Teaching excellence in higher education: critical perspectives

Across the globe, contemporary higher education policy discourses are being driven increasingly by international league tables, market competition, and the dominance of prestige culture, with notions of ‘excellence’ framing both sector-wide responses and institutional practices (Stevenson, Whelan, and Burke 2017). A major critique emerging across the research literature is that the global HE sector is being profoundly reshaped by these processes of neoliberalism, which are driven by economic imperatives to develop ‘global, entrepreneurial, corporate, commercialised universities’ (Morley 2011, 224 in Stevenson, Burke, and Whelan 2014). Whilst this is an increasingly global phenomenon it is, however, being felt particularly sharply in the UK. In November 2015, the UK Government Department for Business and Skills published a Green Paper for consultation entitled ‘Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice’ (BIS 2015). This and the subsequent 2016 White Paper ‘Success as a Knowledge Economy: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice’ (BIS 2016) have ignited controversy about the potential effects on the English higher education sector. The essence of these proposals is to introduce the assessment of teaching at the level of HEIs, via a ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ which would allow institutions to increase fees, depending on the results of the exercise. This set of initiatives has been accompanied by a rhetoric of ‘placing students at the centre’ of higher education, with an espoused emphasis on student social mobility and ‘choice’.

As such, these papers and their ethos may appear benign, or even progressive, appearing to hold universities to account and defend the interests of students by rewarding a formal demonstration of teaching ‘quality’. However, the content and methodology of the proposals have been roundly critiqued by academic and student groups for underscoring a marketised model of higher education (Madriaga and Morley 2016; Stevenson, Whelan, and Burke 2017). This has arguably further entrenched the highly problematic notion of the student as fee-paying ‘customer’ seeking value for money, engaged in a financial transaction with the university for private gain in terms of employability as an individual. The degree – and to an extent the graduate – is cast as a product, with universities forced to act as competitors fighting for market share. The end result – arguably – will be the accelerated reproduction of social privilege, with ‘elite’ institutions enabled to charge ever-higher fees in a context of prohibitive student debt, restricting opportunities to a privileged minority (Stevenson, Whelan, and Burke 2017). These proposals have also been criticised for seeking to relax access to the sector by for-profit providers, whilst undermining the independence of higher education quality assurance with a proposed ‘Office for Students’.

Although this is a UK-based initiative (applied to England), it reflects a broader move in higher education internationally. Neoliberal imperatives have led to the marketisation of higher education across the globe, with ‘student satisfaction’, research and teaching league tables, branding, and competition for students framing such moves (Burke, Stevenson, and Whelan 2015, 30). As such our focus on excellence, prestige and teaching-performance league tables is of relevance in a range of educational contexts. This special issue sets out to interrogate and critique these developments from a variety of contexts and standpoints as follows.

Writing from a US perspective, in the first article in the issue Saunders and Blanco Ramirez (2017) point out the prevalence of claims of excellence in higher education, and the manner in which this construct is presented as an a priori ideal. They remind us that a concept such as ‘excellence’ requires measurement, leading to fragmentation of the complex into the discrete. Drawing on Readings (1997) and building on Saunders (2015), they argue that this enables the commodification of higher education, rendering it as external object which can be bought or sold. They explore the relationship between the concept of excellence and the related positioning of students as ‘customers’ with the associated and increasingly taken-for-granted regimes of accountability which underpin this notion. They go on to highlight and critique the dominance of the Global North and its culturally-specific and hegemonic practices of ‘development’ and accreditation of higher education. They examine in particular how this is played out via assessment regimes, course evaluations, student satisfaction and league table rankings. For them, excellence is a ‘technology of neoliberal ideology’ in which the focus on satisfaction leads us away from the benefits of exploration, challenge and even failure. In their consideration of ‘the teaching of excellence’ to others via quality assurance practices, to be measured and compared in global rankings, they review policy documents from the USA, the UK, Australia, India and Mexico and find a common tendency to reduce the complex and the contextual to simplified indices.

