Rs and gripes? Head for the US

Alan Jenkins suggests we have much to learn from the US's intellectual excitement over teaching.

The three "Rs" are top of the teaching agenda again, but this time they stand for: ranking, rating and regulation. They are based on the assumption that stronger central control can improve teaching, be it through the Quality Assurance Agency rating courses or requiring degree standards to be benchmarked against national standards.

How does this compare with the United States? The two systems face similar dilemmas over funding and providing mass higher education, but there are notable differences in organisation and culture. Strategies for control, funding and improvement are more diverse and devolved in the US than in the United Kingdom.

The US has in effect a set of systems: one that recognises the differences between research-focused universities and those that are primarily undergraduate teaching institutions. The forces that have shaped the US system are growing in the UK. These include the move to concentrate government and private-sponsored research into a few institutions.

This has led to a devaluing of undergraduate teaching and the separation of teaching and research. Since the end of the cold war, US universities - particularly the research elite - have experienced a decline in federal-sponsored research. This has led to universities raising tuition fees. The knock-on effect has been that state legislatures have cut their university funding for research because of student and parent anger that teaching costs more but has been neglected at its expense.

Central to US moves to focus on teaching are the ideas of the late Ernest Boyer and his colleagues in the private Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990) argued that the emphasis on original research and the "publish and get grants" cultures has devalued teaching and "on many campuses, a culture that restricts creativity rather than sustains it".

His way forward was not a set of prescriptions but to draw on the US cultural tradition of civic engagement and faculty love of teaching, arguing that teaching should be seen as a scholarly, intellectual and public activity.

Although he emphasised that the importance of teaching be reflected in the university reward and promotion structures, he and his colleagues set out no templates. Instead, Boyer emphasised that it was for individual disciplines and institutions to clarify how they wished to implement these ideas. Institutions should be enabled to "pursue their distinctive missions", he said.

The danger is that such words are empty rhetoric (in the UK we hear similar phrases from the QAA and the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals). However, visits to US campuses and the annual American Association for Higher Education's "Faculty Roles and Rewards Conference", convinced me that there is a lot to learn from the reform movement that Boyer and his colleagues started.

What is amazing is the intellectual excitement and the culture of engagement with the ideas surrounding the "scholarship of teaching". Individual staff, departments, institutions and disciplines are discussing, disputing, reshaping and implementing these ideas in very different ways and using a variety of funding sources. At the University of Texas at Austin, for example, candidates for promotion have to have evidence of student and peer observation of teaching.

At Madison University Wisconsin there is a chancellor's award for departmental excellence in teaching, and at the University of Wisconsin as a whole there is a teaching fellows' programme for outstanding teachers to complete a scholarly teaching project.

Indiana University funds scholarships for staff with strong records of public service. University leaders see the Carnegie ideas as a basis for constructive debate within universities and with public and private funders. Private donors who were once wooed to fund research programmes are now also supporting teaching initiatives.

Many of these campus initiatives come though from large charitable trusts such as Carnegie itself, Pew and Kellogg, and federal funders such as the Department of Edu-cation and the National Science Foundation.

While such initiatives come from all sectors, they include some of the major research universities. They recognise they have to demonstrate the added value students get from the higher fees for attending a research university. Thus at Rutgers University the focus is on ensuring that undergraduates benefit from courses and projects that are research-based.

It is not that US higher education is a utopia for us to emulate. On many campuses such developments are patchy and wither away when external funding ceases. Others are preoccupied with moving up the research ladder. Yet what we can take from the US are the principles of intellectual engagement, creativity and diversity.

I am confident that the Institute for Learning and Teaching will soon shift its attention from a preoccupation with accreditation to encouraging Carnegie-style debate on scholarship and research in teaching. I am certain that we will soon see similar local and discipline-based initiatives coming out of the subject networks and some of the institutional teaching strategies. However, I fear that the QAA and the research assessment exercise will still rank, control and ossify.

Alan Jenkins is an educational developer and is in charge of the Institute of Learning and Teaching accredited course for new teachers at Oxford Brookes University.