Why choice of teaching method is essential to academic freedom: a dialogue with Finn

ABSTRACT

The paper sets out a conceptual argument that the choice of teaching method is part of the freedom to teach in higher education. It enters into a dialogue with the views of Stephen Finn in a paper published in Teaching in Higher Education in which he argues that academic freedom should be limited in respect to teaching methods. The concept of pedagogic self-governance is linked to the importance of choice of teaching method and illustrated by reference to the history of the seminar and signature pedagogies. While Finn argues that not developing pedagogical skills is a breach of professional ethics it is contended that a failure to engage in research and enable students to critically evaluate the latest propositional and professional knowledge in a subject represents a much more serious issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic freedom
• freedom to teach
• pedagogic-self governance
• signature pedagogies
• COVID-19

Introduction

In 2020, Teaching in Higher Education published a paper by Stephen Finn entitled ‘Academic freedom and the choice of teaching methods’ (Finn 2020) in which the author argued that the professor’s freedom to teach should be limited in respect to teaching methods. In adopting this position Finn provides a conventional interpretation of the freedom to teach in terms of protecting university professors who are presenting or discussing controversial issues in class. He argues that the choice of teaching method should be determined on the basis of educational effectiveness rather than personal preference as this would not compromise the professor’s freedom to teach in any way. As Finn (2020, 120) states: ‘ … I argue that teachers ought to be required to teach in certain ways, and that such requirements are not an infringement of academic freedom’.

In this paper, I will seek to enter into a dialogue with Finn by first setting out an alternative theoretical interpretation of the freedom to teach which incorporates what I will refer to as pedagogic self-governance meaning that the academic profession should enjoy autonomy with respect to the choice of teaching method and the development of the curriculum. This understanding of the freedom to teach goes well beyond a narrow framing in terms of professors espousing unpopular, unconventional or controversial opinions. Secondly, I will argue that academics drawing on the latest understanding of research and scholarship in their discipline and in relation to its practice, are best placed to select their teaching method rather than others working at a strategic level who tend to apply generic rather than discipline-specific criteria. While it is certainly true that there are existing constraints on the choice of teaching methods, including professional accreditation, innovation in the development of teaching methods is more likely to flow from control by academics at the forefront of practice rather than leaders and managers operating at a strategic distance without intimate knowledge of signature pedagogies. I will illustrate my argument by reference to the history of the university as demonstrated by the way in which the medieval disputation was supplanted by the seminar in the modern university of the nineteenth century. Finn states that his analysis does not single out any teaching method for censor although it is clear that his thinly veiled target is the lecture. Hence, thirdly, I will contend that the familiar and critical characterisation of the lecture, as a dull and teacher-centred monologue, fails to appreciate its many forms and the way in which it provides a key meeting point between teaching and research. Indeed any teaching method, even the much-vaunted seminar, can fail to be student-centred if the lecturer is insufficiently willing or able to engage with learners. Fourthly, and finally, I will argue that Finn’s vision might lead to someone other than the teacher – presumably those charged with the learning and teaching of the university – controlling teaching methods and that the role of the educational developer should be delicately balanced between consultancy and managerialism. Unfortunately an increasingly managerial orientation is being accelerated by the micro-management of online teaching and learning as part of university responses to COVID-19 an observation supported by growing empirical evidence that such policies are diminishing the creative and critical freedoms of academics (Watermeyer et al. 2020). Survey evidence indicates that 84 per cent of British academics regard COVID-19 as having as having ‘further consolidated decision-making by centralised senior leadership teams’ (Watermeyer et al. 2021, 5).

My analysis will include reflections on the changing role of the educational developer a capacity in which Finn works as an assistant professor and assistant Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the United States Military Academy, West Point, USA. As such, he is writing from the position of someone who is involved with the development of others as teachers as an educational developer (or faculty developer in US terms). My own background includes 10 years working in educational development roles in the UK and informs my observations in respect to the orientation of this work, and its steady drift from consultancy to managerialism (Land 2004).

