Constructive alignment: from professional teaching technique to governance of profession

Abstract

The focus of this article is on changes of epistemic content in evaluating and controlling teaching at universities. Methodologically, in this study, we integrate macro-historical-political configurations with contemporary micro-social situations in contrast to a discursive-philosophical orientation. We strive for integration between historical processes and social practices. From the theoretical point of departure in the concept of epistemic drift, we want to investigate the changes and ambivalences that are the consequences when epistemic criteria developed in one social jurisdiction (research on teaching and learning in the 1970s and 1980s) are used in another social setting (teaching and learning in higher education, or TLHE, in the 2010s). The epistemic content discussed here is the qualitative turn of teaching and learning in the 1970 s and 1980s, a turn that paved the way for the conceptualization of constructive alignment (CA) later in the 1990s, the concept that is the object of analysis. As the text moves on, it will be shown how CA gradually merge with a managerial form of learning outcome, in various policy contexts on European, national (Sweden) and university levels. We describe how CA became institutionalized as the most common pedagogical model in Swedish TLHE courses. Against this background of historical processes – the theoretical pedagogical foundation of CA, Bologna policies in Europe and Swedish higher education policies and national institutionalization of CA – we illustrate ethnographically how CA is received in local, social situations.

Keywords:

• epistemic drift
• teaching and learning
• constructive alignment
• higher education
• Bologna

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ola Fransson, Ph.D., is an historian of ideas and science and is a researcher at Centre for Profession Studies (CPS) at Malmö University. In his research, he focuses on the history of teacher education and its relation to higher education.

Torbjörn Friberg, Ph.D., is a social anthropologist and currently a postdoc researcher at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. He is at present working on the anthropology of Triple Helix – the relationship between university, industry and government – in relation to the establishment of the European Spallation Source (ESS) and the MAX IV in Lund, Sweden.

Notes

1. Friberg collected the ethnographic material for this study during his fieldwork over a period of 10 months (March–December 2010). The material mainly consists of social interactions between pedagogical developers (policy agents) and university teachers (participants) in mandatory courses of TLHE in Sweden. It follows that all participants have given their consent to participate in this study. Moreover, it should be noted that the participants have been anonymized when being presented in the ethnographic section in this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Centre for Profession Studies, Malmö University, Sweden.