A voyage around the ideological islands of higher education research

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ideological orientations of higher education (HE) researchers in the form of a visual map, including three principal ‘islands’ – Pragmatists Peninsula, Reformists Rock and Dystopians Retreat. The development of the HE research field in general, illustrated by the last 40 years of scholarship within Higher Education Research & Development in particular, is explained in relation to this metaphorical seascape. The analysis identifies a number of shifting publication patterns, such as the gradual radicalisation of HE scholarship, a growing dystopian literature and the reorientation of pragmatist research interests from micro- and departmental-level concerns to meso-level work directed at strategic, university-wide agendas.

KEYWORDS:

• Ideology
• publication
• research field
• higher education studies

Introduction

Ten years ago I published a visual map of higher education (HE) research in this journal representing the collective endeavours of HE scholars as a seascape (Macfarlane, 2012). This ‘cartographic provocation’, as it has been subsequently described (de Oliveira Andreotti et al., 2016, p. 84), consisted of two main ‘islands’: ‘teaching and learning’ and ‘policy’ divided by what I called a ‘sea of disjuncture’ intended to represent the lack of communication and relationship between these two areas of HE scholarship. Although the map was essentially designed as a piece of whimsical fun, it attracted the attention of two of my more empirically-minded colleagues, Hugo Horta and Jisun Jung. Their analysis, using a Louvain algorithm of all HE research articles published in Asia between 1980 and 2012, confirmed the divided nature of teaching and learning and policy-oriented communities represented on the map (Horta and Jung, 2014). More recently, Daenekindt and Huisman (2020) drew on the abstracts of 17,000 articles between 1991 and 2018, again largely corroborating my speculative hunch. The map has also inspired others to create their own versions and use it as a creative stimulus for new lecturers to reflect on their own academic identity (King et al., 2014).

Ten years on I have created a new map (see Figure 1) in which I have sought to identify the ‘ideological islands’ that characterise the values and beliefs of HE researchers: Pragmatists Peninsula, Reformists Rock and Dytopians Retreat. There is still, in my view, a ‘sea of disjuncture’ between policy researchers and those specialising in teaching and learning. But, this new map is about understanding why topics are chosen rather than just describing what is being researched and written. Unlike the previous seascape, the ideological islands identified signify how HE researchers cluster around different value positions drawn from their personal and political beliefs. These value positions influence the purposes of research and relate to ideology and methodology and the balance between empirical data, theory and rhetoric. In this short article I will present and explain this seascape and connect it with the history and changing nature of scholarship published in Higher Education Research & Development (HERD) over the last 40 years.

Figure 1. The ideological seascape of higher education research.

Mapping the seascape

Situated roughly in the middle of the map, the Pragmatists Peninsula is where the least overtly ideological researchers gather to investigate a range of issues of essentially practical importance to the HE sector. This does not mean that researchers in these areas are not ideologically driven in some way but that the results of such work, in the main, are probably the most immediately applicable to the practice context. These issues focus on where universities have considerable vested interests such as student engagement, digital learning, quality assurance and assessment and feedback. Over the years, these topics have shifted a little as the strategic concerns of the university have developed and changed: the student ‘experience’ is now student ‘engagement’, ‘overseas’ students have become ‘international’ and there has also been a revolution in managing learning technology, from the ‘audio-visual aids’ of yesteryear to the ‘learning platforms’ of today. The most astute or opportunistic pragmatists will spot the latest trend and look to ride the wave for as long as there are funding streams to bid for. This is why recently, a new low-lying island called ‘COVID key’ has emerged off the coast of Pragmatists Peninsula. Pragmatists, especially their sponsors, are interested in solving problems, finding out what is ‘most effective’ or, possibly, identifying ‘best practice’. However, they also need to ensure that their research is not simply seen as a policy tool or part of an institution’s strategic plan to accrete greater academic prestige. This can be a hard trap to avoid where researchers work as educational developers or are engaged in an institutionally sponsored project linked to a university strategy.

