The implementation of progress files in higher education: Reflection as ...

Springer 2006

Higher Education (2006) 51: 465–486 DOI 10.1007/s10734-004-7764-8

The implementation of progress files in higher education: Reflection as national policy SUE CLEGG & SALLY BRADLEY Learning and Teaching Institute, Sheffield Hallam University, City Campus, Howard Street, Sheffield S1 1WB, United Kindom (E-mail: [email protected]; s.a.Bradley@ shu.ac.uk) Abstract. Progress files, involving personal development planning (PDP), are becoming a feature of many higher education systems internationally. In the UK they will become mandatory for all undergraduate students from 2005. This presents a major implementation challenge, because while reflection has been a cornerstone of practice in some areas of higher education for a considerable time, its generalisation as national policy changes its discursive location. The paper presents findings from a case study of the implementation of PF in one UK Higher Education Institution (HEI). It reports on how staff in one institution understand PF in the context of national policy, and on how they interpret the challenges they face in facilitating reflection for all students. The paper argues that pedagogical innovations take on a different meaning when applied to the system as a whole. Keywords: higher education, personal development implementation, progress files (PF), reflection.

planning

(PDP),

policy

Introduction Progress files (PF) and personal development planning (PDP) are not new in either higher education or in education more generally (e.g. Kingdom 1997; Slusarchuk 1998; Somervell 1998) and there is an existing national network supporting their development (Centre for Recording Achievement 2003) with considerable experience of their use in the compulsory education sector. Moreover, the development of PDP represents one strand in the broader employability agenda and global shifts, which according to Edwards and Usher (2000), are replacing the dominant identity of the ‘enlightened student’ with that of ‘autonomous/self-directed/flexible lifelong learners’ (p. 55). Barnett (2003) makes a similar point, arguing that we are experiencing ‘a pedagogical displacement in which the weight of the pedagogical challenge is shifted from the presentation of disciplinary culture to an interest in the self-generational capacities of students’ (p. 148). This includes the

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endorsement of increased learner autonomy (DFEE 1997). PDP can thus be conceptualised as one of the technologies through which these changes are being effected (Clegg 2004) and as a mechanism for shifting pedagogy to meet the requirements of a more complex external environment (Jackson and Ward 2004). Moreover, similar patterns are emerging across Europe and in other advanced higher education systems (Hudson et al. 2004). However, the decision to make their provision mandatory in UK higher education represents a significant development in a sector unused to having its practices determined at national level, and where there are deep divisions over the exercise of power by external agencies in the guise of quality (Morley 2003). The UK’s Quality Assurance Agency’s (QAA) policy on the development of PF requires that all undergraduate students are provided with an opportunity to engage in PDP by 2005/2006 (Quality Assurance Agency 2001). The QAA, which is the UK organisation responsible for defining and making explicit standards for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), defines PF as containing: the transcript: a record of individual’s learning and achievement, provided by the institution; an individual’s personal records of learning and achievements, progress reviews and plans that are used to clarify personal goals and can provide a resource from which material is selected to produce personal statements (e.g. CVs etc) for employers, admissions tutors and others; structured and supported processes to develop the capacity of individuals to reflect on their own learning and achievement, and to plan for their own personal educational and career development. The term PDP is used to denote this process (Quality Assurance Agency 2001, p. 2). The QAA expects transcripts to be used from 2002 to 2003 and for PF to be in place for all higher education students by 2005/2006. This represents a major challenge to UK higher education. Although the national initiative has developed out of the broader movement to equip students with the skills and capacities which employers believe that graduates require (Jackson and Ward 2004) the approach is ambitious and goes beyond the simple recording of achievement to the heart of educational practice. Approaches to implementation have varied across the sector. Some institutions are opting for common university wide systems (JISC 2002) while others are building on existing practice and encouraging diversity within an agreed framework; some are integrating

