Might the apparent antagonism of research and teaching practice offer insight into universities, their core practices and transitions? If we eschew perspectives whose point of departure is social roles (which in this context result either in academic-centric or student-centric analysis) and start instead with social practices might we see things differently? Do students and academics share a university practice?
Here I shift the question from two views that have dominated discussion about universities: 'governance' and 'role-centred' perspectives11 (such as that represented in Figures 2.1 and 2.2) to practice perspectives. I ask: what is it that the practices of teaching and research have in common which makes them seem antagonistic and antithetical to each other? Is there more between them than surface repellence? Can we think about the unity of teaching and research differently if we adopt a practice perspective as our analytic frame?
More specifically I ask: is there a practice, a fundamentally shared practice, which underpins the work done in a university and whose different sameness creates a centrifugal or polarising force in the way academics presently work, driving different dimensions away from each other?
I think there is.
In my view, practices of 'coming to know' are at the heart of what people in any university do. Practices of coming to know unite all members of its community as well as the academic labours of teaching and research and the work of those who support this practice. Learning in a university is disciplined by the critical rigour of a research-founded orientation to coming to know. I call this research- founded approach to coming to know 'research-learning'. The Boyer Commission put it this way:
The ecology of the university depends on a deep and abiding understanding that inquiry, investigation, and discovery are at the heart of the enterprise, whether in funded research projects or in undergraduate classrooms or graduate apprenticeships. Everyone at a university should be a discoverer, a learner. That shared mission binds together all that happens on a campus.
(1998: 9) Brew amplifies this:
Both learning and research are about making meanings. Research and learning both involve the pursuit of intellectually challenging ideas … [B]oth learning and research are concerned with discerning the critical features of phenomena. Both teaching and research involve exploring existing knowledge and trying to go beyond it. Both involve the human act of making sense of the world. (2012: 112; citations omitted)
11 See Clark (1986) and more recently in Australia, Marginson and Considine (2000). I include the ‘talk and texts´ analysis — or what Alvesson and Kärreman (2011) would call discourse (with a small ‘d’) analysis — like that of Schapper and Mayson (2010) and Mayson and Schapper (2012).
The point is that the learning practices at the heart of a university are coming to know through research practice and products just as research itself is a kind of practice of coming to know and learn. This kind of learning is founded on an approach to coming to know which, as a matter of routine, questions the taken-for-granted assumptions of 'common sense'. Initially at least its outcomes tend to go beyond 'common knowledge', although they may over time become incorporated into such generally held knowledge. I refer to learning which is research-founded and call it 'research-learning' to indicate the constitutive fecundity of this 'two-in-one' practice.
I introduce the concept 'research-learning' to clarify the broad ensemble of social practices which entail practitioners in a search for new and significant knowledge, inspiration, insight, lucidity, meaning and understanding by: skilling up and applying in practice disciplined and critical questioning; finding new (if only fleeting) frameworks for focusing, observing, experimenting, creating, evoking, gathering 'evidence', considering and analysing; and then, when new understanding and insight is found through these processes, communicating this in ways that enable others to see, to understand and then, again, to test. Searching and informed, disciplined re-searching is at the heart of research-learning practice.
Echoing Boyer's admonition on research in a research university, I say everyone at a university should be a research-learner engaged in practices of knowledge discovery and transmission. Research-learning has some shared and generic practices: critical appraisal and flexibility of mind, consideration, recognition, inspiration and case-making. Research-learning is uncommon sense- making applicable across the range of fields, from the inspirational arts to fields of 'hard' scientific practice.
If research-learning is the paradigmatic or generic social practice which unites all in a university, it is also a richly variegated and dynamic practice.
Practitioners in the discipline of geology or its sub-field, geomorphology, have a fundamentally different approach to enquiry from those in the inter-disciplinary field of gender studies or genetics or the discipline of German. Each might be studied in a contemporary university.
But the nomenclature of disciplined difference is changing. The label 'discipline' now appears anachronistic and too narrow a referent for the dynamically forming, transforming, deforming and reforming 'fields of research-learning
practice' which contemporary universities (in the east as in the west) host. So I use the term 'field' to refer to the specialised subjects of research-learning practice.
As a rule of thumb, different and emerging and disappearing fields of research- learning practice can be identified by their accepted (yet always contestable)
• name(s)
• ambits of interest
• focal subjects or sub-fields of enquiry
• practices or 'methods' of doing things, including questioning, enquiring, investigating and composing
• substantive material or data which practitioners focus on and work with
• theoretical paradigms, analytic frames and key concepts through which patterns are recognised or insight achieved in practice
• principles of rigour/rules of the game for making and critically evaluating narrations, soundings, calculations, cases and 'findings' as acceptable within their community of practice
• conventions for presenting 'findings' and 'creations' as significant and compelling, and accomplished practice — including accomplished use of distinctive notational forms, citation conventions and linguistic expressions (see Hyland and Bondi, 2006; Hyland, 2008)
• histories of practice
• social relations and communities of practice (including local, system- wide and global social forms, internal distinctions, recognitions and progressions, as well as 'external' alliances and oppositions)
• habitus, personal styles and demeanours of practice, transition and struggle in the field (after Bourdieu).
My usage of the term 'field' is consonant with Bourdieu's concept of a 'field' in Homo Academicus (1990 [1984]) but also in The Field of Cultural Production (1993) and his final lecture series Science of Science and Reflexivity (2004). Bourdieu discussed the concept of 'field' in both its generic and specific manifestations, with the field of science as his example. A field, he wrote,
is a structured field of forces, and also a field of struggles to conserve or transform this field of forces … The agents, [in this case] isolated scientists, teams of laboratories, create, through their relationships, the very space that
determines them, although it only exists through the agents placed in it, who, to use the language of physics, 'distort the space in their neighbourhood', conferring a certain structure upon it. It is in the relationship between the various agents (conceived as 'field sources') that the field and the relations of force that characterize it are generated. (2004: 33)
Bourdieu's analytic use of the term 'field' enables us to recognise both fields of research-learning practice (as might be labelled 'disciplines' or 'fields' in everyday speech) and a university field, which in the international context of academic interactions and publications, for example, and the 'internationalisation' of university study and global rankings of universities which have bitten hard for just over a decade or so, is now unquestionably a global field of forces and struggles.
As with struggle, change also must be recognised at the heart of any analysis of research-learning fields. As we confront 'super-complexity' (after Barnett, 2000), with changes in global power and the emergence of 'wicked problems', our once apparently even intellectual keels are destablised. Inter-disciplinary, cross- disciplinary and a variety of innovative problem-oriented fields have surfaced in the ever-more choppy confluence of cross-currents in which universities seek to provide individuals and societies with light by which to understand and navigate (see Strathern, 2004; Holland et al., 2010).
To consolidate the point: research-learning is the generic and core practice of any university, any university system and of the global university field. But research-learning is also richly variegated practice — differentiated into a range of dynamic but generally distinguishable fields of practice as diverse in their research-learning practices as anatomy, Arab studies, or astrophysics (just to start an indicative list starting with 'A').
The next section of this chapter focuses on the social context of learning and transition in practice: communities of practice. I argue that research-learning practice constitutes, and is constituted by, the practices of people in communities of practice.