Behari-Leek and McKenna (2017) examine the role of teaching excellence awards in South Africa, pointing out that these have raised the profile of teaching as a scholarly project, in a move away from the dominance of research. However, like Saunders and Blanco Ramirez (2017), they raise questions about the extent to which ‘excellence’ can be seen as a generic measure, in this case in a postcolonial context characterised by social injustice. They argue that teaching excellence must contribute to the transformation of society and inclusivity. They found that in the national Teaching Excellence Awards and also across 13 higher education institutions, ‘excellence’ was described in largely generic terms which they argue rewards performativity above responses to student needs in context. They also question the utility of the concept in terms of democratisation and also creativity and criticality. Drawing on a critical realist framing (Fairclough 2005), they conduct a discourse analysis of documents related to these awards. They refer to the recent #feesmustfall protests in South Africa, the associated inequality gap post-apartheid, and the university as a public good as opposed to a customer-based ideology of the individual beneficiary. Like Saunders and Blanco Ramirez, they highlight the inherent tension between the university as a force for social transformation and the notion of ‘excellence’ as articulated in a competitive, marketised arena. They point out that a focus on teaching excellence can be helpful in challenging notions of teaching as craft or common sense, and recognises the role of research in informing teaching. However, they argue that if excellence is based on a generic skills discourse, the complexities of socioeconomic and disciplinary context will be elided, arguing that a ‘culture of excellence’ in these terms can in fact lead to mediocrity (Morley 2003). They identify a ‘gold standard’ discourse with a focus on ‘world class’ higher education, pointing out the tensions that may arise between the local needs of students in poverty versus those attending elite institutions in privileged settings. They also argue that a performative view of teaching minimises the emergent and interactive nature of the pedagogic encounter in context. The dangers of ‘crowd-pleasing’ as opposed to challenging students are also drawn out here.

Oravec (2017) takes a critical look at how academic work is evaluated, focusing on academic metrics and their influence on the construction of excellence and academic ‘stardom’ in research and publication. She also points out the predominance of quantifiable measures, and explores how these are ‘gamed’ by academic staff, departments and institutions, such as through citation circles or use of ‘paper mills ‘to boost citation statistics on platforms such as Google Scholar. She argues that this can lead to corruption and may negatively impact on the integrity of higher education as a whole. She makes the important point that this can result in a concern for the appearance of academic participation, as opposed to ‘the more complex nuances of academic exchange’. She concludes that this focus on instrumentalism as opposed to the intrinsic value of academic work is undermining the academic career as a ‘calling’, and may lead participants to simulate ‘excellence’ in ways which may be ethically problematic and corrosive to the sector.

Dixon and Pilkington (2017) focus on what they call the ‘Cinderella sector’ of further education (FE), with reference to higher education provision in the context of two FE colleges in the UK. They begin by pointing out that HE provision in FE contexts has a history of being subjected to close UK government scrutiny, with ‘teaching excellence’ being emphasised since the late 1990s. Drawing on Ball’s concept of the ‘terrors of performativity’ (2003), they draw out implications for HE from the experience of the FE sector. The Common Inspection Framework is central to ‘the rhetoric, practice and policing of excellence’ in this context. This was revised in 2012 with a stronger emphasis on teaching, learning and assessment, leading to an emphasis on ‘outstanding teaching’. Like other authors in this Issue, Dixon and Pilkington raise the difficulties of defining excellence or reducing it to quantifiable and generic measures, arguing that it should instead be viewed as ‘nuanced, contextualized and relational’. They emphasise the malleability of the concept and the shifting nature of its definition, which may be vulnerable to manipulation for a variety of purposes. They highlight how panoptic practices of observation can create an atmosphere of surveillance and may create stress for teachers. These may take a range of forms, each judged differently. They critique ‘balanced scorecards’ in particular as essentially competency-based models with a veneer of quasi-scientific rigour. In a card-sorting exercise and their interview and focus-group study they explored lecturers’ and college managers’ perspectives of what constitutes ‘outstanding’ teaching. They found a strong consensus around three constructs with the lecturers: active learning, differentiation and questioning. The managers’ perspectives were found to differ in some of the elements of teaching they valued. Lecturers also reported pressure to be constantly ‘outstanding’, with a tendency to seek student good opinion and positive feedback in order to achieve positive reviews and compliant behaviour, in order to meet the demands of the inspectorate. This is presented as a cautionary tale in advance of the introduction of the UK-based ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ for HE.

