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Learning, teaching and assessment strategies in higher education:

contradictions of genre and desiring
Sue Clegga; Karen Smithb
a
Carnegie Research Institute, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UK b Educational Development
Unit, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK

First published on: 22 December 2008

To cite this Article Clegg, Sue and Smith, Karen(2010) 'Learning, teaching and assessment strategies in higher education:
contradictions of genre and desiring', Research Papers in Education, 25: 1, 115 — 132, First published on: 22 December
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 Research Papers in Education
Vol. 25, No. 1, March 2010, 115–132

Learning, teaching and assessment strategies in higher education:

contradictions of genre and desiring
Sue Clegga* and Karen Smithb
a
Carnegie Research Institute, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UK; bEducational
Development Unit, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK
(Received 22 January 2008; final version received 19 June 2008)
Taylor and Francis Ltd
RRED_A_358582.sgm

Research
10.1080/02671520802584145
0267-1522
Original
Taylor
02008
00
s.clegg@leedsmet.ac.uk
SueClegg
000002008
&Article
Papers
Francis
(print)/1470-1146
in Education (online)

This paper presents an analysis of ethnographic data collected by researchers as

part of the process of rewriting an institutional learning and teaching strategy in an
English university. The research was driven by a desire to understand what work
a learning and teaching strategy might accomplish, and the form/s of address in
strategy documents. The data for the study comprised in-depth interviews with
staff, focus groups with staff and students, documentary analysis of the existing
institutional strategy documents from equivalent higher education institutions, and
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data from notes, memos, minutes and a personal reflective diary of events. These
data did not provide the basis for an evaluation of the effectiveness of the strategy,
rather they played a role in informing the development of the strategy,
interrogating the limitations of strategy and exploring the ways in which such
strategies discursively position pedagogic and academic identity. We conclude
that strategy is non-linear and the site of multiple contradictions, and that the work
of strategy documents is accomplished through rhetorical forms in which desiring
is as important as rational argument. How academics are discursively positioned,
therefore, becomes a matter of power. Tensions between different approaches to
teacher improvement, in the name of improving student learning, are acted out in
the process of authoring strategy documents.
Keywords: higher education; strategy; academic identity; desiring; genre; time

Introduction
Within mass higher education systems internationally, university teaching has become
an object of policy. Governments have striven to ensure that quality is defined and
maintained (Morley 2003); that students are prepared for employment in flexible
labour markets; and that as students increasingly shoulder more of the costs of higher
education, as a positional rather than a public good, institutions respond to shifts in
demand and feedback. Although higher educational institutions (HEIs) are formally
and financially more independent of the state, they are becoming increasingly regu-
lated through centrally set performance indicators and targets. Neave (1998, 2005)
argues that in the ‘evaluative state’ excellence is codified in relation to public purpose,
and stratification has become an instrument of public policy rather than a mere
descriptor of esteem. The general trend towards the definition of mission and the
specification of goals has become part of the ways in which learning and teaching

*Corresponding author. Email: s.clegg@leedsmet.ac.uk

ISSN 0267-1522 print/ISSN 1470-1146 online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/02671520802584145
http://www.informaworld.com
 116 S. Clegg and K. Smith

‘excellence’ (Skelton 2005, 2007) are being re-shaped through learning, teaching and
assessment strategies.
Moreover, strategy development is now part of the broader project of new mana-
gerialism which, as Deem et al. (2001) identify, involves: a narrative of strategic
change in relation to the management of public service organisations, the develop-
ment of distinctive organisational forms and new practical control technologies (see
also, Clegg and McAuley 2005; Deem and Brehony 2005; Deem, Hillyard and Reed
2007). These changes include the alignment of systems towards the achievement of
institutional strategic goals (Patrick and Lines 2005), audit (Morley 2003), changes
in governanance (Shattock 1999) and direct governmental regulation (Stensaker
2006). This may appear to provide greater transparency through audit systems which
document progress against performance indicators and monitor the delivery of strate-
gic organisational goals. However, Strathern (2000) has argued that ‘transparency’
rather than being neutral and obvious, is a metaphor with ‘tyrannous’ dimensions and
operates so that other kinds of reality are ‘knowingly eclipsed’. The development of
learning and teaching strategies and distinguishing ‘learning and teaching’ as an
appropriate subject of regulation and scrutiny could be considered as one element in
the broader managerialist project, making ‘teaching and learning’ more transparent
but partially eclipsing our knowledge of the actual practices of teaching (Strathern
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2000).
We should not lose sight, however, of the partial and contested nature of these
changes. The operation of the managerialism in higher education, in contrast to some
other fields, is characterised by hybridity, with largely untrained academic-managers
and considerable fuzziness in practice (Deem at al. 2001). As Maton (2005) points out
in his analysis of the autonomy of the ‘field’ of higher education and its re-shaping
(Bourdieu 1990), while relational autonomy has been weakened, positional autonomy
has retained its strongly insulated character; the re-shaping of higher education has
come from actors inside the field not from those outside it (see also, Gale and Kitto
2003). This is particularly true of the core academic areas of research and teaching.
The often painful experiences of playing and policing the (new) rules of the game
while simultaneously being aware of how that game undermines those elements that
are sustaining and rewarding in academic life has been powerfully dramatised by
Sparkes (2007) in relation to research. Learning and teaching is another site where the
rules of the game are being rewritten. The processes whereby learning and teaching
strategies are developed, therefore, are of considerable interest as a site where
academic identities are being made over, albeit in contradictory and incomplete ways
(Clegg 2008; McWilliam 2004).
Learning and teaching strategies now play a significant role in the UK, and also in
Australia, New Zealand and the USA (Gibbs, Habeshaw, and Yorke 2000; McWilliam
2004; Patterson 2001; Rowley and Sherman 2001) as part of a policy shift in higher
education towards defining teaching as a legitimate object of scrutiny and improve-
ment. In England, these changes have been directly engineered through funding in the
form of a designated Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund (HEFCE 1999a), which
requires institutions to develop learning and teaching strategies in order to draw down
funds (HEFCE 1999b). This is in contrast with other nations in the UK, which have
their own funding procedures. In an evaluation of these moves, Gibbs (2001)
concludes that while such strategies were new to the higher education sector, there had
been considerable progress over a relatively short time span with most institutions
developing fully defined learning and teaching strategies, even before the HEFCE
 Research Papers in Education 117

