Collected below is the first part of my notes on reading My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, a pop-ethnographic study of undergraduates conducted at Northern Arizona University – anonymized as AnyU – in 2002 by Rebekah Nathan, the pseudonym of Cathy Small, a Professor of Anthropology at the same institution. Perhaps because of confusion […]
via Rebekah Nathan’s My Freshman Year: Part 1 — Pedagogy & the Inhumanities
“Poetic Ambition on the Semester System”: Ezra Pound’s Avant-Gardism and Teaching Institutions
Continue reading Avant-Garde Pedagogies Conference Abstracts
Please join us for our next reading group, which takes place on Wednesday 2nd March, from 2pm to 4pm, in Room c389 (the Chiltern Building of the Marylebone campus).
We will be reading the prologue and two chapters from Gert Biesta’s recently published book, The Beautiful Risk of Education (2014):
For University of Westminster staff, the whole book can now be accessed from this link in Library Search. A pdf of these chapters is available here: Biesta, Beautiful Risk of Education.
Biesta argues that what many teachers know but are increasingly prevented from talking about is that education always involves a risk, and that attempts to take the risk out of education by making it strong, secure and predictable involve the chance of removing education altogether.
There’s an interview with Biesta about his book here: http://www.philosophy-of-education.org/publications/author-interview-gert-biesta.html.
Friday 8th and Saturday 9th July 2016
University of Westminster, London
Hosted by the Higher Education and Theory (HEAT) network, the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture (University of Westminster) and the Philosophy of Education Research Centre (University of Winchester)
BLAST …British Academy (Blast 1)
The conference is intended to provide an interdisciplinary forum for addressing how we might respond to the contemporary crisis or transformation of education without succumbing to conservative nostalgia for the past or an uncritical acquiescence to present forces in an increasingly corporately-driven agenda. The concept of the avant-garde will be used as a lens to focus these discussions.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a series of social, political, economic and technological upheavals that transformed aesthetics and contributed to a sense of the crisis of the arts and culture. While the technical developments of photography, radio and film, increasing commodification, the emergence of the culture industry and the rise of kitsch, mass and popular culture produced tensions within art that lead to a reactionary nostalgia for the culture of the past they also gave rise to a period of intense artistic innovation and experimentation that has come to be associated with modernism and the avant-garde. As Poggioli Renato puts it, avant-garde literature sought to be not a ‘display case or a salesroom but a free, or least an open, laboratory’.
In his Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger claimed the avant-garde turns against both ‘the distribution apparatus on which the work of art depends, and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept of the autonomy’. If the publication of Bürger’s book in 1974 perhaps marks the point of avant-garde art’s exhausted collapse into postmodernism, Hannah Arendt was already in the 1950s anticipating an attendant ‘crisis of education’. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a comparable series of transformations – the rise of the internet and new media, the dominance of the education industry, commodification and indebtedness, globalisation and the growth of mass and popular education – have lead teachers, scholars and activists to talk increasingly of a contemporary assault on education. In response to these claims, this conference seeks to address these issues through the lens of the avant-garde. It seeks to recover an alternative perspective for theoretical approaches beyond the impasses designated by classical philosophies and postmodern theories of education. For the avant-garde is ‘not that which is most historically advanced in the sense that it has most history behind it’ but, as Peter Osborne suggests, that which ‘disrupts the linear time-consciousness of progress in such a way as to enable us, like the child, to “discover the new anew” and, along with it, the possibility of a better future’. Or, as Jacques Rancière more succinctly claims, the avant-garde is ‘the aesthetic anticipation of the future’.
A hundred years on from the frenetic flurry of movements and manifestoes that characterized the high point of modernism and the avant-garde in art, this conference asks where can we find the comparable experimentation in pedagogical theory and practice or the open laboratory of learning? How might such modernist or avant-garde impulses in the arts provide a framework for calling into question not merely traditional or bourgeois pedagogical ideas, techniques and the distribution apparatus upon which education depends, but perhaps also the dominance and assumed value of higher education itself within contemporary society?
The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience …Under the pretence of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices… we do not “learn,” …all we ever do is “relearn”
(Manifesto of Surrealism)
Currently Confirmed Speakers:
Alan Golding (English, Louisville, KY.), author of ‘Isn’t the avant-garde always pedagogical: Experimental Poetics and/as Pedagogy’ (2006) and From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (1995).
