Understanding educational development in terms of the collective creation of socially-just curricula

ABSTRACT

Suellen Shay’s research focused extensively on both the challenges of creating socially-just higher education curricula and the knowledge and practices of the field of educational development. Shay’s work highlights the important ways in which curricula define what it means to be educated and the importance of socially-just curricula that provide all students with the opportunity to participate in and succeed through higher education. In order to meet the challenging agenda this creates for curriculum transformation, there is a need to rethink the focus of educational development in higher education. I argue that an important implication of Shay’s work is to shift educational development from a focus on the development of individual teachers to focus on the collective creation of socially-just curricula. I explore the implications of this change for understanding the practices and priorities of educational development in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge
• curriculum
• students
• educational development
• Suellen Shay

Introduction

I first came across Suellen Shay’s work on assessment that used Bourdieu’s concepts in order to offer a double reading of assessment practices (Shay 2004, 2005) when I was exploring different ways of conceptualizing teaching-learning interactions in higher education (Ashwin 2009). Shay’s use of Bourdieu stood out to me for the richness of its engagement with the ideas and for the deep insights that she developed using particular empirical cases. Whilst Shay started with a focus on assessment, she increasingly saw issues of assessment as reflecting issues of knowledge and curriculum rather than questions of the use of generic assessment criteria (Shay 2008). Crucially, Shay argued that rather than starting with questions of assessment, as conventional educational development wisdom suggested, educational developers might be better of starting with questions of knowledge and curriculum. In this article, I first explore the Shay’s intellectual agenda and then examine the role of educational development in pursuing this agenda. Whilst I disagree with some aspects of Shay’s argument, I show how her focus on the development of socially-just curricula can form the basis of a new agenda for educational development.

Suellen Shay’s intellectual project

Shay’s concern with questions of knowledge and curriculum led her to argue strongly for curriculum reform that considered both the kinds of curricula that are needed and the kinds of knowledge that should inform those curricula. Drawing on the work of Basil Bernstein (2000) and its extension through Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (Maton 2013), Shay (Shay 2011, 2015, 2016a, 2016b; 2017; Shay and Mkwize 2018; Luckett and Shay 2020) argued for transformed university curricula that:

1. Are designed for the diversity of students entering university, enabling them to have successful educational experiences, and supporting their progression. These curricula need to be suitable for the majority of students and designed to overcome the epistemic obstacles faced by these students. It is important that students’ needs and current levels of understanding are properly assessed when they enter higher education. Interventions should be developed that systematically improve graduation rates for all students.

2. Are relevant to the rapidly changing world that students will graduate into and will prepare them for employment rather than preparing them for an idealized version of the world. Curricula need to engage students in learning that is important for their future careers and for their future contributions to society. They need to give all students access to the broad range of experiences commonly experienced only by privileged students in electives and extra curricula activities.

3. Take the voices and experiences of students seriously and recognize and make use of the rich sources of knowledge in and about the contexts that students are coming from through the languages of the students;

4. Challenge misuses of power by academics that demean, exclude and discriminate against some students;

5. Help to break patterns of inequalities by redistributing knowledge and by challenging and changing existing knowledge structures.

For Shay, these arguments were both particular and general. They grew out of the particular educational challenges and inequalities in South Africa, and she also used them as an invitation to others to consider how they might use the tools offered by her analysis to interrogate their own higher education contexts. Shay recognized the ambiguous role of universities in offering the potential to disrupt inequalities whilst also acting as gatekeepers of the existing order and reinforcing existing inequalities. She argued strongly that addressing these inequalities required the development of socially-just curricula that redistributed knowledge and ensured formal and epistemic access (Shay 2015; Shay and Peseta 2016; Luckett and Shay 2020). This requires curricula that offer students access to powerful knowledge. My own intellectual project has many similarities with that offered by Shay. For example, the argument in Ashwin (2020) for transforming university education is strongly aligned to the five points above. It argued for the development of degree programmes that are well designed and based on evidence-informed views of:

• who the students are, how and why the knowledge, which students are offered access to, is important and powerful;

• how it enables them to understand and change the world, and who students will become through their engagement with this knowledge;

• how they will contribute to society including, but not limited to, their employment.

