Learning to think together

Abstract

In this paper I reflect on my experience as a member of the editorial executive board of Teaching in Higher Education between 1996 and 2005, during which period I was first reviews editor and then editor. The paper begins by outlining the editorial procedures established in the first 10 years of the journal and highlighting two major priorities in establishing pedagogy as a major field within higher education policy and practice: interdisciplinarity and internationality. The paper then opens up into a discussion of the challenges and opportunities posed by, on the one hand, successive research assessment regimes within higher education and, on the other, the corporatisation of the publishing industry. I argue that the combination of these two factors has had a significant effect on the opportunities open to academic workers for thinking together not only about their own pedagogic practice but about the implications of that practice for the wider social and political sphere. Teaching in Higher Education opens up potentially important spaces for thinking together about the nature and purpose of teaching and learning. But these remain highly contested spaces that academic workers are positioned both within and against. That positioning – as I suggest by way of conclusion – raises important questions for both academics and publishers.

Keywords:

• corporatisation
• interdisciplinarity
• internationalisation
• pedagogy
• publishing
• thinking

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Sue Clegg and Penny Burke for inviting me to contribute to this Special Issue and for commenting on an earlier draft. Thanks also to William Fisher for his insightful comments on that draft and for stimulating discussions on related issues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 1980; Disability and Society, 1986; International Studies in the Sociology of Education, 1991.

2. Anyone in doubt of the illegality of the Iraq war should read the ex-cathedra judgement of Britain’s former senior Law Lord, the late Tom Bingham: ‘If I am right that the invasion of Iraq by the US, the UK and some other states was unauthorized by the Security Council there was, of course, a serious violation of international law and the rule of law’ (Bingham 2010, 124).

3. The journal moved from three to four issues per year in 2000 (following the first special issue the previous year which had raised that year’s output to four issues in total). The number of issues per yearly volume was increased once more in 2008 from four to six (again following a double special issue the previous year which had raised that year’s output to six issues in total). The number of issues per yearly volume was further increased to eight in 2013.

4. The first RAE took place in 1986. The RAE has now been renamed the Research Excellence Framework (REF). See Nixon (2013) for a recent account of the impact of the RAE on higher education – and Erkilla and Piironen (2015) for a broader European perspective on global university rankings.

5. The Shanghai ranking of world universities was first published in 2003.

6. The THES ranking of UK universities was first published in 1993. It became a global university ranking in 2004.

7. ‘Units of assessment’ were designated categories of research under one of which each departmental submission had to be entered. Each ‘unit of assessment’ had its own peer review panel.

8. ‘The fissured workplace’ is David Weil’s (2014) term for a variety of mechanisms – temporary and part time contracts, subcontracting, franchising, third party management, outsourcing, etc. – whereby corporations increasingly seek to fragment employment.

9. I have attempted – with colleagues – to track some of these changes in an on-going survey of educational publishing: see Nixon (1999), Nixon and Wellington (2005), Wellington and Nixon (2005), Wellington, Nixon, and Su (2012).

10. See, for example, Nixon (2012).