Freedom to teach as pedagogic self-governance

Whilst academic freedom is normally understood in terms of the freedom of inquiry and institutional autonomy, the freedom to teach – or lehrfreiheit – is a comparatively neglected concept originating in the German tradition of the university. Applying Berlin’s (1958) two concepts of liberty the freedom to teach may be interpreted as both a negative freedom from external constraints and threats to the free speech of the university professor and as a positive freedom to the free expression of unconventional and unpopular views and analyses. These are the negative and positive liberty versions of the freedom to teach. Conceptually, my analysis will mainly focus on the familiar interpretation of the freedom to teach as under threat from external sources and argue instead that more attention should now be paid to the way in which this negative freedom is threatened from within the university itself by growing managerial and bureaucratic power over the teaching function. Freedom in teaching, in research and in the actions of the institutions that conduct higher education may be thought of as both a means and an end in academic life in line with enlightenment thinking (Rider 2018). Understanding the freedom to teach as including the choice of teaching method helps to ensure that the goal of teaching students the ‘discipline of dissent’ (Ashby 1969, 64) takes place without obstruction.

In the nineteenth century, the power of the church and the dated traditions of the university as a corporate body from medieval times still held sway in most nations but in Germany the freedom to teach was seen as its distinguishing feature. This meant that ‘for the teacher and his hearers there can be no prescribed and no proscribed thoughts’ and that ‘constant criticism’ of all ideas was seen as the basis of the advancement of knowledge or science (Paulsen 1906, 228). The American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) Declaration of Principles relating to academic freedom from 1915 (AAUP 1915) incorporates the concept of lehrfreiheit and argues that the freedom to teach can be undermined in both privately endowed and state institutions. The declaration identifies that there is a risk that this can occur in the former type of institution when, for example, it is based on a church or particular denomination where intellectual freedom is subordinated to the interests of religious faith. In the latter type of state institutions the risk to the freedom to teach is identified as stemming from political considerations or pressures related to social, economic or political questions of the day where unconventional or radical opinions are subject to repression.

The dramaturgical representation of this latter reality has frequently resulted in the censure or dismissal of university teachers from universities accused of expressing or holding radical ideas and beliefs under pressure from government or powerful lobby groups. McCarthyism, via its pernicious effects on the academic freedom of expression of university teachers in the US, provides a classic illustration of this dramaturgical interpretation (Lazarsfeld and Thielens 1958). However, while the fear of censure or dismissal for expressing unorthodox, unfashionable or radical views remains a very real threat to the freedom to teach, particularly in contexts without democratic forms of government, there are more subtle ways in which the freedom to teach has been eroded in the everyday life of the university teacher. Massification, quality assurance regimes, and curriculum streamlining may all be linked to declining autonomy in teaching (Hoecht 2006; Akalu 2016). Collectively these trends act as constraints on the freedom to teach already resulting from the standardisation and benchmarking of teaching practices which they promote. As a result academics have fewer opportunities to teach specialisms related to their research as class sizes have grown and standardised teaching practices have evolved with teams of lecturers replicating parallel seminars. Regulations concerning the curriculum, assessment and feedback have proliferated too in order to produce benchmark quality standards. The ideological assumptions of neo-liberalism and new managerialism (Deem and Brehony 2005) have reinforced these developments. The result is that academic judgement has gradually been displaced by institutional control and the associated processes of standardisation eroding the freedom to teach in the everyday sense as opposed to high profile restrictions in respect to a lecturer’s freedom of expression. This all means that the freedom to teach needs to be understood as about both direct attempts to censure the free expression of ideas and the decline of what Moodie (1982) called ‘academic rule’ referring to autonomy in the choice of teaching methods and control of the curriculum. Moodie stresses the central importance of ‘academic judgement’ and states that ‘ … the most important decisions about the work of academics … should be taken by or on virtually mandatory advice of academics.’ (Moodie 1982, 131–132). However the phrase academic rule has a somewhat self-serving tone and might be better expressed as pedagogic self-governance, conveying the sense that academics have freedom in the selection of teaching methods and processes. Other authors have identified specific freedoms that support the concept of pedagogic self-governance, including ‘freedom to teach by whatever method one chooses’ (Bligh, Thomas, and McNay 1999, 106). Creative control of the curriculum, the exercise of academic judgment in teaching and assessment and the right to intellectual renewal through employment on a contract that encompasses both teaching and research have further been identified as key conditions that underpin the freedom to teach (Macfarlane 2022). These conditions underpin the freedom to teach since without them such a freedom cannot be realised in practice.

