Experimentation and development through the CETL programme: connections between education, learning and working

Citation

Saunders, M. (2011), "Experimentation and development through the CETL programme: connections between education, learning and working", Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning, Vol. 1 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/heswbl.2011.50501caa.002

Experimentation and development through the CETL programme: connections between education, learning and working

Article Type: Commentary From: Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning, Volume 1, Issue 3.

The experiences embodied in the papers in this special edition demonstrate the opportunities for experimentation and new thinking the Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) programme generated. In particular, the focus for this edition is on those CETLs, which had an explicit concern with the connections between learning and working and the synergetic relationship between the two. This short introductory paper will contextualise some of the issues the papers grapple with by a depiction of the CETL programme as an explicit theory of change and also within the broadly social practice theoretical stance they adopt to work, learning connections. By this, the papers have broadly adopted the perspective that denotes a concern with activity, with behaviour, with what people do, what they value and what meanings they ascribe either singly, in groups, in institutions through their systems or nationally through national managing structures (see Saunders et al., 2011).

What were the purposes of CETLs?

CETLs were first announced in the 2003 Government White Paper, The Future of Higher Education. Following a consultation and a two-stage bidding process in 2003-2004, Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) initially announced funding for 74 CETLs in January 2005. This approach to the improvement of teaching and learning in higher education (HE) has an embedded theory of change, i.e., it constitutes a strategy with the intention of bringing about improvements in teaching and learning by establishing CETL. This embedded theory focuses on the following propositions:

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  reward and recognition (excellent practice should attract further investment, which will deepen its impact);

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  excellent teaching produces excellent learning; and

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  recognising individual and institutional excellence in teaching and learning promotes excellence across the sector.

The CETL programme ended up as an investment of some 350 million pounds by the HEFCE in England and Wales and the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland. After the initial announcement 81 centres in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were established to reward and recognise excellent teaching in a variety of disciplines and cross-disciplinary practices. In England this investment is an intensification of the work undertaken under the Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund which was a source of funding, via HEFCE, available for development projects in teaching and learning within and between HE institutions.

However, the programme was not overly prescriptive, thus encouraging a diverse range of expressions across most HE disciplines. The CETL programme can be described as an example of “categorical funding” (see e.g. Halfon et al., 2007) that is a resource-driven mechanism to produce change against specific criteria, over a time-limited period, usually with an evaluative component. It is the latest in a line of approaches to interventions or change strategies in teaching and learning in HE that have all been characterised by degrees of openness appropriate to the culture of relative autonomy in the UK system.

CETLs were a novel strategy, complementing work already achieved through the device of learning and teaching strategies and through central initiatives such as the Subject Centre Network and then the HE Academy[1]. They give credit to a commitment to teaching enhancement at a time when the research assessment exercise might distract attention from teaching.

Interestingly, the CETLs did not constitute a managed programme. This can be illustrated by comparison with the subject centre network, which was also evaluated by the same team (Saunders et al., 2002). The CETLs were supported by the HE Academy and HEFCE provided some support as well but the strong sense is that these were like independent countries located on the same continent – they certainly did not constitute a “United States of CETLs” let alone an empire. A CETL might be discipline based or have a more cross-curricular brief (as in the cases here) but its raison d’être was to act as a “beacon” of innovative practice that might be replicated elsewhere.

Theory of change embedded in the CETL programme

Importantly, the CETLs were launched with an explicit “change theory” associated with the idea of excellence, or more precisely, “beacons” of excellent practice and the way its reward and further resourcing might act to encourage further innovative practice across the sector. From an evaluative perspective, the programme had a clearly stated policy objective (to improve teaching and learning in HE) derived from the seminal Dearing Report on HE in the UK (Ron, 1997), through a particular instrument (Centres of Excellence), using a variety of mechanisms (at the level of individual CETLs these included, for example buildings, research, curricular development, staff fellowships) to create desired effects (better teaching and more effective learning)[2]. This framework can be described in the following form in which the elements construct a conceptual hierarchy. According to HEFCE,

the purpose of CETLs is to reward excellent teaching practice and to invest in that practice further in order to increase and deepen its impact across a wider teaching and learning community[3].

The key phrase in this extract is emboldened to emphasise that the CETL programme was designed as a strategy to maximise the impact of excellent practice across the whole sector. The key metaphoric phrase “deepen its impact” signals this intention clearly. There are other ways of accomplishing these effects, so we can suggest that this particular intervention (the use of Centres for Excellence) had within it the embedded assumption, or theory, that creating and reinforcing existing good practice through CETLs would deepen impact. Importantly, in the case of the CETL strategy, we can depict it as an example of a “complex policy instrument”, with an explicit theory of change that has particular implications for change and development. These instruments are designed to improve teaching and learning quality in HE but do not have detailed specifications. Key ideas that are loosely assembled to constitute an underlying theory-in-use are:

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  HE is proud of its semi-autonomy, has complex cultures and affiliations and is used to generating its own momentum.

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  A relatively light touch is most likely to yield positive improvements through these instruments.

