Talk the Talk and Walk the Walk: Are Career Academics Gatekeepers to Students’ Tacit Knowledge?

Abstract

An opinion piece that argues for a more balanced portfolio of academic staff within faculty, whereby pracademics are 'pivotal' academic staff who can 'talk the talk and walk the walk' with students who have industrial placement experience.

Role requirements in academic recruitment for Construction and Engineering

“…Despite such a requirement however, the ramifications for recruitment practice is that individuals with industry experience seeking employment opportunities in the HE sector will be overlooked in favour of candidates with PhDs and the potential to secure research funding through grant income or REF assigned block funding based on high-quality journal papers (Tennant et al 2015). It is not our aim to denigrate such qualifications as, having a PhD and a PGCAP or a PGCert can help in understanding non-subjectspecific pedagogy of Teaching and Learning, but neither helps in contextualising learning with real world examples in the way industry experience does (Pilcher et al 2017;Forster et al 2017;Murray et al 2017). It was with a specific goal of addressing the disproportionate bias towards research and away from teaching created by this researchfocused policy, that the UK government introduced the Teaching Excellence Framework in 2016 (BIS 2016;cf.…”