Lying just above Pragmatists Peninsula is Reformists Rock. This second island is where HE researchers can be found who are dedicated to promoting equity and social justice through their work. These researchers are driven by a desire to see reforms in how HE systems and universities operate, including opportunities for historically under-represented communities to participate and benefit fully. Perennial topics of interest include access to HE and the expansion of participation to disadvantaged groups together with the (ill) effects of tuition fee regimes. Current hot topics include gender and leadership, southern theory, the de-colonisation of the curriculum and white privilege (see the ‘isle of white privilege’). These agendas for research and social change are closely connected with restorative justice. Despite the emotive nature of their causes, reformists will tend to rely on generating empirical evidence to back their positions rather than depending simply on rhetoric. In common with more artful pragmatists, reformists often pursue causes that reflect the spirit of the age, making it more likely that they can attract research funding. The more radical members of Reformists Rock will sometimes migrate or spend time on neighbouring activists atoll. This is where the world of HE research meets radical politics. Activist-academics want to change the world, mobilise communities, including students, and see their scholarly endeavours as intertwined with the need for protest and direct action. The issues that concern them tend to be transnational such as the climate and ecological emergency, sustainable development, global citizenship and the Black Lives Matter movement. HE research has always been a loosely rather than tightly knit community of social scientists. Its permeable border is illustrated here, bringing together those who want to change the world, not just the usual group of dedicated HE researchers developing a sub-set of specialist academic knowledge. Activists marshal moral and normative arguments and undertake direct action on occasions, with less reliance on empirical evidence.

In the southeast corner of the map, we find Dystopians Retreat. This island is not called a retreat for nothing, as it symbolises a group of researchers, often of a more socio-philosophical bent, who believe that HE is in a lamentable condition, a state of almost perpetual ‘crisis’ and ‘decline’. Their articles and books tend to use these terms repeatedly along with favoured ‘isms’ and ‘izations’ (see the (idol)ization isle). This is the island where those misty-eyed idealists, who have perhaps turned a little disenchanted in their mid to late career, tend to migrate. They long for the so-called golden age of HE and seek to turn myth into fact (see ‘golden age sands’). The position of the dystopians tends to be shaped more by rhetoric than empirical evidence, a characteristic they share with the activists, but this tendency makes it harder for them to attract research funding. They believe that academic freedom is always ‘under threat’, that students are no longer as motivated as in years gone by, that the ‘therapy’ culture has led to their infantilisation and that the trials of performativity are destroying the soul of the academic profession. Where dysoptians engage in research, they tend to rely mainly on the views of other, similarly disenchanted academics to confirm their suspicions that things aren’t what they used to be (e.g., students are more instrumentally driven). Commenting on the large body of work about the marketisation of HE, Komljenovic and Robertson (2016, p. 623) summarise this literature in the following terms:

students are referred to as customers; going to university is an investment in human capital; academic work is increasingly driven by economic imperatives; Vice-Chancellors act like CEOs; the university’s administration includes units on enterprise and other forms of commercial activity, and so on. And of course, all of this is true.

As Komljenovic and Robertson help to confirm, one of the pet metaphors of dystopians is that students now act like customers (but not, apparently, when they were students themselves, of course) and that research has been ‘commodified’ by neo-liberalization, their favourite go-to ‘ization’. (For more popular ‘izations’ please visit the (idol)ization isle.)

HE research is, of course, heavily indebted to social scientific thought more broadly. This is why there are three ‘banks’ on the outer edges of the map – philosophy, sociology and psychology, respectively. Inevitably the vast majority of those named on these banks are male, Western, and deceased, but I make no apology for this as they are still the most heavily cited in the literature. However, this topographical insertion might get me in trouble with the southern theorists based on Reformists Rock. If a HE researcher is conducting a piece of work about access and equity in HE, for example, the work of Bourdieu is almost always cited. Of course, further disciplinary influences, that are not mentioned on the map due to the lack of space, have come in with the tide from beyond HE seas, including anthropology, politics and economics, among others. I resisted the temptation to name HE researchers as I did on my original map back in 2012 in connection with the islands. It would be easy to do this, but part of the fun is thinking about where to place yourself and others you know. This way I avoid either offending anyone or boosting their ego.