Aislinn O’Donnell (Learning, Society and Religious Education, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick), author of ‘Experimental Philosophy and Pedagogy’ (2015) and ‘Another Relationship to Failure: Reflections on Beckett, Failure and Education’ (2014).
Gary Peters (Faculty of Arts, York St John University), author of ‘Ignorant Students/Ignorant Teachers’ (2010) and Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas (2005).
Hannah Proctor (English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London), author of ‘Synthetic Dreams: Gender, Modernity and Art Silk Stockings’ (2015) and ‘Neuronal Ideologies: Catherine Malabou’s Explosive Plasticity in Light of the Marxist Psychology of A. R. Luria’ (2011).
Peter Roberts (School of Educational Studies and Leadership, University of Canterbury, NZ), author of Happiness, Hope, and Despair: Rethinking the Role of Education (2016) and Better Worlds: Education, Art, and Utopia (2013).
Stevphen Shukaitis (Centre for Work, Organization and Society, University of Essex), author of ‘Pedagogical Labor in an Age of Devalued Reproduction’ (2016) and The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics & Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde (2016).
Titles & abstracts to be sent to Matthew Charles by Tuesday 1st March 2016: M.Charles1@westminster.ac.uk
Possible Areas of Interest:
Aesthetic education: Dada, Fluxist, Futurist, Surrealist or Vorticist perspectives
Avant-garde architecture and spaces of learning
Avant-garde pedagogies and institutional critique: unschooling, unlearning
Chance, spontaneity, the irrational and the unconscious: towards anti-constructivist theories of learning
Cognitive capitalism and teaching in the creative industries
Contradictions of contemporary pedagogy: education and anti-education
“Dada means nothing”: pedagogical pessimism, educational nihilism
Ezra Pound as educator: teaching literature
Feminism, modernism and education: Amy Lowell, H. D., May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf
“Grand Pedagogy”: Brecht’s Didacticism
Historic, Neo- and Post-Avant-gardes and education
Kitsch, education and public policy
Pedagogical experimentations and innovations: flipped, blended, hybrid learning and the avant-garde
Queer Pedagogies/Queering Education
The Academy and the avant-garde: dependence and resistance
The poets, artists and pedagogues of the Black Mountain College
The Russian avant-garde, biomechanics, Soviet psychology: historical, dialectical and anthropological materialist theories of education
Torn-halves: elite education, the Educational Industry and Adorno
Walter Benjamin on teaching in the age of digital reproducibility
The next Higher Education and Theory Research Lab, which encourages Westminster staff to reflect on and discuss the ideas underlying their pedagogical practices, will take place on Wednesday 9th December and we’re very lucky to have some fantastic contributors:
Thomas Moore is a Principal Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations and also Faculty Director of Learning and Teaching.
Andy Peisley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Leadership and Professional Development, having previously worked as a consultant in leadership assessment and development and a professional actor. Andy, who is currently undertaking an MA in Higher Education, is going to talk about his use of and research into mask work approaches to pedagogical practices outside of drama related disciplines.
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is Professor of Law and Theory in the Westminster Law School, Director of the Westminster Law and Theory Lab and was the OUP National Law Teacher of the Year in 2011 and subsequently a member of the Judging Panel. Andreas will be applying his interdisciplinary approach to spatial justice (which draws on autopoiesis, Deleuzian studies, feminism, object-oriented ontology and new materialism) to think about the spatiality of learning and teaching.
Please do join us from 2- 4 pm in room 2.06A in the Little Titchfield Street building (4-12 Little Titchfield Street, W1W 7BY).
Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control. Therefore we don’t really know what to do with information. Unanalyzed projects comes into existence simply because the information is there. Crowd sourcing takes the place of democracy. Universities become adjuncts to what is called international civil society; the humanities and imaginative social sciences bite the dust.
– Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 1
University World News reports that the OECD’s Education Policy Committee is seeking to develop a new project for “benchmarking higher education systems performance [sic]” as a way of providing “more transparency” about the real outcome of courses:
Higher education internationally was operating as a hybrid public-private “quasi market”, [Frans van Vught] told the [“Higher Education Futures”] conference [organised by the OECD and the Singapore Ministry of Education on 14 October 2015], and it was a crucial market failure that clients-students and their families cannot get the information they need.
“They are unable to make rational informed choices. They pay more but they do not know more,” van Vught said. “Students can only judge the quality while they are actually experiencing it.”
