Reflections on Ashwin’s Transforming University Education

I have just finished Transforming Higher Education: A Manifesto by Paul Ashwin. I found this book helped to settle my view of what HE is for, and would recommend it to anyone who has ever found themselves wondering what the point of teaching undergraduates is.

Ashwin’s core message is that HE should be considered as the process of students coming into a transformational relationship with a structured body of advanced knowledge. The book is about making the case for this conclusion, and then exploring how to turn this vision into reality. It ends on a very pragmatic note, essentially concluding that HE would be better if everyone had thought a bit about what HE is.

Personal Framing

People come at books from different angles, and it is perhaps worth sharing my trajectory to this text. I have really struggled with deciding what the purpose of HE is, but I feel that most people I meet find my struggle puzzling (or even willful). I often wonder if the self-evident value of HE might have been easier to see when that education was free.

The first scholarly literature I seriously engaged with was the work deriving from Skinner - a pigeon psychologist - commonly referred to as the school of ‘behaviourism’. By this model, learning is about getting students to do the right thing at the right time; teaching is therefore an activity which can be objectively measured and improved. Every time you look up at some monolith of ‘effective practice’, there’s a pigeon looking back down at you.

The second tranche of literature I read stemmed from Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Perhaps expressed most compellingly by bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, education is presented as a process of transforming the self. By this model of ‘critical pedagogy’, teaching is successful to the extent that it lets students consider and alter who they are.

A third view comes from Newman, perhaps most recently (contentiously) expressed by Collini: HE is about entering into a life of the mind. Sharpening one’s thoughts against specific study makes thoughts sharp in a general sort of way, though there is little account of any mechanism by which this occurs.

The current policy landscape also makes the case for mercenary HE very strong: I find it very hard to fault someone who does a Chemistry degree so that they can earn enough to support their family.

Why is ‘why?’ important?

I found these perspectives very hard to reconcile in my own contexts, and thinking about them has occupied a huge amount of my time in the last few years. Most particularly, the structure of Chemistry as a discipline seems to get in the way of a lot of the easy syntheses which I see so prominently in the humanities-derived writing on the purpose of HE. For example, the idea of graduate citizenship is often a compelling part of degrees in subjects which emphasise critical thinking.

The purpose of HE is not some abstract concern: it is important every time I make a pedagogic decision. There are questions about how to teach multinuclear NMR effectively, but none of those questions make sense until you work out why the topic is worth teaching in the first place. Do you teach NMR in a practical way which will let students access analytical insight in labs, or do you focus on the nuclear wavefunctions which will let students consider the relationship between quantum mechanics and inorganic structures? In a degree which is bursting at the seams with content, such decisions have to be made every day. Part of that decision is a contextual response to the broader structure of the course, but part of it is a deeper decision about why we’re all doing this in the first place.

Ashwin’s core thesis is that Higher Education is about students coming into a transformational relationship with a structured body of advanced knowledge. Such a relationship lets students come into a new understanding of who they are and what they can do in the world. This idea seems to resolve the tensions I have been experiencing in my own thinking, because it accounts for the prominent role of the subject of study. Crudely: students are challenged to transform themselves (Friere) in the context of learning how to navigate (Skinner) the knowledge (Newman) of their discipline (Ashwin).

So by Ashwin’s view there is value in learners becoming able to assign the proton NMR spectrum of GeH4. Effective teaching helps them get there, and the process of getting there helps them to consider and change how they think. Bad teaching can hinder students learning how to assign an NMR spectrum, and therefore restricts students’ opportunities to relate to the structured knowledge of NMR spectroscopy.

In contrast, I found Friere hard to reconcile with teaching anything apolitical. Skinner never convinced me that any piece of disciplinary knowledge was worth learning at all. Newman’s view had me looking for thematic points which were typified by aggressively specific corners of knowledge.

Style and Tone

I found Ashwin’s tone very refreshing. He has committed to making the book a manifesto, and accordingly it is (transparently) partisan. I admired the openness with which he engages fairly with objections to his line of argument; e.g. in the last few chapters he confronts a series of ‘awkward questions’ about his position. Indeed, his intention seems to be to set out a clear position rather than to convince the reader. I found the moments when I disagreed were useful for understanding my own view more fully.