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the transcript elements of the PF into the PDP process; others are encouraging PDP development at curricular level while dealing with the transcript element centrally. There are varied arguments for these approaches. However, there are common issues for any major roll out of innovative pedagogical practice. Implementation inevitably involves large numbers of staff in understanding what is happening and how it might impact on their practice. Moreover, a form of pedagogy calling upon students to develop capacities (however broadly understood) involving reflection represents a major challenge for staff supporting diverse student groups. Researching staff perceptions of these processes is one way of informing practice and can also give us insight into the challenges that the PF initiative poses. In this paper we report on a research study which looked at staff attitudes and existing practice in one institution at an early phase of the implementation. The overall philosophy towards PF in our case study institution has been to build on existing practice and encourage the development of PDP at the course level. While there is a common entitlement for students, and a framework within which the developments are taking place, there is institutional policy level recognition that different disciplinary traditions and professional areas have diverse histories and philosophies. The development of PDP is linked to these differing traditions. Part of our research has involved analysing staff attitudes and experiences and modelling the different approaches that are being developed. These have been reported elsewhere, and we distinguish three idea types in the dominant orientation to PDP: professional, employment and academic which rest on differing pedagogic identities (Clegg and Bradley Forth coming). We found that identities based on introjection and strong boundary maintenance displayed greater tension in relation to PDP than those areas already constructed on projection (Bernstein 2000; Clegg and Bradley Forth coming). The purpose of this paper is rather different. It reports on the shared issues we identified across Schools and Departments. These fall broadly into two areas: the importance of history and language in shaping attitudes towards the PF initiative, and the problem of reflection itself. Neither of these themes should surprise us. There is a substantial literature dealing with issues of organisational change and the impact of policy language on pedagogical development (e.g. Henkel 2000; Moore 2001; Clegg 2003; Morley 2003) and an equally expansive literature from Scho¨n (1983, 1987) onwards detailing the challenges of reflection from both a critical stance (e.g. Ecclestone 1996; Clegg 1999, 2000; Bleakley 2000) and in terms of an elaborated pedagogy (e.g. Moon 1999; Atkinson and

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Claxton 2000). However, there is relatively little empirical research looking at staff responses to nationally mandated pedagogic innovations in higher education. This paper begins with a brief incursion into the relevant literature, however the bulk of the paper concentrates on the experiences of staff on the ground, since the aim of the research was to understand staff perspectives in our case study site. After outlining our methodology, the major part of the paper therefore concentrates on presenting an analysis of our findings. We believe case study data can reveal insights into underlying processes and tensions and, although by their nature singular and incapable of generalisation, are important in pointing up relevant issues. While the institutional context is variable across the sector, we believe there is a pressing need to understand and work with local diversity if national policy is to be understood and implemented in meaningful ways. Reflection, policy, practice and change In the present policy context, reflection cannot be understood simply as an isolated pedagogical activity. Ideas about reflection operate at the level of policy and theory and the emphasis on reflection signals a fundamental shift in the meaning of studentship and the purposes of higher education. The ways in which reflection has become fundamental in higher education has been remarked on by a number of theorists. Barnett for example, describing teaching as an ideology, argues: If the original meaning of ‘student’ lay in one who studied texts, now it lies in one who studies him or herself. From epistemology to ontology: this is the turn that the curriculum in higher education is undergoing.’ (Barnett 2003, p. 148) Edwards and Usher (2000) arguing from within a postmodernist framework have linked these shifts to broader globalising tendencies (Edwards and Usher 2000). Within broader sociological literature, the idea that reflexivity and individualisation are major features of society is ubiquitous (Beck et al. 1994; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). The similarities in these views are striking and suggest that the emphasis on reflection cannot be regarded simply as an isolated pedagogic devise, but rather represents broader societal and policy shifts in understandings of education and the production of the self (Clegg 2004). In higher education, this is marked by a political and policy emphasis on the need to produce employable subjects (Lees 2002; Mason et al. 2003). The


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Higher Education Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE) initiatives in the areas of employability and PF can be understood as part of these broader epistemic and ontological shifts. Some of the issues associated with the implementation of PF, therefore, relate to general debates about the displacement of the university’s more traditional concerns with disciplinary ways of knowing. It would be unsurprising, therefore, if staff did not express some ambivalence about their relationship to these newer forms of knowing, including some anxieties about the relationship of reflection to disciplinary knowledge (texts) in the older sense. Staff responses to pedagogic innovation are often interpreted through the dualism of ‘teachercentred’ or ‘student-centred’ orientations, with arguments for retaining aspects of existing practice being understood as a reluctance to relinquish teacher-centred practices. However, the distinction is more complex when considering reflection, and is not the same as that between ‘constructivist’ and ‘transmission’ models of pedagogical practice. It is perfectly possible to take a constructivist approach to disciplinary knowledge, and indeed recognise the value of reflection within a disciplinary context, while having reservations about the role of reflection in the production of self implied by the employability agenda. It could of course be the case that many of those championing constructivism from an academic development perspective are more at ease with the newer employability agendas, and that a concern with the discipline is associated with a preference for more traditional methods, but this is an empirical matter and not entailed by the argument. Because the term reflection encompasses such a wide variety of practices, changes in context impact on the meaning of reflection for both students and staff. The fact of national policy changes the discursive location of reflection in the curriculum. Responses to national initiatives are therefore not likely to be confined to ideas about the value or otherwise of particular pedagogic devise, rather they connect to broader feelings about the nature and purposes of higher education. According to Barnett (2003), learning itself can be understood as a new ‘ideology’ in counter-distinction to the newly dominant ideology of research. This means that the whole area of pedagogic innovation is highly charged and not reducible to simply being for or against a particular learning stratagem. Moreover, the institutional contexts within which these policies are being introduced are themselves changing. Much of the literature dealing with recent changes in higher education has focused on shifts in internal governance from forms of collegial organisation to more managerialist approaches

