Linkages between research, scholarship and teaching in universities in China



Richard Neale

2. Academic staff must teach effectively and thoroughly.

3. The teaching must incorporate up-to-date research and
scholarship.

4. Academic staff should be respected externally by their
peers.

5. A good proportion of academic staff should be person-
ally active in research.

6. There should be an appropriate staff development pro-
gramme.

The terms ‘scholarly’ and ‘scholarship’ appear repeatedly in
the QAA document, so at this juncture it is worth noting that
the
Chambers 20th Century Dictionary defines a ‘scholar’ as:
“one whose learning is extensive and exact, or whose
approach to learning is scrupulous and critical.” However,
although this definition centres on ‘learning’ it offers no ref-
erence as to whether scholars should acquire learning from
research they themselves have performed. This is particularly
relevant to the teaching-research debate because a central
issue is to what extent and how current research feeds into
teaching.

The fifth point above concerns academics conducting
research themselves and this is of particular interest to me,
because there is much debate about whether all university
teachers should be personally active in research. The QAA
position seems to be pragmatic, and personally I was sur-
prised that this ‘good proportion’ was set at such a low value
of one-third, although it is argued that:

A genuine higher education today cannot be
offered entirely separately from some kind of
research base. But that does not mean that either
institutions of higher education or their staff are
obliged to conduct research. Staff, though, do
need to have the time and resources to so keep up
with their field of study that they are immersed in
its conversations.

Barnett (1992, p636)

Barnett also argues for teaching being up-to-date and schol-
arly but that academic staff need not be personally research
active to achieve this:

Introducing research into the curriculum is
justifiable provided it is used to expand the
students’ intellectual horizons, and not because it
propels students towards becoming embryonic
researchers. The relationship between research
and higher education is such that someone,
somewhere, should have engaged in research; but
that does not mean that research is part of the
meaning of higher education.

Barnett (1992, p628)

The issue is therefore complex, not least because HEIs have
their own unique aims, characteristics and research cultures
and so respond in different ways. It seems to me that the
challenge for senior university managers is to bring these
requirements together so as to provide a coherent set of per-
formance criteria across the spectrum of their academic staff.

One author stands out in this literature, whose work is exten-
sively quoted throughout: the seminal study by Ernest Boyer
(1990) in the USA. He claimed that: “The time has come to
move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research debate’
and give the familiar and honourable term scholarship a
broader, more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy
to the full scope of academic work.” His view was that aca-
demic merit was too rigidly associated with research rather
than teaching and that the perceived detachment between
the two was in need of revaluation. In particular Boyer (1990)
proposed four scholarly but overlapping academic functions:

The scholarship of discovery, which is what is generally
meant by research.

The scholarship of integration, whereby scholars reflect
on research findings and “give meaning to isolated facts,
putting them in perspective”.

The scholarship of application: “How can knowledge
be applied?”; “Can social problems themselves define
an agenda for scholarly investigation?”.

The scholarship of teaching: “When defined as schol-
arship.. .teaching both educates and entices future
scholars”; “Teaching can be well-regarded only as pro-
fessors are widely read and steeped in the knowledge of
their fields”.

This functional analysis brings the key activities of the aca-
demic job into the single concept of ‘scholarship’. It seems
to be appropriate in the current environment of rapid global
change in which university academic staff find themselves,
allowing individual academics scope to position themselves
in ways that suits their abilities and inclinations.

Boyer (1990) also suggests a framework of 18 strategies by
which HE institutions can improve the relationship between
research and teaching, grouped under four general cate-
gories that serve to support the research-teaching nexus:

Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education

Volume 1 Number 1 76



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