mick healey "the teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more...

Mick Healey"the teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this

alone, that he has still far more to learn than they - he has to learn to let them learn"

(Heidegger)

International Perspectives on the Professional Development of Geography

Faculty

Introduction

• Professional development of geography Faculty is a major challenge

• Geographers in HE largely learn 'on the job’• Concentrate on the development of the

teaching function• Focus on enhancing how geography is taught

I. IntroductionII. Developing the Scholarship of Teaching and

Learning Geography in Higher Education III. Some Recent Initiatives in the Professional

Development of University Geography Teachers

IV. Challenges to Professionalizing Teaching Geography in Higher Education

V. Conclusion

International Perspectives on the Professional Development of Geography

Faculty

II - DEVELOPING THE SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING

AND LEARNING GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

The time has come to move beyond the tired old teaching versus research debate and give the familiar and honourable term scholarship a broader and more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of academic work

(Boyer, 1990)

Scholarship of Discovery

Scholarship of Integration

Scholarship of Teaching

Scholarship of Application

The four types of scholarship

Embedding the scholarship of teaching

Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Web site)AAHE Campus Programme (Web site)Developing scholarship in teaching - UTS (Web site)AAHE Faculty Roles and Rewards (Feb 2000)PoD (Nov 2000)ILT Symposium (Oct 2000)SEDA (April 2001)City University/UEL (June 2001, 2002, 2003)Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (on-line) (2000)HERD 2000 vol 19 (2)Journal on Excellence in College Teaching (2003)Hutchings (2000); Kreber (2001); Huber and Morreale (2002)

Key Features and Components of the Scholarship of Teaching

'The scholarship of teaching has become an amorphous term, equated more with commitment to teaching than with any concrete, substantive sense of definition or consensus as to how this scholarship can be recognized'

(Menges, Weimer and Associates 1996: xii)

'Despite an increasing number of articles and books on teaching-scholarship published in recent years … the notion of teaching-scholarship remains an elusive yet intriguing concept'

(Kreber, 1999: 323)


Exercise:Please scan Table 1 on p4 of the handout entitled “Statements about the scholarship of teaching”To what extent do you agree with the statements on the sheet? In pairs identify:

ONE statement with which you both agreeONE statement with which you both disagree

4 mins

77 participants completed all or parts of the exercise: • There was a full range of views on each of the statements• Care is needed in interpreting the findings. However, only

quotation 10 (Richlin, 2001) caused more than one in five of the delegates to 'sit on the fence'.

• Over 90 percent of delegates agreed with statement 4 (Martin et al., 1999); over three-quarters of the group agreed with statements 1 (Boyer, 1990), 2 (Cross and Steadman, 1996), and the three quotes from Healey (2000a, b) (5, 8 and 12).

• Less than half the delegates agreed with the two statements from Richlin (2001) (3 and 10) and Ramsden (1999) (6).


Is the scholarship of teaching distinct from scholarly teaching? • Statements 3 and 10 suggest they are distinct, while statements 4,

7 and 8 suggest that the scholarship of teaching includes scholarly teaching, but also has additional features.

• A scholarly approach to teaching is sometimes referred to as 'scholarship in teaching'. The ‘scholarship of teaching’, on the other hand, shares the characteristics of excellent and scholarly teaching, but in addition involves communicating and disseminating about the teaching and learning practices of one's subject and entails researching into how students learn within a discipline.


The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Three essential and integrated elements:• Engagement with the scholarly contributions of

others on teaching and learning• Reflection on one’s own teaching practice and

the learning of students within the context of a particular discipline

• Communication and dissemination of aspects of practice and theoretical ideas about teaching and learning in general and teaching and learning within the discipline(Martin et al., 1999)

III - SOME RECENT INITIATIVES IN THE PROFESSIONAL

DEVELOPMENT OF UNIVERSITY GEOGRAPHY TEACHERS

Professional Development of University Geography Faculty: Recent

Initiatives• A discipline-based approach to educational

development• Initial teacher development courses• Continuing professional development

A Discipline-based Approach to Educational Development

There is a need for a disciplinary-specific component in educational development, both for initial training and continuing professional development (CPD)

The primary allegiance for most academic staff is to their subject or ‘academic tribe’ rather than their institution

Initial Faculty Development Courses

US: • 1970s AAG geography graduate teaching

assistants (GTAs) • many generic courses for GTAs • multi/inter-disciplinary courses on e.g. diversity,

area studies and international studies • Geography Faculty Development Alliance

UK: • Residential workshop for new teachers of

geography, earth and environmental sciences in HE

Continuing Professional Development

US• Human Dimensions of Global Change• Virtual Geography Department

UK• GeographyCal• Geography for the New Undergraduate• Virtual Field Course• RGS-IBG ‘Chartered Geographer Status’

Geography Discipline Network

• Consortium of 6-10 HEIs in the UK• Research, develop and disseminate good teaching, learning

and assessment practices in geography and related disciplines

• 23 teaching and learning guides for staff and 1 for students – on teaching and learning geography; key skills; supporting disabled students

• 5 national conferences; over 60 department-based workshops• Over 35 full-text papers and publications; abstracts from

three geography educational journals; 200 summaries of interesting learning, teaching and assessment practices – linked to LTSN-GEES (more international summaries invited)

• Regularly receiving over 7500 hits a weekhttp://www.glos.ac.uk/gdn/

International Geography Networks

Journal of Geography in Higher Education (1977)International Editors for North America and Australasia; a JGHE Lecture