Suellen and I often discussed our ideas (for example, see Shay et al. 2009 for an outcome of these discussions involving Jenni Case) and drew on some common conceptual resources (particularly Bernstein 2000) but these projects developed in distinctive ways. One area where we took different positions was in relation to the implications of these projects for the role educational development.

The role of educational development in pursuing this project

A key focus of Shay’s work was to consider the role that educational development could play in curriculum transformation. Shay (Shay 2011, 2012, 2017; Shay and Peseta 2016) argued that there were two elements of educational development that would need to be enhanced if it were to support the transformation of curricula. First, the knowledge base of educational development should move beyond craft-like knowledge to be systemic so that it can be more easily communicated and shared (Shay 2011, 2012; Shay and Peseta 2016). Second educational development needs to support collaborative projects aimed at transforming university curricula (Shay 2017; Luckett and Shay 2020). Whilst I disagree with Shay’s first argument, the second provides the basis for further elaborating the process by which curricula can be transformed.

In relation to the first argument, Shay (2012) argued that knowledge in educational development had developed through engagement with complex and messy problems. This had led to the development of principles of practice that teachers were encouraged to use to solve problems in their particular context. Whilst Shay saw a place for this knowledge, she argued that it was not systemic as it had no capacity to explain the problem that it was intended to solve. Shay argued for the importance of a rich conceptual language that could be used to develop more generalizable principles. Whilst Shay herself found LCT particularly helpful, she also recognized that this rich conceptual language could come from other perspectives.

I disagree with this first argument. There are three aspects to my disagreement.

First, I disagree with Shay’s view that educational development is primarily based upon craft-like knowledge. The principles that I would argue underpin effective educational practices draw on systemic knowledge based on over 50 years of research into teaching, learning and assessment in higher education. Whilst the precise wording and emphases of these principles change and they are based on a variety of conceptual approaches, the underlying core in different sets of principles are highly consistent (for example, Chickering and Gamson 1987; Kuh 2008; Ambrose et al. 2010; Entwistle 2018; Ashwin et al. 2020). Ashwin (2020, 42–43) summarizes these different sets of principles into six core principles that argue that ‘a high quality university education:

1. Starts from an understanding of who the students are;

2. Is based on a deep understanding of the knowledge being taught and how to make this accessible to students;

3. Is designed as a coherent set of experiences that will enable particular students to develop an understanding of particular bodies of knowledge;

4. Is based on a clear sense of how students are expected to change through their engagement these experiences;

5. Evaluates students’ learning in terms of their understanding of these bodies of knowledge;

6. Is collectively produced’.

Second, whilst I would agree that when conducting research it is important to draw on a coherent conceptual language, I do not think the same is true when seeking to enhance educational practices. I would argue that in our educational practices we are much freer to view the same educational situation from a number of different conceptual positions and decide which way of seeing the situation supports us to address the educational challenges that we face. The reason that I take this position is that I take the view that the complexity of the world of educational practices exceeds our capacity to know it (Law 2004, Ashwin 2009). In engaging in educational development work, we have to accept that our plans and strategies are based on simplifications of the world. Different ways of simplifying are based on different assumptions about the social world and so will not be compatible. It is not possible to synthesize all simplifications together and attempts at such synthesis will lead to oversimplifications of the social world (Mol and Law 2002). Rather, as Mol and Law (2002, 11) argue

It becomes instead a matter of determining which simplification or simplifications we will attend to and create and, as we do this, of attending to what they foreground and draw attention to, as well as what they relegate to the background.

However, as Strathern (2002) argues, it is possible to shift between these different simplifications in order to examine what understanding of a situation is offered by their different foci. Different conceptual approaches offer different simplifications and in engaging in educational development work we can move between different ways of understanding any situation in order to see what approach offers us the most productive way of moving forward (for different approaches in educational development see Amundsen and Wilson 2012).

