Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

(a project in the ESRC Learning Society Programme, award reference L123251071)

Working Paper No.1

The Languages of Innovation:

listening to the higher education literature

Harold Silver

ISBN: 1-84102-021-4

Faculty of Arts and Education, University of Plymouth, Douglas Avenue, Exmouth EX8 2AT

Tel: 01395 255463 Fax: 01395 264196 E-mail:

 1998 by Harold Silver

The languages of innovation: listening to the

higher education literature

Harold Silver

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Abstract

The literature of higher education has in recent decades been only spasmodically concerned with innovation, and even then with gaps and silences. This paper surveys the ways in which innovation and innovators have been discussed primarily since the 1960s, considering ways in which innovators, innovations, processes and resistances have been analysed. The paper explores some of the identified origins of the innovation interests in higher education, and outlines a typology of salient forms of innovation. These include the movement away from formal lecturing and attempts to establish emphases on individualised or independent learning. It looks at relevant initiatives that it was possible to develop at the level of the individual innovator, and those that meshed in with institutional policy and the responses of institutions to external pressures, funding and opportunities. The most notable of these external influences was the Enterprise in Higher Education programme. The literature examined therefore ranges from the reasons for academic staff innovating to institutional policy. The paper looks at the range of factors suggested as encouraging or inhibiting innovation. The recent literature on innovation in higher education, rather than in education more widely, as well as in industry, commerce and the economy, is relatively sparse. Much of what has been produced is concerned either with description of or proposed strategies for initiatives or with discussion of the adaptation of new technologies to the needs of an expanded and more diverse higher education system under severe economic constraints. This analysis of the literature suggests some of the basic questions that need to be considered in order to elevate the discussion of innovation from simple models to an understanding of its position in higher education, the levels at which it takes place, its motivations and contexts.

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IPeople Innovating

Some origins

In 1976 two American political scientists wrote that ‘innovation has emerged over the last decade as possibly the most fashionable of social science areas’. Unfortunately, the theoretical value of the research that had been done was ‘problematic’, and the findings were varied and ‘unstable’ (Downs and Mohr, 1976, p. 700). From the 1960s, indeed, a considerable international literature of innovation emerged, including classic texts in a number of disciplines. Of particular importance was the literature addressing the contexts and nature of innovation in management, organisation and industrial competitiveness. Burns and Stalker’s The Management of Innovation began its influential career in 1961. A crescendo of American work on innovation in industrial organisations and the professions developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Such landmarks as Peter Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the United States and Charles Handy’s The Age of Unreason appeared in the 1980s, as did international interest in the innovatory features of workplace organisation in Volvo or General Motors, Japanese quality circles, and the literature of the ‘quality of work life’. Although some of this may have been fashionable, and some of the findings ‘unstable’, there were serious underlying pressures – economic, technological and social - towards making and analysing change. Higher education was not to escape the concerns, uncertainties and often crises that the pressures reflected.

The Hale Committee report on University Teaching Methods in 1964 underlined that the need for research on university teaching in Britain, including ‘the application of the new methods of communication made available by modern technology’ and as a result of increased student numbers, had been apparent for some time. What was needed, however, was not more surveys of the kind the Committee had undertaken, but ‘operational research… The need is now for experiment’ (University Grants Committee, 1964, p. 111). Such a call for innovation in higher education was not identical in origin or shape with calls in industry or politics, but it reflected similar concerns. The Committee talked about the American ‘national temperament ever friendly to innovations… stirred to a mood of self-criticism in educational matters by Russian scientific achievements, and the pressure of demand for higher education has also acted as a stimulus towards experiment’. Despite national differences British universities faced essentially the same problem – that of ‘dealing with a demand for higher education which has increased, and will continue to increase, more rapidly than the resources likely to be available to meet it with traditional methods’ (ibid., pp. 109-10). The problem of making effective use of resources to meet significant challenges was, and would remain, an important context for innovation in higher education as in industry and commerce.

Some aspects of innovation in higher education were also to derive momentum from developments in the secondary schools. Factors in some kinds of innovation include the inducement offered by technology available on the market, as has been the case with some developments at school level in the second half of the twentieth century. This has been true of the long history of attempts to harness the resources available for 'audio-visual aids' or 'educational technology'. The story from the 1950s of, for example, American 'programmed instruction' and British 'programmed learning' or the language laboratory and the computer, begins in research and products, and continues with the penetration of the schools and higher education, in the latter case either directly or following experience in the schools. Innovation and change had a longer, firmer history at school level in the post-war decades than did higher education, either because the school system saw greater need and opportunity, or because it was more amenable to pressure and less resistant than higher education to change. The proliferation of journals, yearbooks and other literature addressing 'ava' or 'ed tech' in the 1950s-80s was concerned principally with developments in the schools. A momentum of discussion about the nature and purpose of innovation in schools had been established and it was sustained, notably in North America and Britain, in association with various interpretations of school effectiveness and improvement (Fullan, 1992; Silver, 1994; National Commission on Education, 1993, ch. 5).

