Scholarship in Higher Education: Building Research Capabilities through Core Business

ABSTRACT

As performativity within the academy continues to escalate, this paper considers the place for building research capacities through a scholarship in teaching and learning initiative at an Australian university. While the tensions that exist between discipline research and scholarship in teaching and learning remain, evaluation data for a central higher education research group suggests that an alternative research pathway is possible through collegial structures. The drive towards performativity is not unique to Australia and the evidence presented provides insights that may be useful for a broader audience that may be considering research capacity building.

Keywords:

• teaching and learning
• scholarship
• research performance
• collegiality
• communities of practice

Acknowledgements

Anna Lichtenburg, a former colleague and research fellow, is gratefully acknowledged for assisting with framing various parts of the paper. Access to HERG survey data by the HERG director and the helpful comments of two independent reviewers are also acknowledged.

Notes

¹ The ERA 2010 ranked journal and ranked conference lists relate retrospectively to the ERA 2010 reference period of January 2003 – December 2008. A new list will be created in 2012 that is different from ERA 2010 and it is proposed that outcomes for research quality will be comparable between the two lists.