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(Clegg and McAuley Forth coming). These changes are associated with shifts to a mass system of education and to more rigorous external monitoring and demands on the sector to demonstrate its procedures for ensuring and improving quality (Morley 2003). Quality, according to Barnett (2003), is a ‘pernicious ideology’, which we can recognise as ‘ideology’ because it takes the form of ‘a discursive compact that brooks no dissent’ (Barnett 2003, p. 98). Ideologies in this sense are projectional, in that they work to ensure the achievement of that which they purport to describe. In this context, national initiatives cannot be understood as neutral as they operate on a compliance model, subject to checks on quality. A national initiative such as that on PF, no matter how sensitively it is implemented on the ground, essentially involves academics in delivering to a national (albeit a relatively open) script. Barnett (2003) argues that the idea of the academic community cannot function as counter ideology to such initiatives as it does not have advocates which can mobilise it as such. This means that while individuals and indeed groups of staff may have reservations them these are likely to remain disorganised in their forms of expression. The policy dynamic described above inevitably interacts with and changes the meaning of pedagogic innovation. Moreover, the experience of PDP at a practice level is complex. There is a comprehensive literature on reflection going back some three decades, which extols the virtues of reflection in the curriculum. Recent work in further education (Bullock and Jamieson 1995) and higher education (Cuthbert 1995, 1998) have reported on the benefits of PDP, and the policy has gained retrospective legitimacy with the publication of the Evidence Based Policy and Practice Centre (EPPI Centre) systematic review of the literature (Gough et al. 2003) which concluded that there was strong evidence for the effectiveness of PDP. However, despite this weight of evidence, there are good pedagogical reasons why academics might nonetheless have reservations about PDP on non-ideological (in the sense understood above) grounds. Practitioner reports highlight some of the difficulties encountered. To take one recent example, Fry et al. (2002), and Pee et al. (2002) in their work with dental therapy students report that undergraduate students disliked the experience, although they recognised its value. Moreover, there is an extensive literature dealing with the limitations of reflection on theoretical grounds. Learning is not accomplished entirely at the level of the cognitively accessible. Tomlinson (1999a,b) for example argues that ‘knowing how’ may be entirely tacit and that


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people may not be able to describe what they are doing. Drawing on results from empirical psychology, Tomlinson suggests that there is some evidence that: ‘verbalisable knowledge may develop through high numbers of practice trials, emerging only after implicitly processed task performance has improved’ (Tomlinson 1999a, p. 410) Tomlinson was involved in looking at teacher learning, and he observed that many teachers claim that they do not reflect. He hypothesised that in getting on and practising their craft, teachers and other professionals may in fact be improving their performance. He therefore extended the range of the subject positions, commonly found in the literature, from the dualism of ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ to generate a fourfold classification. This includes ‘deliberative action capacity’ and ‘explicit representational awareness’ in the explicit register, but also gives us ‘intuitive action capacity’ and ‘implicit representational awareness’ in the unconscious or tacit register. While Tomlinson was dealing with the education of particular professionals, the experience of learners improving but not being able to reflect on their learning is common in many learning situations (Chivers 2003). Claxton (Atkinson and Claxton 2000), for example, expounds the ‘value of not knowing what one is doing’ in some learning contexts. Recognition of the importance of the tacit is also analysed by Eraut (2000) in his writing about professional learning. In his highly sophisticated account of tacit knowledge, in both formal and non-formal settings, Eraut distinguishes between awareness and representation. Knowers may not be aware of what they are doing, but once they become aware can communicate it, however, there is also knowledge which cannot be communicated. He cautions: that the limitations to making tacit knowledge explicit are formidable, and much of the discussion about it in the literature is ill-informed if not naı¨ ve. The probability is that ‘thick’ tacit version will coexist alongside ‘thin’ explicit versions; the thick version will be used in professional practice, the thin version for justification, for explaining. (Eraut 2000, p. 134) If, in addition, we take into account what we know about the difficulties that students experience in mastering academic writing and in particular the difficulties of moving between genre (of which reflective writing is one) then the challenges of reflection, which is at the core of most understanding of PDP and hence PF, become formidable. We should not be surprised, therefore, by the difficulties