Re-visiting the islands with HERD

The ideological islands represented on this map may be related to the development of scholarly contributions to HERD since its inception 40 years ago. John Powell’s editorial in the first issue back in 1982 indicates that the original vision for the journal had most in sympathy with Pragmatists Peninsula:

The focus of this journal is upon change, that is with research and development that extends our understanding and thus justifies what we do or indicates what we ought to be doing, and with those developments in educational practice which explore or exemplify more satisfactory ways of conducting the enterprise of higher education. (Powell, 1982, p. 1)

In line with Powell’s vision, most of the early papers published during the 1980s and early 1990s were pragmatic in direction with an emphasis on the improvement of teaching practice and student learning. Favourite subjects included student motivation, teaching styles, the role of the curriculum, textbook selection, evaluations of teaching quality, non-verbal communication in lecturing, problem-solving, classroom environment and small group work. Papers during this period were very firmly focused on teaching and learning practices. They used empirical data in combination with theory to offer practically grounded possibilities for improving practice and student achievement. There were also more papers than we tend to see today about academic practice in the disciplines such as civil engineering and architecture, among others. During this time the ‘subject-based pedagogy island chain’, located off the south coast of Pragmatists Peninsula, was still in its infancy before subject-specific education journals emerged in more significant numbers in the late 1990s.

By the 1990s, the bulk of papers published in HERD still belonged on Pragmatists Peninsula when learning theory and problem-based learning were especially hot topics. However, more papers started to appear on subjects that are more usually associated with the work of those who live on Reformists Rock, such as the needs of students with disabilities (Hubbard, 1994), those from ‘overseas’ (now ‘international’) (e.g., Burns, 1991), and how gender impacts on pass rates (Keef, 1992). A growing sense of professional self-consciousness is also apparent from the mid to late 1990s, with papers about academic work, including leadership and identity, becoming a more significant element of the journal. This was prompted at this time, in part, by the emergence of ‘new’ universities in Australia and the UK. Papers related to doctoral supervision start to grow, and the challenges of adapting to additional expectations regarding staff research performance become prominent, including the pressure to publish (e.g., Bazeley, 1994; McGrail et al., 2006). Ironically, while ‘research’ was represented mainly as a new intrusion or extra burden in professional life in the early 1990s, ‘teaching workload’ is now perceived by junior academics as negatively affecting their chances of research success (Cenamor, 2021). It seems that attitudes have come full circle.

In the 2000s, while HERD still published many papers belonging on Pragmatists Peninsula, the topics under investigation started to shift from the micro- to the meso-level as institutional concerns, such as academic governance (e.g., a special issue in 2007), student engagement (Ahlfeldt et al., 2005; Barnacle & Dall’Alba, 2017), retention and drop-out (e.g., Leveson et al., 2013) graduate attributes (e.g., Green et al., 2009), e-portfolios and employability came more to the fore, a trend that accelerated in the 2010s. The heightened importance of the meso-level in the focus of publications reflects the changing nature of educational development during this period from an approach based on consultancy to one more akin to managerialism (Land, 2001). Indicative of this trend was the special issue on strategic educational development published in 2008. It became more common to see reflections on how educational development plays an institution-wide role (e.g., Palmer et al., 2011).

