The teaching and societal services nexus: academics' experiences in three disciplines

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the perception of academics regarding how their experiences from societal interaction (third mission) inform their teaching and vice versa. We report on a phone survey of Swedish academics in three engineering-related disciplines. The findings show that there is a perceived positive and bidirectional relationship between societal interaction and teaching. Industry-related activities were perceived to inform teaching more than other types of societal interaction. While societal interaction is at large more important for the academics in their search for relevant teaching topics and content, teaching was deemed more important for the implementation of societal interaction. We conclude by proposing that academics creatively (re)combine experiences from third mission and education, often mediated by their research activities.

Keywords:

• teaching
• societal interaction
• higher education
• industry interaction and public interaction
• hybrid models of teaching and societal interaction

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to Joakim Björkdahl and Maureen McKelvey for valuable comments on earlier versions of this work. Ethan Gifford provided important suggestions on the manuscript. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Daniel Ljungberg acknowledge the Sten A Olsson Foundation for Research and Culture for their support: This paper has been written in context of the research programme Radical Innovations for the Enhancement of the Swedish Economy, running at the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Department of Economy and Society, University of Gothenburg.

Notes

1. The most prominent theme of studies related to the ‘nexus’ between teaching and research has quantitatively studied the statistical association between research productivity and teaching quality. Overall, no such relation has been found (see the meta-analysis by Hattie and Marsh 1996). More qualitative studies of professors’ attitudes and perceptions, however, tend to find that there is a (complex) relationship between teaching and research, with research generally being perceived as more important for teaching than vice versa (Smeby 1998; Grant and Wakelin 2009). More recently, Galbraith and Merrill (2012) found a statistical positive association between research productivity and teaching effectiveness when measuring the latter using a student learning outcome measure rather than student evaluations, which have been the most commonly used variable in earlier studies (cf. Hattie and Marsh 1996).

2. To clarify, we use academics, and interchangeably, ‘professor’, as a generic term denoting a university employee with a Ph.D., regardless of position, who is actively engaged in research.

3. The authors have prior experiences in the disciplines in terms of education and research but not as practitioners. One of the authors has a Master of Science in electrical engineering and has researched mining and the geo-sciences. The other has a Master in industrial engineering.

4. The terminology varies across nations and universities.

5. Due to the word limitation of this journal, the literature review is excluded.

6. During the interviews, education was explained to include activities aimed at teaching and supervising students, whereas third mission activities included those activities aiming to interact or communicate with society at large, beyond the borders of the university and the scientific community. Explicit examples were given during the interviews to clarify that third mission includes actively commercializing research results, by for example patenting inventions or creating and engaging in spin-offs, or by executing their roles as an ‘expert’ in some public setting, by taking part in public debates, giving public lectures, etc.

7. It is important to note that the interviews showed that the greatest contribution to novelties in teaching was their prior education activities. In a similar vein, the most important contribution to third mission was prior third mission activities.

8. The average perceptions of the sample for a relationship are based on structured Likert-scale questions ranging from third mission being ‘Not relevant’ to ‘Highly relevant’ for influencing teaching and vice versa.

9. We are thankful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that there is a trend toward a more interactive mode of teaching. The outcome of this trend in regard to the issues studied in this paper is not clear. However, from our evolutionary point of view, such interactive modes of teaching are over time also likely to become another routinized activity.

10. To our surprise, in our study, we have not found any significant exceptions. However, we suggest that there are great variations among individual professors, universities, disciplines, and the level of the course or program.