Third, I would argue that rather than the issue being a lack of coherent conceptual approaches for educational developers to use, the issue is that the available conceptual approaches are not drawn upon in an effective way in educational development practices. Thus, rather than the challenge being a lack of knowledge, the challenge is how the knowledge we have about education and educational development in higher education is translated into effective educational practices. A way of expressing this difference here is that in Shay’s argument knowledge acts as a ‘trump card’ that succeeds by the weight of its conceptual richness. Whereas, in the approach argued for here, knowledge is more of a catalyst that can enhance the development of effective practices. Thus, the primary focus is on how we can interrogate and enhance educational practices rather than how we can re-describe practices. Considering new ways of describing practices is important but only to the extent to which it supports the interrogation and enhancement of practices.

Overall, these three concerns mean that the challenge for educational development is not to develop a richer conceptual language to describe educational practices. The messiness and complexity of these practices means that new knowledge will not necessarily set us free. Rather the challenge is how can educational development draw on the knowledge that it has about educational practices in order to change these practices. This leads us to Shay’s second argument about how educational development can support collaborative projects aimed at transforming university curricula (Shay 2017; Luckett and Shay 2020). It is this argument that I suggest can form the basis of an alternative agenda for educational development.

An alternative agenda for educational development

From the perspective of this alternative agenda for educational development, current educational development practices tend to be overly focused on changing individuals. Often educational developers’ main institutional responsibility is to provide courses to introduce new academics to the principles of good teaching, learning and assessment. However, these academics may have little or no power or authority to redesign curricula in their departments and instead tend to adopt the ways of teaching of their more established colleagues (Fanghanel 2012). Providing individual academics time, space and support to develop their teaching is clearly important. However, it does not lead to sustained changes in university teaching. The alternative agenda is informed by the argument that rather than focusing on individual teachers in this way, the primary focus of educational development should be to support the collective creation of socially-just curricula. As highlighted in Shay’s work (Shay 2017; Luckett and Shay 2020), many educational developers already engage in such practices, the alternative nature of this agenda lies in arguing that it should become the primary focus of educational development. It is also important to recognize that the argument made here is about dominant educational development practices. In the educational development literature (for example, Amundsen and Wilson 2012; Gibbs 2013; Turner, Healey, and Bens 2021) there is discussion of a range of different foci for educational development ranging from the individual to the educational and institutional environment to national and international higher education systems.

In setting out this agenda, I first explain the idea of ‘curriculum’ and the view of ‘educational development’ that informs it. I then show how this agenda addresses the five aspects of curriculum transformation highlighted in Shay’s intellectual project.

The view of curriculum that informs this agenda is based on Basil Bernstein’s (2000) notion of the pedagogic device that Shay drew on in her work (Shay 2008, 2011). The pedagogic device brings together the way in which knowledge is differentially distributed (distribution rules), made available for teaching through the production of curricula (recontextualizing rules), and is transformed into ways of assessing students’ performances (evaluation rules) (Bernstein 2000; Ashwin 2009). The pedagogic device can be seen as providing a sense of three forms of knowledge: the distribution rules can be seen as focusing on knowledge-as-research, the recontextualizing rules on knowledge-as-curriculum and the evaluation rules on knowledge-as-student-understanding (Ashwin 2014). Whilst it is important to be clear that the pedagogic device operates at the level of societies rather than individual institutions, it highlights that what is distinctive about universities as educational institutions is that all three forms of knowledge can be produced within a single institution. Academics collectively produce knowledge-as-research, they also design degree programmes and thus produce knowledge-as-curriculum, and they teach these programmes to students and help to produce knowledge-as-student-understanding.

An important aspect of the pedagogic device is that knowledge is transformed as it moves from knowledge-as-research to knowledge-as-curriculum and to knowledge-as-student-understanding. Crucially the transformation of knowledge as it moves between the different rules of the pedagogic device means that as the form of knowledge changes, so the logic that informs that form of knowledge changes. As Bernstein (2000) argues, this means that the logic of a curriculum is not the same as the logic of the discipline on which it is based. This is because the process of producing curricula involves conflict in which different agents seek to define which elements of a discipline or professional field are included as part of a curriculum. In higher education, this involves discussions between agents such as academics, students, professional bodies, institutional quality agents, external examiners, national quality agencies (Ashwin 2009). Power plays a crucial role in this process. In this way, disciplines are transformed as they are turned into a particular curriculum. Similarly when students engage with that curriculum, they transform the knowledge themselves as they relate it to their previous knowledge and experiences (see Ashwin 2009 for a fuller discussion of this process). It is important to recognize that rather than being a conceptually coherent exercise, the development of knowledge-as-curriculum from knowledge-as-research involves many conflicting languages that compete in order to define what counts as a legitimate curriculum. There are the languages of the educational principles that inform the design of a curriculum, there are the languages of the disciplinary and professional knowledge of the subjects that form a curriculum, and there are the languages of the institutions, professional bodies, and government agencies that also seek to shape a curriculum (see Ashwin 2009). Many of these languages are incommensurable and so the process of curriculum transformation can be seen as involving conflict as different agents try to assert the legitimacy of the language that they wish to bring to the process (Bernstein 2000).

