Exploring Disciplinary Teaching Excellence in Higher Education: Student-Staff Partnerships for Research

This book explores disciplinary teaching excellence through a diverse range of student-staff partnership research projects. Despite being a highly contested term, ’teaching excellence’ is something that universities aspire to and are expected to have. However, the editors and contributors argue that not only are definitions of excellence often broad and generic, but they lack nuanced understandings of disciplinary excellence in higher education. This book begins by unpacking some of these contested definitions of teaching excellence, followed by a series of co-authored chapters produced by students and staff who have undertaken research projects where they examine teaching excellence in their respective disciplinary areas. These chapters demonstrate that teaching excellence may be better understood as a process of becoming that is achieved through partnership between teachers and students. This book will be of interest and value to students, educators, and policy-makers concerned about teaching excellence, as well as scholars of student-staff partnerships.

Laura Barnett is Lecturer in the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey, UK. Her disciplinary background is in sociology and her research interests relate to everyday social experiences, inequalities and widening participation linked to learning and teaching in higher education.

Kieran Balloo was Lecturer in the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey, UK. His disciplinary background is in psychology and his current research broadly explores the impact of students’ backgrounds and the university environment on their experiences of higher education.

Marion Heron is Senior Lecturer in the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey, UK. Her disciplinary background is applied linguistics and she currently researches in the area of educational linguistics. She has worked in a teacher education role in a variety of national and international contexts.