It was important, he [Simon Marginson] said, because “we need to give learning outcomes equal status with research”, and to provide a better basis for student choice. It was also necessary to have something more solid than subjective “market-oriented student satisfaction surveys” as a basis for measurement.
This is set to replace the OECD’s discredited Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project. Although ‘AHELO was intended to measure teaching quality rather than institutions’ past reputation’, it proved difficult to standardize this information internationally because of national differences in HE systems. The new project seems designed to overcome this:
The backbone of our work on higher education will be to try to organise a situation where results of outcomes of learning at higher education institutions are more comparable,” he [OECD Deputy Secretary-General Stefan Kapferer] told the conference.
It is interesting how this anticipates and mirrors much of the emphasis and rhetoric of the UK government’s recent proposals for the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), discussed here. Drawing a relation between the two places consideration of the TEF and its role in the government’s goal of creating and expanding the HE market in the UK within a more international context (including, of course, thinking about the effects on Scottish HE of introducing the TEF and variable fee caps to English and Welsh institutions).
We know expansion of the international market is of fundamental importance to the government’s reforms of HE but also a sticking point because it comes into tension with its position on immigration. There has been a decline in the number of international student starting courses in the UK since 2011, particularly of non-EU students from India (the number of Indian students starting courses in UK universities almost halved between 2011 and 2013) and of those studying STEM subjects (there was a drop of 10% for STEM subjects in the same period). Universities’ responsibility to ‘report’ to the Home Office on Tier 4 international students were tightened in 2011, requiring that they demonstrate such students are ‘attending lessons, lectures, tutorials, seminars or meetings with [their]… personal tutor/supervisor’ and ‘submitting coursework, or, attending tests or examinations’. London Met controversially fell foul of new regulations in 2012 and temporarily lost its sponsorship status (in part for failing to failing to properly monitor students). Institutions also have a cut-off point for the number of student visa applications refused by the Home Office, which was tightened in 2014 from 20% to 10%, and they must also ensure such students have proficiency in English (Glyndŵr University had its highly trusted sponsor status temporarily suspended in 2014 based on concerns over questionable English-language Proficiency tests, as did 57 private colleges). Applying for such a student visa currently costs £322, although new powers passed in the Immigration Act 2014 will increase the scope for the government to raise fees for visas and immigration services.
It is likely that recent changes to immigration policy, especially to the Tier 4 immigration route in 2013/2014, will continue to have some effect on certain institutions and subjects. The impact of such measures are filtering through to the every day experience of teaching and learning in HE, most notably in the introduction of electronic register systems which reports suggest have suddenly been installed in classrooms across a number of universities in London over the summer (and, presumably, are already present in other institutions). One teacher at Birkbeck has referred to this as ‘The Border in the Classroom‘.
In our recent HEAT reading group on Spivak’s writings on the theory and practice of education, we considered what Spivak praised as ‘learning the double bind – not just learning about it’ (Spivak, 1). Allan Parsons – picking up on the some of the points made in that reading group – has published an excellent post on this blog reflecting on the limitations of Spivak’s privileging of the classroom, which – he points out – is only the site of an ‘everyday struggle’ for the teacher, not for everyone else. Perhaps there is even something of – older, Freudian accounts of – schizophrenia in such claims: the withdrawal of the patient’s reality principle and the regression to a primary narcissism involves fantasies of the end of the world, just as educators frequently talk of a crisis in education as if it were – to quote from a famous speaker I once heard at a conference on HE – the “end of civilization” itself. Without wishing to undermine the serious and problematic implications of such changes, perhaps this also explains why changes to teaching and learning in HE are often experienced by teachers themselves as the elimination of higher education, while they actually involve its expansion.
One specific site of such a double bind – a structure in which we are obliged to react to two conflicting or even contradictory demands, which typically are given at different cognitive levels – is, in Spivak’s ‘Teaching for the Times,’ related to ‘Eurocentric economic migration’ (138):
It is no secret that liberal multiculturalism is determined by the demands of contemporary transnational capitalisms, our place within which we are obliged to disavow …What actually happens in a typical liberal, multicultural classroom “at its best”? On a given day we are reading a text from one national origin. The group in the classroom from that particular national origin in the general polity can identify with the richness of the texture of the “culture” in question …People from other national origins in the classroom… relate sympathetically but superficially, in an aura of same difference. (142)
How, then, might the ‘border in the classroom’ within UK – and specifically English and Welsh, if thinking about the TEF – – Higher Education reflect and reinforce those kinds of double binds: you must attract international students/you must not attract international students, you must treat everyone as equal/you must not treat everyone as equal? And, accepting Allan’s criticism of classroom-focused educators, how might this obligation to monitor and report on classroom attendance as a privileged measure of engagement produce other kinds of double-binds within contemporary education?
