something concrete to contribute. This external push did, however, also force me to formulate ideas where I might otherwise have procrastinated.
One such push was the need to succinctly explain the purpose of my project to others very early in the process. I initially outlined it as: ‘understanding the significant roles language plays in shaping discipline specific knowledge and understanding’. The specific ‘research’ question then became: How do taught post graduate tutors and students experience the intersection of language and disciplinary knowledge communication. What impact does this have on their identity?
However, underlying this question were layers of other complex, inter-related questions that all impacted on my approach to the investigation as it developed. These included:
• Why do I need to understand this?
• Who else needs to understand the role language plays?
• How much more do I and these ‘else’ need to understand than is already known?
• How do ‘we’ currently understand the role language plays?
• How significant do we believe language is in shaping our disciplinary knowledge?
• What (kind of) language do we think is significant within our discipline?
• Do we think about language at all?
• Is language considered within teaching and learning practices?
• What does our understanding of language and a discipline say about the way the discipline is taught and learned (and assessed)?
• Is there consensus of understanding around the role of language: across disciplines; between teachers and students; between EAP teachers and content teachers? If not, is consensus necessary? If necessary, how can it be reached?
• What is the role of the student, the content teacher and the EAP teacher in developing an understanding of the discipline and its language?
• What do we mean by language?
Each one of these is in itself a complex question that continues to be debated in the field of applied linguistics and EAP. Language competencies alone are ‘complex, dynamic and holistic’ (The Douglas Fir Group, 2016: 26). I do not, then, attempt to provide comprehensive answers to any of these questions in isolation; rather it is necessary to highlight that a focused question created for one SoTL project does not emerge in isolation to others. The Douglas Fir Group have provided a useful framework that demonstrates the ‘multifaceted nature of language learning and teaching’ (2016: 24). If we are truly working to understand a real situation, we cannot construct a true picture if this complexity of intersecting issues is not considered.
Methodological Approach
As an ‘accidental scholar’ the theoretical and methodological influences on my thinking expanded as the project progressed. The aim was not to find a fit within a specific research paradigm or to find a disciplinary home. As an EAP practitioner it is necessary to have knowledge of wider academic communities in order to act as a bridge or an opener of thresholds for our students. As a practitioner it is necessary to know enough; engagement in scholarship forces a widening and deepening of your understanding and requires you to draw on this as you develop your thinking around practice. This is particularly the case when you make your work public and are required to conform to the social and cultural norms of academic knowledge communication. Throughout the process the sense that I was engaged in scholarship for practice and for practitioners and students, rather than research about practice remained at the forefront of my approach. The question ‘How useful is (this) theory for practice?’ was a constant, and frameworks or theoretical perspectives were chosen for their explanatory power in relation to practice within that context and time, rather than to provide theorised positions. This results in what could be viewed as a rather motley collection of theories, frameworks, perspectives and approaches.
First and foremost, it is important to recognise the influence I, as investigator, had in the collection of, as well as interpretation of, data. Working within the practitioner research paradigm, my approach was heavily influenced by Exploratory Practice (Allwright & Hanks, 2009) as this is where my journey into scholarship began (Hanks, 2015; Bond, 2017a, 2017b). I was not aiming to find clear answers to the questions I was asking, but simply to better understand the situation. I was working towards an understanding based on the principles of quality of life and collaboration that have been developed by Exploratory Practice research (Allright & Hanks, 2009; Hanks, 2017). As the principle investigator in this project, but also as a participant, the understandings I reached were intended to have a direct impact on my own student education practices as well as (hopefully) those of others. In fact, I viewed the heightening of awareness and the consequent co-construction of knowledge through the interaction between the researcher and interviewee (Guba & Lincoln, 1994) as one of the first means of having impact on the educational practices of my institution through this scholarship project. In this way I hoped to fulfil the SoTL requirement around the ‘dissemination of analyses of practice to inform others and developing intellectual communities and resource commons’ (original bold script; Fanghanel et al., 2015: 7).
