The long road to reinvention: how an interest in research-based evidence led to a successful large bid for funding

Alan Jenkins
Reinvention Fellow

www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/research/cetl/

In September 2005 a new centre called the Reinvention Centre launched a five year project to encourage students to learn through research-based activities. The centre will target undergraduates, especially those in year two, and hopes to select some students who will work with staff to research issues of importance to local communities. The successful bid partners, the University of Warwick and Oxford Brookes, each claimed their institutions had “taken an evidence-based practice approach to linking teaching and undergraduate research”.

Brookes’ ‘long march’ to developing evidence-based policies on teaching and research started in 1996 and led to the 2004 requirement that all courses ‘demonstrate how the linkages between research and teaching and learning are realised in the formal curriculum and the wider student experience’. Things started relatively quietly when the then Deputy Head of Social Science and Law, Tim Blackman, was asked at School Board whether an increased focus on research would weaken ‘teaching quality’. He suggested this issue be investigated rather than simply pronounced upon , and four of us took up the challenge including one, Rosanna Breen, who subsequently completed a doctorate in this area. We identified a large corpus of research on the relationship between teaching and research, most of which analysed measures of staff research productivity and student evaluations of ‘teaching quality’. A 1996 meta-analysis concluded ‘that the common belief that teaching and research were inextricably intertwined is an enduring myth. At best teaching and research are very loosely coupled’ (Hattie and Marsh, 1996, 529). Such statements helped to convince governments and institutional leaders world-wide to create policy and funding separations between teaching and research.

We then investigated the views of students by running discipline-based focus groups, first at undergraduate and then at postgraduate level (Jenkins, Blackman, Lindsay and Paton Saltberg, 1998; Lindsay, Breen and Jenkins, 2002). This revealed that students saw staff research as a potential source of current knowledge, staff enthusiasm and credibility, though students were often unaware of what their teachers were researching and of the role of research in the university. While postgraduates were generally more positive about (staff) research, they wanted that research to be directly relevant to their studies. But generally our findings showed a much more complicated and potentially positive view of the relationship of university research to student learning than the previous correlation-focused methodologies. At the same time, we were able to shift attention from the question, ‘do all staff need to be active researchers?’ to one more like ‘how can all students learn in a research environment?’ (Jenkins, Breen, Lindsay and Brew 2003, Jenkins 2004a).

Others were also researching the area and reaching similar conclusions. Our own findings also matched those of the University of East Anglia in that both studies showed students realising benefits from staff involvement in research , but also students having little sense of being ‘stakeholders’ in the university’s research. Indeed, students were angry at staff absences for research and seeming lack of interest in teaching. Zamorski (2002,) describes students as “recipients of research rather than actors in its production” (p 417). This was in stark contrast with the findings at Warwick where the Research Scholarship Scheme supported selected undergraduates to do a small research project linked to current research work within the University. The Warwick students reported feeling themselves to be active researchers, if only for a limited time (Blackmore and Cousin, 2003). That was the model we wished to follow and we were reassured by reports of its success in the US and in some UK institutions, notably Imperial, Chester, Cambridge (Jenkins 2004b).

The next step was a successful bid to the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning to establish a project on linking Teaching and Research in Built Environment Disciplines. This project allowed us to explore how teaching/research relations varied by discipline and to investigate the role of departmental, institutional and national policies in its development. The ultimate aim was intervene in the curriculum and institutional policies, following Colbeck’s (1998) US-based research which documented factors that helped staff see on the one hand, teaching and research as ‘merging into a seamless blend’, or alternatively, as having competing and antagonistic roles. The project demonstrated how “issues of department (and institutional) organisation and culture – in particular the effective policy separation between teaching and research – result in failures to support staff to achieve potential synergies between these activities” (Durning and Jenkins, 2005, p407).

