Vehicles for change: developmental schemes, their impact and implications

A significant feature of institutional polices to enhance student learning has been the staff award scheme. These schemes fall broadly into two categories: prizes, awarded retrospectively, and development grants, for ongoing work. They are usually small-scale awards of funding, tied to institutional learning and teaching strategies and based on a bidding model. They are used for a wide variety of—overlapping— purposes. The intentions underpinning them might be to reward and recognise teaching, to encourage transfer of practice, to support professional development, to lever academic staff behaviour, or to encourage (or direct) ‘grassroots ’ innovation. Funded development projects, in particular, are often conceptualised as bridging a ‘gap ’ between individual aspirations and institutional strategy. These schemes are not unproblematic. Experience shows that developmental projects are not always successful in effecting change beyond the local context (discussed, for example, in Taylor 2007). Similarly, scholarship projects do not necessarily enhance teaching practice, or improve student learning (Trigwell and Shale 2004). Teaching award schemes are underpinned, often tacitly, by a variety of values and intentions (Gibbs 2007). Further, the policies they are linked to are themselves based on a diversity of conceptions of ‘quality ’ and ‘enhancement ’ (Harvey and Green 1993)