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staff face in facilitating reflection, difficulties compounded by the problem that they also may not have a language in which to describe their own tacit knowledge. Case study The data gathered for the case study comprised transcriptions of 32 semi-structured interviews which were undertaken over a nine-week period during the second semester of 2002/2003. Both authors of this paper were involved in the interviewing and compared notes throughout the fieldwork period. Open questions were used in order to try to establish, in as much detail as possible, the background and approach to PDP within Schools and staff perceptions of current practice. The interviews were of an exploratory nature and produced a wealth of rich data. We also looked at course documentation as a way of further probing practice as developed in Schools. We used a snowball method of sampling people to be interviewed, asking our informants for the names of staff most closely involved, starting with Learning and Teaching Coordinators in Schools and key Academic Developers and policy makers, and digging down to course level. In this way, we were able to get a picture across the institution. In some instances, where Schools had distinctive subject divisions, we interviewed more than one member of staff. Interviewing stopped when we felt we had reached saturation and no new data were forthcoming, although as befits our theoretical discussion we were aware that we could only have access to partial descriptions of actual (tacit) practice. The analysis was done by hand and in close consultation, so that interpretations were crosschecked between the authors for coherence and meaning. Each interview was analysed in depth as a whole as well as for common themes. The quotations used in the text are used as examples and to illustrate the points in the text, but our interpretation of what was meant was derived from the context of the interview as a whole, our knowledge from the documentation, and from other interviews conducted in the same School. For ethical reasons we have anonymised the data, referring to individual interviews by number, which means some loss of interpretive context. We have not, for example, generally indicated the sex of the speaker, or the name of the School/discipline except where this was crucial to meaning.


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History and language One of the most important ways in which staff made sense of the demands on them to implement the policy on PF was in relation to past local histories, both in relation to similar pedagogical experiments and also in their general orientations to policy driven change itself. Shared histories and memories shaped attitudes to the present. The factual nature of these memories is not at issue since these are always open to varied interpretation, but their retelling was striking in the context of the interviews. Many interviewees across subject areas spontaneously chose to narrate examples from the past, where similar initiatives had been tried and floundered. Two examples suffice to capture the tone of the comments: Personal portfolios, no, no we avoided that at that point because we noticed that everybody else was rushing down that road and noted and smiled rather smugly when everybody abandoned it two or three years later. Because all the Schools that took on personal portfolios (in the late eighties was it?) and went on to abandon them for various reasons. (Interview 7) We’ve had a very, very bad experience when I first arrived about eight years ago where we threw a lot of money on an external consultant on a very, very similar project which sort of died a death by the following Easter having been sort of not implemented very well in September – and it was the way it was done and that you don’t tell people to do things at [name], or you certainly don’t tell sixty people in one go to do something and tell them they’ll be disciplined if they don’t do it, that’s like a challenge round here, isn’t it? It’s like an invitation to a fight, that. And it was implemented badly, the students didn’t actually understand it, the staff didn’t understand and in terms of staff it was actually causing them more work (Interview 3) The particular histories narrated were complex. In the first instance above, a whole number of arguments surrounded the view that the School had been vindicated in refusing to go down the personal portfolio route in the 1980s. Chief among these appeared to be that of sustaining a meaningful personal tutorial support system, which the School in question had abandoned as ineffective. The School abandoned personal tutor systems, we’ve various resurrections of it and various attempts to try and track people

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more securely particularly in the first year and the first semester in the first year so last year [named route]. . . tried a version of the personal tutor scheme, to see if it made a difference and it didn’t so we abandoned it (Interview 7) Effective in the context of the interview seemed to have been interpreted in terms of improved student performance and retention. The approach to the demands to develop some systematic approach to PF, therefore, seemed to be framed by the sense of trying things and seeing them fail, or observing others who ‘abandoned’ their efforts. These sorts of stories are in a sense inevitable. Much of what constitutes PDP (however named) has been common pedagogical practice, and every School already had elements in place or had past some experience of similar experiments. Attitudes to the present are inevitably mediated through the interpretation of these (past) events. In many instances, these initiatives had been associated with particular groups of people. In one interview PDP was described as being ‘a little bit discredited amongst staff allied to – in people’s minds – it was allied to what they say was the PPD clique’ (Interview 25). This group of staff were seen as being interested in ‘education’ in counter-distinction to mainstream disciplinary content and research effort. These histories involved value judgements about the worth of certain activities, and being perceived to be too keen on educational innovation in this context was not viewed in a positive light. The challenge appeared, therefore, to involve moving from an identifiable small group of enthusiasts to the broader staff group. In both the examples above (from humanities and engineering, respectively), there were real anxieties, based on past experience, of rolling out what had been relatively local pockets of experimentation to include everyone, and as noted some scepticism about the evidence in relation to ‘effectiveness’. The second example above about the negative response to be being told what to do suggests that there is also a general issue of ‘compliance’ with other people’s agendas. Histories were not only about local initiatives, they extended to the whole idea of national policy: But I’m saying they haven’t been particularly positive. It’s a fairly benign response if you like, it’s a sort of shrug of the shoulders ‘yes we’ve got to do it; this seems a sensible way to do it, let’s get on with it’. I think it – I mean I think people have seen that this is something that is being driven centrally, it’s not a School initiative, it’s not even a University issue initiative, it’s a government initiative. And I think therefore people are possibly fairly sceptical about it to be honest.