National Centre for Geographic Information and Analysis Core Curriculum projectInternational Network for Learning and Teaching (INLT) Geography in Higher Education (1999)

Listserve; Web site; Newsletter; International projects;Nine papers from 1st Symposium in Honolulu published; 2nd Symposium at RGS-IBG 2001 in Plymouth; 3rd at AAG 2002 in Los Angeles; 4th at IGC in Glasgow 2004

IV - CHALLENGES TO PROFESSIONALIZING TEACHING

GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Issues around an evolving concept

1. Is the scholarship of teaching best developed through the disciplines?

2. How may the status of the scholarship of teaching be raised?

3. What is the relationship between the scholarships of teaching and research?

4. What is the role of pedagogic research in the scholarship of teaching?


• Statement 12 suggests that for most academic staff their primary allegiance is to their subject or profession, and their sense of themselves as staff at a given institution is secondary. Moreover there is a strong perception among staff that there are significant differences among disciplines in what academics do and how those activities are described and valued.

• Others argue disciplinary allegiance is only one factor. With an increase in specialisation within disciplines and the growth of inter-disciplinarity, discipline boundaries are dissolving.


SoT needs to be embedded in disciplines and departments/schools:

• Learning goals vary between disciplines• The primary allegiance for most academic staff

is to their subject or profession

“Improvement of teaching needs to be rooted in the intellectual substance of the field”

(Rice, 1995: vi)


Different disciplines have distinct styles and approaches to teaching and learning. E.g. the Anthropology Network has attempted:

– to develop an anthropological language to studying teaching and learning

– to 'translate' the language of educational development into an anthropological context so that they can identify the values that they want to privilege in teaching anthropology

– to develop an anthropological approach to the scholarship of teaching.


‘The discipline of sociology focuses its study on culture, socialization, social inequality, and social change. Each of these core areas of inquiry can shed light on understanding how the scholarship of teaching and learning in sociology has taken shape, taken hold or not taken hold, and been stalled over the last 25 years’

(Howery, 2002).

‘Pedagogy depends on sociology more closely than on any other science’

(Durkheim, 1903)


To be scholarly academics need to use the same kind of thought processes in their teaching that they apply to their research

(Elton, 1992)


Example: Approach of GDN Projects is:

1. To identify generic principles and theories and illustrate them with discipline based examples

2. To work with educational developers, educational researchers and disability advisers


If teaching is to be valued equally with research then, like research, teaching must open itself to the scrutiny of theoretical perspectives, methods, evidence and results(Martin, et al. 1999)

For every process which supports quality in research, there is a parallel process which can be used to support quality in teaching(Gibbs, 1995)

2. Developing the Status of Teaching

• In pairs please look at Table 2 and choose any ONE process for enhancing the quality of teaching which is parallel to the ones listed for enhancing the quality of research.

• Discuss the differences in the way the process operates for research and teaching. How could the process for teaching be made as rigorous as it is for research?

5 minutes


The most significant of the processes for enhancing quality is the reward for teaching excellence, for both individuals and departments

(Gibbs, 1995)

There is “no substitute for action to promote good teachers if universities want their staff to accept that good teaching is properly recognised”

(Ramsden & Martin, 1996)


The relationship between teaching and research is a complex one, and where is does exist, it takes place through elements which are common to both processes, such as 'scholarship' and the ‘act of learning’.


What is research-based learning?• Research outcomes informing the

curriculum• Research-process based methods of

learning• Learning to use the tools of research• Developing an inclusive research culture

Nexus needs to be managed and planned it will not happen automatically


• Student-centred teaching and learning processes are intrinsically favourable towards a positive nexus, while more traditional teaching methods may at best lead to a positive nexus for the most able students, who in the perception of traditional academics are of course the future university teachers

(Elton, 2000)• The rapidity of teaching on the 'problems'

method is something really astonishing(Kropotkin, 1885)


Example: LTSN Generic Centre project: Linking teaching and research in the Disciplines

– Biosciences– Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences– Health Sciences and Practice– Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism– Law– Medicine– English

Boyer (1990) saw research as the cornerstone of the scholarship of teaching

‘The improvement of learning and teaching is dependent upon the development of scholarship and research in teaching’

(Prosser and Trigwell, 1999: 8)

‘Higher education will benefit if those who teach enquire into the effects of their activities on their students’ learning’

(Ramsden, 1992: 5)



Research into learning ranges:

• from an evaluation of a session, or a whole module• to a major educational research project

Much educational research is ‘action’ or ‘classroom’ research


Example: Developing pedagogic research capacity in LTSN-GEES

Enhancing the quality of fieldwork through pedagogic research

Pedagogic researchers Evaluation group (learning to do pedagogic research) discipline specialists and pedagogic researchers

Discipline specialists(cross-GEES disciplines)

V - CONCLUSION

Conclusion

• Framework for the professional development of geographic educators in HE in the C21st

– mixture of generic, disciplinary, and inter/multi-disciplinary elements for initial training and CPD activities

• Key to developing geographical educators in HE is to promote the scholarship of teaching and learning

Conclusion

• Teachers in HE need to learn how to adopt a scholarly approach to teaching and how to collect and present rigorous evidence of their effectiveness as teachers

• Good teaching needs to be better understood, more open to scrutiny, and better communicated

• The scholarship of teaching will only be developed if it is appropriately recognised and rewarded with respect to the other forms of scholarship

THANK YOU

THE END

mick healey "the teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more...

Documents