Prizes, pedagogic research and teaching professors: lowering the status of teaching and learning through bifurcation

Abstract

Considerable resources and intellectual attention have focused on seeking to raise the status of teaching in higher education over the last two decades. Initiatives at an institutional level have included the funding of pedagogic research, teaching awards and the creation of teaching professorships. In a broader context, the scholarship of teaching and learning movement has campaigned for a reconfigured and more inclusive understanding of scholarship. However, despite the good intentions of these initiatives, the effect been to lower still further the status of teaching, bifurcating universities between ‘teaching’ and ‘research’. It is argued that efforts should instead be directed at integrating academic practice as a more effective way of raising the status of teaching.