Book review

Title: Research and Teaching: Beyond the Divide
Author(s): Brew, Angela
Year: 2006
Edition: 1
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 1403934355
Price:£18.99

Reviewer: Imogen Taylor, Head of Department, University of Sussex
Review date: 08/06/2007

This book is excellent, a ‘must read’ for academics, students or other stakeholders interested in debates about integrating research and teaching, or in pedagogic research and evidence-based teaching. It is one in a series of publications designed to fill the gap between the ‘practical concerns’ of university teachers, managers, and policy makers and the detailed research-based arguments for an academic audience. From my perspective wearing a number of these hats, this book very effectively manages to fill the gap. Crucially, Angela Brew, now at the University of Sydney and previously at the University of Portsmouth, carefully weighs the arguments, presents underpinning theory, identifies the research evidence and provides detailed case-examples, mostly from the UK and Australia. All this is set in a clearcut vision:
"I am passionate about bringing research and teaching together because I believe that is the key to the inquiry based education that I think we need in the future. If we are going to prepare students for an unpredictable future; a future where they will have to solve problems that we cannot at this moment even dream of, then they need to develop the skills of inquiry, and if we are going to get anywhere near tackling some of the world’s big problems, then we have to think about how research needs to change and who needs to be involved in doing it" (xiv).
Inquiry includes developing critical analysis, gathering evidence, making judgments, and refining critical reflection.

Part 1 explores the forces and ideas that underpin discussion of the relationship between research and teaching. Brew notes that research studies have consistently failed to establish the nature of the relationship between research and teaching. She notes that while teaching and research have much in common, their relationship is essentially asymmetrical, drawing on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who argues that the social space of academia is a site for different forms of power - cultural, political, economic or intellectual, and research and teaching each have different levels of academic capital.

Brew suggests that our view of the relationship depends on our view of teaching and research. In the traditional model, the researcher generates knowledge and the teacher transmits it as information. However, if knowledge is viewed as interpretive and context bound - then learning is a process of co-construction including both teacher and student. In this new model, the focus is on meaning-making by all participants as learners and knowledge builders, including teachers. This requires inclusivity and as academics have more social capital than students, and can impose meaning, reflexivity is important in surfacing the underlying assumptions and transforming the environment.

In Part 2, Brew examines case studies that attempt to integrate research and teaching. She believes that the greatest opportunities for change and growth are at undergraduate level and notes the separation between students and academics, with students as spectators, engaging in research tasters. Brew identifies problem-based learning (PBL) as an example of research-based teaching that engages students in collaborative inquiry, but suggests PBL needs to develop from student-student to student-teacher collaboration, and include students setting the problem under study.

In Part 3, Brew examines how teaching can enhance research and argues that students can aid researchers by raising critical questions, that researchers can learn from teachers about dissemination and the process of critical reflection. Brew analyses the cultural and contextual factors that influence the integration of teaching and research, noting for example the implications of increasing teaching-only positions and the casualisation of staff. Barriers notwithstanding, Brew ends with her vision of the university as an ‘agora’ or market place, where ideas are exchanged and developed,and research directions emerge. Here academics, who may have specialist knowledge, work with other professionals, experts, and lay people to generate knowledge. In social work and social care, this would surely include service users and carers.

Brew suggests that the ‘scholarship’ of learning and teaching is important not so much because it leads to changes in learning and teaching but because of its capacity to lead academics to a reflexive critique, crucial to systems change in higher education. She surely exemplifies this belief in her book.