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(Interview 9) The quote captures frustration evident across the data that even quite sensible pedagogic initiatives, once they became associated in people’s minds with a compliance model, generated resentment. Across the data, no one expressed a strongly antagonistic view to the ideas of reflection, review, planning as such, although the language and interpreted purpose of the activities varied quite widely. Staff did however express the view that once these practices migrated into being a ‘policy’, which they would be required to demonstrate, this in and of itself created tensions. One response was a sort of irritated frustration about being asked to demonstrate something that is so integral to practice that it was felt almost as an insult. This was not an uncommon reaction, and it is interesting since reluctance to comply is sometimes interpreted as a lack of pedagogical sophistication, or a rejection of the underlying constructivist philosophy in favour of a stereotypical ‘transmission’ model. However, there was no evidence for this in our data. Even in the case quoted above (Interview 7) where there was considerable ‘smugness’ about not going down the PDP route in fact described practice on the ground that involved multiple examples of reflective and portfolio type activities. The scepticism appears to relate to pulling things out of context and being required to demonstrate them at an institutional level. In part, this reaction is a response to the ways in which activities are named and by association appear to be other than what is valued by practitioners. The language of ‘file’ in this respect was particularly discredited: The National Record of Achievements and it was a National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) approach to life so …but it’s basically saying the National Record of Achievement [a national initiative in English schools] and the pizza boxes and that approach was instigated then and it fell on its knees and here we are staff talking about [name of course] eight years ago, we tried to have a system, it didn’t work, every student was supposed to be carrying this folder around, the equivalent – a green folder or file, it was the equivalent of the pizza box and it didn’t work, it fell on its knees. (Interview 12) The idea of a file as a box, a thing not a process, was not only associated in people’s minds with NVQs and a particular notion of education as a commodity, it was also strongly associated across the interviews with the National Records of Achievement. The Record of

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Achievement was a file that young people leaving school could take to employers or into further education as evidence. However, across the interviews, there was a widespread perception that this was discredited and that neither educationalists, nor employers, took any notice of it. Moreover, there was evidence of a substantive educational argument against learning as a ‘thing’ and in favour of a process model. This is not necessarily incompatible with the QAA description of PF, which does describe the process of PDP, nonetheless the language PF jarred with many of our respondents. I think what the problem is the name, I think it’s a bit of a misnomer, Progress Files, isn’t it? Because it’s talking about a process principally. (Interview 20) I suppose in terms of the Progress File – the terminology is problematic because people and QAA are responsible I think to some extent, they keep changing the terms but if we’re talking about Progress Files then there’s Personal Development Planning and it seems to me that there are different functions within the PDP – whatever we decide to call it – and one is I suppose it’s about learning development and the other is about presentation of achievement and I think that both things are there but I think the danger is that it simply becomes just simply presentation. (Interview 13) The interviewee above described (13) the ‘file’ as involving ‘a very behaviouristic model’ and ‘the tick box syndrome’. The use of such language is, therefore, perceived being more than just a trivial matter; it conflicts with deeply held feelings about the value of particular educational approaches. From our analysis of the data we, therefore, detected a deep ambivalence about the idea of PF as a national policy. Respondents were thoughtful in their analysis of the educational value of particular practices and as we have shown in our previous papers were highly sensitive to professional and disciplinary nuances. Even in the context where the approach to PF has been to allow diversity, however, there is considerable suspicion of what happens to a practice once it becomes part of a national agenda. This is in part because it involves the renaming of a particular pedagogical practice, but also because there is a sense that identifying PDP as a separate identifiable part of the student experience alters its meaning. So while there is no institutional pressure to have PF as a stand-alone element with a ‘file’ (electronic or otherwise)


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as a ‘thing’, staff unease remained. All the people we talked to could see pedagogic advantages in reflection, but positioned themselves and their colleagues as being uneasy about having to comply. To some extent, this can be interpreted as the inevitable response from professionals who have long regarded the curriculum as under their own control. However, this unease co-existed with deep anxieties about what reflection might become if all students in all circumstances were assumed to be involved.