funds were in place to support their development (Gibbs, Habeshaw, and Yorke 2000).
Many are now in their third iteration.
Our paper explores the problems associated with the development of such strate-
gies. While there is no doubt about the progress of the genre, there is relatively little
written about the processes at the local level whereby HEIs develop strategies, nor
indeed much about how they are viewed and actively reinterpreted by staff (with the
exception of Newton 2000, 2003). In her study of higher education institutional policy
Fanghanel (2007) explores the ways respondents positioned themselves in relation to
a curriculum policy text and how they brought their own interpretative frames to it,
but she does not explore the policy formation process itself. Much of the theoretical
literature suggests that the operation of strategy itself is non-linear and unpredictable
(Trowler 2002). In this paper we report on research that was ongoing as part of the
process of supporting the redrafting of one institutional learning and teaching strategy.
The research was formative in informing the development of the strategy document.
The authors of this paper were directly involved in the strategy formation process, but
were neither the strategy’s ‘principals’ (responsible for the position represented in the
text), ‘authors’ (who compose the signs) nor ‘animators’ (who set it in motion)
(Davison, Boswood, and Martinsons 2004).
The paper begins by mapping some of the complexities of the strategy development
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process and a review of the available literature on strategy in higher education, and is
followed by a description of the methods employed in the study. Our data were
collected over a period of nine months, and consisted of texts, interviews, focus groups
and an ongoing ethnographic engagement in the field. Our analysis highlights the
competing perspectives associated with the development of strategy, the impersonal
modes of address in strategy documents, the emotions and desiring of participants, and
uses a narrative approach to understand the tensions and contradictions in the strategy
development process.

Learning and teaching as strategy

Learning and teaching strategies operate at institutional level in publicly defining the
institution’s approach, and in driving reform internally. While they function as a top-
level strategy, in practice their development is orchestrated by academic/educational
developers whose roles are shifting from support for individual academics to an
emphasis on organisational change and increasing the professionalism of university
teachers. As Ling (2005) makes clear in a volume dedicated to an exploration of the
relationships between educational development and leadership in higher education,
there is a shift in their work to the level of the organisation:

Development within organizations may be viewed as contrived change in the behaviour

of people, processes and the organization to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of
the institution in meeting its purposes. (Ling 2005, 6)

The mechanisms for engineering these shifts have been extensively documented in
the literature. At the institutional level, these moves include aligning quality systems
towards the achievement of an institution’s strategic goals (Patrick and Lines 2005).
Patrick and Lines (2005) argue that transformative improvements can only be
achieved when these systems are engaged with at a local level (see also Fanghanel
2007; Stensaker 2006; Trowler, Fanghanel, and Wareham 2005) in ways which make
sense in terms of the academics’ own practices and knowledge.
 118 S. Clegg and K. Smith

A number of authors have cast doubt on the efficacy of attempts to implement

change through the formulation of mission and strategy documents. Patterson (2001)
has explored whether the normative goals in statements of university mission, which
are derived from business and management models, represent anything more than
‘idealistic rhetoric’. While such goals have to be articulated by law in New Zealand,
Patterson (2001) cautions against their efficacy in highly complex organisations and
is critical of an over-simplistic adoption of management models. Trowler (2002) simi-
larly is critical of rational-purposive models of policy and argues instead that there is
a ‘loose coupling’ between policy initiatives and outcomes at the local level, rather
than technical-rational (Bleiklie 2002; Kogan 2002):

Instead the process of ‘encoding’ policy is a complex one in which policy texts are devel-
oped as a process of negotiation, compromise and the exercise of power. As a result these
policy texts are usually laden with multiple agendas, attitudes, values and sets of mean-
ing. (Trowler 2002, 12)

