The templated academy: troubling discourses of 'teaching excellence' in UK Higher Education

This qualitative institutional ethnographic case study investigates the policy-mediated power structures within an English higher education institution, focusing on the impact of teaching excellence policy constructs on academics' professional lives and identities. Institutional ethnography is a distinctive research approach that seeks to offer explication of institutional power dynamics. Interview data was juxtaposed with institutional policies and committee papers associated with the National Student Survey (NSS) and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) using institutional ethnographic text mapping. The analysis reveals how these structures shaped responses to teaching excellence policies, both materially and ideologically. Conflicting perspectives emerged between managerialist aims to improve NSS and TEF ratings and teaching academics’ practical ideals of teaching excellence. Staff compliance appeared to be reinforced through a student engagement discourse which resulted in various forms of recognitive and intersecting social injustices. Findings thus show a need for alternative eudemonic models of teaching excellence in English higher education policy that prioritise social justice without compromising institutional efficiency and fiscal responsibility as hallmark qualities of modern universities. Additionally, treating respondents as co-researchers and considering the effect of institutional capture on an institutional ethnographic researcher, the study challenges more traditional views of subject-object dynamics in sociological research. As such, this inquiry contributes to a deeper understanding of past and present higher education institutional practices while offering insights for future policy and practice directions.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

London Metropolitan University

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Fregona, Charlotte

• 370 Education

Dc Identifier Grantnumber

N/A

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.londonmet.ac.uk:10482