The importance of method to innovation

When Finn (2020) states that it is not an infringement of academic freedom for academics to be required to teach in particular ways I would beg to disagree. The choice of teaching methods is, in my view, part of the freedom to teach. In fairness to Finn, however, interpreting the freedom to teach in this manner does not in itself justify the existence of such a freedom. This brings me to the grounds for justifying why academic control over the choice of teaching methods needs to be retained. Here, the justification closely relates to educational aims and purposes that go beyond concerns about active learning per se, the latter of which appear to be Finn’s main focus.

The history of teaching methods is intimately linked to the continuous development of the university and disciplinary fields both old and new. The seminar, for example, spread rapidly in the new German universities of the nineteenth century because it enabled university teachers to move from an oral tradition involving the interpretation of sacred texts via the medieval disputation to a new written form of the seminar paper (Kruse 2006). The seminar was conceived as a way for students to learn how to ‘pursue an independent methodical investigation of a problem’ (Paulsen 1906, 65). Its etymology, from the Latin word seminarium meaning ‘plant school’ or ‘plant garden’, tells us its purpose was to help students develop their intellectual independence (Thiele 1938). The seminar method owes its origins not to educational developers or university managers but to the philologist Gottlob Heyne at Göttingen University and, later, his student Friedrich August Wolf in Halle. While the seminar as we understand it today became well known under Heyne’s influence in the 1760s it was not until the 1810s after the establishment of the University of Berlin that it became institutionally established (Karlsohn 2016). The seminar spread to the US and Europe as a result of graduate students who had studied in Germany bringing the method back with them, such as the historian Paul Vinogradoff who is credited with introducing the seminar at Oxford in 1903 (Watt 1964).

Yet, of course, lectures and seminars represent an essentially generic view of teaching methods which have limited relevance to the teaching of some university disciplines or subjects. The discipline ought to be the starting point. The early issues of higher education journals are filled with contributions from academics from a wide range of disciplines writing about the teaching of their discipline. In the late 1970s, for example, Studies in Higher Education was full of contributions from an eclectic, multi-disciplinary range of academics, and the occasional senior administrator, such as P.J. Black, a professor of physics at the University of Birmingham, Harry A. Lewis, a lecturer in philosophy from the University of Leeds, Alex Johnstone and David Sharp, respectively, senior lecturer and professor of chemistry at the University of Glasgow, Ian Turner, associate professor of history from Monash University; and finally, Adrian Rowe-Evans, secretary and registrar at the University of Warwick. Today the professionalisation of the field of teaching and learning means that fewer voices from such a wide range of disciplines can be found in leading journals about teaching and learning in higher education. Even early primers on university teaching such as Teaching and learning in higher education by Ruth Beard (1970) covered no less than 22 different academic disciplines in depth including anatomy, biochemistry, law, management, and veterinary science. This stands in sharp contrast to many contemporary teaching and learning primers. The marginalisation of the disciplinary perspective from the learning and teaching conversation has long been noted (see Quinlan 1999) and has reinforced assumptions that teaching methods can be standardised and centralised. As Kahn and Anderson (2019) have more recently argued the discipline needs to be the locus or starting point to being a good higher education teacher. This point seems to be overlooked in Finn’s analysis.