As an investigation born out of practice and practice-based questions, the methodology used also emerged from this practice. It was by necessity rather than intentional design, ethnographical. As Swales has recently argued for EAP in general: ‘We can and should aim for an insider “emic” approach, even if we cannot always achieve it, because the effort involved in trying to become something of an insider will often produce pedagogical and educational benefits’ (Swales, 2019: 11). I was already deeply immersed in the context and institution under investigation and taking an ethnographic approach allowed me to recognise the intersubjective nature of the project I was undertaking. Ethnography, as ‘participant observation’, ‘involving detailed descriptions of small groups and of their social and cultural patterns’ (Street, 1995: 51) acknowledges my status as both investigator and participant. Academic Literacies (Lea & Street, 1998) provides a theoretical framework for ethnographic studies around language and literacies development, use and power and is also one of the knowledge bases that EAP draws on (Ding & Bruce, 2017). I therefore followed an Academic Literacies approach to data collection, which included observations of classroom interaction and analysis of student writing, as well as paying attention to the lives and roles of students and teachers outside the classroom. In this way, I built a detailed understanding of, and acknowledged the interaction between, classroom practice and the wider academy, and the role each plays in staff and students’ academic, social and cultural experiences as each of these areas themselves impact on the others, adding to or detracting from the power of individuals and groups.
My approach also drew from other methodological constructs and theoretical perspectives. I draw parallels between the Academic Literacies concept of there being three ‘levels’ of approach to literacy development in Higher Education (skills development; socialisation and transformation) and the outlined phases of Threshold Concepts (Pre-threshold; liminal and over the Threshold, Meyer & Land, 2003). However, the overarching theoretical perspective I took was one of Critical and Social Realism, following Margaret Archer (1995), who argues that it is necessary to focus on the interplay between structure, culture and agency or between the individual and collective. This Critical Realist lens allows for a distinction to be made between what is observable and what is real; it accepts that all understanding is subjective. Archer emphasises the importance of temporality and argues strongly that society does not converge with the individual, or vice versa. Rather there is an interplay between a pre-existing structure and an agential self. She positions this as also developing through three distinct (although unpredictable and changeable) phases from structural conditioning to sociocultural interaction finally to structural elaboration. In this way a society or institution, although pre-existing, is formed and re-formed as a result of the individuals, roles, collectives who make up the human nature of that society. In this way it is important to study both the agential actors and the culture and society of which they are a part, building a picture and understanding from the interplay that takes place. This perspective also lends itself to an ethnographic case study approach (Porpora, 2015) as well as an Exploratory Practice paradigm where researchers work to understand rather than definitively answer.
I wanted to develop a detailed picture of education practices and linguistic understandings within different sites, with a different disciplinary focus and a different student population/cohort mix. I hoped to consider the significant differences in experience across sites as well as the similarities (Silverman, 2000). As ‘using a case study provided a systematic way of examining language, identity and power’ (Feagin et al., 1991 in Sterzuk, 2015: 57), my ethnographical investigation developed into a multiple Case Study approach. Aimed at retaining ‘the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events’ (Yin, 1994: 3) and allowing for a number of different sources and methods of collection to create a ‘thickness’ (Geertz, 1973) to the data, three sites within the larger institution being researched formed part of the project investigation. Within each of these Case Studies, the collection of data took on slightly different forms depending on circumstances (Yin, 1994). As with most ethnographic case studies, although the data collected can be categorised as qualitative rather than quantitative, there was not one specific form of data collected. Rather, I acted as curator of a collection of documents and conversations which could be seen to relate in some way to the focus of the project, noting comments and thoughts in a journal as the project progressed.
What ultimately developed from this rather messy, emergent research design was data that provides both individual narratives of a moment in time and around a specific experience and then a layered, deep, often contradictory and complex picture of an institution in flux as it interacts with different agents.
Project Design and Data Collection
As the methodological approach to the project being reported in this book was emergent and reflexive, crossing boundaries as my understanding of the issues and questions being investigated developed, the project design needed to reflect this exploratory approach. SoTL also requires that I acknowledge my disciplinary epistemologies. As an EAP and language teacher, my overall perspective of the University is subjective (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). The perspective taken is of the entire University as a language classroom; a site of linguistic struggle, in both its literal and theoretical senses. This struggle is enacted within and through content knowledge, educational cultures and individual and collective identities, all of which directly impact on teaching and learning. All forms of communication involve language (if viewed in multimodal terms) in some form; understanding how language creates and develops knowledge and thought within a discipline is essential to the work of a University, and therefore the work of all those teaching in it. The main focus of this project is to consider how this language is used to express and connect ideas and how those working in the University engage with and understand its power.