The challenges of reflection Many of our respondents expressed worries that even where learning had clearly taken place students did not, or could not, express it for themselves. One tutor describing learning in the work placement context explores this dilemma: ‘Ok, don’t just have a look these logs, look at what they’ve done, you know, not ‘have you kept the log up to date’ ‘yes’ ‘ok then’, have a look at it and say ‘what have you learned’ and maybe look at other things that you just give the reminder. Otherwise it can be almost out of sight out of mind because they get one visit in one year. And that’s their lot. You know so in terms of that, when you’re working – a lot of ours are fifty, sixty hours a week you know – when they go out there, and they see the work as being much more important than anything they’re being given back at [university]. And some of them realise that they’ve got to go through the motions because it does count towards their final degree. They’ve learned a lot they’re probably getting jobs out of it, and the rest of it, and they’re more worried about that than they are about any reflective log or anything that they think they may have learned in that time. But the learning is immense, you see it immediately. (Interview 3) This tutor was convinced of the learning; it was immediately recognisable to him, but he along with other tutors gave examples of logs being completed after the event, of being prosaic lists of things they have done, going through the motions or hoops but with very little indication that the students themselves find the form of expression especially insightful or useful. A common theme across the interviews was with the difficulties of student engagement:

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I’ve done quite some sort of informal asking of students how they feel. I did address this in the Courses Committee as well and they said they didn’t want it at levels two and three. They did not want to engage in this process, they thought it was a waste of time. (Interview 18) This member of staff could see advantages for those students who did choose to engage, but had found extreme difficulty in motivating students. At the moment, PDP activities are voluntary in the second and third year of the course and the tutor sees clear advantages in this sort of voluntary engagement: We don’t have any formal [i.e. compulsory] training in this and some students may well find that invasive, whereas if they come and proffer this information or come and ask for a request then it’s not invasive, it’s their request for that information. I think – I’m a great believer in facilitating, I’m not so – I’m a great believer in the carrot (Interview 18) Across the interviews, there was a considerable sensitivity to context and a feeling that once PDP becomes a formal (and possibly assessed) part of the curriculum reflection changes its meaning. The use of ‘invasive’ is interesting, since it suggests that not only has a person the right not to share their reflection should they so choose, but that to asked to do so changes the nature of the relationship. In fact in our case study institution there has been a decision that the student’s file should belong to them, but clearly drawing down data from this source is still seen as an issue for some tutors and is a factor in shaping assessment decisions. Tutors on other courses expressed similar worries about making students provide evidence that they have engaged in reflection and a view that this might compromise the honesty of what is being expressed. In particular, tutors felt it was difficult for students to acknowledge difficulties openly with their lecturers, and that the nature of the pedagogic relationship may inhibit students sharing problems. For some staff this recognition of the difficulties of reflection is based on notions of the ways reflection is viewed culturally: Reflection is, well it’s not a doing thing, it’s something that is a luxury – well maybe a luxury – they don’t see the purpose no matter how much you explain – its very difficult the culture of well and do my assignments and get my marks. But looking back is not something is not something that they are actually used to doing and they don’t feel that there is an need to do that (Interview 6)


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This staff member, who was not native born English and for whom English was not her mother tongue, felt that Englishness itself was an issue and an associated pragmatic rather than reflective orientation to life – hence the idea of ‘a luxury’. In other instances, it was disciplinary cultures that were felt to be inimical to reflection So we’re –we’re taxing our brains as to what a progress file should really look like given that most Engineering students come to the university to do Engineering, they don’t come to the university to reflect on whether they can write, communicate, they’re good at group work, can drive a computer, know the university assessment regulations, know what it takes to become a Chartered Engineer. They are all – they see very low priority – they’re here to study and to have a good time and if it isn’t study or having a good time then they’re not really interested in it. So you know they want a degree in Engineering, they don’t want a degree in self-reflection and I think that is the hurdle we’ve got to overcome. (Interview 25) These cultural issues are seen as very real problems when seeking to engage students. The corollary is that when students do engage they are described as doing so in a very perfunctory manner. There are examples of students obviously completing the task retrospectively by filling in paper work after the event just before a tutorial, of simply describing what they have done with very little analysis. Some tutors felt that group dynamics and the maturity of participants can outweigh these problems. One interviewee, having described some of the typical problems above, described a counter example of where reflection was seen as unproblematic and where weaknesses could be shared: One group that I’ve just spoken to who are all mature students said sort of ‘hey it doesn’t matter, we’d be quite happy to share our reflection with the group because we all know each other very well and there would be nothing that we didn’t already know that that person was struggling with’. Because they’re a very bonded group and there are forty of them but they’re all mature students (Interview 31) The general view of staff in our interviews appears to be that reflection is a higher-level meta-cognitive skill, which many (particularly younger) students find difficult to accomplish. The notion that reflection is difficult to accomplish also extended to recognition that coaching and supporting reflection is also skilled, and that some staff are better at facilitating the process than others. This is

