Although it’s widely advocated that connections should be built between research and teaching, it’s less clear how this happens in practice. This paper will explore how a sociomaterial perspective can help develop clearer accounts of how such connections have, and have not, been achieved. Links between research activity and teaching quality were once described as "an enduring myth", leading to a programme of research to identify pedagogic approaches that can help build such connections. Healey (2005) notes, however, that opportunities for such research-based education can vary widely across disciplines. This variation depends partly on the social norms around research, but also on the resources, tools and technologies that it involves. Latour & Woolgar’s studies (1979) showed that successful laboratory work required the coordination of tissue samples, graphs and desks, and that the scientific process could not proceed without these often mundane things. Studies of students’ digital literacies show that in Education and related social sciences, studying involves books, photocopies, pens, iPads, library tables, buses, field sites, software packages, data sticks, highlighter pens and the movement of texts from digital to print format and back again (Gourlay & Oliver, 2013). Much of this mirrors the practices of researchers active in these fields. Such studies raise questions about wider patterns of connection between study and research. When do these resources cross boundaries between research and teaching practice? What variations exist across disciplines, and why? What can following these mundane things tell us about the success – or otherwise – of connections between research and teaching?

1. What do connections
between research and
teaching look like?
Martin Oliver & Lesley Gourlay
Culture, Communication & Media
UCL Institute of Education
m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk; l.gourlay@ioe.ac.uk
ioe.academia.edu/MartinOliver
ioe.academia.edu/LesleyGourlay
13/04/15
1
UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015

2.  Connected Curriulum –
 “Moving from research-led to research-based
teaching”
 What does this look like?
 How will we know it when we see it?
 What might stop it happening?
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
2

3. The research-
teaching nexus
13/04/15
3
UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015

4.  “An enduring myth”; Universities recommended
to pursue:
improvement of the nexus between research and
teaching... to increase the circumstances in which
teaching and research have occasion to meet
(Hattie & Marsh, 1996: 533)
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
4

5. Variation across disciplines
Undergraduate students are more likely to have
opportunities to work as, for example, a research
assistant on a research project in a biology
laboratory, than to work alongside, say, an English
professor interpreting a play.
(Healey, 2005)
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
5

6.  Likely to be affected by codification of the
knowledge base (Griffiths, 2004)
 Harder where ‘narrow’, specialised approaches to
research dominate, rather than ‘broad’, critical,
interdisciplinary or applied approaches
(Interestingly, suggests the opposite pattern to
Healey)
 Again, a purely social framing
 Discussion of links to “working on ‘real-world’
problems”, but in terms of employability, not sites,
nor the tools & technologies needed
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
6

7. “Disciplinary spaces”
 A phrase used by Healey, apparently as a
metaphor
 No evidence of literal examples
 Disciplinary work envisaged as consisting purely
of social practices
 Are there more literal spaces, too?
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
7

8. Sociomateriality
13/04/15
8
UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015

9. If you can, with a straight face, maintain that
hitting a nail with and without a hammer, boiling
water with and without a kettle... are exactly the
same activities, that the introduction of these
mundane implements change 'nothing important'
to the realisation of tasks, then you are ready to
transmigrate to the Far Land of the Social and
disappear from this lowly one.
(Latour 2005: 71)
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
9

10. Spaces of knowledge
production
Humans, and what they take to be their learning
and social processes, do not float, distinct, in
container-like contexts of education, such as
classrooms or community sites, that can be
conceptualised and dismissed as simply a wash of
material stuff and spaces. The things that assemble
these contexts, and incidentally the actions and
bodies including human ones that are part of these
assemblages, are continuously acting upon each
other to bring forth and distribute, as well as to
obscure and deny, knowledge.
(Fenwick et al, 2011: vii)
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
10

11. The materiality of research
 Ethnographically-informed work within Science
and Technology Studies has traced
heterogeneous networks involved in the
production of scientific knowledge
 Successful laboratory work requires the
coordination of tissue samples, graphs, papers
and desks (Latour & Woolgar, 1979)
 Practices of knowing as material engagements
that (re)configuring the world (Barad, 2007)
 The ‘ontological politics’ of medical diagnosis
shaped by stories, tissue samples, procedures,
etc. (Mol, 2002)
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
11

12. Enacting spaces
We recognise space as the product of
interrelations; as constituted through interactions,
from the immensity of the global to the intimately
tiny. […] We recognise space as always under
construction. Precisely because space on this
reading is a product of relations-between, relations
which are necessarily embedded in material
practices which have to be carried out, it is always
in the process of being made. It is never finished;
never closed. Perhaps we could imagine space as
a simultaneity of stories-so-far.
(Massey, 2005: 9)
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
12

13. The campus is best thought of not simply as a
constraint but, to borrow Brown and Duguid’s
phrase, as a ‘resourceful constraint’ […] The
campus – or more generally, the co-location of
learners, teachers, labs, class-rooms, lecture
theatres, libraries and so on – refuses to lie down
and die.
(Cornford & Pollock, 2005: 181)
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
13