The period since 2010 has witnessed far more contributions relating to Reformists Rock and Dytopians Retreat. Much of the reformist agenda has centred around indigenous knowledge, southern theory and the effects of colonialism (e.g., Acton et al., 2017; Coombe et al., 2017; Papoutsaki & Rooney, 2006). There was a symposium on the southern theory in 2017 and a special issue on ‘indigenous voices in higher education’ in 2021. The latter sought to overtly encourage a ‘rethinking how the publication process for scholarly journals can do more to remove obstacles for Indigenous authors and publish more of their work’ (Hall et al., 2021, p. 1). This type of approach might start to redress the historical under-representation of non-Western authors in the HE literature. While familiar Western socio-philosophical figures, including Ron Barnett, Stephen Brookfield, Judith Butler, Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, Henry Giroux, Jürgen Habermas, Jack Mezirow and C. Wright Mills all get one or more citations in the indigenous voices special issue, so do a broader range of non-Western authors than usual in a standard HERD issue.

Other key topics have emerged including staff and student mental health issues (e.g., Tytherleigh et al., 2005), ethnicity (Radmehr et al., 2019), LGBT and a special issue on queering the academy (2015), gender and staff inequality (Dobele et al., 2014; Gardiner, et al., 2007) and hardy perennials such as widening participation (e. g. Dawson et al., 2013). Research agendas primarily established in the 1990s, such as doctoral education, have shifted from largely pragmatic beginnings to a more critical and reformist focus with concerns about the equitable treatment of students becoming much more noticeable.

By the 2000s and 2010s more papers started to appear which were dystopian in tone or sympathies. These are evident from titles such as Mary Henkel’s (2007) ‘Can autonomy survive in the knowledge society?’ and growing qualms about the erosion of academic autonomy and collegiality frequently associated with the effects of so-called ‘new’ managerialism (e.g., Cheng, 2012; Schulz, 2013; Spiller, 2010; Waitere et al., 2011). Issues related to academic ‘work’ associated initially with Pragmatists Peninsula have migrated to Dytopians Retreat under the edgier nomenclature of academic ‘identity’ with authors adopting a more pessimistic tone (e.g., Billot, 2010 and the special issue entitled academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes and politics, 2017). There has been a notable growth in interest in methodology (see Isla Methodology) over the last 10 years symbolised by special issues such as ‘questioning theory-method relations in higher education research’ (2012) and ‘alternative methodologies in higher education’ (2013). Methodology-consciousness has been on the rise too, especially in papers with a deeper, explicit focus on specialist qualitative traditions such as autoethnography (e.g., Ai, 2017), constructivism, co-operative inquiry, critical realism and conversational inquiry. (Idol)isation isle is increasingly well represented in the journal through, for example, the special issue on globalisation in 2003 and the ‘internationalising the home student’ special issue in 2011.

Island hopping

Of course, many HE research topics can be found on more than one island but with a different type of emphasis. The effects of COVID-19 on universities, and their teaching regimes, are topical examples. Pragmatists are interested in how staff and students can best adapt to learning online, reformists are interested in whether the pandemic provides any opportunities to address inequalities in access to university, support and resources, while dystopians are suspicious of platformisation and how academic autonomy is potentially being undermined through management responses to the crisis.

HE research careers are far from linear, so most experienced researchers have travelled between and across more than one of these islands. I have always believed that emotions have as much, if not more, to do with research than dispassionate hypothesis testing. There is almost always a personal backstory behind the topics that explain the ‘positionality’ of HE researchers and perhaps researchers of any field. Those interested in equity and access have often felt disadvantaged by their own academic background, while my own interest in academic freedom stems from my experience as an undergraduate student where I found the political positions adopted by my lecturers so overbearing that I self-censored. My own research career serves as an example of island hopping. When I started publishing in the early 1990s about degree results I was living largely on the Pragmatists Peninsula. I then spent some time writing about business and management education on subject-based pedagogy island chain off Pragmatists Peninsula before becoming more interested in the ethics of HE. This led me to draw quite heavily on philosophy bank and then spend an increasing amount of time on Dystopians Retreat as I became, perhaps, a little more jaded and less optimistic.

Finally, I must emphasize, this new map, like the last one, is simply a playful, heuristic device and a way of opening up a discussion. I have no idea whether it will resonate as much with colleagues as the previous one. Still, it is offered as a fresh provocation that explores our ideological drives and purposes, not just the topics we choose to research.

Disclosure statement

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