Structure, reflexivity and their interplay: understanding university faculty members’ implementation of teaching excellence

Abstract

Against the backdrop of teaching being downplayed in higher education, this study unravels how the university faculty members’ implementation of teaching excellence is influenced by the interplay of objective structural conditionings and subjective internal deliberations, drawing upon Margaret Archer's social realist framework and her distinction between human reflexive modalities. By exploring 21 faculty members from three Chinese universities with different structural constraints and enablements, the study shows that dual modalities are manifest in all faculty members, among which meta-reflexivity applies to everyone. However, autonomous reflexivity and communicative reflexivity play more dominant roles in generating purposeful actions under the same structure. Furthermore, some structural forces are non-negotiable constraints, and people having the same reflexivity modality may act differently under different structural conditionings. The study calls for universities to cater to both structural arrangements and reflexive deliberations to transform constraints into enablements for teaching excellence.

Keywords:

• Structural conditionings
• reflexive modalities
• social realist approach
• teaching excellence
• higher education

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Youth Project, National Office for Education Science Planning (China) [grant number CIA210268].