3rd International Pedagogical Research in Higher Education Conference
Research-teaching linkages to enhance student learning

We are pleased to announce the third PRHE conference which will be held in Liverpool from the 25th -26th October 2010. The timing has been arranged to follow on directly from the ISSOTL conference which will be held for the first time in Liverpool (19-22 October 2010) http://www.issotl.org/conferences.html

The PRHE conference is a biennial event which brings together, in an intimate and welcoming environment, researchers and practitioners to share research findings, promote rigorous pedagogical research and build collaborative research networks.

The theme of the PRHE conference is: 'Research-teaching linkages to enhance student learning’.

The 2010 PRHE conference will, as usual, be organised by Liverpool Hope University but this year the location of the conference will be in Liverpool city centre at the University of Liverpool’s Foresight Centre, an award winning facility for conferences and events.

Keynote speakers:

KEITH TRIGWELL - The University of Sydney
Professor of Higher Education - Institute for Teaching and Learning

Title: Studies relating research, teaching and learning in higher education

Abstract: There is very little empirical evidence to support the claim by large numbers of academic staff that there is a positive correlation between teaching and research. A meta-analysis of work reported up to 1995 indicates that the correlation is near zero (Hattie and Marsh, 1996) despite others arguing that better researchers are better teachers. Studies with more of a qualitative focus have more recently provided information from different perspectives, but there is still much contention surrounding this field of study. This presentation will briefly review this research and then focus on a recent study (Prosser, et al., 2008) that has shown that among research-active teaching academic staff, variation in the nature of the description of their research focus is found to be related to variation in the quality of their approach to teaching. Where the research focus is on wholes or themes, the teaching is more likely to be described as student-focused with the intention of changing or developing students’ conceptions of the subject matter. Where the research focus was more on parts or components of disciplinary fields, the teaching was more likely to be described in teacher-focused ways with the intention to transfer information to students. In other words, the way academic staff experience their research is related to the way they experience their teaching. This relationship is both logical and empirical, and is supported by qualitative data (Trigwell and Prosser, 2009). “All this suggests that it is not the quantity of research that is associated with quality of teaching, but how scholarship in the discipline or profession is maintained and developed that is important. This may apply to non-research active as well as to research active academic staff” (Prosser, et al., 2008, p13). Given that there is an association between student-focused conceptual change teaching and the quality of student learning (Trigwell, et al., 1999), the issue becomes more of one based on the teachers’ understanding of subject matter than has hitherto been considered.
read more

Mick Healey - University of Gloucestershire
Professor of Geography and Director of the Centre for Active Learning,
Title: Engaging Students in Research and Inquiry

Abstract
“We need to encourage universities and colleges to explore new models of curriculum.  Government and funding bodies should incentivise and support the radical realignment of undergraduate curricula: we require curricula that are transdisciplinary, that extend students to their limits, that develop skills of inquiry and research, and that are imbued with international perspectives. …  There are several models that we might explore. They should all: … Incorporate research-based study for undergraduates (to cultivate awareness of research careers, to train students in research skills for employment, and to sustain the advantages of a research-teaching connection in a mass or universal system) …”
Paul Ramsden, Chief Executive of the Higher Education Academy, in his invited contribution to the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills’ Debate on the Future of Higher Education (2008, 10-11, emphasis added)

The argument of this session can be simply stated: all undergraduate students in all higher education institutions should experience learning through and about research.  My interest in developing students as researchers originated through explorations over the last few years into ways to enhance the linkage between teaching and discipline-based research.  The conclusion to arise from that work is that one of the most effective ways to do this is to engage our students in research and inquiry; in other words, to see them as producers not just consumers of knowledge.  Many undergraduate research programmes are for selected students and may well be outside the formal curriculum, e.g. in summer enrichment programmes.  However, here it is suggested that the key to mainstreaming undergraduate research and inquiry is to integrate it into the curriculum.  The session will explore the variety of ways in which undergraduate research and inquiry based learning are undertaken using numerous mini-case studies from different disciplines, departments and institutions in UK, mainland Europe, Australasia and North America.
read more

Jan Meyer - The University of Durham
Professor of Education and the Director of the Centre for Learning, Teaching, and Research in Higher Education,
Title: Threshold concepts and opportunities for research on student learning

Abstract
The threshold concepts framework presents a number of opportunities for research into student learning. At the heart of the notion of a threshold concept there is, in the process of associated learning, a transformation characterised (in varying degrees) by cognitive, ontological, discursive, and epistemic, shifts in the learner. There is a transformed view of subject landscape ‘the world looks different’, a repositioning of self in relation to the subject and its disciplinary discourse as in for example ‘beginning to think like an historian’, a new ‘way of knowing’ accompanied by characteristic disciplinary forms of reasoning and explanation. This observation opens up new terrain for research on student learning and, in doing so, it presents a new set of research questions and methodological challenges; in particular how, and at what response level, and in what mode of liminality these shifts can be quantitatively or quantitatively modelled. The discourse of threshold concepts is often conducted at a metaphoric level; the visual-spatial-temporal metaphor of a transformative portal that leads from a liminal space (limen is Latin for threshold) to a new space, a new landscape, a repositioning or transfiguration of self. In the encounter of threshold concepts the liminal condition essentially captures the temporal dynamics of learning journeys that are enacted (towards and through) the portal, as well as the statics of ‘stuck places’. Thus provoked by, for example, the troublesome (counter-intuitive, alien) nature of many threshold concepts, the state of liminality invites research attention, and particularly so in terms of modelling that can inform pedagogic responses. The dynamics of the liminal space present conceptually fertile opportunities to re-address some of the classic student learning research questions of the past three or more decades.

Randall Bass – Georgetown University
Assistant Provost and Executive Director, Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship
Title: The rise of social learning as a bridge to expertise

Abstract

One of the effects of the “learning paradigm” on higher education is to mark the end of the course as a bounded experience and in some ways to challenge the centrality of the formal curriculum. Both are under pressure from at least two directions: the growing body of evidence for the impact of experiential learning and the expansion of participatory Web-based cultures as the site of informal learning.  This presentation will explore the impact both of these forces are having on the way that we recognize, access and develop expertise in any particular area of learning, especially through what John Seely Brown refers to as “reversing the flow” between content and practice. This inversion bears significantly on the linkages between research and teaching as it challenges us consider our previous notions about student intellectual development and will likely lead us to value different kinds of foundational educational experiences. This presentation will explore these issues through several pedagogical examples that apply an expanding definition of expertise to inquiry-based intellectual work of students (including informal and experiential knowledge, as well as the role of reflective judgment and uncertainty). In particular, this presentation will explore the centrality of social interaction to the nature of learning in these new conditions and ask whether a framework for social pedagogies (i.e. the centrality of representing knowledge for others) might be one useful way to design curricular experiences so as to engage students with disciplinary thinking in its most embodied forms. 
read more

Recent References on the Topic of the Workshop

2008 George Kuh, High Impact Educational Practices: What are they, who has access to them, and why they matter. Association of American Colleges and Universities.
2009 Randall Bass and Bret Eynon, “Capturing the Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning: A Synthesis of Findings from the Visible Knowledge Project.” Academic Commons. January 2009. http://academiccommons.org
2009 Henry Jenkins, et. al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. MIT Press.
2010 Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, “Designing for Difficulty: Social Pedagogies as a Framework for Liberal Learning.”  White Paper for the Teagle Foundation. [forthcoming, September 2010].