A more fine-grained way of understanding teaching methods is provided through signature pedagogies, a phrase originally coined by Schulman (2005, 52) to refer to instructional practices most closely associated with the teaching of professional subjects. The quasi-Socratic method in law (Schulman, 2005), and the associated use of moot courts, ‘clinical bedside teaching’ in medicine and ‘situated coaching’ in clinical areas in nursing education (Benner et al, 2009) provide examples of the ways in which teaching methods evolve and develop within professional subjects. In the arts and humanities critique is a signature pedagogy in the teaching of a number of subjects, such as graphic design (Motley, 2017), while the case study method is used extensively within the teaching of medicine, law and business and management studies (Rippin, et al, 2002). It is important to note that signature pedagogies are always in the process of evolving in parallel with the emergence of new areas of higher education teaching and enquiry. The digital environment of higher education teaching and learning has recently led to the evolution of game-based learning across a wide range of disciplines and digital storytelling in arts and humanities subjects such as American literature courses (Oppermann, 2008).

Hence, freedom to be able to select methods that are appropriate to one’s subject is vital for the development of the disciplines. Understanding of, and innovation in, teaching methods and pedagogy stems from the creativity of academics rather than administrators and if this creative freedom is curtailed the ossification of innovation is more likely to follow. The critical point I wish to emphasise is that the wider consequences of removing the power of professional judgement from academics in respect to the choice of teaching methods would risk a misalignment between pedagogy and educational aims. Here I am defining pedagogy as the act or art of teaching through the use of particular instructional practices rather than in more overtly ideological terms where the importance of pedagogy being ‘engaged’ or ‘authentic’, for example, might be stressed. As Nixon (2012) has argued it is not always necessary to define a particular ‘kind’ of pedagogy but it can be thought of as reasoning and, sometimes, acting together.

The importance of research, not pedagogical skills

The seminar as a teaching method is intimately linked with the development of the research university in the nineteenth century since it is a means of developing students as independent investigators after the truth. This is the defining characteristic of the Humboldtian university in the German tradition, originating with the University of Berlin in 1809, which can be traced through the twentieth century to the self-styled research universities of today. It is arguably the dominant tradition of Western higher education (Peters, 2019). While our collective understanding of the term ‘research’ has tended to narrow along performative lines during the last thirty years, the original intent was to encourage independence of thought, among academics and students thinking in collaboration, rather than reliance on canonical texts from the medieval tradition.

Hence, if a seminar encourages active learning but does not otherwise facilitate the re-examination of knowledge claims it is not a proper seminar. Given that we are living ‘in a ‘post-truth’ era where conventional forms of knowledge and methods for validating knowledge claims are downplayed by those in power and where expertise – and the experts who hold it – are under attack’ (Harrison and Luckett, 2019, 259) the importance of interrogating claims to truth is more than a romantic liberal ideal of the university. It is vital to the present. This means that prescribing particular teaching methods and proscribing others on the basis of the extent to which they foster active learning – as Finn seems to suggest – would potentially inhibit the choice of an approach best suited to examining knowledge claims in a discipline or subject.

Moreover, the choice of any method is no guarantee that the teacher will execute it in the manner in which it is theoretically intended. Seminars, while ostensibly intended for student discussion, can easily become teacher-dominated with little or no student contribution and, similarly the lecture, while often characterised as a teacher-dominated monologue, can be executed in a student-centred way and promote active learning via discussion breaks, questioning methods, polls, problem-solving exercises, and other techniques. The truth, as Watt points out (1964, 377), is that the teaching method cannot protect students from a teacher with an autocratic temperament:

… the authority of the teacher can be more crippling to the student in the seminar than in the lecture, where there is no obligation to respond.

Thus far in this dialogue with Finn’s paper, I have mainly focused on questioning his argument with respect to the choice of teaching method. I now want to turn to a different part of his argument in which he states that ‘to not develop one’s own pedagogical skills, in other words, is a breach of professional ethics.’ (Finn, 2020, 123). I would argue that it follows from my previous analysis that failing to engage in research in any way ultimately affects the quality of university teaching more fundamentally. By ‘research’ I am a taking a broad, liberal view (see Macfarlane, 2021) as opposed to a narrow and rarefied one limited to only the discovery of new empirical data. This includes those engaged with broader philosophic work such as ‘scholarly investigation, appreciation, creative and textual criticism, re-interpretation and a critical treatment of contemporary thought’ (Truscot, 1943, 333) as well as the scholarship of teaching (Boyer, 1990).