We spoke in the last reading group about building the Higher Education and Theory network in connection with other parts of the university and other institutions. I’ll try to write a bit more about this when I get a moment and it would be very helpful to read other people’s thoughts about effective and efficient ways of doing so. I was recently sent this article about ‘Building an Effective Impact Network’ and – although it is written in what (well, to me at least) feels like an over-reliance on policy-speak and (because of its context) seems to possess a rather instrumental view of networks that is overtly focused on impact – I wondered whether or not the principles it lays out could be of any – self-critical or productive – help in (re)focusing the HEAT network?
In this and a related article, it sets out the following four principles and five associated processes:
Some interesting observations about the messiness of learning by Naomi Barnes, writing at Hybrid Pedagogy, who concludes:
Learning is much messier and dynamic than scaffolded, compartmentalised education policy would lead us to believe. In classrooms, keeping on topic and task is an important structural and behavioral expectation. Random thoughts are actively discouraged. I believe that we need to start paying more attention to the random thoughts because when learning is conceptualized as a web, rather than a line, randomness becomes more meaningful… Social constructivist trained teachers have experience in guiding collaborative problem solving. But instead of scaffolding the pathway to expertise, why not allow students to pursue their interests in a topic and then look for ways to synthesize what each student brings to the table?
Does this resonate with HEAT members’ own experiences in a useful way? Or are there problems with this approach?
New Books in Education has a podcast interview with Tom Sperlinger, Reader in English Lite
rature and Community Engagement at the University of Bristol, discussing his new book Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation (Zero Books, 2015):
The book is an account of Tom’s time teaching English literature at Al-Quds University, located in the Occupied West Bank. Because of their unique environment and perspective, the students in his class had interpretations of Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and other seminal English literature works that struck a chord with the author. Through his book, he provides a glimpse into the everyday aspects of a place that is not often discussed in terms of higher education.
From the book’s blurb, sounds like an fascinating project:
Is ‘Romeo and Juliet’ really a love story, or is it a play about young people living in dangerous circumstances? How might life under occupation produce a new reading of ‘Julius Caesar’? What choices must a group of Palestinian students make, when putting on a play which has Jewish protagonists? And why might a young Palestinian student refuse to read?
For five months at the start of 2013, Tom Sperlinger taught English literature at the Abu Dis campus of Al-Quds University in the Occupied West Bank. In this account of the semester, Sperlinger explores his students’ encounters with works from ‘Hamlet’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ to Kafka and Malcolm X. By placing stories from the classroom alongside anecdotes about life in the West Bank, Sperlinger shows how his own ideas about literature and teaching changed during his time in Palestine, and asks what such encounters might reveal about the nature of pedagogy and the role of a university under occupation.
The government’s Green Paper on HE, Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice, has been published today, including more detailed proposal for the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF):
This consultation contains proposals to reshape the higher education landscape to have students at its heart. Its core aims are to raise teaching standards, provide greater focus on graduate employability, widen participation in higher education, and open up the sector to new high-quality entrants.
This document sets out proposals for how the Government’s manifesto commitment to introduce a Teaching Excellence Framework will deliver better value for money for students, employers and taxpayers. It also sets out plans to drive social mobility by further increasing higher education participation by those from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups.
This consultation proposes a new single gateway for entry to the sector, which would create a common system for all providers. It sets out proposed new architecture for the higher education system, to reflect the way higher education is now funded by students, and to reduce the regulatory burden on the sector. Finally, this consultation considers the potential implications of these changes for the research landscape. (7)
The background to much of these changes are tied to concerns about economic growth, since education and training is seen as a key driver to wider growth and because the effective repayment of tuition fees depends upon students entering higher-earning jobs, as I mentioned in my previous post about the TEF:
The TEF will be primarily linked to graduate employment figures because, according to theories of human capital, investment in education and training should lead to increased earnings and the ongoing expansion of higher education should therefore lead to economic growth. The increased amount of debt related to student loans that accompanies this expansion is a problem, however, so the government wants to encourage courses that lead to graduate employment because this should increase economic growth and reduce the student loan debt by improving repayment figures. Permitting a partial relaxation of the cap will also introduce greater variation in course fees and so open up more of a market between kinds of providers; linking this to employment figures justifies the return on investment for the student.
