Full Description
The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)'s aims, implementation and effect on the English higher education sector remains a controversial and often contested subject. This text offers a stimulating and wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussion of the implications of the TEF on the UK's fast-moving policy environment, and increasingly neoliberal higher education sector.
Questioning the basic premise of the TEF, the authors tease out how students and staff are affected in different and often unfair ways by its implementation. Whilst acknowledging that the TEF has focused management attention on ways in which a diverse student population is, or is not, supported in their learning, this book highlights how it remains problematically silent on other kinds of diversity in the system such as specialised courses, diverse teaching styles, and varying institution sizes.
Offering readers ways of rethinking and resisting 'teaching excellence', this book provides a timely examination of how, in various ways, the TEF, treated as an exclusionary quality assurance system, is likely to reinforce extant structural inequalities and competitive hierarchies in the sector.
Contents
Preface: Institutional polishing; Kate Carruthers Thomas and Amanda French
Chapter 1. Elusive and elastic, and 'incorrigibly plural': definitions and conceptualisations of teaching excellence John Sanders, Joanne Moore, and Anna Mountford-Zimdars
Chapter 2. Operationalising teaching excellence in higher education: from 'sheep-dipping' to 'virtuous practice';John Sanders, Joanne Moore, and Anna Mountford-Zimdars
Chapter 3.'Wishing Won't Make It So': Strategic ambiguity, Policy Ad hoc'ery, Deliverology and the Wickidity of TEF's Equality and Diversity Aspirations'; J. Crockford
Chapter 4. Rapport and Relationships: The Student Perspective on Teaching Excellence; Jenny Lawrence, Leanne Hunt, Hollie Shaw and Donovan Synmioe
Chapter 5.'It's not what you do, or how well you do it, but who you are': Can student evaluations ever deliver a fair assessment on teaching excellence in higher education? Amanda French
Chapter 6 Queering the TEF; Brendan Bartram
Chapter 7. Diversity Deficits: Resisting the TEF; Andrew Brogan
Postscript; Amanda French and Kate Carruthers Thomas