The view of educational development that informs this alternative agenda draws on McAlpine et al.’s (2006) work on teacher thinking in higher education. They argue that there are four zones of teacher thinking: conceptual, strategic, tactical, and enactive. These four zones of thinking link abstract ideas about the purposes of higher education to actions in the classroom (Roxå and Marquis 2019). The conceptual zone considers teachers’ commitment to the purposes of higher education, the strategic zone is about developing overall strategies in order to realize these commitments, the tactical zone is about planning specific actions in order to achieve these strategies that take account of the specific contexts in which the strategy is being enacted, and the enactive zone is about thinking in the moment of teaching. These zones can similarly be applied to educational development in order to explore the conceptual, strategic, tactical and enactive approaches to educational development.

Bringing together Bernstein’s view of curriculum with McAlpine et al.’s (2006) view of teacher thinking offers an alternative agenda for educational development that addresses the aspects of curriculum transformation that were central to Shay’s work. In this agenda, in terms of conceptual thinking, the purposes of educational development can be understood in terms of supporting the power of higher education to transform students through their engagement with bodies of academic knowledge. A key shift in this alternative agenda is at the strategic level. Rather than primarily focusing on the professional development of individual teachers, the strategic focus shifts to focus on the enhancement of curricula. This shift is for two reasons. First, the ‘theory of change’, the ideas that inform educational developers assumptions about how particular actions will lead to particular outcomes (Saunders, Charlier, and Bonamy 2005), that underpins the individual-focused approach is weak. In this case, the weak theory of change is that if we can transform the teaching of each individual teacher then this will scale-up to transform education across whole institutions. Whereas, a focus on changing curricula shifts attention to the design of the programmes that students are studying and takes educational development directly into discussions of the nature of the knowledge that makes up higher education curricula. Second, when educational development focuses on the professional development of individuals, any successes are very vulnerable to those individuals changing roles or moving to other institutions. In contrast, if educational development can help to change curricula then this has a sustained existence beyond the individuals who are involved in the design of those curricula. Clearly, these curricula may be reviewed again in the future, but if this is based on an ongoing commitment to giving students access to transformational knowledge then it is a very different situation than individuals leaving a particular role.

Turning to the tactical and enactive zones is where we can see how this approach would support the transformation of curriculum that Shay (2011, 2012, 2017; Shay and Peseta 2016) argued for. Within this agenda, an important role of educational developers is to bring different groups of actors together to redesign curricula. These actors will include academics, students, educational developers, learning technologists, those working in quality assurance and professional bodies and employers. Educational developers then can be seen as central in helping to manage a conversation involving these different actors in order to review the design of curricula. The idea would be to support the five elements of Shay's argument for transfromed curricula identified earlier and discussed below:

1. Curricula that are designed for the diversity of students entering university, enabling them to have successful educational experiences, and supporting their progression.

An essential element of the collective review of curricula is to focus on bringing particular students in relation to particular bodies of knowledge. Thus the focus is on exploring how the curricula of particular programmes is collectively developed in a way that considers the students who will study it, the particular bodies of knowledge that have been brought together to make-up the particular curriculum, and the contexts in which this curriculum will be studied. This is very different to many institutional approaches to curriculum redesign that involve introducing common elements, such as graduate attributes, to all curricula across an institution (for example, Turner, Healey, and Bens 2021). It is about designing a specific and particular curriculum that responds to the levels of understanding that prospective students currently have of the bodies of knowledge that make-up a curriculum and providing them with a realistic path to the levels of understanding that are expected at the successful completion of the programme. The key here is that rather than blaming the student for being the wrong kind of student, curriculum transformation is about how to make bodies of knowledge accessible to the students who will actually study the programme under consideration. This will involve serious intellectual engagement on the part of those designing the particular curriculum. It will involve successes and failures, fine-tuning and amendments. Part of the enactive zone of educational development is to support this process and help those involved in the process to deal with this uncertainty collectively and inclusively.

