Fashioning docile teacher bodies? The strange space of the ‘staff teaching seminar'

Abstract

For 40 years, the ‘staff teaching seminar’ has aimed to prepare academics to meet the complex demands of university teaching. In Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ), as elsewhere, the seminar emerged in the late 1960s–early 1970s, and preceded centrally funded academic development (AD) centres. Targeting new academics, the programme typically focused on core activities of university teaching and blended presentations by experienced academics from various disciplines with group activities and plenary discussions. Several decades on, this pedagogical space is plainly recognisable as a core site of AD in NZ today. In order to problematise AD’s ambitions for this site and others like it, this essay refracts past and present versions through the prism of heterotopia. In so doing, we sound a warning about AD’s implication in the inexorable rise of governmentality in our institutions. We also, though, recognise the ways in which the staff teaching seminar eludes such forces.

Keywords:

• academic development
• Foucault
• governmentality
• heterotopia
• university teaching

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge our original collaborators in the international project, Critical Histories of Academic Development in Australia, the UK and Aotearoa/New Zealand: Ian Brailsford, Alison Lee, Peter Kandlbinder, Catherine Manathunga, Sue Clegg and David Gosling. Also members of Barbara's writing group who gave feedback on a draft, Susan Carter, Fran Kelly, Brenda Allen, Alex Sims and Kathryn Owler, and the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. Our title for the introduction to university teaching and learning event was used at the University of Canterbury (1973, 1974).

2. The earliest NZ seminars were organised by the Association of University Teachers, usually in collaboration with a university committee or delegated senior academics. They took place at Victoria University of Wellington as early as 1959, at University of Canterbury for several years prior to 1971 (UC, 1973, Educational Policy Committee working paper), and at Massey University prior to 1972 (UC interview). At the University of Auckland, once the Senate agreed in 1973 to make the ‘recent one-day course on university teaching’ annual (UA, 1973), the Centre for Continuing Education took responsibility for organising it with a nominated senior academic as the convenor. Similar developments occurred in Australia and the UK (McAleese, 1979): in the latter, a 1974 agreement between the Association of University Teachers and the Universities Authorities Panel introduced a three-year probationary period for academic staff linked with a ‘co-coordinated development programme’ (McAleese, 1979, p. 121).

3. In addition to the archival work described above, we interviewed the founding ‘directors’ of academic development centres in all eight universities. This work was part of a wider project investigating the emergence of AD in Australia, NZ and the UK.

4. Some of these issues have been under discussion since academic development’s beginnings (Yorke, 1977).

5. Geographic location is incidental; the analysis offered would be recognised in many institutional and national contexts. For completeness, however, the institutions are the University of Canterbury and the University of Auckland.

6. Grant has taught on these programmes for a decade. Her experience informs the general commentary in which this analysis is embedded.

7. A good proportion of those who attended the UC programme in 1973 were experienced teachers, some of whom were nominated by their HODs at the request of the organiser (UC, 1973, Letter to HODs) and distributed across the small groups to guide and contribute to their discussions. Their presence was a mixed blessing as evaluations showed they could dominate conversation (UC, 1973, Evaluation summary).

8. Higher education research with a teaching and/or learning focus was just getting underway as a field in the early 1970s. The arrival of Studies in Higher Education in 1976 marked a shift from a planning, policy and/or comparative focus to one that would: ‘demonstrate that the study of the processes of teaching and learning in higher education, and the broader institutional context in which those processes take place, can constitute as valid a field of intellectual inquiry as can any specialized discipline’ (Becher, 1976, p. 2).