The paper explores academic staff and departmental research and teaching cultures in the Education Departments of five universities in Scotland and England, countries with increasingly diverging public policies in respect of education. The relationship between research and teaching, how the purposes of universities are defined and the status of research in Education are current UK higher education policy preoccupations. Data is drawn from interviews with 40 academics, observation of department settings, documentation and websites. The analysis draws on the work of Bourdieu, considering the changing habitus of individual academics, their departmental and academic subject context and the forms of symbolic capital now required in Scottish and English Education departments in response to new policies affecting their academic field. The paper also utilises recent literature on the research-teaching relationship. The career trajectories of respondents, their habitus and the forms of symbolic capital that they bring to academic life are examined, as are the extent to which the teaching and research cultures in each of the five departments studied mirror each other and whether these also reflect the two different policy contexts. The themes how academic cultures are shaped and research/teaching connections viewed have international as UK relevance.
This paper asks the question: do people with different levels of research productivity and identification as a researcher think of research differently? It discusses a study that differentiated levels of research productivity among English and Australian academics working in research-intensive environments in three broad discipline areas: science, engineering and technology; social science and humanities; and medicine and health sciences. The paper explores the different conceptions of research held by these academics in terms of their levels of research productivity, their levels of research training, whether they considered themselves an active researcher and a member of a research team, and their disciplinary differences.& Angela Brew
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