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  Change tends not to be linear and happens unevenly, with some areas surging ahead while others take some time to shift or remain resistant to change.

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  Change is brought about by complex causal mechanisms (carrots, sticks, sermons and partnerships) but also by the convergence of many long-term and short-term factors (opportunity, funding, policy change, new appointments).

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  Change increasingly relies on many enabling features sometimes called affordances being put in place.

These characteristics converge to enable many interesting examples of experimentation in teaching and learning. The challenge for CETLs was always how they were going to be used as a change resource beyond themselves. The papers here are addressing that issue and are bridging between their experience and the general case by depicting embodiments of how curricular practice might capture the educational opportunities offered by the workplace.

The HE learning experience and work nexus

There are tensions between the notions of learning, working and educating throughout the educational system that are usefully illustrated by reference to the HE system. Some have argued (Barnett, 2003) that there is a growing crisis of confidence in academic or scholarly practice in general HE as sufficient preparation for the rapidly evolving new work order. It is here that a form of neo-correspondence is emerging. Aided by ICTs, education is being redefined as learning. At first sight, this redefinition is in danger of stripping away education's higher emancipatory or civilising goals and being reconstructed as a technical fix. Learning at work and work itself become integrated activities as it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between projects, planning, information handling and evaluation, quality or learning circles. HE is often called upon to validate learning in this new environment and asked to provide a qualification framework.

However, as the cases analysed in this edition show, the opportunities offered by integrating and bridging work and learning within the HE curriculum can be emancipatory, creative and driven by educational values associated with critical thinking and problem solving. HE is struggling to determine precisely what HE aims might be in an environment in which intellectual endeavour is increasingly un-confined to the physical space and institutional practices of educational institutions. Knowledge production, circulation and use are no longer the preserve of the educational or dedicated research institution.

The developmental work and experimentation provided by these cases suggests a possible long-term future in which learning processes, often embodied in ideas such as partnership, network and loosely coupled systems, are the focus rather than education. We can speculate on a future narrative in which education becomes increasingly de-institutionalised, the physical institutions of learning cease to be as socially important. Learning opportunities become freely and easily available to most individuals and groups via ICTs in, for example, the home, community and work-based learning centres in which boundaries are crossed forming new communities of practice. A new discourse of virtuality is being created for communities, networks and collaborative knowledge production. The structurally derived social, cultural and economic power of differences between educational institutions begins to diminish. If these trends continue, it might be the way the socially excluded can seize opportunities for knowledge use. In this scenario, the way individual and group identities are presently constructed, defined and sustained by their educational experience is transformed.

Learning will be integrated into a much wider range of practices, including work. Ivan Illich's (1973) 40-year-old vision of a de-schooled society becomes a possibility. If learning is no longer in the hands of providers but learners, and, further, in the workplace by groups and employees and employers, its emancipatory (educational) potential lies not only in content and process but also in open accessibility and use. This perspective might sound naive but it is not. It acknowledges that learning processes will not challenge power directly but that education or learning will gradually cease to be the site on which social and cultural disadvantages are centred.

The narratives offered here shift the analytical focus from the gap or boundary between education on the one hand and work on the other, to a consideration of the way learning and practice, particularly work practice, are integrated and produce new learning processes and opportunities. It is notable that this narrative often strips education from the equation and uses the less aspirational concept of “learning” in its stead. So it is to the way education, learning and work might be “integrated” that these papers stress.

A meta theory narrative has emerged based on the integration between work practice and learning as the paper by Vincent Carpentier, Norbert Pachler, Karen Evans and Caroline Daly demonstrates. A contemporary theory narrative settles on the way “practice” itself might yield knowledge and learning. This meta narrative turns to a consideration of the learning process but does so by figuring the locus of concern as learning in social or organisational contexts rather than individual cognitive process. David Laughton's paper takes a different although related tack in which he analyses the way in which a CETL (Employability: identifying and evaluating institutional impact) developed an embedded “cross curricula” approach in which work and the students’ practices within it were the focus. This contrasts creatively with the work presented by Barbara Workman, Pauline Armsby, Alan Durrant and Philip Frame in which the locus of practice shifts from student to employee as the learners depicted in their cases are in full- and part-time employment. These papers, take us further in our understanding of these connections.

The narratives analyse an extended notion of professional and organisational knowledge, produced and sustained through situated work practice. By integrating theory narratives that explore professional learning process (see Eraut, 2000; Schon, 1991) with those that develop the idea of “practice” itself (Giddens, 1993; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 2000, 2009) with a concept of the knowledge resources (formal, explicit and technical, on the one hand, informal, tacit, social, cultural and discursive on the other) that are produced and accessed, metaphorically as “rules” that frame our work behaviour, this narrative has broken new ground and provided a fertile opportunity for new research into the way learning and work intersect (see e.g. Little and Arthur, 2010). The focus and aspirations of this journal are to extend and explore this area. It has a corpus of theory that depicts the new entrant or novice in a working environment as travelling through a cyclical journey of practice within work settings, access to existing and the production of new knowledge resources, informal learning processes, the creation and use of rules (as knowledge resources) for continually evolving clusters of practices. As these cycles proceed, the novice moves from the periphery to the centre in terms of experience and expertise.