Jaspers (1959, 58), writing in this broader liberal tradition in the 1950s before the advent of research performativity in the contemporary university, states that it is only those actively engaged in research who are truly capable of teaching at university since they are the ones able to ‘bring the student into contact with the real process of discovery’, an argument which finds widespread support from within both the liberal (e.g. Minogue, 1973) and Humbodtian tradition of higher education (e.g. von Humboldt, 1970). Jaspers goes further by arguing that while the research worker might be ‘pedagogically inept’ those who do not engage in research will only be capable of passing on ‘a set of pedagogically arranged facts’ (Jaspers, 1959, 58). Hence, what makes a legitimate higher education teacher is not pedagogic expertise but a person capable of injecting what Jaspers called the ‘spirit of science’ into the classroom. In the Humboldtian tradition what ‘qualifies’ someone to teach in higher education is not a postgraduate certificate in learning and teaching nor even a PhD but a continuing engagement with the theoretical or professional field of learning as a researcher. This means that the right to teach in higher education is a provisional not a permanent right (Macfarlane and Eriksen, 2020). Without continuing to engage in research the university teacher is forced to draw on ‘dead results’ (Jaspers, 1959, 58) rather than the latest thinking. Hence, a more serious breach of professional ethics to the one identified by Finn (i.e. ‘to not develop one’s own pedagogical skills’) is to fail to research and bring students into contact with and critically appraise the latest propositional and professional ideas, theories and practices in a subject or discipline. What justifies the university teacher selecting their own teaching methods is that those doing the teaching have the right to teach in the sense that they are ‘qualified’ for the task by being active researchers.

Finn goes further in his paper by suggesting that prescribing the time allotted to different teaching methods poses no particular risks to academic freedom:

Imagine, for example, that a professor were required to spend class time in a clearly prescribed manner: one third of the time devoted to lecture, another third devoted to small group discussion, and the final third to teacher-led discussion. Would such a requirement prevent an instructor from expressing his or her own views freely, from raising controversial matters in class, from gaining the respect and confidence of the students, or from getting students to think critically for themselves? (Finn, 2020, 120).

Yet, this suggestion would pose some concerns for me since it removes the autonomy to determine how to teach from the person most qualified to make this decision (i.e. the research active university teacher). It may well affect the ‘raising of controversial matters in class’ since it could prescribe methods of teaching which are not as well-suited to generating this type of discussion as signature pedagogies.

A further significant risk to the academic freedom of both the university teacher and the student is posed by the way in which a growing number of universities are creating teaching-only contracts removing from the teacher what I call the right to intellectual renewal (Macfarlane, 2022) and for the student the right to receive a truly higher educational experience. Intellectual renewal is about the opportunity to engage in subject based research and not to be contractually restricted to pedagogic research which is now becoming the norm for those employed on teaching-only contracts at many institutions. These restrictions deny academics on such contracts the opportunity to remain research active in a way that feeds into the provision of university level teaching.

Learnification and the lecture

At the beginning of his paper, Finn refers briefly to a New York Times article in which an assistant professor is critical of the voguish nature of active learning and defends the lecture as a teaching method. While dismissive of this argument, Finn neglects to explain that there is now a growing body of literature, and not just the odd newspaper article, influenced by Geert Biesta’s concept of learnification (e.g. Biesta, 2015; Gourlay, 2017; Graham, 2002). This involves what Biesta (2019, 549) describes as the ‘redefinition of all things educational in terms of learning’. University learning and teaching certificates for early career academics commonly set out to challenge what is often characterised as a ‘teacher-centred’ approach and canonise active learning. Such courses are a well-established part of the landscape of higher education in contexts such as Australia, New Zealand and Northern Europe, including the UK (Fanghanel, 2012). They are far from universal across international higher education but especially important to consider in these contexts. This compulsory training has been a feature of most British universities since the late 1990s introduced in the wake of the Dearing Report (NCIHE, 1997). The objectives of such programmes include a focus on university teachers being ‘student-centred’ and adopting active approaches to teaching influenced by the contributions to the literature of figures such as John Biggs, Donald Schön and Ference Marton among others (Kandlbinder and Peseta, 2009). Reflective practice is the dominant paradigm endorsed by nearly all such programmes (Fanghanel, 2012).

