A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

492 ❘
Enhancing personal practice
What is it to be scholarly, what is it to be competent?
Demonstrable personal competence in teaching and the production of a range of
appropriate scholarly outputs are interrelated and indispensable elements of
appointment to a senior ‘teaching excellence’ post. Indeed, understanding the myriad
connections and syntheses between ‘doing’ teaching and concepts derived from
theoretical frameworks for learning and other professional literature lies at the heart of
what it is ‘to profess’ and to earn the title ‘professor’ or ‘professorial fellow’. It is this kind
of praxis which promotion procedures attempt to interrogate.
It might be argued further that scholarship is the vehicle which draws the tacit
knowledge (Polanyi, 1958) of excellent teachers into the public domain and, hence,
makes it available to other practitioners. Moreover, scholarship is the means whereby
‘reputation’ is built and ‘esteem’ validated. It is not surprising therefore that promotion
boards give it close attention, nor that valid forms of scholarship are now more frequently
interpreted as ‘action- ‘ or ‘policy-based’ as opposed to discovery-led ‘blue sky’ research.
It would seem that Boyer’s (1990) plea for a reconsidered view of scholarship and new
respect for a ‘scholarship of applications and teaching’ has been not only heard but
enshrined in the promotion criteria of the most forward-looking HEIs.
Activities associated with reflection, action learning and action research are now well
documented (see Chapter 28) and widely accepted as precursors of praxis, leading to
continuing professional development.
Numerous studies of ‘professionals’ trace the development of practitioners from novice
to expert, and Case study 4 provides an interesting account of one such journey and
gives insight into the kind of profile presented for promotion to a ‘pedagogic’ Chair.
Progression in a practice-based activity such as university-level teaching has been
described as passing through a number of stages (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986). Level 1,
the novice stage, is characterised by adherence to taught rules and little discretionary
judgement; level 2, the advanced beginner, takes more account of the global characteristics
of situations but tends to treat all aspects and attributes as having equal importance.
At level 3 the practitioner is considered competent, is beginning to see actions as part
of longer-term goals, and is able to undertake conscious and deliberate planning and
perform standardised or routine procedures. At level 4, that of proficiency, situations are
seen more holistically, important aspects are more readily recognised, decision-making
is less laboured and guiding axioms can be interpreted differently according to situation.
The expert, the level 5 practitioner, no longer relies on rules and guidelines and has an
intuitive grasp of situations based on deep understanding, knows what is possible, and
only uses analytic approaches in novel situations or when new problems occur. Thus the
expert stage is characterised by implicit and unconscious practice. For the experienced
mid-career teacher in higher education, and particularly for those applying for promotion
via the learning and teaching route, much practice will be at levels four and five. This type
and level of accomplishment need to be evidenced in the documentation presented for
progression to a promoted post and triangulated with data derived from students, direct
peer observation and other metrics.