• (2) Curricula that are relevant to the rapidly changing world that students graduate into and prepare them for employment rather than preparing them for an idealized version of the world.

A second element of this collective curricula review to explore what a curriculum supports students to do in the world once they have graduated. This involves examining what new ways of thinking and doing students will develop through their engagement with their degree programme (see McCune and Hounsell 2005; Anderson and Hounsell 2007; McCune et al. in press) and what these new ways of thinking and doing will allow them to contribute to society once they have graduated. For some professional areas, this focus on what graduates do in the world is already a focus of their university education. For example, Walker and McLean’s (2013) work gives a sense of how curricula in professional education can be focused on producing professionals who are committed to the public good. For other subject areas and in other institutional contexts, this focus on what students do in society with the knowledge and capabilities they develop at university is much less developed. However, given that universities promote the benefits of studying for a degree, they have an educational responsibility to know what graduates are able to do with the knowledge they engage with when they study. This is about ways of seeing and being in the world more than is about the individual elements of knowledge that can become rapidly out of date (Bowden and Marton 1998). Whilst employment is an important element of graduates’ contribution to society, there are many other ways that graduates are supported to engage with society through their degrees, whether this is through community or political activism or participation in civic enterprises. Gaining a deeper understanding of the ways in which graduates draw on the bodies of knowledge they have studied in their degrees will have the added benefit of degree programmes having a closer relationship to the societies in which they are located. It will involve a direct conversation between those designing curricula and alumni and wider society about how successful this education has been in supporting their engagement with society.

Whilst being clear about what the knowledge that students engage with in their degrees will enable them to do in the world, it is equally important to be clear that the design of the programme should be based on a coherent sense of what degree programmes can achieve educationally. This needs to be rooted in the collective bodies of knowledge that are the focus of higher education. One way to consider this is to see degree programmes as providing students with access to understanding how bodies of knowledge are produced and validated within a particular discipline or field of study. This allows a consideration of the ways in which being able to produce and validate these forms of knowledge has relevance in society rather than shifting to a purely instrumental view of the benefits of higher education.

• (3) Curricula that take the voices and experiences of students seriously and recognize and make use of the rich sources of knowledge in and about the contexts that students are coming from through the languages of the students

The third element of curriculum transformation is to consider how students will recognize themselves in a particular curriculum. An important contribution of Bernstein’s (2000) notion of the pedagogic device is that it highlights that curriculum structures are not directly inferred from the structure of disciplinary or professional knowledge. They are rather the result of power struggles over what should be included in a curriculum. This insight provides space to challenge those who use authority to simply assert what should be included in a curriculum based on an imagined cannon. It opens up space to consider why particular aspects of disciplinary and professional knowledge have been selected and excluded from a curriculum and why particular voices and experiences of the operation of that knowledge have been amplified or silenced. This is not an argument for ‘anything goes’. It is about understanding what is powerful about the knowledge that students engage with in their university education and identifying how to support them to experience and make use of this power. Part of this is to find ways of supporting students to understand the relevance of this knowledge to what they want to achieve in the world. However, part of it also involves students being open to what this knowledge can offer them.

This element is clearly related to debates around decolonization of curricula (Shay 2016b; Lange 2019; Arday, Zoe Belluigi, and Thomas 2021; Hlatshwayo and Alexander 2021). In this case, it is about having an educationally-focused discussion about the knowledge and practices that are included and excluded in a curriculum. This involves examining how what is included or excluded helps particular students to gain access to powerful knowledge that supports their engagementt with the world after they graduate.