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perceived as creating real problems in some areas with large numbers of students to support: There are only some people who are really suitable for meeting a student for this purpose, but then you don’t want to fill their work plan with these kind of – I mean there’s a limit how much you can cope with. So that’s a problem. (Interview 17) The costs to individual staff of becoming over-identified with this sort of work have been already noted in relation to the prestige accorded disciplinary teaching and research, but it also seems that staff are aware that there are particular personal professional skills in facilitating this form of learning that not all staff possess. Some staff referred directly to their own sense of a lack of expertise, for example, one member of staff involved in coaching students in producing a CV commented that: But again I did it with a colleague and we did it as best as we could – we weren’t professionals at it and students again, most of them didn’t really take it too seriously (Interview 16) Feeling trapped into a situation where both staff and students accord the material little credibility appeared extremely discomforting. In other areas it is not just simply a matter of perceived skill set, but also staff who do not feel that supporting PDP type activity is a sensible use of their other skills, or that they had a real understanding of what is involved: The difficulty we have is a lot of staff feel their job is technical, they’re technical specialists and they don’t believe that their time is being usefully employed, developing what they believe are personal skills and assumes they’re skills that any person in Higher Education should already have. So there is a lack of ownership and we still have staff who really don’t enjoy it and would do anything to not be doing it so if there’s an excuse to rearrange or cancel or not be there they will find it. (Interview 25) Supporting PDP is thus tied up with academic identity and the credibility of different types of activity, and associated with avoidance. This is not surprising, the epistemological assumptions underpinning the idea of the ‘technical’ in some science and engineering areas valorises the external and objective nature of the materials being dealt with, rather than the personal. Professional understandings of the personal are likely to be variable across disciplinary divides as well as between different lecturers. However, the reservation about worth and expertise in


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relation to technical subject based skills were also found some areas of the humanities. There can be no simple reading off from assumed epistemology, therefore, especially in a context where many courses have a distinctive feel which is made up in part by the discipline, but also by the perceptions among staff of the sorts of students they recruit and of their aims and aspirations. Staff in describing the issues to us used multiple descriptors not simply disciplinary one. There was also evidence that some staff felt tentative about the nature of PDP and its overall value: I’ll be quite frank with you, I am not absolutely clear about the value of this approach for a number of reasons really, I’m not sure that well a – staff support tutors on this have a real sense of the meaning of personal development plans or progress plans or whatever the label we’re using. I’m not sure that there’s any sense of coherence about the meaning of these plans for the long-term development of the student’s career in the three years. (Interview 29) Some of these broader anxieties about competence, and not knowing what the range of language used to describe the activities, could clearly be seen to undermine the legitimacy of PDP in the eyes of some tutors. There was also a strong temporal dimension to many of these comments, with concerns about whether students could really see the benefits of planning on the time scale of an undergraduate career. It appears, therefore, as though many of the problems that staff identify as being difficult for their students are also readily identifiable among themselves and their colleagues. There are of course exceptions in areas such as health and education where reflection is the dominant professional paradigm and, therefore, staff are seeped in the practice to such an extent that they cannot understand why other colleagues in higher education might find issues to do with reflection difficult: I mean, having sort of grown up in health and social care I find it difficult to understand the problems people have got with this. You know, the questions about reflection and learning and all that I do find difficult to see well why is it a problem (Interview 22) This view highlights the ways in which supporting reflection is something that exists within distinctive pedagogic and professional traditions, and that for those where this has not been the dominant paradigm reflection presents a major challenge. Our data suggest that disciplinary identities mediate responses, and that even within an institutional context where diversity of approach has been embraced

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some staff find it difficult to go beyond what may have been tailored small scale initiatives to envisaging provision for all their students. Equally for areas where reflection and PDP is common place there appears to be little appreciation of the problems others might encounter. The common concern, therefore, of the difficulties of reflection for students, was shifted through the professional and disciplinary cultures, which in turn supported or marginalised the legitimacy of the skills involved.

