A presentation from the STEM Annual Conference 2014.
At Glasgow Caledonian University the central academic development unit has been working with a small cohort of early-career lecturing staff to explore their impressions of professional values in teaching. These lecturers work mainly in the engineering and life sciences subject groups. Over a period of eight weeks members of the cohort contributed to a reflective blog through which they explored in turn each of the four UKPSF professional values. In performing a close-reading analysis of the blog contributions we examined the myriad ways in which the cohort defined and interpreted the four values and whether there existed a nucleus of shared values.
Most of the blog contributors had brought with them existing values from their various professions. In follow-up interviews and group discussions we investigated the extent to which these prior values are also transmitted to students sometimes as part of a determined process of preparation for the workplace. Subsequently using the blog posts alongside existing data from interviews with subject leads and heads of department we considered the potential disparity between ‘leadership’ values and ‘teaching’ values. Does this disparity act as a barrier to our aspiration for a flat organisational hierarchy with an empowered corpus of teaching staff? What are the operational implications of this? Finally in returning to our core purpose we began to ask questions of how organisational culture values around learning and teaching are transmitted. In discussion with the original cohort we drew on Hofstede’s onion model to explore the implications for the student learning experience.