• (4) Curricula that challenge misuses of power by academics that demean, exclude and discriminate against some students

It is important to recognize that there are power differences between academics and students. A key element of being a teacher is to use expertise in order to support students’ engagement with knowledge. It is this expertise that informs academics’ legitimate uses of power in engaging with students, for example in assessing the extent to which students have engaged meaningfully with a curriculum. However, academics use of their expertise in working on the design of curricula and in teaching needs to be based upon evidence. This evidence includes engagement with scholarly literature about educational practices, data about their teaching and feedback from their students and investigations of their teaching practices (Ashwin et al. 2020). There are other uses of power by academics that are illegitimate and excluding. Part of acting as a steward of knowledge, involves a commitment by academics to find ways of making knowledge accessible to students. It is also important to note that students have important insights into their experiences of engaging with this knowledge and in making links between academic knowledge and their wider lives. An example of an illegitimate use of academic power is where academics dismiss students as the wrong kind of knower rather than exploring ways in which students’ struggles with knowledge can be supported.

Part of the collective transformation of curricula is for academics to explain to students, educational developers and other stakeholders why a curriculum is designed in the way that it is. These explanations should be educative in the sense that they are focused on explaining both what is required by the knowledge that makes up a curriculum and what is required to give the students access to understanding this knowledge. These explanations should be considered in the light of students’ and graduates’ accounts of their experiences of engaging with this knowledge both during their course and in their engagement with the world after graduation. Similarly, account needs to be taken of the views of other stakeholders who have an understanding of these processes and the relationships between students/graduates and knowledge such as employers, professional bodies, and community organizations.

• (5) Curricula that help to break patterns of inequalities by redistributing knowledge and by challenging and changing existing knowledge structures

Overall, this approach to transforming curricula is aimed at redistributing access to powerful knowledge by considering both the content and structure of knowledge-as-curriculum and how this will be transformed into knowledge-as-student understanding. Assessing knowledge-as-student understanding should be focused on students’ meaningful engagement with knowledge that they can make use of in the world, rather than their ability simply to reproduce the words or formulae of their teachers in examination conditions. This approach to curriculum transformation requires new metaphors for the relationship between academic knowledge and society. It is not about an ivory tower but about how the knowledge produced by universities directly contributes to people living in the world in an equitable, sustainable and fulfilling manner.

Implications of this alternative agenda for educational development

This alternative agenda has four implications for educational development. First, it repositions the nature of expertise in educational development. Rather than about having one conceptually-rich way of understanding educational processes, it is about having many different conceptually-rich ways of understanding educational situations. This expertise involves engaging others in discussions about which way of understanding a particular educational situation is most powerful given the nature of the situation and the questions that are being asked of that situation. This involves recognizing that all ways of understanding in a particular educational situation are limited. Rather than being seen as ‘definitive concepts’, these ways of seeing should be seen more like ‘sensitizing concepts’ that provide a sense of a direction to look along and are open to change (Blumer 1969).

Second, this alternative approach to educational development recognizes that educational development is always compromised. It is situated at the intersection of the demands of institutions, academics, students and external stakeholders. These different parties have different values and expectations about what educational development can provide. In positioning educational development as a way of bringing these different voices together in the formation of curricula, it places this compromised and compromising aspect of educational development in the foreground. Whilst it is important to maintain a principled position in relation to these different voices, it also highlights the importance of educational development not over-promising what it can deliver.

Third, in engaging with these different voices, it is important that educational development keeps an eye on the ‘big picture’ of what it is trying to achieve. Shay’s agenda for the transformation of curricula (Shay 2011, 2012, 2017; Shay and Peseta 2016) provides a powerful articulation of this purpose. It focuses on contributing to the role that higher education can play in challenging inequalities in societies by providing more equal access to powerful knowledge. A key element of this is the way in which degree programmes provide students with an understanding of how bodies of knowledge are produced and validated in particular discipline or field.

Overall, this alternative approach to educational development can be seen as changing the subject and object of educational development. The object of educational development is changed from the professional development of university teachers to the transformation of university curricula. Related to this, the subject of educational development is changed from the educational developer who supports the professional development of university teachers to the collective work of all those who are engaged in the transformation of university curricula. This alternative agenda builds on and extends the important contribution of Suellen Shay to understanding of the educational purposes of higher education and the role that educational development plays in supporting the pursuit of these purposes.

Disclosure statement

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