There is a further difficulty for the sector; unlike its business counterparts, institu-
tions are nominally free to set their own mission but many core areas of strategy in the
UK are required, learning and teaching strategies being a case point. This produces the
curious outcome that most institutions, despite their obvious differences, appear to be
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striving for the same sorts of ‘excellence’ (Cowburn 2005). Cowburn (2005), more-
over, points out that different strategies, with different aims and objectives, for exam-
ple Financial, Human Resources, coexist increasing the incoherence Trowler (2002)
characterises. It cannot be assumed, for example, that learning and teaching strategies
are necessarily aligned with other strategic foci in the institution. Indeed in some
instances different policies at Government level militate against this being likely, for
example the highly selective approach to research assessment puts pressures on
researchers to concentrate on research at the expense of teaching.
This is not to say, however, that policy and strategy documents have no power.
Bessant (2002) has pointed out in her analysis of metaphor in policy-making that the
techniques of rhetoric: ‘secures the authority and credibility of our knowledge claims’
and acts ‘to persuade others’ (Bessant 2002, 91). Policy is productive, what Ball
(1998) describes as ‘policy magic’ in his analysis of the way the market becomes the
‘solution’ to education problems. Learning and teaching strategies become a ‘solution’
to the educational ‘problem’ of university teaching, through naming and discursively
framing the problem to be solved. They aim to create a particular pedagogic identity
through the operation of the rhetoric, namely through the invocation of: ethos (moral
authority), logos (reasonableness), pathos (emotional appeal), kairos (timeliness and
appropriateness) and exigence (the necessity or urgency of communication) (Edwards
and Nicoll 2006). Strategy documents are a form of rhetorical practice which creates
moral authority (ethos), as well as emotional appeal (pathos), along with the more
obvious manufacture of reasonableness (logos). This emphasis on the productive work
of strategy and the role of metaphor is a major theme in the general management liter-
ature (e.g. Akin and Palmer 2000; Illes and Ritchie 1999). Davison, Boswood, and
Martinsons (2004, 1), for example, argue that:

Managers engaged in formulating strategy have a complementary and increasingly impor-

tant responsibility as organisational communicators. They and their ghost writers, along
with those implementing strategy, are engaged in a continuing contextualisation or sense-
making of organisational life, a semiotic process in which metaphors play a central part.
 Research Papers in Education 119

Notably they warn, however, that metaphors can also be dangerous for managers
creating unhelpful organisational and emotional responses as well as intended and
benign ones. Generative metaphors can be powerful in shifting an organisation’s
direction but they can also confuse and are open to (mis)interpretation. As their
reading of university documents shows, this is true in higher education and not just in
business. Policies are ‘filtered’ through academics’ own experiences, epistemologies
and ideological beliefs (Fanghanel 2007).
Everything aforementioned highlights the complexity of strategy formation and
implementation. Moreover, Newton’s (2003) account of implementing an institutional
learning and teaching strategy confirms this in practice, with different meanings attrib-
uted to the strategy by different constituencies. The concerns that emerged from his
interviews with ‘front-line academics’ were about loss of autonomy, strategy overload,
bureaucratisation of teaching, the importance of local culture and the ‘shift’ from teach-
ing to learning. These are all findings which, as the author points out, resonate with
other literature (e.g. Clegg 2003; Henkel 2000). While other strategies, for example
Human Resources or Facilities, may seem far removed from an academic’s everyday
role, with learning and teaching strategies the relevance is all too clear (Newton 2003).
In addition to learning and teaching strategies, a whole panoply of measures and proce-
dures, including the many innovative pedagogic projects which receive special funding
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(Hannon 2005), claim to have as their central purpose the improvement of the students’
learning experiences. In this increasingly complex terrain, new subject positions and
possibilities in relationship to teaching and learning are being created at the same time
as old ones are becoming increasingly constrained and re-shaped (Clegg 2008; Morley
2003). Edwards and Nicoll (2006) argue that:

Professional development becomes a form of identity work, attempting to translate the

practices, values and attitudes of the worker with those of the profession and, in some
situations, the very goals and mission of the organisation. (Edwards and Nicoll 2006, 124)

This is as true for academic developers who are intimately involved with the
learning and teaching strategy formation process, as well as for teaching staff whose
identities are being reformed and re-worked. Unsurprisingly, therefore, strategy
formation is a contested site engaging multiple desires and emotions, and competing
pressures. We, therefore, used the particular context of the rewriting of a learning
and teaching document to understand how strategy as a text speaks and positions its
constituents (Fanghanel 2007), and to capture some of the processes of ‘encoding’
in the ‘process of negotiation, compromise and the exercise of power’ (Trowler
2002, 12) that took place in terms of constituting the ‘principals’, ‘authors’ and
‘animators’ of the text itself (Davison, Boswood, and Martinsons 2004).

Methodology
Our approach is broadly ethnographic, set in the context of a formative evaluation
informing the strategy process. Along with much work in the ethnographic tradition
we focus on a single case (Hustler 2005). As in our previous work (Clegg 2003), we
have been influenced by Adam’s (1995) challenge to take time seriously in social anal-
ysis. She argues that ‘to make explicit what we know intimately at the non-discursive
level requires a phenomenological attitude’ (Adam 1995, 40). A phenomenological
attitude and bracketing of assumption was in part made easier in this context by the
 120 S. Clegg and K. Smith

relative unfamiliarity of the authors with the strategy development process, and their
insider/outsider positioning as supporting the authoring of the text but not being directly
principals, authors or animators of the strategy. As in most ethnographies, our data are
multiple. The study took place over a period of about nine months, excluding the
summer break.
We began the research process with documentary analysis. Our documentary data
comprised nine UK learning and teaching strategies. Atkinson and Coffey (2004, 56)
recognise that most ethnographic studies have not paid sufficient attention to written
documents. Documents, however, are worthy of close scrutiny. Any document is
‘packed tight with assumptions and concepts and ideas that reflect on the agents, and
its intended recipients, as much as upon the people and events reported there’ (Prior
2003, 48). The analysis of the documentary data focused on the construction of the
texts to gain a deeper understanding of the strategy as a specific genre, where genre
refers to:

A recognizable communicative event characterised by a set of communicative

purpose(s) identified and mutually understood by members of the professional or
academic community in which it regularly occurs. (Bhatia 1993, 13)

