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Peer observation is widely used within UK Higher Education (HE) institutions as a means of improving teaching standards. Interest in processes such as peer observation has risen as a result of an increasingly prevalent audit culture. Policies aimed at increasing levels of accountability in public Institutions have contributed to the commercialisation of education and have been accompanied by an increasingly dominant managerialist hegemony. The Dearing Report (1997) is widely recognised for advocating increasingly professional approaches to teaching within HE and recommended a greater emphasis on both standards and monitoring.

Since the 1980s, the external social, economic, cultural, and political environments that higher education institutions face in many countries have undergone rapid change (Vidovich, 2002). For national governments, the intense pressure of global competition between universities, the rapid expansion of higher education and declining resources raise the demand for more effectiveness and efficiency in the activities of HEIs. This has caused "radical reform" or "structural readjustment" in the higher education sector. HEIs are required to be more accountable for the quality of their provision. Hence, quality assurance mechanisms become prevalent in many countries. This research seeks to explore how the mechanisms for ensuring quality assurance in teaching have influences on university management and academic work, as well as the extent to which it can be argued that they have changed the culture of teaching and learning in two national contexts: China and England. These two national contexts demonstrate major changes, which have been made or are being/made over the last ten years. Data are drawn from interviews with 40 academics and administrators, across the two countries, as well as information gained from official documentation and websites. Case studies from four Schools of Business have been used to investigate similarities and differences between one research-intensive and one teaching-intensive university in both countries. The ideas of how HEIs and academics respond to change have been drawn on by employing a theoretical model to analyse the influences of quality assurance mechanisms across the different types of universities. Changes to academic identity and academics' work are examined, as well as the extent to which the institutional management of teaching quality reflects each other. The 'findings are discussed in relation to the differing policy contexts within the two countries. The findings of the study indicate that the quality assurance mechanisms to some extent contribute to the improvement of teaching quality through some basic conditions for good teaching and learning; however, the actual effects of quality assurance systems on improving quality of teaching and learning are limited, The argument is that high teaching quality is mainly based on intrinsic factors such as academics' commitment and enthusiasm for teaching and subject knowledge, and their professional accountability. With respect to the influences of quality assurance mechanisms on university management, Bauer and Henkel (1997) deduce that institutions often act as mediators between academics, outside pressures, and agencies in order to protect shared interests and values whilst avoiding the dangers of stasis. Therefore, a well-developed institutional culture and infrastructure of self-regulation is much more critical than the external-exerted national quality assurance system (Kells, 1999). Quality can only be improved with the recognition of the role academics play as active agents rather than passive recipients.

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This study examines ways in which the practice of information literacy is experienced by undergraduate students in Biology and Social Sciences, using a learner-centred, phenomenographic approach. It challenges simplistic connections which are made between availability of information, learning and learner autonomy in the contemporary information environment. Variations in the experience of information literacy practice in relation to academic assignments are presented. Four distinctive information literacy pathways, or ways of experiencing the process, are identified. The learner-centred perspective has enabled clear distinctions to be made between information literacy pathways, in particular clarifying the concept of focus which has been problematic in earlier work. The Minimalist pathway was associated with poor academic performance. The other three, Gathering, Pinpointing and Connecting, enabled students to be successful in their courses but differed in terms of the development of: subject-matter autonomy; confidence and a sense of competence as a learner; and personal engagement with academic work. The student experience is viewed as a negotiation of ways to act involving the study context, subject knowledge and the student's own role. A key differentiating factor is the student's ability to discern subject knowledge as something which exists outside its embodiment in study tasks. A further factor is the position of the student in relation to both the subject and the study context. This is associated with differences in the sense of control and students' perceptions of themselves as learners. Suggestions are made for educational practice. Attention must be given to the processes of learning and not just its products, such as assignments. A developmental approach towards all students is needed. Even students who appear to be doing well may need guidance to develop autonomy in relation to subject matter. The electronic information environment can provide opportunities and tools but it is interpersonal interaction, between lecturers and students and amongst students, that builds the bridge between information, learning and learner autonomy.

This thesis is a small scale qualitative study of the ways in which 151 and 3rd year undergraduates studying in a post 1992 British university and a group of academic staff from the same university construct the idea of good feedback on written work. The research was carried out using semi-structured interviews with individual participants which were audio recorded, transcribed and then analysed using NVivo 9. An extensive literature review was conducted which located the origins of feedback in behavioural psychology and systems engineering as well as in the field of cybernetics and second order cybernetics with its links to constructivist theories of learning. The work of Foucault is drawn on to provide an analytical framework which focuses on the themes of discourse, power, identity and emotion and these themes are tracked through the comments of the staff and student participants. What emerges from the data analysis is that whilst both staff and students have well established discourses relating to feedback there is significant divergence in relation to the themes of power and identity, which the staff attach considerable significance to and identity and emotions which the students see as important. The contrasting emphasis which the thematic analysis highlights are discussed in detail firstly in relation to the student perspectives and then that of the staff before a synthesis of both perspectives is provided. It is proposed that the solution to the problems inherent in such divergent views on feedback as those identified amongst the student and staff participants, lies in a greater use of dialogic forms of feedback in which knowledge and learning in relation to feedback is co-constructed by staff and students

