The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)’s aims, implementation and effect on the English higher education sector remains a controversial and contested subject. This text offers a wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussion of the implications of the TEF on the UK’s fast-moving policy environment, and increasingly neoliberal higher education sector.
The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)'s aims, implementation and effect on the English higher education sector remains a controversial and often contested subject. This text offers a stimulating and wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussion of the implications of the TEF on the UK's fast-moving policy environment, and increasingly neoliberal higher education sector. Questioning the basic premise of the TEF, the authors tease out how students and staff are affected in different and often unfair ways by its implementation. Whilst acknowledging that the TEF has focused management attention on ways in which a diverse student population is, or is not, supported in their learning, this book highlights how it remains problematically silent on other kinds of diversity in the system such as specialised courses, diverse teaching styles, and varying institution sizes. Offering readers ways of rethinking and resisting 'teaching excellence', this book provides a timely examination of how, in various ways, the TEF, seen as an exclusionary quality assurance system, is likely to reinforce extant structural inequalities and competitive hierarchies in the sector.
This books offers new ways to think about teaching excellence in higher education and presents a definition of the concept of teaching excellence. It offers a fresh interpretation of Boyers famous account of scholarship as the foundation of university teaching. To fully understand the nature of teaching excellence in higher education, the book gives an account of the various dimensions of the domain of university teaching and the core drivers required to bring those domains to life. The idea of empowerment underlies the journey to excellence in teaching. The book argues that university lecturers aspiring to become excellent should be active agents, strongly pursuing the development of their perfectible abilities required for high quality teaching. The work draws on recent developments in virtue theory to set out the qualities of character requisite for guiding and driving university lecturers to grow and develop into excellent teachers.
Teaching excellence is a topic of international significance, having importance for higher education worldwide, yet is generally considered to be poorly defined and understood. The current discourse of teaching excellence is narrowly framed, instrumental and performative, with an onus on measurement and quantification. Wood and Su investigate and rethink excellence in higher education, connecting this to the understanding of the role and purpose of higher education. Stakeholder perspectives on teaching excellence are explored, and the authors argue that it is through engaging with higher education constituencies, to examine teaching excellence from different angles and stances, that more inclusive understandings may be built. These stakeholder perspectives, which form the central chapters of the book, include higher education institutions, academics, students, employers and parents. The importance of a commitment to engaging with understandings situated in the diverse experiences and contexts of stakeholders for an 'inclusive perspective' on teaching excellence is affirmed. At the close of the book, the Coda examines some of the implications of the responses to the COVID-19 global pandemic for inclusive perspectives on teaching excellence in higher education.
This volume presents the major outcomes of the third edition of the Future of Higher Education – Bologna Process Researchers Conference (FOHE-BPRC 3) which was held on 27-29 November 2017. It acknowledges the importance of a continued dialogue between researchers and decision-makers and benefits from the experience already acquired, this way enabling the higher education community to bring its input into the 2018-2020 European Higher Education Area (EHEA) priorities. The Future of Higher Education – Bologna Process Researchers Conference (FOHE-BPRC) has already established itself as a landmark in the European higher education environment. The two previous editions (17-19 October 2011, 24-26 November 2014), with approximately 200 European and international participants each, covering more than 50 countries each, were organized prior to the Ministerial Conferences, thus encouraging a consistent dialogue between researchers and policy makers. The main conclusions of the FOHE Conferences were presented at the EHEA Ministerial Conferences (2012 and 2015), in order to make the voice of researchers better heard by European policy and decision makers. This volume is dedicated to continuing the collection of evidence and research-based policymaking and further narrowing the gap between policy and research within the EHEA and broader global contexts. It aims to identify the research areas that require more attention prior to the anniversary 2020 EHEA Ministerial Conference, with an emphasis on the new issues on rise in the academic and educational community. This book gives a platform for discussion on key issues between researchers, various direct higher education actors, decision-makers, and the wider public. This book is published under an open access CC BY license.
The author gives us a vision of educational reform that transcends standards, curriculum, and instructional strategies. He argues for a paradigm shift-a schoolwide embrace of an "ethic of excellence" and with a passion for quality describes what's possible when teachers, students, and parents commit to nothing less than the best. The author tells exactly how this can be done, from the blackboard to the blacktop to the school boardroom.
This book offers inter-disciplinary, evidence-informed discussion around notions of excellence in higher education teaching. It will act as a key stimulus for institutional and sector-wide debates and a reference point for initiatives around the TEF agenda.
Individuals in mid-career positions in higher education typically feel that they are faced with fewer engagement endeavors and new initiatives with which they can participate in as institutions tend to find them not as new and their ideas no longer as cutting edge, even though they very well may be. For women in academia, this phenomenon is even more complex. Typically, by mid-career, women have survived the sprint to tenure while juggling family/caregiver responsibilities. Post-tenure they may find themselves in a space where they have more control over their work and can engage at a more comfortable pace. However, without institutional support and personal determination to remain engaged, women may find themselves facing stagnation in their career development. Thus, it is essential that mentorship opportunities are established and career trajectories put in place for mid-career women. Women in Higher Education and the Journey to Mid-Career: Challenges and Opportunities considers specific challenges, issues, strategies, and solutions that are associated with female academics during mid-career phases. The book includes a variety of emerging evidence-based professional practice and narrative personal accounts as written by administrators, faculty, staff, and students. The book considers strategies for remaining vibrant and productive and suggestions from successful mid-career women academics and reflections from women who have passed the mid-career phase. Covering topics such as tenure, self-care, and academic leadership, this reference work is ideal for administrators, faculty, policymakers, academicians, scholars, researchers, practitioners, instructors, and students.
If the quality of an education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers, then countries need to do all they can to build a high-quality teaching force.
This book presents a duoethnographic exploration and narrative account of what it means to be a teacher educator today. Adopting a narrative approach, the book presents different personal, political and institutional perspectives to interrogate common challenges facing teacher education and teacher educators today. In addition, the book compares and contrasts the teacher education landscapes in Australia and the UK and addresses a broad range of topics, including the autobiographical nature of teacher educators’ work, the value of learning from experience, the importance of collegiality and collaboration in learning to become a teacher educator, and the intersection of the personal, professional and political in the development of teacher educator pedagogies and research agendas. Each chapter combines personal narratives and research-based perspectives on the key dimensions of teacher educators’ work that can be found in the literature, including self-study research. Readers will gain a better understanding of the processes, influences and relationships that make being a teacher educator both a challenging and rewarding career. Accordingly, the book offers a valuable asset for university leaders, experienced and beginning teacher educators, and researchers interested in the professional learning and development of teacher educators.