At higher education level the early thrust was mainly in teacher education, though some non-technological developments in the UK and internationally gathered pace from the 1960s – including attempts to develop alternatives to the traditional lecture, and to respond to research on student learning. In the decades following the Hale committee’s emphasis on operational research and experiment, in some corners of British higher education innovators saw some virtue in the schools’ experience, the research, the need or the opportunity to explore ways of undermining centuries-old teaching routines. Increasingly the ‘innovators’ also became multiple constituencies, individuals and groups, initiating or responding to initiatives. The promotion and language of innovation were adopted in different circumstances at different levels of activity and policy.

The genesis, nature and purposes of innovation as it came to pervade higher education in the 1990s are the main concern of this paper. It examines how innovation was perceived, how innovations were undertaken and in response to what motivations and pressures. From the literature of innovation it is intended to extricate some of the ‘languages’ in which the theory, context and practice became embedded, and to consider some of the implications for the study of teaching and learning.

Innovation

In higher education, as in other institutions and organisations, innovation has been discussed in the literature at all levels, from individual initiative to institutional (or whole system) policy. It has been discussed explicitly as top-down and bottom-up activity, and it could be interpreted as in-out and out-in, reflecting the measure of individual exploration and its dissemination, and the innovation that results from external pressures – including financial, market and technological pressures and changes. We shall return to a discussion of possible typologies that emerge from the literature, but at this point it is important to establish one reservation regarding higher education.

A typology of innovations in higher education could consist of: (a) organisation and management, (b) curriculum and (c) teaching and learning. It is with the third of these that we are here concerned, but it is important to underline that innovations in this area are not entirely distinct from those in the other two. Computing entered higher education in large measure as an aid to the first and established itself indispensably in a situation of increasing scale, complexity and accountability as a basis for management information systems. Teaching and learning have been influenced by structural changes, including the creation of committee structures and the appointment of personnel to manage staff development and the funding of innovation. Curriculum change has taken place in new structures and influenced the ways teachers teach and students learn. The moves to modular structures and semesters (themselves largely responses to increased student numbers and financial constraints) and the introduction of credit accumulation and transfer, have been the most prominent such influences, directly challenging some aspects of teaching and assessment. Curriculum change has, however, been a response to a variety of factors, including understandings of the boundaries and packaging of knowledge, and it has most frequently been a product of working parties, departments, faculties and institutional committees. It is an assumption in much of the relevant literature and here that changing curricula is easier to conceive and implement than changing the culture of teaching and learning, the latter being less amenable to committee or communal decision-making.

Where teaching and learning on the one hand, and curriculum on the other hand, overlap most seriously is in such areas as inter-disciplinary initiatives, assessment procedures and student access. The first of these is a curriculum development that may require team teaching or other changes in discipline-based procedures. The second is a curriculum concern which also has implications for the learning interaction between teacher and student. The third is an issue of institutional policy and management, student support, curriculum structures and choices, and possible adaptations of teaching aims and approaches. Similar considerations would apply, for example, to work based learning and adapting course content to develop core skills and competencies. We are concerned with such overlapping areas only where they have clear messages regarding innovation in teaching and learning.

We cannot here address issues relating to the variety of definitions of ‘innovation’, and the value judgments inherent in the usage. The most common assumption is that innovation is a deliberate process (or product), directed towards (but not necessarily achieving) improvement, which may involve originality or adaptation. We shall return to some of these considerations, including innovation as generated by individuals and by systems, as distinct from ‘change’, and as a response to different situations. The next step here is to consider what the literature largely accepts as innovations, as planned changes which either seek to replace conventional or traditional teaching and learning processes, or which involve entirely new processes which respond to contextual factors rather than to intrinsic factors within teaching and learning.

Beyond lectures

The 1992 MacFarlane report on Teaching and Learning in an Expanding Higher Education System outlined ‘conventional teaching’ procedures based on lectures and proposed that ‘there needs to be a re-examination of both the purposes and the techniques involved…and more extensive use made of new methods which support the additional transferable skills now being required’ (Committee of Scottish University Principals, 1992, p. 7). For several decades different attempts at innovation had been based on critiques of the conventional lecture. Pressures for the replacement of the lecture by seminars and tutorials were a feature of the 1950s and 1960s, and the Hale committee reported in 1964 that both students and the University Grants Committee had been highly critical of the lecture. The latter had described it as ‘out-dated’ and a ‘one-way process’, establishing no contact between lecturer and student, and incapable of ‘stimulating academic discussion of any value’ (University Grants Committee, 1964, p. 45).

The urge to replace lecturing as the sole or predominant teaching method underpinned many, though by no means all, of the innovations with which we are concerned across these decades. These included initiatives associated with Enterprise in Higher Education (EHE), many of which considered ‘the first obvious candidate for change has to be the 50 minute stand up lecture. Traditionally it lies at the heart of the “chalk and talk” approach to university teaching and has been held up by many as the villain of the piece’ (Sneddon and Kremer, 1994, p. 4). Curriculum changes, including those internationally in health-related areas particularly, often meant a considerable shift in balance between lecturing and other approaches. One such change to a ‘truly inter-disciplinary’ curriculum at Queen Mary and Westfield College of the University of London, ‘reduced didactic content, and emphasizes independent learning…Lectures have been retained as the core method for transmitting information, but their numbers and content have been pruned considerably’. Small-group tutorial and other methods were being used ‘to enhance a deep and independent approach to students’ learning’ (Carroll, 1997, p. 283).