Hence, the first main section of Fulfilling our Potential is entitled ‘The Productivity Challenge’, which begins by claiming that “Increasing productivity is one of the country’s main economic challenges, and universities have a vital role to play” (10) and links to a government paper from the summer entitled Fixing the foundations: Creating a more prosperous nation.
Fixing the foundations claims a link between national productivity and living standards (equated with wages), such that “where average wages are above UK levels, productivity is also higher” (5). The causal relation between the two remains ambiguous here, an ambiguity repeated with the rhetorical suggestion that raising productivity will raise wages: “Raising annual trend growth by just 0.1% would mean the UK economy would be £35 billion larger in 2030 – the equivalent of approximately £1,100 extra for every household” (6).There is, obviously, a much more mediated relation between productivity and living standards, since productivity could increase without wages or living standards increasing if companies exploit their workers or public spending continues to be cut (France, for example, is more productive than the UK even though average wages are lower). Or wages and living standards might only increase for those being rewarded for increasing productivity in their workforce. Or, conversely, increases in productivity might be the effect of increases in wages and a better standard of living, so that the task of government would not be to increase productivity but primarily to increase living standards and wages. This would justify the government’s 2016 increase to the National Living Wage (which is included as point 9 in their framework for raising productivity, within the drivers entitled “A Dynamic Economy”), although other cuts, such as to Tax Credits, which will leave many working families worse off, contradict such a position.
In the other set of drivers to productivity listed as “Long Term Investment” is a section on Skills and Human Capital which connects these ideas on productivity back to HE. These sections of Fixing the foundations argues that:
The UK’s skills weaknesses – and failure to grow a serious system of respected employer-led professional and technical qualifications – are of such long standing, and such intractability, that only the most radical action can address them.
Many of the proposed changes will have an enormous impact on schools and FE, including changes to student qualifications, teaching training and pay in schools, an increase in compulsory apprenticeships (i.e. as an alternative to full-time education with the raising of the school leaving age to 18) closely connected to businesses, and the attack on funding for FE colleges. Those connected to HE from this July 2015 document are:
In the Green Paper on HE just published, Fulfilling our Potential, the last two proposals about the TEF and new providers are interarticulated and fleshed out in more detail. The website WONKHE has some detailed analyses by David Kernohan and Andrew McGettigan on these two proposals, and McGettigan also discusses it here.
In terms of their interarticulation between the TEF and new providers, the TEF is envisioned as another mechanism to introduce more of a consumer market into the HE sector (and with it, more alternative providers), since – along with uncapped student numbers – it will allow some institutions to generate further income by attracting more students (based on published TEF results) and charging higher fees (since good TEF results will allow universities to increase fees in line with inflation), while “lower quality providers [will] withdraw… from the sector, leaving space for new entrants, and raising quality overall” (19).
A significant portion of Fulfilling our Potential focuses on the streamlining and speeding up alternative providers to acquire degree-awarding powers and university title status, and Andrew McGettigan discusses these in detail here.
To summarize the main points of the paper regarding the TEF:
David Kernohan has argued that,
Not only will the TEF not do what it has been designed to do, not only will it add to institutional burdens and spawn new internal processes, not only will it generate endless questions and challenges for whoever in the Office for Students (OfS) is forced to run it, it will also not reward institutions or excellent teaching staff in any meaningful way.
He points out that the proposed use of QA standards to determine Level 1 status is problematic (some institutions won’t have access to results by the TEF Level 1 deadline and 96% of institutions that were reviewed in 2014 passed) and that the financial incentives for acquiring other TEF Levels are minuscule (the differentiated caps at each level cannot exceed “real terms” increases, suggesting below inflation increases of currently 0.8% for anything below the highest Level). As Andrew McGettigan concurs, “There’s not much incentive for universities to focus on teaching excellence” because “How will such a tiny reward compare to the administrative costs of submitting to the independent panel of TEF experts?” While it is tempting to imagine universities refusing to play the TEF game, it would also be disappointing to think a chance to improve and reward teaching might be overlooked. More likely, however, is that universities will none the less be compelled to enter and try to game the TEF, as they were with the REF, but not in relation to fee increases but increasing competition between institutes over student numbers, and this will nonetheless have little consequence for actual teaching excellence.
