Where does professionalism reside in an HE sector in which teaching and learning are ever more subject to bureaucratic standardisation and in which, as funding structures make only too clear, research output is the really significant measure of success? My institution recently decreed that those members of departments who used to be known, at most, simply as the person who chaired the undergraduate teaching committee should become ‘Directors of Teaching and Learning’—sorry, ‘Learning and Teaching’. As always, a change of name has more mixed effects than the movers and shakers in the Post Office seem quite to have grasped. T he oxymoronic managerial innocence of ‘Director of Learning and Teaching’ makes only too evident the contradictions and tensions which currently beset our roles as teachers. The grand title is obviously well enough intentioned. Like the English Subject Centre itself, it responds to a felt need to improve the prestige of teaching in relation to research. But it does so by highlighting the considerably less prestigious—in some colleagues’ eyes the positively perfidious—relationship between teaching and administrative procedures. (‘The Subject Centre is not about increasing administrative or reporting tasks’, we were anxiously assured when it introduced itself in October.)
As I listened in a recent Faculty Learning and Teaching Board to the fulminations of a colleague from another department who took the document on National Qualification Frameworks as a form of personal offence, I found myself defending the equity of standardisation against the vagaries of unexamined ‘professional’ autonomy. To have become this amphibious creature, a ‘Director’ of teaching and learning, is perhaps always already to have compromised, then: to have abandoned individualised relationships with students and texts for the brave new world of quality assurance; to have been seduced by delusions of grandeur into an internalised enthusiasm for the procedural niceties you spend so much time dealing with—even, dare I say it, enforcing. Not surprisingly, I don’t believe that’s the case. Indeed, the challenge of accepting responsibility for the teaching and learning aspects of a department’s activities lies precisely in resisting deprofessionalisation—which appears most often in the form of inflexible bureaucracy, but which can also come more cunningly disguised as the equally inflexible, but ostensibly high-minded, refusal to believe that ‘bureaucracy’ might ever involve questions of principle.
There isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a binary opposition between the pursuit of best teaching practices and the implementation of transparent procedures of accountability. The oddity lies perhaps in ever thinking that these things were separate, or separable. But it’s certainly true that the significant focuses of professional judgment have shifted, or at least expanded, over the last ten or so years. What with the paranoia that attends Academic Review and the QAA on the one hand, and the university sector’s general paranoia about litigation on the other, directing (or just practising) teaching and learning sometimes threatens to become a triumph of form over content, of paper trails over principles. In this climate, one of the more important exercises of judgment is to detect the difference between merely legalistic or fetishistic obsessions with consistency, and those ‘administrative and reporting tasks’ which, though often tedious enough, serve the best interests of students because they are based in genuinely equitable systems of transparency and comparability.
Academic and pedagogical principles can be the only basis for bureaucratic procedures, and I actually enjoy working between my department and the centre of the university to ensure that that’s the case. It’s also true that academic and pedagogical principles depend quite heavily on bureaucracy for their implementation—but then, as Director of Learning and Teaching, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Newsletter Issue 1 - May 2001
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