Undergraduate experiences of the research/teaching nexus across the whole student lifecycle

ABSTRACT

There is currently much interest in the interconnections between research and teaching in Higher Education. This relationship is usually termed ‘the research/teaching nexus’ (RTN). However, within this wide body of literature, there has been little attempt to explore the emergent experiences of students across the entire length of their degree programme. Drawing on the results of a three-year qualitative study that followed 40 students through their whole student lifecycle, this paper explores how undergraduates in an English university experienced the RTN, how those experiences developed over time, and how these changes can be variously enabled or constrained. Situating the findings in the context of the ‘post-truth’ society and the uncertainty of employment futures, the paper highlights how the nexus can also often serve to exclude students as much as it includes.

KEYWORDS:

• Research/teaching nexus
• higher education learning and teaching
• academic transitions
• widening participation

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the University of Sheffield and especially Julian Crockford and the Widening Participation Research and Evaluation Unit, who hosted the ‘Sheffield Student 2013’ longitudinal tracking project this paper is based on.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Tom Clark http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6871-629X

Rita Hordosy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1888-8269

Notes

1 Two students declined to be interviewed in the third year.