Reconstructing Professionalism in University Education

Symposium and Springboard

• How can academics carve out new and effective ways of working with students against a background of constant change and policy pressure?
• How can university teachers both enhance student learning and realize their own educational values?
• What might be the shape of university teaching and its research?

From 1998 to 2000, a small group of academics in the University engaged in an exploration of professionalism in Higher Education. We were from very different disciplines and we each worked on a research project involving teaching and learning within our own area - designing a new course, engaging a large first-year class, introducing a mentoring programme, motivating independent learning through project work, using debates to develop students' critical thinking, and evaluating the success of our teaching.

The key to the exploration, however, lay in the opportunity to share our struggles and our successes with the others - intellectual equals and yet non-judgmental, non-defensive. How often does this happen in the University?

Through a developing dialogue, each of us sought to improve our teaching practices. More fundamentally, we also explored what professionalism in university education meant to us and how to realize it in our work with students and with colleagues. Our individual projects provided the food for our formal and informal group discussions that nurtured our professional work.

We have produced a book that documents our experiences. Reconstructing Professionalism in University Teaching is due to be published by the Open University Press on July 1st. As is typical of the dialogue within the group, the book opens up as many questions as it answers. Open issues are:

• What is ethical practice in higher education? Is it moral?, political?, critical?
• What happens, what do we learn, when we listen to what students say about their learning in our classes?
• What about the students at the back of the class?
• What happens when teaching becomes the focus of our scholarly exchanges?
• What is the importance of looking at pedagogy within the context of the discipline we teach, and what happens when we do?
• How do we address resistances - from classroom, to department to university level and beyond?
• What does it mean to be 'true' to ourselves?
• What can I do from where I am?

We now wish to create a second wave of discussion throughout the University and the wider community on these issues. As a springboard into the discussion, we are holding a symposium at the University of Glasgow on 17th September 2001 to publicise the book and begin the debate. Professors Ron Barnett, Stephen Rowland and Melanie Walker will be speaking, but we want the event to be based round a vibrant, interactive workshop structured on the questions and concerns of the participants.

Following on from the event, we will host an on-going seminar series. Our goal is to bring a much-needed, yet heretofore hidden, debate into the open. If you would like further information about the symposium, please contact any of us at the addresses below, or register an interest at http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~quintin/symposium

Reconstructing Professionalism in University Teaching is due to be published in the SRHE series of the Open University Press on July 1st 2001. ISBN 0 335 20537 2