This kind of replacement or curtailment of lecturing was often reported where changes were institution-wide or, as in one Australian example, where an ‘unconventional kind of course’ was being introduced in a conventional university (Barnett and Brown, 1981, p. 13). As student numbers increased substantially in the 1980s and 1990s some innovations were directed at enabling large classes to function in new ways. One example in environmental sciences was based on interaction through handouts, the operation of seminar groups whose membership was self-selected by students, and student compilation of a self-determined dossier for assessment. The staff concerned did not accept the necessity of continuing to teach ineffectively in large classes, and therefore explored the creative use of ‘person-centred’ approaches, especially active involvement in group work (Barkham and Elender, 1995). An example from law was directed at modifying the traditional case method ‘in which the lecturer talks and the students take notes’. It was still, in 1987, ‘common to find law lecturers addressing, or even dictating notes to, students with a minimum of interaction’ (Tribe and Tribe, 1987, pp. 299-300).

Scattered experiments with small-group teaching or ‘free group discussion’ were being reported from the 1950s, particularly in medicine and biology (Johnson, 1952; Barnett, 1958). The main progenitor of these experiments in higher education, Jane Abercrombie (earlier writing as M.L. Johnson), worked with small groups for example in medicine and architecture, reporting her work in The Lancet, the Health Education Journal, New Biology and other journals in the medical, health-related and science fields. In her influential The Anatomy of Judgment in 1960 she concluded that it was work with individual students in small groups that released them from ‘the security of thinking in well-defined given channels’ and enabled them to find ‘a new kind of stability based on the recognition and acceptance of ambiguity, uncertainty and open choice’ (Abercrombie, 1964, p. 141). The search for small-group solutions to teaching problems continued, to be intensified by the pressures of the 1990s. Group strategies were the subject of much scrutiny and controversy, focusing on the difficulty of securing student involvement and preventing staff dominance, as well as on staff reluctance to abandon the familiar lecture approach (Committee of Scottish University Principals, p. 9; Sneddon and Kremer, pp. 159-66, 172-3). A directory of projects being undertaken under EHE nationally included in its classification ‘Student groupwork’, which contained 112 entries (EHE Unit, University of Portsmouth, 1994, vol. 2, p. 719).

Towards the student

Small group teaching, peer group learning, group projects and group assessment form one corner of the area of innovation. With inputs from a variety of directions, of which group teaching and learning is only one, an ‘innovation movement’ has developed which focuses on ‘student-centred’ or ‘independent’ learning. The vocabularies in use are varied and often have emphases distinguishable only with difficulty, ‘student-centred’ being the least useful here given its all-embracing character. ‘Student autonomy’ has arguably always been a feature or an aim of much university education – for example, Oxford and Cambridge’s supervision system. Vocabularies much in use in the 1980s and 1990s have been those of ‘independent’ and ‘individualised’ study.

The recent interest in ‘independence’ in the student’s learning process has some roots in the programmed learning movement of the 1950s, and for higher education notably in the Keller Plan of the following decade. The Keller Plan for a ‘personalized system of instruction’ was developed in the United States as an attempt to free students’ experience from constraints imposed by the lecture situation and to enable them to progress on the basis of ‘mastery’. Students were to be told:

This is a course through which you may move, from start to finish, at your own pace. You will not be held back by other students or forced to go ahead before you are ready How fast you go is up to you. (Keller and Sherman, 1974, p. 15)

The plan was adopted primarily in science and engineering education, and by the time the Nuffield Group for Research and Innovation in Higher Education conducted its work in the mid-1970s the plan was in use in some university courses in Britain. A paper on the plan and its operation at the University of Surrey, for example, was prepared for the Nuffield Group (Boud and Bridge, 1974).

This was the best known scheme for 'individualised' learning, based on a curriculum which students mastered at their own pace. It was one example in what the Nuffield Group put together under the title 'Towards Independence in Learning' (Nuffield Group, 1975). Independence, as embodied in the creation in the early 1970s of Schools of Independent Study at North East London Polytechnic and the University of Lancaster, was concerned not only with self-pacing, but also with measures of student autonomy in designing their courses of study. The Lancaster development aimed at giving students in the programme during the second half of their degree 'a great deal of freedom, flexibility and independence from existing courses'. Planning their own schemes of study, students had the opportunity 'to orient their learning to achieve their own goals' (University of Lancaster, 1975/6, p. 1). Independent study at NELP was concerned with students defining their own stage of development, aims to be achieved, and (within 'the minimum structure required to ensure comparability of standard') the design and control of their programme of study (Stephenson, 1980, pp. 68-9).