Concluding thoughts The dominant themes we have identified from our data confirm many of the findings from previous studies of reflection and the difficulties of supporting its development. On theoretical grounds, we would wish to argue that these challenges are real and not just reducible to the particularities of individual staff attitudes. Indeed, what came through from our data was the extent of engagement on the part of staff in trying to think through problems positively. There are however major challenges. Scaling up local initiatives, which have involved staff and students who for a variety of reasons recognise the pedagogical and professional benefits of reflection, across the whole system involves many people who feel uneasy with reflection as a particular discursive form. There is evidence in our data that some staff feel that they do not have the skills to support reflection and that they also question its usefulness among groups of students who are not predisposed to engage. This relates to theoretical questions concerning the nature of tacit knowledge and whether and how it can be articulated, but also touches on broader shifts in understanding of the purposes of higher education. The understandings of all those we interviewed were intimately bound up with discipline and professionally specific orientations. These straddled obvious disciplinary divides, and concern with the technical demands of subject were as evident in science, and some areas of engineering, as they were in the humanities. Overall, where reflection did not appear to flow naturally from context it was understood as being problematic for both staff and students. Moreover, it was clear that separating out ‘reflection’ was seen as difficult, even where staff had good descriptors for the sorts of practice involved in reflection there was a reluctance to label it outside disciplinary boundaries. The issue of labelling in this sense is not trivial. Naming something as a separate activity can change its nature. The overwhelming negative response to


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the language of PF with the seeming focus on product also acted to deter staff who felt that they have their own sophisticated pedagogical understandings of process. We have analysed different disciplinary responses in another paper, and it is clear that the practical resolution to the common problems and issues staff have identified will be varied. However, we would suggest that there is a danger, as described in our interviews, but also theoretically warranted that reflection will become a simulacrum, involving a thin and not very interesting form of descriptive writing, which neither staff nor students really value. It was clear that many staff in our study had direct experience of where students had engaged only at the most superficial level and were felt to have had neither the motivation nor the skills to produce sophisticated forms of analysis. Such claims are not surprising, Ecclestone (1996) warned that reflection was becoming a mantra some time ago and questioned the conditions under which it was being produced. It is clear that compulsion alters the nature of the relationship for students as well as staff and the generalised expectation to demonstrate reflective capabilities may produce forms of discourse valued by neither staff nor student. It is incumbent on us as educators to articulate a theory of the real benefits that can come with reflection. Staff in areas where there is a tradition of using of reflection as part of professional practice felt confident and able to do so. Other staff, however, where there is no such tradition and where the dominant epistemological assumptions may run counter to such an idea, feel that they and their colleagues may struggle. This is not just a question of individual competence, as we have seen current theory indicates the very real complexity of reflection and the limitations of what can be represented in text. The danger of a universalistic policy is that an understanding of these complexities may be lost. The associated problem is that this can then become translated into a ‘blaming’ of staff and students who fail to achieve the appropriate of performance, rather in the ways that Tomlinson (1999a, b) describes in relation to his reflection averse, but competent and improving teachers. A more rigorous approach is to enquire, as he does, into the limits of our theoretical understanding of these processes, rather than resort to exhortation. The timescales of reflection may be much longer and slower, and indeed more intuitive and in the implicit register than the timescales of undergraduate, or indeed continuing, formal, post-graduate and postexperience, education. It would of course be possible to dismiss the concerns with compliance and language that emerge from our data as not really getting to the nub of the matter. As Barnett (2003) suggests, we found no clearly

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articulated counter community of ideas in our data, which expressed a coherent alternative view to the policy. Rather the dominant tone in the interviews was worried and expressive of varying degrees of frustration. To trivialise these expressions, however, would be to miss the significance of the PF as a national policy and ways reflection can function as ideology. To deny the value reflection in some circumstances, or argue that it may not be always possible, is to risk being told that one is doing it anyway without one realising it, or that one will get there in the end. The mark of ideology is that its proponents are so certain of their terrain that there can literally be no alternative, alternative realities are simply denied. Moreover, the ways initiatives become embedded within quality systems are by no means neutral. The example of the ways in which the language of learning outcomes have come to be represented in course documentation and as a measure of quality provide a parallel case of where a reasoned pedagogical initiative has been seen to have constrained pedagogic creativity (Hussey and Smith 2002, 2003). Barnett (2003) has argued that the teaching and learning agenda more generally, is being produced as an ideology in counter-distinction to research. The danger is that reflection and PDP are also being produced in this way. There are good reasons for valuing reflection as part of the pedagogic process and these were recognised by our respondents. However, the ambivalence of staff towards PF as national policy is a recognisably rational response, even among those committed to its benefits of reflection. The advent of teaching and learning interventions at a system-wide strategic level is relatively new, and unexpected and unintended consequences would seem likely to flow from these interventions. It is only by continuing to research them as they are implemented that we are likely to be able to appreciate their true impact, and make a broader assessment of whether in Barnett’s (2003) terms they represent virtuous or pernicious ideologies. References Atkinson, T. and Claxton, G. (2000). The Intuitive Practitioner on the Value of not Always Knowing What One is Doing. Buckingham: Open University Press. Barnett, R. (2003). Beyond All Reason: Living with Ideology in the University. Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002). Individualization. London: Sage. Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994). Reflexive Modernization; Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Oxford: Polity.


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