Co-Constructing research excellence: A case of teaching research methods to an MEd class

Abstract

University academics are committed to the pursuance of research excellence and teaching excellence at the same time. This commitment is partly driven by the pressure of regular and frequent assessment and performance reviews. On the front of research, applying for external grants and publishing in high-impact academic journals is a constant theme in the lives of the academics; while on the front of teaching, they undergo student evaluations on about every course that they teach. Apart from the mounting external pressure, individual academics develop their own identities through years of socialization in contemporary academia and society. How one’s academic identity and experience in the research and publishing world might influence one’s conceptualization of teaching excellence and impact upon one’s classroom teaching is little known, despite a longstanding interest in unpacking the teaching-research nexus in higher education. Our study aims to address this important but under-researched issue of potential connection between research excellence and teaching excellence as it concerns individual academics, by focusing on the classroom teaching of one professor in the field of Early Childhood Education (ECE). Our dataset consists of transcribed classroom recordings of the focal professor teaching a research methods course to an MEd class in the specialism of ECE at a university in Hong Kong, the researcher’s course observation notes, and a series of interviews conducted with the professor. A data-driven approach was adopted to code and analyse the data, aimed for triangulation of evidence. Our findings revealed how the focal professor recognised, scaffolded, and built excellence through what he called a PBL2 (problem-based and project-based learning) or even PBL3 (adding practice-based learning) approach. At the same time, his identity as an accomplished scholar-researcher and a public intellectual was manifested in his classroom teaching. He described research as being expensive and the publishing world as being competitive (where one has to be innovative and fast); he talked about his own research projects and drew upon his research and publishing experience in advising the students on research ideas, topics, designs and methods. His pursuit of research excellence translated into his high expectations for the class of students whom he wanted to transform from “laymen” to “good researchers” in the first few months of their MEd study; while his social responsibilities as a public intellectual were seen to be linked to the kinds of research agenda he pursued and to his way of nurturing critical thinking among the students Tracking the teaching-research nexus in its process of being played out in the lives of university academics and understanding their approaches to co-constructing excellence with their students, as we aimed to do in our study, is an important pathway toward “recognising, scaffolding, and building excellence in university learning and teaching”.