One important concern in the writing is to identify the ways that the economic rationale for HE is currently operating, and to compare this with the ‘transformational relationship’ thesis. I found this one of the most thoughtful parts of the text. Ashwin recognises that economic reasons (e.g. graduate salaries, national industrial strategies) are a legitimate part of the conversation. For example, he acknowledges that a government seeking to improve citizens’ employability might spend their money on something other than HE. At the same time, he holds that the economic discourse has permitted an instrumentalist model of HE which is hard to reconcile with the model he advocates. If a student selects a course based on advertising about graduate salary, is it even fair to push them into a transformational relationship with disciplinary knowledge?

Myths

I found the introductory sections to be some of the most startlingly clear writing about HE teaching policy I have ever read. In particular, Ashwin devotes three chapters to challenging myths about HE education: its purposes; its elements; and its measurement.

Myths about the elements of HE teaching were particularly bracing for me. Ashwin treats the Inspirational Teacher critically, for example, emphasising the profoundly collective activity of teaching a whole degree. In the context of HE being about students developing a transformative relationship with advanced knowledge, one educator’s role can only be a small part of a student’s learning.

Myths about the measurement of teaching were coupled with a useful set of criteria about what an appropriate measurement would look like; I commend them to anyone looking at (say) module evaluation design or league tables.

The most striking single idea, though, was about category errors in graduate attributes. If I teach my student to solve a problem, they are not suddenly good at problem solving: they can solve one particular, narrow, specific problem. Solving an NMR assignment problem is a tiny subset of solving all problems. This set theory framing has really struck me. I wonder how long I have spent (?wasted?) thinking about graduate attributes.

Solutions

The next section of the book proposes solutions to the problems articulated when laying out the myths of HE. Broadly, Ashwin centres the role of professional, disciplinary educators being able to give an account of the design choices they have made and their responses to students’ experiences.

He recognises that this is a serious and arduous task. To construct a degree requires expert disciplinary knowledge and considerable creativity, thoughtfully responding to the process of transformation which each student will undergo when learning.

In the closing chapter, there is a discussion of the changes needed for this view of education to come into common practice. Importantly, this addresses powerful actors like institutional leadership and policy makers. I found this section particularly interesting when it framed the marketisation of HE as a theory of change. Ashwin contrasts this with the ‘contagion’ model for improving HE through best practice; it is undeniable when set out so plainly that the market model of change has been more effective than effective practice, though the dimensions of change are admittedly different.

Reflections

I feel that the book accomplished what it set out to do, and I am very glad I read it. I think I broadly agree with the core model. At the same time, I am left with a few unresolved questions.

Recruitment

It was unclear to me whether Ashwin was inevitably committed to a ‘streaming’ model of the HE sector. His focus on the process of transformation means that cohort consistency might be seen as a positive parameter when designing a degree. Would his vision crumble if, say, every student attended their local University? If you design a course for a student with - say - three Bs at A Level, should you reject applicants with three As?

Microincentives

There was some serious discussion of the relationship between teaching and research, but only so far as it related to curriculum design and teacher credibility. A deeper problem relates to what it means to be an academic.

For example, promotion and hiring are typically related to research output (e.g. grants, papers). Teaching is routinely framed as a distraction from research; this seems like a serious obstacle to not only realising the ‘transformational relationship’ model, but also legitimising it in the first place.

While Ashwin was openly critical of Teaching Excellence, it seems that Research Excellence has become a firm part of the UK HE landscape. Research incentives are often overwhelming for individual academics, and this ugly fact chips away at the core assumption of any book about teaching: that teaching matters to teachers in the first place. Any vision for teaching has to either (1) critique Research Excellence as well; or (2) respond to it. 

Good and Bad Teaching

I really liked Ashwin’s vision of good teaching: that it is a creative human act which is fundamentally resistant to either standardisation or standardised measurement. At the same time, I know that my own education has included truly terrible teachers. These teachers put me off entire disciplines of knowledge.

A managerial mechanism for distinguishing good teaching from bad seems important for helping students to come into a transformational relationship with advanced knowledge. I feel that Ashwin placed a great deal of trust in the reflective practice of the teacher. In the context of the pressure to produce research output, this seems somewhat fragile to me.

Conclusion

A short, snappily-written book with a provocative view of why Universities do undergraduate teaching. However much of the book you agree with, you will find it valuable to read if the ‘why’ of HE is a problem that exercises you.