Given this perspective, it was important to collect data that included all involved in the teaching and learning process – both EAP teachers, other teaching staff and students. It was also important to look at the influence of interactions and experiences that took place both inside and outside the traditional learning spaces, so across the entire TPG curriculum. The curriculum in this project being conceived as in its widest sense as ‘the interplay of all those involved’ in Higher Education and as a ‘cultural imperative’ (Barnett & Coate, 2005: 159).
The collection of data, then, took place across the three separate Case Study sites within my own institution. One of these was the EAP teaching unit, the other was an Arts, Humanities and Cultures (AHC) School and the other a Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) School. This allowed for comparison across disciplines and for consideration of any (dis)connections between those whose primary role is to focus on language (the EAP unit); those who are concerned with content knowledge; and those (the students) who find themselves grappling with both simultaneously. The experiences and thoughts of both student and teacher were included, the aim being to create a sense of where and if overlap occurred.
The collection of data ran over a period of 10 months, from May 2016 through to March 2017.
Interviews and focus groups
The interviews and focus groups with teachers were all semi-structured and were built around a similar set of questions. The questions were designed to develop an understanding of how the teachers approached teaching at TPG level specifically, and how they viewed it as different to teaching at undergraduate level, before moving on to consider how they felt language had an impact on their disciplinary content teaching and assessment practices. I also asked them to consider any differences they perceived in their approach to international and home students and asked them what, if any, training they felt was necessary to support teachers when working with increasingly diverse groups of students.
EAP teachers were asked similar questions. The focus on content and language was reversed, asking how teaching EAP with a focus on disciplinary content impacted their language teaching.
Similar questions were used for individual interview and focus groups for the students, asking why they had chosen to study their TPG programme, what the differences were between their undergraduate programme and their post-graduate programme, and if they felt that language had any impact on their ability to understand and study on their programme. Questions also covered understandings around assessment practices, and what support they received and would like to receive from the University.
The student Focus Groups were re-interviewed on three occasions over the 10-month period. The structure of these interviews became looser throughout. The opening request ‘Tell me how things are going’, with guidance to think about their language use was usually enough. Having this more longitudinal element to the data collection, with multiple points of data generation, allowed comparison across the different data sets (Cohen et al., 2007). Importantly, it provided insight into the development and change in the students’ understanding of and approach to language, learning and content communication over time and across two sites, as these students initially began their time at university as EAP students before moving into their academic School.
Observations
By allowing direct access to events and interactions (Simpson & Tuson, 2003), observations allowed me to look directly at the interaction between language and content as it played out in the different learning environments of each of the three Case Study sites, rather than relying only on second-hand recounts (Cohen et al., 2007). As the intended focus of the observations was the language/content interplay, I chose to use the usual observation form used for peer and evaluative observations of EAP teaching within the EAP unit. I chose this form because of my own familiarity with it, but also because it guides the observer to direct their focus on academic language and discourse. However, whilst fit for purpose in an EAP classroom, and useable in more discursive seminars, I found this format unusable in a practical or lecture session. Here the pedagogy and approach were different, rendering many of the observation questions irrelevant. In these sessions, other than noting down the arrangement of the room, I wrote my own field notes as a train of events, with some verbatim interactions. Much of the final product tended to be lists of vocabulary that were either totally unfamiliar to me as a non-disciplinary expert, or that I felt would not be taught with that particular orientation of meaning in a general EAP or language classroom. This in itself provided useful insight into the disconnect between a students’ likely previous English language learning experiences and their real disciplinary experience of language in use.
Field notes and informal discussion
Here I distinguish between the notes taken in the more unnatural, and therefore more formal, situation of classroom observations where, however familiar the context, I was always an ‘outsider’, and the messier and more personal notes taken after critical incidents, to enable the development of thought processes or as an aide memoire.
The majority of my field notes were taken during the period leading up to, during and directly after the summer EAP pre-sessional programme that took place during the period of data collection. This was when I was most directly involved as a participant as well as an observer. Immersed as I was in interactions that directly addressed the questions I was hoping to explore, the daily interactions with students and teachers all held potential meaning. Taking notes enabled me as much as possible to view events and conversations from a different perspective, making the familiar strange and allowing myself to create the critical distance needed to begin to view the data as an outsider.