14. Studying material
connections
13/04/15
14
UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015

15. Previous work at UCL
 Studies with medics highlighted the importance
of material resources in their teaching, including
"potted specimens, x-ray displays, posters with
clinical topics on, videos, plastic models, and
then of course computers" (Plewes & Issroff, 2002)
 Practical advice from Cain (2010) on the
implementation of object-based teaching
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
15

16. Digital Literacies as a
Postgraduate Attribute?
 JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme
 http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/
Design Studio: http://tinyurl.com/q92jhzh
 iGraduate survey / Focus groups / multimodal
journalling in year 1
 Case studies across three areas in year 2:
 Academic Writing Centre
 Learning Technologies Unit
 Library
 (More information in Gourlay & Oliver, 2013)
13/04/15
16
UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015

17. Journaling
 12 students recruited from the focus groups
 3 from each of the four groups (PGCE, taught masters,
taught masters at a distance, Phd)
 Distance students interviewed via Skype
 Given iPod touch
 4 Members of staff
 Interviews took place over 9-12 month period
13/04/15
17
UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015

18. Knowledge work is
extensively mediated
Office tools (primarily Microsoft, plus Google docs and Prezi)
Institutional VLEs (Moodle and Blackboard)
Email (institutional, personal and work-based)
Synchronous conferencing services (Skype, Elluminate)
Calendars (iCal, Google)
Search engines and databases (including Google, Google Scholar,
library databases, professional databases such as Medline, etc),
Social networking sites (Facebook, Academia.edu, LinkedIn) and
services(Twitter)
Image editing software (photoshop, lightbox)
Endnote
Reference works (Wikipedia, online dictionaries and social
bookmarking sites such as Mendeley)
GPS services
Devices (PCs at the institution and at home, laptops including
MacBooks, iPhones, iPads, Blackberries and E-book readers).
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
18

19. Juan’s sense of place
Where I live it could be, you could be in a town sort
of anywhere and you wouldn’t really necessarily
notice. Whereas you come in here and you come
over the Waterloo Bridge and you see St Pauls and
the Houses of Parliament, you know, you’re in
London, you’re doing something again. You know,
this is where people do important things and that,
kind of, thing and it gives it a reality. […] It focuses
me a little bit on that.
(Juan, Interview 3)
 Also talked about international fieldwork to
create a new data set
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
19

20. Juan’s essay writing journey
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
20

21. “The bathroom is a good
place to read”
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
21

22. Conclusions
 The research-teaching nexus is about more than
social practices
 Attending to the material and spatial element of
practice is important in understanding the
success (or otherwise) of connections
 Questions remain to explore
 When do these resources cross boundaries between
research and teaching practice (Bowker & Star,
2000)?
 What variations exist across disciplines, and why?
 What can ‘following’ mundane things tell us about
connections between research and teaching?
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
22

23. References
13/04/15
23
UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015

24.  Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum
physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
 Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000) Sorting things out:
Classification and its consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT
press.
 Cain, J. (2010) Practical concerns when implementing object-
based teaching in higher education. Available online:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/teaching-learning-
methods/object-based-learning/obladvice.pdf
 Cornford, J. & Pollock, N. (2005) The University Campus as a
‘resourceful constraint’: process and practice in the
construction of the virtual university. In Lea, M. & Nicoll, K.
(Eds), Distributed Learning: Social and cultural approaches to
practice, London: RoutledgeFalmer, 170-181.
 Fenwick, T., Edwards, R., & Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging
approaches to educational research: Tracing the socio-
material. London: Routledge.
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
24

25.  Gourlay, L. & Oliver, M. (2013) Beyond 'the social': digital
literacies as sociomaterial practice. In Goodfellow, R. & Lea,
M. (Eds), Literacy in the Digital University: Critical Perspectives
on Learning, Scholarship and Technology, 79-94. London:
Routledge.
 Griffiths, R. (2004) Knowledge Production and the research-
teaching nexus: the case of the built environment disciplines.
Studies in Higher Education, 29 (6), 709-726.
 Hattie, J. & Marsh, H. W. (1996) The relationship between
research and teaching - a metaanalysis. Review of
Educational Research, 66, 507–542.
 Healey, M. (2005). Linking research and teaching exploring
disciplinary spaces and the role of inquiry-based learning. In
Barnett, R. (ed), Reshaping the University: New Relationships
between Research, Scholarship and Teaching, 67-78.
Buckingham: McGraw Hill / Open University Press. Available
online:
http://delta.wisc.edu/events/bbb%20balance%20healey.pdf
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
25

26.  Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to
Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979) Laboratory life: The social
construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills: Sage.
 Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage.
 Mol, A. (2002) The body multiple: Ontology in medical
practice. Durham: Duke University Press
 Plewes, L., & Issroff, K. (2002) Academic staff attitudes towards
the use and production of networked learning resources. In
Banks, et al, Proceedings of the Third Networked Learning
Conference. University of Sheffield. Available online:
http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc20
02/proceedings/papers/29.htm
13/04/15UCL Teaching and Learning Conference 2015
26