The Ideologies that Sustain the Teaching-Research Hierarchy in Higher Education
In this session, Jenny Taylorson shares insights from her recent research exploring the often-unspoken assumptions that shape how teaching and research are valued within higher education.
Drawing on a combination of lived experience and empirical research, the talk examines the idea of a teaching-research hierarchy – the tendency for research to be positioned as more prestigious than teaching in terms of status, recognition, and career progression. The session focuses, in particular, on the underlying ideologies that sustain this hierarchy. These include beliefs about what it means to be an academic, such as the notion of the “life of the mind” and the privileging of disciplinary expertise and knowledge production. Jenny also explores how these ideas give rise to broader knowledge hierarchies, in which understandings of teaching are filtered through the lens of disciplinary knowledge and communities, and how teaching can become associated with forms of labour that have historically been undervalued. Through illustrative examples and excerpts from interviews with 44 academics across the UK HE sector, the session highlights how these ideologies shape academic identities, influence career pathways, and affect openness to teaching development and support.
Ultimately, this talk encourages listeners to critically examine how institutional cultures and assumptions shape not only what we do as academics, but who we are able to be within higher education.