Beyond the summer, the notes taken became more erratic, and centred on critical incidents or more personal thoughts as I reviewed data previously collected.
My notes were generally divided between a detailed description of the conversation or event, with a column for my own thoughts and interpretations, allowing me to work to distinguish between the two.
Other documentation
This documentation is more difficult to quantify. It is also not as clearly visible in the emerging themes of the project. However, the information collected through these documents served to add ‘thickness’ to the analysis, as they served to support or deny themes arising from other sources. I made use of formal records of meetings in connection to teaching and student education, for example Student–Staff Forum minutes, weekly staff meeting minutes as well as less formal documents such as personal emails. Under this category, I also include public documentation such as website pages; student facing Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) documents as well as student assessed writing, feedback and other learning and teaching materials
Data Analysis
The data collection process was not structured in phases and relied on having open access to the Schools and participants. This access was less available in one (the STEM) site than in the other two, so analysis and the conclusions drawn here need to be viewed more cautiously.
The initial and main focus for analysis was the transcripts and notes from interviews and focus groups. It is hoped that the depth of information collected overall counterbalances, to some extent, the potential for a skewing of the data provided by participants who may or may not have had their own agenda in volunteering to participate. There were a few moments during interview when a subject requested what they said to be ‘off the record’; this suggests that there was a genuine openness and willingness to provide honest responses to the questions posed throughout, but with a clear sense of the audience the research was likely to reach.
A good deal of reflexivity is required on the part of the investigator in order to find themes and develop an understanding of what the data collected can reveal about how those involved in teaching and learning understand the role language plays in their lives without asserting my own pre-conceived or previous-experience-based assumptions. The framework used for analysis was emergent, building on the usual models for ethnographic and case study research of allowing themes to emerge from the data through repeated reading, scrutiny and annotation. I initially attempted to use a template analysis (King, 2004). As the focus of the project was on teaching and learning, and also EAP I created a template that attempted to overlap the HEA’s UKPSF (2011) with the BALEAP TEAP Competencies (2014), both of which outline professional competencies for teaching in HE, including required values, knowledge and areas of activity. This template clearly would not work for data provided by students, so for this I looked at the ‘graduate attributes’ as outlined by my institution and attempted to map threads onto this. However, working with multiple templates prevented any consideration of where teachers and learners intersected and shared experiences and I found I was trying to force threads into the template where they didn’t really fit. This process was not wasted time though as the notes I made highlighted other more visible themes arising inductively from the data in the manner similar to that suggested by grounded theorists (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). I was strongly influenced by Academic Literacies as a theoretical framework (Lea & Street, 1998; Street, 1995) as threads that focused on socialisation, induction and resistance emerged. While the focus for analysis remained connected to language use, it became impossible to ignore data that gathered together quite strongly around other more socio-political, cultural and institutional issues relating to teaching and learning at TPG level. It is here that I found I needed to move beyond an EAP knowledge base and explore wider sociological concepts. Thus, different thematic layers become visible. Crucially, the dynamic interplay of the different elements of the HE context emerged as having a human impact on individuals in terms of their identity, sense of agency, sense of trust in their institutions and its structures and processes, and on their concept of time and time availability. Here again, I believe there is strong resonance with the experiences of others in other institutions, not only in the United Kingdom but across the globe.
Contexts
The institution
The research that forms the basis of this book took place in one UK Higher Education institution. The institution is a Russell Group University, so is research intensive and traditionally has been heavily research focused. It also positions itself as striving for excellence in student education, and as placing equal value on this as on research. Mid-way through the data collection period of this project, the University received a ‘Gold’ award in the first iteration of the TEF in 2017.
The University is large and diverse, with around 38,000 students studying across five different Faculties. More than 7000 of these students are classed as international. The majority of these international students study at TPG level.
The three specific sites chosen for the case studies were chosen to reflect some of the diversity that exists in provision, approach and student population across the institution.
The site of Case Study 1
Site one was the EAP teaching unit. This is a teaching unit; the academic members of staff are on teaching and scholarship contracts, with no remit around research and no requirement to submit to the REF (Research Excellence Framework). It is, however, structurally a part of a larger academic School rather than being housed in a service unit, thus teaching staff are on ‘academic’ pathway contracts rather than academic related or professional/managerial.
