Developing a regional approach to outstanding teaching and learning: a case study

It has often been acknowledged that teaching in higher education is afforded a relatively low status when compared to its more lucrative relation, research, and this is echoed in the literature (for example, Weimer, 1997; DfES, 2003 in Young, 2006). Teaching awards are reputed to provide many benefits to institutions and participating academic staff. Research indicates that teachers in higher education need recognition for their teaching efforts, respond positively to this recognition, and that teaching awards are one effective way of recognising and rewarding teaching (e.g. Ruedrich et al., 1992, 1986; Dinham and Scott, 2003). It is also acknowledged that when good teaching is rewarded, academic staff will remain committed to the improvement of teaching (Carusetta, 2001). This is not to suggest that the concept of the teaching award is universally ratified and supported (cf. Layton and Brown, 2011). Difficulties are reported, for example, in respect of identifying what teaching awards actually endorse (Chism, 2006). Other research has worked on identifying how to refine systems for recognising excellence, and interrogate, in a constructive way, the assumptions on which these systems are built (Skelton, 2004). Some recent commentary asks whether teaching awards and similar initiatives might actually lower the status of teaching despite best efforts to the contrary (see MacFarlane, 2011). The underlying challenge for the educational developers tasked with implementing the teaching award initiative described in this chapter was to establish a professionally useful process in a national (and global) environment of ‘entrepreneurialism, managerialism, massification, commercialism and reductionism’ (MacFarlane:163), a system which would have, and be perceived to have, academic and professional integrity. This system, which arose as part of a cross-institutional strategy of a conglomerate of higher education institutes, was re-imagined as a process which would, to as large an extent as possible, mitigate aspects of the ‘game’ of academic development, as Layton and Brown (2011: 164) characterise it, where ‘irresolvable, profound and unremitting contradictions hold sway’. In a time of reduced resources but increasing competitiveness, the Shannon Consortium was designed to establish the Shannon region as a zone of excellence in teaching and learning at third and fourth level and was part of a broader targeted initiative (the Strategic Innovation Funding cycle, 2006-2010). Four institutions in the mid-west of Ireland (University of Limerick, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick Institute of Technology Developing a Regional Approach to Outstanding Teaching and Learning: A case study 3