A more detailed analysis of these data forms the basis of a separate paper (Smith
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2008). Close readings of the texts at the unit of the clause were carried out. Clausal
subjects were categorised, while verb phrases were defined as being either passive or
active. Such detailed textual analysis allowed a deeper understanding of how individ-
uals, institutions and institutional documents were positioned, represented and
discussed. Textual analysis cannot uncover how a text is read or interpreted. A reader
engages actively with a text and as they do so, they bring their ‘stock of cultural knowl-
edge, a knowledge (or ignorance) of similar texts, and his or her unique biography’
(Atkinson and Coffey 2004, 72). In order to assess how these texts are understood and
enacted, other data collection methods were necessary. A second major source of data
was from a detailed analysis of 21 interviews, undertaken as research interviews with
guarantees of confidentiality and anonymity. The interviews were undertaken early in
the process with staff in Faculties (academic) and support Departments, and in the
spirit of what Barbour and Schostak (2005) describe as the conditions for ‘critical
reflective dialogue’ we created the space for respondents to reflect on and react to
previous iterations of strategy and in which they could express their hopes for the new
version. All the staff in the group had expressed a degree of interest in learning and
teaching; the invitation was sent to a list of people who had attended seminars or had
been in some way involved in leading on learning and teaching initiatives. This group
was chosen as they might be expected to have engaged with previous strategies at
some level. Most, however, were not senior staff involved directly in strategy forma-
tion; rather they identified themselves as teachers and as people who were interested
in learning. The interviews were open and probed about what they thought learning
and teaching strategies were for, the work they did and for whom they were written.
We also asked them whether they had ever used/referred to the existing document and
if so to describe how. We showed them the headlines of the existing (old) version and
asked them about their salience, about what they would like a strategy document to do
and what they wanted from the new one including its form and language. The inter-
views were fairly lengthy lasting on average between 45 minutes and 1 hour. The data
were analysed inductively for themes, but with sensitivity to the individual context of
 Research Papers in Education 121

the utterances. Other sources of data were more richly diverse; they included: an open
meeting with an external facilitator; telephone interviews with strategy developers at
other institutions; minutes, notes, drafts, consultation and committee meetings; and a
reflective diary kept throughout the process. Focus groups were also carried out with
academic staff, support staff and students. As well as helping us to see these groups’
‘normative understandings’ of learning and teaching strategy, they also provided these
groups with the opportunity to contribute to the strategy development process (Bloor
et al. 2001, 8, 13) – an opportunity we deemed to be extremely important. These data
were analysed iteratively and new data were collected in response to new questions
that emerged in the field work.
In order to make sense of shifting orientations through time we drew on some of
the categories Land (2004) developed in his earlier study of academic developers. The
decision to utilise these categories was made based on our ongoing analysis of
emergent themes from our own data rather than prior to the data collection. The
‘orientations’ Land described were not the property of individuals but rather represent
different approaches to academic development itself. Individuals in his and our study
often adopted more than one position and, in our study, changed over time.
We treated all our data with ethical sensitivity and a decision was taken very early
not to record data on individuals; rather the record is one of processes and orientations
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towards meaning-making. These orientations were mobile, not attached to persons, so

the decisions not to concentrate on individuals appeared to be methodologically sound
as well as morally defensible. We recognise that many of the individuals involved in
the process could legitimately construct an alternative narrative of their engagement,
but this was not our purpose and such narratives belong to those individuals, not us.
As with any other analysis, therefore, we recognise that ours is not the only interpre-
tation available. The narrative that we offer is based on our own stories from our own
location; those stories: ‘rearrange, redescribe, reorganise, invent, omit and revise’
(Ellis and Bochner 2000, 744). It was, however, possible to compare focus group data
against the language and themes from the interviews, so that there were some internal
checks in terms of exploring the interpretative framework. As we were participants we
were also aware of the positionality of the other participants and their formal institu-
tional roles, and the fluid sources of symbolic and other sorts of power. There are also
gaps. We were not party to some of the higher-level meetings that were also ongoing,
only to decisions that emerged from them. We recognise that as with all accounts ours
is, therefore, partial. In insider research, such as this, there are tensions about the self
since we were also actors in the events we describe. We were very conscious of our
own ‘researcher’ orientation and initial unfamiliarity with ‘strategy’ as a field and
recognised the special difficulties Bourdieu describes ‘involved first in breaking with
inside experience and then in reconstituting the knowledge which has been obtained
by means of this break’ (Bourdieu 1990, 1).
In presenting our analysis we have organised our account around an emerging
chronology as well as themes. The first part draws on our rich ethnographic data,
reflective notes, minutes and observations, and presents an analysis of the shifting
orientations towards strategy development through time. The second section on genre
and positioning presents an analysis of institutional learning and teaching strategies
that was commissioned early in the process and was designed to inform the authoring
of the new learning, teaching and assessment document. The final part presents an
analysis of desiring based on the interview data. The aim of these three sections is to
show the contradictions of practice and discourse and the power games that unfurl
 122 S. Clegg and K. Smith

during the development of learning and teaching strategy resulting in the complexity
that Trowler (2002) describes.