In comparison to similar units in other HEIs, this EAP unit is large, employing around 60 full-time teachers year round and recruiting between 60 and 100 extra teachers for the summer pre-sessional teaching period. Teaching takes place over the whole year; for most this is divided into four 10-week terms although some teaching is also semester based. Most (but not all) of the teaching undertaken by the unit is either on presessional programmes that run throughout the academic year as well as in the summer, or on insessional programmes, where students already on their programme of academic study are provided with extra language development classes. All of the students taught by staff from this unit are from outside the United Kingdom and have English as an additional language (EAL)5. The summer is the busiest period of the year; in the summer of 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 the unit taught 1030, 1188, 1959 and 2500 students respectively.
During the early period of data collection for this project, the unit was developing and then delivering a new suite of summer pre-sessional programmes that moved teaching away from English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) where students studied together regardless of disciplinary interest towards a range of English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP), where different programmes were developed in collaboration with academic Schools in order to better prepare students for their future disciplinary language and discourse. Most of the student participant volunteers were recruited from two of these disciplinefocused pre-sessionals.
The site of Case Study 2
Site two was the AHC School. As with most Schools in this kind of institution, academics who work in this School are on a range of contracts, some who are focused only on research, some with the requirement to conduct research as well as teach, others on teaching and scholarship contracts.
For the purposes of this study, it is important to note that at the time of the investigation the School ran eight separate TPG programmes which had grown rapidly in size over the previous four to five years, largely due to an increase in the number of international student enrolments. In 2016/17 there were 332 students enrolled on its 8 TPG programmes; 46 of these were from the United Kingdom; 15 from the European Union and 271 International, with 180 from mainland China, Taiwan (3) or Hong Kong (2). Thus, it is clear that the vast majority of students studying in this School at TPG were not only ‘international’ but more specifically were Chinese.
Prior to the study, this School had worked to develop close links with the EAP teaching unit. It had identified language ‘proficiency’ as an issue amongst their cohort of international students and had created clear routes for language development support through the EAP unit. In fact, one of the new summer pre-sessional programmes was designed specifically for students entering this School.
Analysis of the School’s external-facing website suggests high levels of focus on student education. Text describes the various programmes on offer and celebrates the successes of past students, highlighting employability as a key focus of the School’s curriculum. When research is mentioned, it is in tandem with, and fore fronted by teaching: ‘with teaching and research strengths …’. The website also highlights both University and School world rankings – something that is key to many international students’ decision-making processes when choosing their place of study.
In summary then, this School was clearly focused on student education, and invested both time and resources in supporting this.
The School also had an international outlook; it worked to recruit and relied heavily on international students to populate its TPG programmes yet had also raised concerns about the language needs of these students prior to the study taking place.
The site of Case Study 3
Site three was also an academic School, this time based in a STEM Faculty. Again, the academics working within this School are on a range of contracts, with greater and lesser emphasis on teaching or research.
At the time of the study, there were 5 TPG programmes within this School/Faculty. Although each had its own clear identity, there appeared to be a large amount of cross over in module choice between the different programmes, so students worked together across the programmes as well as within. In the academic year 2016/17, 42 students studied at TPG level in the School. Of these, 24 were from the United Kingdom (with 3 from Northern or the Republic of Ireland; 4 from the European Union (excluding the Republic of Ireland), 14 were international from 11 different countries. In comparison to Site 2, then, in this School, at TPG level, the cohort was far more mixed, with around 1/3 of the students being international, and no language group other than English being dominant amongst the cohort. Its international student recruitment was not as extensive or as homogenous as that of Case Study Site 2, all of which may explain why no concerns had been raised about the language needs of its cohort in general.
Unlike Case Study 2, this School did not have strong links with the EAP teaching unit. Although a small number of its prospective students did take a pre-sessional programme, there was no clear focus within the EAP programming on the disciplinary needs of students entering this School and no formal collaboration between the two units.
The external-facing website for this School was, in contrast to Site 2, heavily focused on research. A form of the word ‘research’ was used 17 times on the home page, and the only mention of education was closely linked to research: ‘our research drives the educational programmes we deliver …’. This suggests a School with a more traditional Russell Group University focus, where research is key and viewed as the main driver for excellence. The suggestion is that students would be attracted to study in the school because of its research record rather than a focus on teaching and learning.
