Teaching, in Spite of Excellence: Recovering a Practice of Teaching-Led Research

Although, as a result of the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework, the principle of teaching excellence is receiving renewed attention in English higher education, the idea has been left largely undefined. The cynic might argue, in agreement with Bill Readings, that this lack of a precise definition is deliberate, since teaching excellence is not designed to observe teaching but to permit an integrated system of accounting. This article, however, develops a different line of criticism. Following Readings's characterization of "excellence" as symptomatic of the "Americanization" of higher education, it traces the principle of teaching excellence in English educational discourse back to the influence of debates, led by Ernest Boyer in the US, concerning the teaching-research nexus. Contextualizing these debates in relation to ideas about the learning society influenced by theories of human capital and investment in national productivity, it takes issue with descriptions of recent policy that overemphasize the corporate structure of the university and its vision of the student as consumer at the expense of recognizing the continuation of the nation-state organization of the student as producer. Reconnecting this broader framework back to the teaching-research nexus, the article examines how this intersects with the dominant agenda of research-led teaching excellence, centred on the idea of the productivity of research, and outlines an alternative notion of teaching-led research, developed out of the work of Boyer and Walter Benjamin, within which teaching might continue, in spite of excellence.