Wood and Su (2017) also explore academic staff perspectives on teaching excellence, in an interview study in five UK ‘teaching-intensive’ universities. Like other authors in this issue, they express skepticism about the measurability of excellence, and argue for a more ethical and relational conception. They remind us of the vacuity of the term, and Collini’s point that … ’the ‘excellent’ must become ‘yet more excellent’ on pain of being exposed as complacent or backward-looking or something equally scandalous’ (2012, 109). They point out the oxymoromic nature of the slogan ‘excellence everywhere’, as highlighted by Clegg (2007), and the association of excellence with with elitism. They offer Nixon’s definition as alternative, ‘Excellence is a process of growth, development and flourishing; it is not just an endpoint’ (2007, 22). Here excellence is enacted through the ‘moral unity’ of research, scholarship and teaching (22–23), in contrast to a performative understanding based on quantitative measures. Their interview findings reveal that most participants found the term ‘excellence’ broadly innocuous, but tended to express their understandings of it differently. All expressed doubt about its measurability, remarking on the complexity of the concept and the importance of context and student need. In their conclusions, Wood and Su question the value of outcome measures for improvement of teaching, and like other authors in this issue, caution against negative unintended effects. They argue for locating excellence in the pedagogic relationship and a restoration of the moral basis of academic professionalism, with a recognition of the interconnected nature of teaching, scholarship and research.

In the final paper, Bahia et al. (2017) look at the attitudes and perceptions of lecturers in Portugal in the context of the Bologna Process in Europe. She echoes points made by Behari-Leek and McKenna regarding the ‘uneven playing field’ between rich and poor institutions, citing the ‘illusion’ that excellence is equally available to all. They also raise points about tensions and emotional pressure on academic staff, and the negative outcomes of increased competition as opposed to collegiality. They focus in their study on the emotional states reported by lecturers undergoing this process. Their respondents report dissatisfaction with programming of teaching designed to fit the quality regime. They also expressed the view that true change had not occurred on the ground, and were more discursive than pedagogic. The lecturers placed emphasis on the value of academic freedom, and characterised the multiple performance requirements of the contemporary period as ‘suffocating’. As with other contexts researched in this issue, there was talk of mistrust, simulation, threat to identity and loss of autonomy in an atmosphere where the ‘customer’ must be satisfied.

Throughout the work presented here, there are persistent themes in the analyses of policy discourses, in the interviews with stakeholders, and in theoretical considerations of this issue. The first of these centres on the severe difficulties which arise when an attempt is made to reduce a complex, unstable, context-dependent and multifaceted construct such as ‘excellence’ to a set of metrics. Several authors raise objections to the resultant drift towards a vacuous, generic, skills and competency-focused view of teaching which elides context, disciplinarity, sociopolitical context and student need. In contrast, the importance of nuance, relationality, academic freedom and the emergent nature of the pedagogic relationship is returned to repeatedly. The relationship between contemporary calls for ‘excellence’ in higher education and marketisation were recognised throughout the volume, with concerns raised across all contexts regarding the potential collapse of the sector into a customer-led ethos which may ‘wear the clothes’ of student entitlement, but ultimately erodes the core academic values and intellectual development flowing from challenge, criticality, risk and freedom. The role of the university as a public good and the duty of higher education to uphold social justice, work cooperatively with other institutions and to critique mainstream social and political assumptions was also upheld, and the need for vigilance in terms of defending these values was apparent in all of these accounts. The challenge facing higher education is a complex one – to value teaching and enhance student learning while also maintaining and reinscribing these core values of ‘excellence’.