Participants
I have chosen to de-personalise the participants and use a code rather than pseudonym for all but two. This removes identifiable features such as gender or ethnicity that name choices can suggest, and that can in themselves lead readers to make assumptions around individual reasons for the comments being reported. When I feel it is important for understanding, I do identify a student as ‘home’ (to indicate they were from the United Kingdom and had English as their dominant, if not only, language) or ‘international’/EAL. Whilst these sites of learning are clearly made up of the individuals who work and study within them, this manuscript aims to understand where language and content knowledge intersect within different sites of learning, and not to highlight the individuals themselves. The individual experiences and attitudes reported combine within one site to create the culture of learning that exists there.
However, at the same time, I also believe that something can be learned from the narrative of an individual, and that the experience of one student can provide important lessons. I have therefore chosen to highlight two particular students – Mai and Lin – one from each of the two disciplinary sites. I reconstruct a narrative around their individual experiences and use these narratives as a thread throughout the rest of the text to highlight key themes. In this way, I hope to demonstrate how an institution and the individuals who make up the institution can interact and have impact one on the other.
Who are the students?
In Chapter 1, I problematised and defined the term ‘international’ student for the purposes of this text. The understandings I am aiming to reach here around language and content knowledge relate most obviously and directly to these students, who are all studying through English as an additional language. These are also the students with whom I am directly concerned in my normal teaching practices. However, as part of the investigation, I also wanted to question this assumption. The Academic Literacies field of research is primarily concerned with students from non-traditional backgrounds who enter Higher Education through widening participation routes. Researchers in this field argue that the language of academic study is equally as occluded for these students as it is for EAL students (Ivanic, 1998; Lea & Street, 1998). I therefore wondered if and when language was perceived as a barrier by students in general as well as international students in particular.
I recruited student participants via a number of channels. The first channel was by visiting the classrooms of the cohort of students on the summer pre-sessional directly connected to Case Study site two. I did this early on in the teaching period and, through a verbal and written explanation of the project to each group of students, I received written consent from 155 out of a total cohort of 160 students to observe their classes and use their assessment pieces as part of my data collection.
Table 1 Coding for students
Towards the end of the teaching session, I then sent out an email to the whole cohort via their VLE asking for volunteers to meet me, either as a focus group or as an individual, explaining that I hoped to meet with them throughout the year that they were on their TPG programme. In response to this request, three groups of students and one individual (Lin) volunteered to take part in the project.
I recruited two further individual student participants from this site via a verbal and minuted request at a Student–Staff forum I attended and after a conversation at the end of an on-site seminar observation I undertook.
The student participants from site 3 were not as accessible. In this site, my attention was focused far more specifically on the experience of one student (Mai). Access was gained after a request for help with language was sent to the EAP teaching unit via her personal tutor. Other students volunteered to be interviewed individually in response to an email request for participants which was sent out by the Schools Student Education Support Officer.
Overall, therefore, the student participants from sites one and two were coded as in Table 1.
Here, I have detailed the individual participants who directly consented and provided interview and written data for the project. However, I would also like to acknowledge here the many other students who have indirectly contributed to my work, particularly those who have consented for me to observe and use their writing. Although I do not directly refer to their work here, I did consider it and it added depth to my understanding of the experience of developing post-graduate academic content knowledge through an additional language.
Who are the teachers?
As with the students, this project is concerned with the work of all
University staff. Again, the concern here is the label used to describe us. There are many ways of distinguishing between the various roles we occupy, many of which denote some form of hierarchical status or leadership role. Many of these titles are also highly culturally bound, not only within UK HE, but more specifically within a particular University and do not immediately or directly translate to other institutions. This is particularly pertinent within roles which are centred on student education. For example, within the field of EAP, there has been some discussion (BALEAP JISCmail.ac.uk 03/2017) around the names used to identify with the profession, from Language Teacher, Lecturer in Applied Linguistics to EAP Practitioner, with many expressing a desire to distance themselves from ‘lecturers’ (because, naively, we do not ‘lecture’) and a tendency to label ourselves as ‘other’ than academics within a discipline.