The narrative unfolds: shifting orientations through time

Early in the process of strategy development it became apparent that time itself was a
major consideration, and timeframes continued to be contested and shift throughout
the process. At the first strategy development meeting, involving senior academic
developers at Faculty and University level, there was considerable discussion framed
around what might be described as the ‘researcher orientation’ (Land 2004, 68), under-
stood in this context by most of the participants as allowing research to frame the
strategy formation process. This was reflected in a willingness to commission and
engage with the data including the analysis of other strategy documents. Alongside this
orientation there was a strong ‘interpretive-hermeneutic’ (Land 2004, 108) orientation
and a commitment to involving other actors, including students, administrative and
academic staff, in the strategy development process. This approach, as well as under-
pinning the commitment to ‘research’ animated the desire to consult, involve and
empower other actors through the use of focus groups, and used interviews with staff
as a mode of engagement as well as a form of ‘evidence’ (Bloor et al. 2001, 13). These
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dominant orientations seemed to suggest a slow time frame based on interpreting and
researching views of staff and consulting widely. It also led to the establishment of a
‘drafting group’ which was established to author the document. The ‘group’ included
a student representative, as well as academic developers with key executive and
management roles in faculties and centrally, and others with expertise in strategy devel-
opment, research (including the authors of this paper) and organisational change. The
group was constituted with the dual aim of both having expertise and influence in terms
of strategy development, and also, through the inclusion of a student representative,
showing its willingness to attend to the ‘student voice’. The group was responsible to
the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Academic Development.
An instance of shifting orientations occurred at this early stage when the ‘research-
ers’ presented the case, to key strategic members, for using multiple sources of data
and consulting widely over a time frame of more than a year. In the meeting these ideas
appeared to have considerable appeal and the discussion revolved around the advan-
tages. It became apparent, however, that after the presentation (when the researchers
had left) different considerations based on other orientations came to the fore: namely
the ‘entrepreneurial’ (Land 2004, 42), driven by the need to respond to the external
environment; the ‘managerial’ (Land 2004, 15), recognising the need for a strong stra-
tegic steer; and the ‘political-strategic’ (Land 2004, 22), based on a recognition of the
importance of influence and power and the micro-politics of the context, in this
instance particularly the pressures for faculties to achieve ‘efficiencies’. So while the
worth of the ‘researcher’ and ‘interpretive-hermeneutic’ orientations were not directly
challenged, and indeed continued to be espoused, a dramatic reduction to nearer six
months became the dominant time frame (although this itself was never static). Adam
(1995) has argued for an understanding of time based on the co-existence and inter-
mingling of different dimensions of time as co-present: time as linear divisible clock
time, temporality as our being in time, timing as in ‘when’ time and tempo the intensity
of time. In our data we noted a significant shift. Tempo, timing and clock time began
to be the dominant considerations, whereas the temporality implied by the hermeneutic
approach was sidelined.
 Research Papers in Education 123

Moreover at this, and at other critical points, spatiality became an issue. Public
decisions appeared to have been agreed (i.e. in the space of the meeting) only to be
changed again by the ‘principals’ and ‘authors’ who, by virtue of their managerial and
leadership roles (in the University and Faculty), could exercise the power to make
decisions without recourse to the group. All these dimensions came into play in the
exercise of body language, unease and in reversed decisions, as the work of the group
unfolded. The group could be animated and apparently driven by the imperative of
ethos and pathos, as described in the desires of the interviewees, but then also brought
up short by the situational demands of managerial role and the real and perceived
externalities which were apparent from our scrutiny of other learning and teaching
strategy documents. These tensions were dramatised at a ‘writing’ two-day event
when a form of words based on work emanating from discussions recorded on flip
charts produced a statement of ethos couched in a language designed to capture what
was ‘special’ about the institutional context drawing on the words used by staff in the
focus group and interview situations. However, towards the end of the meeting, after
the euphoria, it was clear that there was anxiety and a desire to take a ‘reality check’
and not to depart from the dominant learning and teaching strategy genre. This
process became apparent in subsequent e-mail exchanges where it had been agreed to
comment on the collective ‘draft’. This was punctuated by a key ‘principal’ authoring
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a different version, which in fact became the basis of the final version and confirmed
that person’s role as ‘author’ (along with his line manager), although never as sole
‘principal’ as this role also resided with the ‘University’ (through its committees).
At the subsequent meetings, managerial, entrepreneurial and political-strategic
orientations predominated. None explicitly rejected researcher and hermeneutic orien-
tations, but the amount of time devoted to interpreting or listening to research findings
and subsequent feedback from consultations on the draft fell dramatically. In the final
stages, the drafting group in effect ceased to function as decisions were increasingly
restricted to members with executive functions and meetings of the drafting group
were cancelled. At this point other members of the group were excluded from the
space of decision-making, and from having any influence on the process. A general
lack of interest in educational research as potentially illuminating management prac-
tice has been noted as a more general tendency by Deem (2006). She describes the
reluctance of UK manager-academics to engage with educational research. Our
marginalised position in the ‘field’ (Bourdieu 1990) might be considered, therefore, to
be part of an overall valuing of the social and cultural capital deployed, which
currently does not include research into higher education.

Genre and positioning

As noted previously, early in its deliberations the group decided to look at other insti-
tutional learning and teaching strategy documents. One of our first pieces of analysis
was, therefore, of the genre of institutional learning, teaching and assessment strategies.
This analysis set the scene for some of the dilemmas the group faced and the tensions
between desiring and the constraints of the genre.
Given the HEFCE requirement that higher education institutions have a learning
and teaching strategy in order to draw Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund monies,
those within higher education would recognise these strategies as having a clear,
communicative purpose and as constituting a specific genre. A cursory look at strategy
documents shows a large degree of similarity in strategies from across the UK in terms
 124 S. Clegg and K. Smith

of their format; a common layout includes: an introduction, the presentation of the

strategy aims and an appendix which houses an action plan. There is also considerable
overlap in terms of content with the themes of teaching and learning resources, diver-
sity, development, employability, research, support and innovation being common. As
Atkinson and Coffey (2004, 61) note, such documents create ‘a kind of predictability
and uniformity out of all the great variety of events and social arrangements’.
Moreover, we found that most of the strategies were written from the perspective
of the ‘university’:

The University of [name] aims to equip its graduates with the knowledge and skills that
will equip them to make a valued contribution to society. (Strategy 5)

The University has continued to develop its human resources policies. (Strategy 3)

Some use the ‘strategy’ itself as the subject, thus the instigator of actions:

The Strategy responds to a number of key drivers, both internal and external, that influ-
ence teaching and learning. (Strategy 10)

This strategy stresses the virtue of a varied learning, teaching and assessment diet that
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allows students to develop …. (Strategy 1)

This approach has the effect of depersonalising the strategies, rendering them
rather dry and impersonal.
This impersonal style is further highlighted through the use of the passive voice:

Curriculum design, therefore, is informed by research. (Strategy 1)

Its targets will be submitted to and reviewed by ARDC [their Academic Committee].
(Strategy 4)

Most of the passives, however, do not have a passive agent:

A particular emphasis will be placed on support for learning during the early stages of
the student life cycle. (Strategy 2)

E-learning, in its various forms, is understood as an essential element of a modern higher

education experience. (Strategy 1)

Agentless passives are often used when the agent is ‘irrelevant or unknown’; they
are common in scientific writing as work can be ‘described impersonally without indi-
cating who did it’ (Palmer 1987, 79). An absence of an author can also suggest the
existence of a reality external to individuals, observers, interpreters or writers (Atkin-
son and Coffey 2004, 71–2). Depersonalisation can also be seen through the use of
imperative clauses and noun phrases. These structures do not contain subjects and
reflect the target/output-driven style of many of the strategies, as demonstrated ahead:

To achieve the highest standards in teaching, learning, assessment and course delivery
by: Fuller utilisation of Communications and Information Technology. (Strategy 7)

In our data we found cases when the documents did adopt a more personal tone.
One of the ways a small number did this was through the first person pronoun ‘we’
 Research Papers in Education 125

and its determiner ‘our’ which was used to encourage a more inclusive feel that the
document belonged to the people in the university:

At [name] University we recognise the importance in supporting students in their transi-

tion to Higher Education and the value of continued and relevant support throughout the
student life-cycle. (Strategy 1)

The pronoun ‘we’, however, is tricky. It can be used both inclusively and exclu-
sively. Sometimes, it seems, the ‘we’ is being used more exclusively, referring to the
person or group who wrote the document:

We already have a well-established track record for monitoring and evaluating the process
of our LTA strategy. This has been formative and summative and has involved both in-
house and external evaluation. We intend to continue this process within the new LTA
strategy. (Strategy 2)

The second ‘we’, arguably, relates to the people who took part in the monitoring
and evaluation of the document – rather than the whole range of staff who work in the
university. A more striking example comes in the following:
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We choose to adopt the definition identified by the LTSN Generic Centre [the Learn-
ing and Teaching Subject Centre is a national network] where employability is seen to
be …. (Strategy 1)

Academic staff might well have chosen to adopt a different version of the
employability definition, but that choice has been taken away from them by an
external group. Overall then strategy documents present staff as recipients of policy,
positioned as actors implementing policy but not as full agents identified with its
voicing. Fanghanel (2007) similarly identifies policy documents as ‘agentless regu-
latory text(s)’ in her analysis of a new curricular framework document. Our analysis
of learning and teaching strategies was to prove problematic in the development
process. The analysis showed that there is a dominant learning and teaching strat-
egy, which is impersonal, centrally driven and formulaic – a genre that the sector
expects. Staff in our study, however, desired something different: a document that
spoke to them, about them and which inspired them to make changes to their learn-
ing and teaching for the benefit of students – a contradiction, then, of genre and
desiring.

Desiring
In stark contrast to the alienating linguistic and rhetorical modes of address found in
our analysis of existing strategy document, our respondents described what they
wanted from a learning and teaching strategy in terms of desire. Across the interviews,
respondents used a rich array of language to describe their hopes in relationship to
learning and teaching and, therefore, what they wanted a strategy to encapsulate. The
metaphor of vision and visionary were commonly used in response to probes about
what a learning and teaching strategy document was for, and more generally in trying
to describe the form. The ways these metaphors were deployed were striking in that
respondents were using the metaphor embedded in speech, not with a capital V as in
Mission or Vision statements:
 126 S. Clegg and K. Smith

more of a vision piece. (Interviewee 1)

a visionary, um aspirational, um challenging document. (Interviewee 2)

building into visions of the future. (Interviewee 6)

There were other rich metaphors indicating that the purpose of such a document
should be to define the ethos of the learning and teaching. One respondent used the
notion of colouring the conversation:

… colour the conversations that people have and help colour the decisions that we make,
more of a vision piece than a guidance piece. (Interviewee 9)

and talked about it ‘permeating’ the conversations and of the principles ‘finding their
way into people’s conversations’. This respondent also used the notion of ‘accent’
describing how the conversations prioritised or flagged some issues as more important
than others. Interviewee 7 described conversations with other people about learning
‘as part of the bubble, it’s part of the fizz and the conversation that goes on there’; this
respondent’s other metaphors were: ‘seeing the inkspot’, ‘on the wave’, ‘in tune’, ‘a
wasp in the room’, ‘the flavour of it’, ‘a difficult game’. Other metaphors across the
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interviews included: ‘guide’, ‘journey’, ‘focus’, ‘blossoming up’, a ‘commons’ (as in

the concept of the Medieval commons), ‘anchor’. These rich metaphors capture some
of the desire for a rhetorical function of pathos in engaging the emotions, and also the
desire for language to capture an ethos establishing a moral authority around the
activities of teaching and learning:

R: I would see that the need for this document to be something which would provide
support for people who do have a proper interest in, in learning and teaching and,
um, not to become a constraint on them.
I: Right.
R: So, so – that’s the first time I’ve said that. (Interviewee 7)

The sense of speaking (thinking aloud) these views for the first time was striking
as it was clear that the question of what strategy is for, addressed to the people who
are its targets and are conjured into being by its rhetorical devises, was one that is
rarely verbalised.
However, if the aforementioned were the attempts to capture and verbalise desire
the descriptions of the reality of the existing documents and its functions also revealed
a darker set of realities (using the metaphor of colouring). Most vividly the strategy
language of student ‘support’ was described as a semantic ‘veil’:
The University will say that and we do that, but on the ground people are saying well we
can’t do that anymore … it’s in a way a pretence, a redefinition of what support is, and
a kind of semantic veil over what happens. (Interviewee 19)

This respondent, describing the language of existing strategy, spoke in terms of its
‘abstractness and generality’ and of the ‘gap’ to the classroom. Interviewee 21
described it as ‘official speak’ the language of HEFCE and QAA (funding and quality
bodies respectively), and elaborated the sense of it being a peculiar form of speech
unlike that which is used by people chatting over coffee and talking about their teaching
– the ‘oh that’s interesting’ mixed in with mundane conversation about last night’s
television:
 Research Papers in Education 127

So, the whole issue about teaching and learning innovative courses and it partly came
out of people sitting over coffee just talking to each other: ‘wouldn’t it be an idea if’, ‘oh,
that’s interesting’, ‘oh, did you see that thing on telly last night?’ … So it’s not as though
it’s a terribly intense thing – what strikes me about it is the teaching, the talk about teach-
ing and learning is common within it. It’s normal. You’re not weird if you talk about it
whereas I suspect these days, you know, some ‘pedagogy’, what’s that nasty word?
(Interviewee 19)

This darker side of language of ‘pedagogy’ as a nasty word, which removes talk
about teaching from the ordinary world of conversation, is also here aligned to the
association of learning and teaching strategy with tick boxes for validation and in
other quality assurance contexts. Indeed when questioned about if and how they used
the existing document, the majority of respondents reported that they only actually
looked at it in order to comply when preparing other documentation. Strategy at the
university level is being used to generate words for strategies at course or module
level, an example of the processes McWilliam (2004) satirises in her depiction of ‘the
degree of intimacy that academics have with the record’ (McWilliam 2004, 159)
rather than with students or their own research. The language of the existing docu-
ments was described variously as ‘motherhood and apple pie’, ‘corporate speak’, ‘too
technical’, ‘vague’, ‘diktat’, (should be) ‘punchier’. In general people wanted a differ-
ent form of language to reflect their desires as described earlier, and in a language and
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format which could engage staff (understood by most interviewees as including

administrative and technical and support staff) and students. This was also reflected
in comments about the form and format; people expressed a desire for something
short, well-produced that could sit on desks rather than the previous rather lengthy
document which was web-based. This desiring is in contrast to our findings from the
analysis learning and teaching strategy texts.
As well as speaking to emotion and ethos there was a very clear sense across the
interviews that they also wanted the learning and teaching strategy document to be
able to speak to those who made decisions, especially in relation to resource consid-
erations which many respondents believed were driving actual decisions. These
tensions and suspicions are captured by Interviewee 4 who was not alone expressing
the view that:

One, one thing that um, we are encouraged to make things, assessment and teaching more
effective and more efficient, um and sometimes I find that quite pressurising. It’s … so
I think we need, we need more direction on, on what sort of efficiencies and what are the
efficiencies for? Are they so that we can do more teaching or are they so that we’ve got
more time to devote to our current, you know, our current level of teaching, and things
like that? So it’s part of me is suspicious of, of that sort of driver. (Interviewee 4)

So respondents also wanted a strategy to act as a defence against these pressures,

because while they accepted the reality of funding, how resources were allocated
against priorities in practice did not seem to be driven by the espoused principals of
good learning and teaching. Other commonly identified tensions were around bureau-
cratic procedures and rigidities. Some respondents also reflected on the priorities
accorded to research and business development opportunities which brought in extra
funding. Faced with these contexts they wanted strategy that could be used as a
defence against arbitrary resource decisions, rules that stifled creativity, and to assert
the importance of (and have access to rewards for) teaching in the face of other
pressures.
 128 S. Clegg and K. Smith

The tension identified previously in both the written texts and from the interviews
and focus groups became part of the data available to the drafting group. These
tensions, however, were not resolvable at the technical-rational level and it became
apparent, as our ethnographic enquiries unfolded, that the contradictions identified
between a document whose rhetorical function was towards pathos and ethos, and
one which simultaneously needed to function as a justificatory document to external
funders within the climate of audit, were present throughout the process. Moreover,
the group charged with the production of the strategy conceptualised themselves as
change agents concerned with the sustainability of the University in a changing
external environment, and at the same time committed to ensuring enhancements
through using the strategy as a lever of change. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the devel-
opment was not linear, and as we have already noted, power shifted away from the
drafting group towards those with managerial power who were simultaneously
involved with business planning.

