In 2021, I learned a humbling and important lesson.
Having waited for many months for the promotion process to decide on my application, I was informed that my attempt had failed. I had not met a number of the promotion criteria and, in retrospect, I was nowhere near.
I had submitted my attempt, based largely on advice from colleagues, snatched conversations about “what actually counts”, instead of doing proper research (the irony!).
Turns out, much of this advice and general speculation was wrong. What really surprised me was that the promotion criteria for learning and teaching focused academics at my institution are crystal clear. There were workshops, I went to them. The criteria are laid out on the university website.
Why did I pay them such scant regard? It was a powerful counter-narrative, about what counts for promotion.
What really counts
I chose wrongly between local (and fallacious) narratives and official guidance. Having corrected my error, I tried again in 2023 and found myself in a leadership role concerned with creating a scholarship community at my institution. Six months in, I am ready to share what I have learned so far. It is this: education focused careers are rewarding, and many institutions are now supporting the “educational turn” in higher education. We need to build stronger communities to support this.
In business schools, education is critical, so we need to get behind this purpose and do it professionally and gladly. But it turned out not to be a building exercise, so much as a joining-up exercise. I found out very early, that there are many scholars working away in the margins and, given the opportunity, will happily display the creativity and professionalism we would hope for in our business educators. What they need is the opportunity, not the training.
Myth-busting is an important step to bringing scholarship into the light. Let’s bust some right now.
The publish or perish fallacy
In our business school, and many others, research-focussed academics outnumber education-focussed academics significantly. For every learning and teaching colleague, there are four research and teaching academics in our school. Research-focussed careers have been rising inexorably since world war two and are seen by many as the only game in town (I recommend the work of Ernest Boyer if you want to know more about this). This means the research-based criteria are well and truly ‘baked in’ by now.
Unsurprisingly, asking a colleague at work about promotion, will lead to a publication centred discussion. This advice is almost always an attempt to help, it comes from a good place. It is also quite close to the truth because education focussed academics can and do publish their scholarly work. But the emphasis is different in important ways.
We share earlier in the research process, and more broadly. From papers to podcasts, we are talking to our community all the time, and it is this active conversation which is valued above the specific channel we use. This has serious consequences because to be a part of that conversation, we need to engage early on, maybe while we are still trying things.
Potentially, we can be building our outputs sooner than research minded colleagues. Many of us are still free to pursue research outputs also, or we may be told to publish in highly regarded education-based journals. But these take time, perhaps years. There is a trade-off between joining the conversation and saving your efforts to publish in a four-star journal, further down the track. The warning here is that the four-star journal may not count for much – despite the general belief that it does.
The stepping stone fallacy
There is a persistent belief that a learning and teaching contract is simply a foot in the door, rather than a career in its own right. Perhaps this is because early career academics engage in a lot of teaching. In a business school, large undergraduate courses are often managed by academics at the beginning of their careers. As lecturers develop their careers, they can often look forward to more relaxed and fewer teaching tasks, with the opportunity to pursue their research.
Teaching careers appear to resemble these early conditions quite closely. Rather than consider an educational trajectory, an academic may simply see novice educators as waiting to emerge as fully fledged researchers. This is speculation on my part, but whatever the reasons, this myth is damaging to learning and teaching careers.
A crunch point is the annual review. At these meetings it is entirely conceivable that the reviewer takes the stepping-stone view. They are likely to reinforce this narrative. Many education-focussed academics are of the opinion that they simply need to accumulate enough publications to make the switch, development of teaching practice is a lesser priority. This leads to serious problems with educators not building professional experience and struggling to get promotion.
Many institutions have policies which allow education or research focussed colleagues to switch tracks. There is nothing wrong with switching to research. However, this decision needs to be made in the full knowledge of what an education focussed career looks like. If you love teaching, a research career could be a disaster. This works both ways, of course. The stepping stone fallacy may also lead senior colleagues to see junior learning and teaching colleagues as simply research apprentices, taking up high teaching burdens while others focus on research.
The university teacher fallacy
A sad legacy of less enlightened times is the memory of teaching as a punishment for researchers deemed not to have made the grade. While this practice is, as far as I know, no longer in place, it does have a legacy. For many senior academics, this memory is vivid and influential. It might be hard to see a teaching career in a different light when this was the norm for so long.
Additionally, the evidence remains in many HR processes which are yet to catch up with a new reality. It can take many years, even decades to remove references in documents to “university teacher” or “teaching only” contracts, terms that were stigmatised in their day.
The definition of scholarship fallacy
Scholarship must be one of the most contested words in the academic world. In the learning and teaching world we have “scholarly teaching”, “scholarship”, and “scholarship of learning and teaching (SoTL)” to contend with. Add this to the fact that in other disciplines, for example life sciences, scholarship is very different to the way we define it in business education. And now let’s throw in educational research and discipline-based education research (DBER). For early career academics, this is understandably overwhelming.
This is where I like to fall back on Boyerian scholarship. Ernest Boyer defined scholarship very broadly. He wrote about four types (discovery, integration, application and teaching). Teaching became SoTL, eventually. This places SoTL very squarely on a broader spectrum of scholarship which might include research (discovery), cross-disciplinary projects (integration) and professional education/knowledge exchange (application). Each of these are key activities in a business school. The fallacy here is not the definitions of these activities, but the idea there is one, and only one, kind of scholarship that counts. Academics are very used to crafting their own careers based on what they “profess”, scholarship is no different.
Creating light instead of heat
There are probably other myths. The very fact that these misunderstandings exist is disconcerting, but as the early sociologist Gabriel Tarde pointed out in the 19th Century, conflict exists not because of difference but similarity. Research-focussed and educational careers lie in the nexus of research and teaching. Each activity supports the other and cannot exist without it.
I have focussed my efforts over the last 6 months in bringing out these discussions. Although working in the shadows is a way to avoid the negative connotations and misunderstandings of colleagues, it is also a very good way to perpetuate those myths. At my school, we have held celebration events and we are planning Summer Schools for education focussed staff. With the recent education turn, recognised by many learned societies, there is a good opportunity for teaching focussed academics to strut their stuff.