The effect of this canonisation of active learning has been to further undermine the validity of the lecture among a new generation of university teachers. This is widely apparent in the contemporary literature and Finn seeks to subtly add to this discourse of derision. While Finn states that he is not criticising any teaching method in particular, his thinly veiled target is the lecture to which he refers in unflattering terms no less than seven times in the body of his paper. The only other teaching method to get a mention is student-led discussion (twice) and teacher-led discussion (once). Criticism of the lecture is, of course, nothing new. In the nineteenth century Bernheim identified the way in which lectures placed the hearer in a passive position (Paulsen, 1906). Yet the lecture has many potential functions not just transmission. Despite the negative labelling lectures combine the passion and personality of the lecturer with the facts and the argument in a way that other forms of communication, such as the written text, can rarely achieve and provide an interpretation of knowledge and practice based on academic expertise and authority. Interpretations may consist of a ‘mosaic’ of the literature, making a complex area of knowledge accessible and producing a ‘skeleton’ outline which students are then able to build on. These are among the many functions of the lecture (Truscot et. al., 1964, 35). Most lectures are neither inspirational nor entirely without merit and fall somewhere between these two stools. As Black (1976, 52) comments we both overvalue how people can learn from lectures and at the same time undervalue ‘their unique contribution, that of being a live, and hence responsive, research practitioner can best play its role as one element in the students’ learning activities.’ The lesson here is that there is no such thing as a good teaching method and a bad teaching method, only good and bad teachers.

In fairness to Finn (2020, 120), he adds the following rider to his suggestion that ‘teachers ought to be required to teach in certain ways’:

It is important to note that when I speak about ‘requirements,’ I refer to the requirements of professional responsibility – not to constraints placed upon professors by university administrators or external agencies.

Here he seems to be suggesting that the use of particular teaching methods involving the use of ‘active learning’ is some sort of moral imperative. Yet this is based on the assumption that educational developers, such as Finn, ‘know best’ and are able to act as moral guardians of the academic profession. My concern is that such a suggestion takes no account of context or disciplinary knowledge and expertise.

Pandemic policies and philosophies of educational development

Ironically, although I have sought to set out my opposition to Finn’s position in this paper, the COVID-19 pandemic and university policy are accelerating the trend toward the loss of pedagogic self-governance in respect to teaching methods that he advocates. University management have used the COVID-19 crisis as a Trojan Horse to introduce radical curriculum change with minimal consultation (Higgins, 2020). Evidence is emerging that COVID-19 inspired policies are negatively impacting on the extent to which academics feel free to make choices about their teaching (Watermeyer, et. al., 2020:np). Concerns appear to cluster around attempts to create a more uniform and regulated teaching environment where the lecturer is de-professionalised and reduced to more of a technical functionary.

In part this is happening because teaching online, as opposed to face-to-face, is being presented as giving rise to distinct pedagogic challenges that demand the use of more active learning. This reinforces the learnification agenda widely evident in teaching and learning certificate programmes and may be seen in advice on University COVID-19 websites. These contain explicit calls to replace lectures with ‘active learning’ tasks and sessions, an example of which can found on the website of Edinburgh Napier University.

Take a look at the learning outcomes for your module and the topics you would cover in the lectures. It may be possible that you can streamline the content and give the students active learning tasks. In an online format, you could provide a combination of the following instead of a lecture … (Edinburgh Napier University, 2020)

Aside from the operating assumption of such statements that lectures cannot contain possibilities for students to engage in active learning, this guidance seeks to discourage one particular teaching method – the lecture – and promote the advantages of others, normally discussion-based seminars. While the seminar ostensibly fulfils the goal of developing students as independent thinkers and scholars if this method is simply thought of as a vehicle for active learning – or ‘student-led discussions’ in Finn’s words – it will lose its true and deeper intellectual intent to promote scholarship.