Concluding reflections: a messy business

We have not attempted a complete narrative nor could there be a definitive narrative;
however, our account and our multiple data reflect the sorts of complexities which we
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noted in our discussion of the literature (Trowler 2002; Trowler, Fanghanel, and
Wareham 2005). Unsurprisingly, the final text represented a compromise in terms of
its attempts to work with pathos and ethos in engaging its academic and other readers,
its attempt to adopt an inclusive authorial voice and not resort to the passive, and its
attempts to lever power in terms of the importance of learning and teaching especially
in relation to reward and recognition for staff. Yet it continues to carry markers of the
learning and teaching strategy genre: it begins with the University mission, it makes
links to other institutional strategy and has recognisable themes. The strategy
document will form a new script for the authoring of the numerous other scripts now
associated with learning and teaching.
Our study confirms the characterisations of the strategy formation process
suggested by the literature in terms of complexity, non-linearity and the micro-politics
of power (Morley 2003). The shifts in orientation we identified were subtle and often
unspoken and power continually moved elsewhere both spatially and actually as deci-
sions were brokered outside the formal meeting in ways which marginalised the less
powerful players. Our analysis suggests that the locus of power is not static and shifts
about, but that it inevitably moves upwards towards the needs and desires of the more
senior institutional strategic players, rather than the staff who will be charged with
acting out the strategy’s aims. The passive voice in many strategy documents and the
positioning of academics and others as subjects of strategy is, therefore, more than a
linguistic quirk which can be simply adjusted through improved rhetorical devices; the
implied ‘principal’ of the institution is always already there. This is not to say that
strategy documents cannot be made more linguistically elegant, and more engaging
and knowing in their address; rather, they actively call into being certain forms of
academic performativity and desiring at the same time as they marginalise others. To
suggest, however, that this operates at the level of calculation would be wrong. The
process itself constantly escaped its authors and animators, other mundane priorities
intrude and the desiring subjects of the authoring process were themselves not coher-
ent, but were rather buffeted by events so that their orientations were not static at the
interpersonal level or in time or place. This suggests that the increased emphasis on
 Research Papers in Education 129

risk management and strategic planning, which have become so important to the
sector and the funding bodies, requires more scholarly attention. Such practices are
indeed ‘changing the subject’ (McWilliam 2004) but in non-linear and unpredictable
ways. Moreover, as Fanghanel (2007) shows, academics are not passive but filter
documents though their own preoccupations. In our study, participants wanted to
inscribe their desires into policy and at the same time used existing documents to try
gain advantage in disputes over resources. Policy documents are, therefore, mobilised
and translated, and their rhetoric can be used as a form of resistance as well as a form
of recognition.
Moreover, the desiring of staff is not simply confined by strategy and policy
discourse it constantly escapes and, as our interviews suggest, is played out through
the complex metaphors in which academic staff represented to themselves how they
wanted teaching and learning to be spoken, and how they wanted the institution as a
metaphor to speak back to them. Other resilient identities and desires are at play in
academic life – including the sense of an agential self and the projection of intellec-
tual readerly and writely selves who continue to derive pleasure in the process of
engagement with students and ideas (Clegg 2008). Rather than any simple rejection
of strategy, or the need for strategic decisions, staff wanted to see their values written
in. They also saw strategy as a text that could be deployed in their own interests when
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confronted by others, most notably in those situations involving what they regarded
as arbitrary cost-cutting. While all the respondents recognised the realities of the need
for economies, they were less sanguine about the impact of such economies when
they appeared to be driven by scripts made up purely by numbers that did not reflect
their own priorities, or were based on ideas which were indistinguishable from those
operating in the strategy documents of any other institution. Strategy documents thus
become part of the micropolitics of institutional life in ways that escape the ‘princi-
pals’ and ‘authors’ (Davison, Boswood, and Martinsons 2004). In this study we have
not been able to explore the actions and implication of the ‘animators’ of strategy, but
on purely theoretical grounds we would adduce that these are likely to share the
messiness of the policy formation process and that they will continually escape the
intentions of their authors. We believe that this is an area that requires more research,
not least because of the importance which is increasingly attached to such documents,
but also because of the shift of academic development activity towards more explicit
change management models. The aim of strategy is to invoke institution-wide
change; we are suggesting that how this remakes, reaffirms and creates pedagogical
and professional identities is complex and open. These processes cannot be simply
read off from the texts themselves but require in-depth investigation involving rich
data from institutional ethnographies.

Notes on contributors
Sue Clegg holds the Chair of Higher Educational Research at Leeds Metropolitan University,
and heads the Centre for Research into Higher Education. She has published widely and her
research spans close-to-practice research, often in collaboration with practitioners, to theoreti-
cal interventions in the debates on agency in feminist theorising, her analyses of information
technologies in learning and teaching and her critique of the nature of ‘evidence-based’ prac-
tice. She has written about the importance of critical distance and work which scrutinises
higher education as well as serving it. Her work includes research into changing policies and
practices in universities and academic identity. Recently she has taken seemingly ‘mundane’
pedagogical practices, such as those involved in personal development planning, and explored
 130 S. Clegg and K. Smith

how these are understood by staff and students and the ways pedagogical practice is reframed
in policy discourse.

Karen Smith is the Learning and Teaching Coordinator in the Educational Development Unit
at Heriot-Watt University. She is programme leader for the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic
Practice taken by all new academic staff and runs introductory teaching courses for laboratory
demonstrators and tutors. Karen’s research interests are around the language of higher education
policy, trans-national education and undergraduate dissertation supervision. She has recently
co-authored a student guide to writing dissertations in the social sciences.

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