TY - CHAP

T1 - Diversity Deficits: Resisting the TEF

AU - Brogan, Andrew

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2020 Editorial matter and selection; © editors, individual chapters; © their respective authors.

PY - 2020/8/6

Y1 - 2020/8/6

N2 - This chapter draws on Michel de Certeau’s work on strategies and tactics to critique the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and, importantly, suggests a form of creative resistance to it. The TEF operates as a strategy of English higher education to reduce teaching and learning to quantifiable proxy measures which are then used to hold academics’ performance to account. The selection and use of these proxy measures introduces a specific relationship between academics and students rooted in the underlying neoliberal principles of exchange and private gain, reducing HE teaching and learning to a provider-consumer relationship. In defiance of this academics need to utilise increasingly creative tactics to enable them to conform to the requirements of the TEF while simultaneously resisting and subverting this provider-consumer relationship. De Certeau’s work on la perruque, or wiggery, as alternative tactics disguised as work for an employer offers us a way to counter the pervasive presence of TEF. La perruque encourages us to make use of the structures and places provided to us by higher education institutions to make something alien to them, for example, reorganising classroom spaces in such a way that does not prioritise the presence of the lecturer or designing sessions and modules starting from existing student knowledge rather than assuming a deficit to be addressed. Each of these tactics of resistance is fleeting and temporary, but each provides academics with a creative possibility to navigate the tensions of neoliberal provider-consumer relationships on the one hand and collaborative knowledge production on the other.

AB - This chapter draws on Michel de Certeau’s work on strategies and tactics to critique the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and, importantly, suggests a form of creative resistance to it. The TEF operates as a strategy of English higher education to reduce teaching and learning to quantifiable proxy measures which are then used to hold academics’ performance to account. The selection and use of these proxy measures introduces a specific relationship between academics and students rooted in the underlying neoliberal principles of exchange and private gain, reducing HE teaching and learning to a provider-consumer relationship. In defiance of this academics need to utilise increasingly creative tactics to enable them to conform to the requirements of the TEF while simultaneously resisting and subverting this provider-consumer relationship. De Certeau’s work on la perruque, or wiggery, as alternative tactics disguised as work for an employer offers us a way to counter the pervasive presence of TEF. La perruque encourages us to make use of the structures and places provided to us by higher education institutions to make something alien to them, for example, reorganising classroom spaces in such a way that does not prioritise the presence of the lecturer or designing sessions and modules starting from existing student knowledge rather than assuming a deficit to be addressed. Each of these tactics of resistance is fleeting and temporary, but each provides academics with a creative possibility to navigate the tensions of neoliberal provider-consumer relationships on the one hand and collaborative knowledge production on the other.

KW - Higher Education and Science Management

KW - TEF

KW - Teaching Excellence Framework

KW - Higher Education

KW - Politics

KW - Resistance

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85148396774&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/b7402538-501b-399a-b2a0-ae1e16fba649/

U2 - 10.1108/978-1-78769-533-720201009

DO - 10.1108/978-1-78769-533-720201009

M3 - Chapter

SN - |978-1-78769-536-8

SN - 978-1-78769-534-4

SP - 201

EP - 226

BT - Challenging the Teaching Excellence Framework

A2 - French, Amanda

A2 - Thomas, Kate Carruthers

PB - Emerald Publishing Limited

CY - Bingley

ER -