Much COVID-19-inspired guidance might appear to be inoffensive ‘best practice’ advice to make online learning more ‘engaging’ for students. Yet it is also part of a more interventionist strategy which is eroding the idea of pedagogic self-governance rooted at the course and departmental level. An example of this type of intervention concerns the so-called ‘chunking’ or ‘slicing up’ of lectures as advice designed as a way of breaking up lecture content into bite size segments. However the ‘chunking’ of pre-recorded lectures (or lecture capture) can interfere with the flow and construction of an intellectual argument that takes time to build in much the same way as a commercial break can interrupt the concentration of the viewer of a film shown on television. Here I am not seeking to defend the lecture as a teaching method per se but to point up the consequences of a command and control approach to learning and teaching at university that will necessarily erode the space for academic judgement.

Instructions about the balance between synchronous and asynchronous teaching online is another way in which pedagogic self-governance, and the exercise of professional judgment, is being diluted. A mix of ‘good practice’ type advice (e.g. Weeks, 2020, University of Alberta, 2020) and policy-level instructions to academics such as those issued by the University of Waterloo (2020:np) in Canada is evident. A number of universities are using curriculum streamlining as an umbrella term for changes that are occurring in the wake of the virus. These developments further mean that the nature of academic work may change profoundly as learning designers, both within EdTech companies working for universities as well as those employed directly by institutions as educational developers, begin to play a more interventionist role in the curriculum (Croucher and Locke, 2020).

Finally, Stephen Finn and myself appear to hold contrasting views as to the role of the educational development function. Finn’s view regarding the control of teaching methods supports a more strategic and directive approach aimed at embedding active learning. This appears to represent what in Land’s (2004) terms is a more managerial orientation to educational development. Here educational developers work closely with senior management (such as pro vice chancellors for learning and teaching), to help them implement the University’s strategy. The ascendancy of this orientation during the 1990s led to my own decision to move out of educational development work in 2000. My own preference, which I saw increasingly undermined as the managerial orientation took hold, is more closely akin to an internal consultant, working with individuals and departments to help them achieve their objectives. This harks back to a time when learning and teaching support units worked in a less directive strategic environment and were able to identify where their services were needed in a bottom up rather than top down manner. It is perhaps more realistic in the current environment for educational developers to try to balance these competing orientations by maintaining wherever possible a consultancy approach tailored to individual and departmental agendas for the enhancement of teaching. This respects both the organisational objectives behind strategic initiatives and the concept of pedagogic self-governance at the individual level. If educational developers can place greater emphasis on the importance of signature pedagogies in the disciplines it would allow them to work more effectively with departments and develop strategies which are bottom up as well as support those that are essentially top down.

Conclusion

This paper has sought to engage with Finn’s argument presented within the pages of this journal by arguing that the control of teaching methods goes to the heart of academic freedom and cannot be disconnected from it conceptually. Teaching methods are already distanced from the locus of the discipline as a result of learning and teaching certificates which focus strongly on generic pedagogic principles. The growing centralisation of control of teaching methods is exacerbating this disconnection and undermines the autonomy of academics to use their professional judgment to select the most appropriate method by which to teach.

Ironically, while I have sought to argue against Finn’s position it is clear that institutional policies in the wake of COVID-19 are increasingly reinforcing the policing of teaching methods through the global shift to online learning. The extent to which academic autonomy and creative control of the curriculum will be reclaimed in a post-pandemic world is likely to depend on whether so-called ‘emergency’ measures become institutionalised as the new normal. Moreover, by asserting the need for more centralised direction in respect to teaching methods pandemic policies take little or no account of disciplinary differences and the implications these have for teaching methods.

Finally I believe that Finn’s argument provides a worrying illustration of the changing role of the educational developer from one focused on the development of individual academics to that of an institutional change agent; in Land’s terms the orientation is a managerial one rather than that of the consultant. The threat to academic freedom, especially in relation to the freedom to teach, is conventionally understood as coming from outside the walls of the university from undemocratic governments and aggressive lobby groups. However, in the day-to-day business of learning and teaching in higher education it is the university itself, and those charged with a responsibility to improve it, who appear to be playing a perhaps unintentional role in undermining the freedom to teach turning Finn’s vision into a disquieting reality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).