The important dimension of this narrative is the way it involves a complex dynamic. This dynamic is constantly evolving as new members of a community of practice use the knowledge resources that are in place by following tacit and explicit rules but at the same time have the potential to create and add to the knowledge base at others’ disposal. This notion is not to suggest that practice is the only source of knowledge resources but that it has moved to centre stage in our understanding. It is clearly an evocative frame of reference providing the theoretical base for many studies globally in which shared or collaborative learning is the central preoccupation, in professional groups, in disciplines and in digital environments.

Returning to the idea of boundary and how it has been reconstructed to offer new perspectives on the relationships between education, learning and work. While boundary is the metaphor for the site of interest in these papers, its preoccupation is more with the way in which boundaries require and produce learning opportunities that, in an important sense, integrate positive features of some of the other narratives, than in a simple representation of “transfer”. The hackneyed metaphor of “transfer” does not do justice to the complex social and cognitive processes that take place as boundary crossing is undertaken (see Beach, 2003, p. 39). We can say generically that when people in one social environment, be it in an educational institution, or any social location move across a “boundary” in time and space, to another social location, either another educational institution, or in the light of the interest in this paper, from an educational environment to a place of work, it can be depicted as a boundary crossing process. Two dimensions are important here. First, the act of moving across boundaries yields the potential for learning as sense making processes and informal learning is given impetus to produce “ontological security” in the new environment. There may be a need for a wide range of bridging tools to help learners and those supporting them to navigate these transitions. The term “bridging” is an apt metaphor because it implies a journey and a connection between places in two senses: just as a bridge takes an individual or group from one point to another, it also joins one place to another. This narrative has a strong vision of the world learners inhabit characterised by rapid change. In this sense “bridging” means enabling:

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  learners to experience elements of future practice as a “rehearsal”;

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  learners to move from one kind of learning experience to another;

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  the facilitators of learning to innovate and change;

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  the learning potential of moving from one system of activity to another; and

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  learners in one activity system to work in concert with learners in another activity system towards a common “project”.

The term “bridging tool” is guided by a specific learning theory. The paper by Sibyl Coldham uses the idea that people engaged in change (the fact that moving from one activity system to another, e.g. from school to work or from HE to work involves “change” is axiomatic) has resonance with the notion identified by Engestrom and others (see Tuomi-Grohn and Engestrom, 2003) concerning the metaphor of “boundary crossing”. In her case, the activity theory framework is used to enable the integrative dimensions available in work/learning designs. A different perspective on the use and “validation” of the learning opportunities offered by the workplace is offered by Norman Jackson's paper, in which the experience of developing a framework for encouraging, recognising and valuing learning and personal development gained through wider experience is analysed and presented. Conventionally associated with the experience of moving between different “activity systems” and the learning processes, opportunities and, indeed, requirements, such crossing implies, shows activity theory has provided a fertile resource for depicting this process. Building on the work of Vygotsky (1999), Engestrom (1999, 2001, 2004) have drawn our attention to ways of thinking that emphasise how learning takes place in a social setting involving practices shaped by tools and resources, communities, divisions of labour and rules such that individuals and groups experience tension, creative problem solving and resolution that utilises these elements towards an “object” or “project” that provides the “point” or raison d’etre of the activity system as a whole.

Concluding remarks

This experimentation through the CETL programme and embodied in these papers has interesting implications. If we depict educational organisations and the workplace as different activity systems, characterised by different communities of practice then moving from one to another involves a form of social and cognitive “brokerage” in which a variety of tools might aid and develop “expansive” learning opportunities. This narrative suggests that the connections between learning and work or educational institutions and work are usefully depicted as involving movement from sets of practices to others, these sets of practices having developmental histories and that bridging from one set (activity system) and another involves use of boundary objects or tools. It suggests that the metaphor of “transfer” is moribund and we need to understand crossing boundaries or connections between activity systems in terms of complex “reconstructions” by individuals and groups. It also sets the narrative for education learning and work connections in situated contexts with people struggling to make sense of their circumstances as they move from one set of practices to another.

I am delighted to endorse the various exciting and thoughtful accounts of innovation in this edition. While I still have some reservations about the theory of change embedded in the CETL framework, there is no doubt, as these papers suggest, the programme enabled innovators to develop new practices in the work, learning and education nexus. This “social practice”-based approach aligns effectively with recent work in the consideration of the nature of practices in HE.

Murray SaundersCentre for the Study of Education and Training (CSET), Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

Notes

The HE Academy provides support to the HE sector by working with individual academics. The network of discipline-based subject centres provides a range of services to subject departments. Its web site states that it works with UK universities and colleges, providing national leadership in developing and disseminating evidence-informed practice about enhancing the student learning experience (www.heacademy.ac.uk/)

This way of analysing policy builds on the work of both Vedung (1998), Pawson and Tilley (1997).

www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2004/04_05/#exec