Of the joining together of access and quality assurance into one body, the claims that the TEF “should be contingent on having measures in place to facilitate the access and success of disadvantaged groups” linked to access agreements, and that “metrics in the TEF will be broken down and reported by disadvantaged backgrounds and under-represented groups …So the TEF will recognise those institutions that do the most to welcome and support students from a range of backgrounds” (22) are still too vague to be meaningful in any way.
As already mentioned, and as Andrew McGettigan in particular has pointed out, the TEF is closely linked to ideas about increasing productivity through investment in so-called human capital, whilst trying to reduce public spending and so ensuring students take on the cost themselves as loans and that enough of them enter graduate-level jobs to ensure they earn enough to repay those loans:
The aim is to improve the teaching that students receive, which in turn should increase their productivity and help them secure better jobs and careers. It should enable employers to make more informed choices about the graduates they recruit, providing better understanding of the range of skills and knowledge they bring from their course, and deliver graduates who are more work ready following an active engagement in their studies. With higher returns, more graduates will be able to pay back more of their loans, reducing the amount that needs to be subsidised by the taxpayer in the longer term. This is on top of the benefits to taxpayers from having a stronger economy powered by a higher skilled workforce. (21)
Since no actual inspections of teaching excellence will be taking place, it is therefore hard to imagine that data regarding employment (and particularly graduate-level employment) won’t play a significant role in TEF assessment, alongside student satisfaction surveys (perhaps more specifically focused on whether students feel they have acquired specific skills and capacities and feel ready for work). As Andrew McGettigan suggests, the old banding system for residual teaching grants is also likely to give way, so that “funding will increasingly follow the creditworthiness of institutions and individuals, rather than the costs of course delivery”. On this model of human capital, investment in education (grants and loans against fees) would be more closely linked to the potential return through higher wages.
Alongside that, however, is the proposal that institutions being assessed for higher TEF levels will be encouraged, but not required, to adopt or integrate a 13-point Grade Point Average in their degree classification system (along with some evidence about tackling grade inflation) to supposedly produce a great variation of classifications and better delineate the labour market. Any claims about grade inflation become highly contentious when linked to discussions of teaching excellence, since absurdly one of the ways of demonstrating teaching-excellence – if a version of this proposal is adopted – could be to show there are less students acquiring Firsts and Upper Seconds. An outcome of this would be to lower student satisfaction scores, which would then come into conflict with any attempt to make degree classifications more robust and more differentiated. Obviously, without measures to tackle grade inflation such a differentiated scale will eventually become meaningless.
Fulfilling our Potential also envisages the TEF as a mechanism for a “rebalancing of the pull between teaching and research” (12) and specifically mentions recognizing “the relationship and mutual benefits between teaching, scholarship and research” (32). Since this distortion was itself partly produced through the introduction of the Research Excellence Framework, which is generally perceived to be an inefficient and inaccurate way of ranking and rewarding research activity, and since the Green Paper insists this rebalancing “should not be at the expense of research, but through additional incentives to drive up teaching quality” (12), there is likely to be further implications either for a more stream-lined REF (anticipated in the Green Paper), for a greater separation between teaching and research activity in universities (despite the claims that, the TEF “should bring better balance to providers’ competing priorities, including stimulating greater linkages between teaching and research…” (20)), or simply for further demands on the workload of academic staff. Although it is unlikely that the TEF will assess or reward good teaching in any meaningful way, relying instead on data taken from already existing surveys, there is a chance that its focus on the institutional conditions and structures of what it calls learning environment (surely teaching environment, if the focus is incentivizing teaching excellence) could re-prioritize the anxiety and isolation regarding teaching – as opposed to research excellence – in universities (as discussed by Elaine Showalter). However, as David Kernohan writes:
the real missed opportunity is the entire lack of incentive for staff who teach. Though the REF has many flaws, the need to be “ref-able” is an important driver for many academics. The individual research can see her activity reflect in the success of their department or institution, and benefit (on occasion) from the increased availability of research funding. With TEF there is no link between individual teaching performance and the assessment of teaching excellence.
Higher Education and Theory Network 