However, although the names we choose for ourselves speak clearly about our own identity and position within the academy, most of these titles are also meaningless to, and possibly ignored by, our students6.
What is important to our students in the context of this project is our role as teacher and how we contribute to their education. This is true regardless of the position we hold. Therefore, throughout this book, I will use the term ‘teacher’ to denote all involved in the education of students, regardless of status in the academic hierarchy. I will distinguish between the type of teaching undertaken by separating ‘content teaching’ (of a particular discipline or field) from ‘EAP teaching7, but when this separation is not relevant, the blanket label of ‘teacher’ will be used to encompass the interactions that any staff member might have with a student that involves learning taking place – including learning development and student support around, for example, careers advice and personal tutoring.
Within Case Study site one, the EAP teaching participants were all involved in teaching those students who were intending to, or already were, studying in Case Study site two. This included those responsible for the development and leadership of the summer pre-sessional programme as well as twelve of the thirteen teachers who taught on it; I met 11 as a group (LC3 – LC11) and another individually (LC1). I also met the six teachers who taught students in this School on the insessional programme as a focus group (LC1; LC2; LC9; LC12 and LC13), speaking to the programme leader both within the group and individually.
Via an email request, I received written consent to interview each of the programme leaders of the eight TPG programmes in site two individually as well as members of the School leadership team. One of these interviews took place via email, the rest being face to face and recorded. I also observed classes given by three of these teachers. These participants were coded from M1 to M11.
In site three, I observed three different teachers, and was able to interview one of these, as well as another senior member of staff. I also took part in meetings that involved one of the programme leaders and student support staff. I chose to code these as S1 through to S5.
As with the student participants, although the bulk of the data used for analysis was provided by the individuals listed here, the field notes I took throughout the investigation included commentary and observations based on interactions with a wider range of staff across the three sites as well as the wider institution. The intention of the project was not to highlight the experiences, approach and attitudes of individuals but to aim to create a nuanced picture of the ‘norm circles’ developed within each Case Study, where a norm circle ‘consists of a group of people who are committed to endorsing and enforcing a particular norm’ and they have ‘the causal power to produce a tendency in individuals to follow standardised practices’ (Elder-Vass, 2012 in Ding, 2016: 12). This is only possible to do by drawing from a range of data sources.
Chapter Summary and Practical Lessons Learned for SoTL
In this chapter I have provided an overview of the external influences on the development of this book, ones that are influencing Higher Education globally. This includes the movement towards evidence informed teaching and learning in Higher Education through scholarship. I considered the ethical implications of engaging in any SoTL project, and how this might impact both positively and negatively on both student and teacher participants as well as the wider institution. I also connected SoTL to the metrics involved in measuring teaching excellence and suggested that this can act as a push for institutions to support those who wish to engage with scholarship more formally, but also highlighted that with this push comes the need for specific support around developing expertise in SoTL methods and processes – giving my own case as an example.
The second half of the chapter then provided details of the scholarship project itself, positioning the researcher within the project, outlining the methodology, data collection and analysis methods as well as providing descriptions of the different sites of study and the participants involved. I end with key points of learning that can be taken from this chapter, and questions that readers, particularly EAP practitioners, might wish to consider for their own scholarship projects.
• You are investigating your own practice, much of which is likely to have developed through experience. You are therefore likely to experience a personal resistance to theory and theorising around your practice. My own approach was to be a magpie; to use a range of theories to explain different phenomena. It is necessary to engage with theory, but it is possible to begin with practice and look outward rather than to fix on a theoretical framework from the outset.
• SoTL itself is still under-defined and unclear. Use this to your advantage. Be part of the definition.
• Work on questions that are relevant to you, for the benefit of your context and your students.
• Collaborate. Draw on the expertise of others. If you have identified an issue that resonates with you, you will be amazed at the buy in you get from others.
• EAP teachers (and others) who often have a lower status within HEIs can, through SoTL and collaborations, make it clear that you have something to offer that others are not able to provide. It is, as Ding and Bruce (2017) have already argued, through SoTL that you are able to find your own academic authority and become a central part of a university’s endeavour to improve student education.
• SoTL is an investment and commitment, and therefore requires investment and commitment on a personal level (as well as preferably from an institution). It is personal and the commitment is therefore emotional as well as intellectual. This is in equal amounts draining and incredibly rewarding.