It was Dearing's Inquiry into HE (1997) that first noted that many universities did not have a learning and teaching strategy (LTS). The resultant HEFCE funded initiative for teaching quality enhancement (TQEF) required universities to develop and implement an LTS. This thesis concerns the development and implementation of the LTS at the University of Westminster from 2001 to 2009, the period of funding. More particularly, this thesis exams the perspective of the learning and teaching coordinators (LTCs) from each of the academic Schools of the University. The LTCs were charged with the management of the implementation of the LTS and teaching quality enhancement change in the institution. This inquiry considers the LTCs views of the nature and implementation of the LTS. The thesis explores the practice of strategy formulation and develops a model of efficient permissive policy and strategy implementation. Responses to the LTS in interviews of the LTCs provide rich perspectives on the professional approach to teaching. The developed LTS Change Model identifies three categories of response labelled as Champions, Adopters and Resistors amongst the LTCs that act as proxies for the wider response of staff across the University. The evaluation of these perspectives demonstrate that the enhancements in learning and teaching evident were not due to any detailed action plan based on the LTS but to a cultural shift in learning and teaching. Modifying the gains in this cultural shift, additional to ineffective strategy formulation and the resistance to change in general, was the nature of academic leadership in the Schools. Despite these negative influences, the recognition and value of teaching in higher education and the facilitation of communities of practice have been the primary cultural shift changes that have brought about a more open and effective approach to teaching quality enhancement.

This thesis provides a post-modern critique of the profession of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). This critique derives from the findings of a progressivist applied ethnographic study of group of ESOL teachers working at an institution of higher education in Britain. The analysis of the findings using post-modern theory revealed that there was a complex mêlée of discourses (in the Foucauldian sense) at work in the research setting: a localised idiosyncratic discourse containing the voices of the teachers and the management, and a dominating mainstream discourse containing institutional and academic voices. The teachers in their classroom practices and their construction of these practices reproduced the norms of this dominant discourse in a pedagogy which can be described as weak communicative language teaching. This reproduction resulted in contradictions in their practices and constructions of their practices with regard to learner-centredness and to the superiority of the pedagogy, as well as to tensions and conflicts between the ethos of education and the requirements of an ‘industry’. Three arguments emerge from these problems: 1. The pedagogy helps to maintain the low-status of TESOL because it reduces teaching to a series of ‘universally-applicable’ techniques and skills, the rudiments of which can be taught on a one-month training course. This pedagogy suits the institutional voice which regards TESOL as a private-sector industry. 2. This modernist ‘scientific’ pedagogy constructed as ‘universally-applicable’ and superior to other ways of teaching is potentially inappropriate because it cannot respond to social, cultural and political contexts of the classrooms in which it is used. 3. The pedagogy is legitimised with theories of learner-centredness that claim to be responsive to students’ needs engendering learner autonomy and self-actualisation while creating a ‘democratic’ and participative classroom. Using Focauldian theory, it can be seen that learner-centredness in fact masks the subtle operation of biopower, and is commensurate with a pedagogy designed as a commodity. These arguments can be located in wider shifts in education and professionalism in late-modern consumer capitalism where the public sector is being invaded by private-sector discourses. I finally propose the possibility of an alternative post-modern pedagogy with a commensurate post-modern critical profession.

This thesis reports the findings of an essentially phenomenographic research study into nurse teachers’ Conceptions of Student-Centred Teaching and Student-Centred Approaches to Teaching. The focus on the experience of student-centred aspects of teaching is a departure from previous research from this perspective in Higher Education that has focused upon teachers’ experience of teaching. The approach and focus of this study is also a departure from research into student-centred teaching in nurse education. Previous research in Higher Education has identified and reported qualitative variation in conceptions of teaching and qualitative variation in approaches to teaching and these have been categorised as either teacher-centred or student-centred. However, the interpretation and separation of conceptions of teaching and approaches to teaching has been largely as a result of the researchers’ interpretation of what it means to be teacher-centred or student-centred in teaching. This study aimed at identifying the qualitative variation that exists in conceptions of student-centred teaching and student-centred approaches to teaching from the perspectives of those nurse teachers who claimed to adopt student-centred methods in their teaching practice. The findings of this study indicate that there are significant qualitative differences in nurse teachers’ conceptions of student-centred teaching and their approaches to student-centred teaching than has hitherto been identified. In both cases a limited number of qualitatively different categories of description were identified (5 in each case) ranging from approaches to teaching that result in the reproduction of expert knowledge and skills to students developing their professional attitudes and values (affective components), and acquisition of disciplinary concepts and skills to student self-empowerment conceptions of student-centred teaching. This study also reports that the relations between conceptions of student-centred teaching and student-centred approaches to teaching are significantly different from previous research in this area, and suggests that some teachers holding student development conceptions of student- centred teaching adopt a similar sophisticated approach to student-centred teaching despite the existence of qualitative variation in their conceptions of student-centred teaching. This research extends our awareness of the experience of student-centred teaching. Finally, the implications of these findings for teacher development are discussed.