So, this was the background that enabled us to show how our previous pedagogic research helped reshape the evidence on teaching/research relations (Jenkins 2004a) and showed us that:

Effective links between staff research and student learning is more about helping students learn like researchers and less about focusing on the research skills and knowledge of staff.
The traditional model of the teaching/research nexus (ie an academic surrounded by a small group of students) has long since gone but may linger on at postgraduate level in a very few institutions.
That links have to be purposefully designed or in effect ‘reinvented’ if we want to encourage student learning and staff motivation. ‘Reinvention’ has to operate at a variety of levels from the individual academic to university-level policies for teaching and for research and on to national decisions about, for example, funding. (Jenkins and Healey 2005).

And, as this article is recounting our long road to success, it finishes with where we decided to go. When Glynis Cousin, then at the University of Warwick, and I were shaping our original bid, we looked to American research and policy discussions which criticised ‘research intensive’ universities for neglecting undergraduate teaching. The critics seemed to say that students were in effect kept out of the universities’ research worlds (so unlike the RAE-focused UK!) (Boyer Commission 1998). The research and the critics’ comments has led to reform of US undergraduate education to bring teaching and research together, resulting in expanding opportunities for US students to carry out research under the guidance of academic staff. Glynis Cousins and I were convinced by the evidence concerning the impact of these changes and in particular, thought this kind of approach in year two of a three year programme would better prepare students for the dissertation in year three. We proposed adapting a US-style scheme to the UK context and the Reinvention Center at Stony Brook (see www.sunysb.edu/Reinventioncenter/ for more information) offered us their support and were happy for us to adapt their name.

So the UK Reinvention Centre builds upon others’ achievements and proposes some of our own. We claimed these interventions would improve final year performance and the quality of dissertations! Now that is something we will have to research but fortunately now have the money and staff to do so.

References

Blackmore, P and Cousin, G (2003) ‘Linking Teaching and Research Through Research-Based Learning’, in Educational Developments 4 (4): 24 – 27
Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University (1998) Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A blueprint for America's research universities, Stony Brook: State University of New York at Stony Brook. Available at naples.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf/
Colbeck, CC (1998) Merging in a seamless blend, Journal of Higher Education, 69 (6), pp 647–71
Durning B and Jenkins A (2005) Teaching/research relations in departments; the perspectives of built environment academics, Studies in Higher Education, 30(4) pp 407-426.
Hattie, J and Marsh, HW (1996) The relationship between research and teaching: A meta-analysis, Review of Educational Research 66 (4), 507-542
Huggins R, Jenkins A, Colley H, Price M, Scurry D (2005) Realising Teaching Research Links in Course Design for Delivery in Semesters, Brookes E-Journal for Learning and Teaching, 1(2) www.brookes.ac.uk/publications/bejlt/volume1issue2/perspective/hugginsetal_05.html!
Jenkins A and Healey (2005) Institutional Strategies to Link Teaching and Research, The Higher Education Academy,York www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources.asp?process=full_record&section=generic&id=585
Jenkins, A (2004a) A guide to the research evidence on teaching-research relationships. York: Higher Education Academy. Available at www.heacademy.ac.uk/embedded_object.asp?id=21570&file.
Jenkins, A (2004b) Supporting undergraduate research (in the UK): An outline proposal, paper presented to Research and Teaching: Closing the divide? An international colloquium, Marwell, Winchester, February 13-14. Available at: www.solent.ac.uk/ExternalUP/318/alan_jenkin_s_paper__2_.doc.
Jenkins, A, Blackman, T, Lindsay, RO and Paton-Saltzberg, R (1998) Teaching and research: student perceptions and policy implications, Studies in Higher Education,23 (2), pp 127–41
Jenkins A, Breen R, Lindsay R and Brew A (2003) Reshaping Teaching in Higher Education: Linking Teaching and Research, London, Routledge.
Lindsay, R, Breen, R and Jenkins, A (2002) Academic research and teaching quality: the views of undergraduate and postgraduate students, Studies in Higher Education, 27 (3), pp 309–27
Rice E (2003) Rethinking Scholarship and New Practice: A Central AAHE Priority.
Zamorski, B (2002) Research-led teaching and learning in higher education: a case, Teaching in Higher Education 7(4), 411-427.