Abstract
This paper reports on a study conducted as part of an action-research project—INTEGRA I&E—aiming to promote the research and teaching (R&T) nexus at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of a Research University in Lisbon, Portugal (Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, ISCTE-IUL). This study set out to investigate a multi-informant perspective of the academics’ rhetoric (conceptions, perception of barriers/facilitators and consequences) concerning the nexus, which can be considered at different levels of the curricular and organizational structure. Focus groups were conducted with 26 professors and 8 researchers from six different disciplinary areas and, afterwards, recorded and transcribed. A content analysis was used to categorize and quantify participants’ responses. Four themes emerged: practices linking R&T, barriers, facilitators and consequences of the nexus. Different levels of analysis were identified for each theme, namely, the level of ISCTE-IUL, Research Centers, Departments, Courses and Classes. Some disciplinary differences were also encountered. This study contributes with a multi-informant and multi-level perspective of academics’ conceptions of the R&T nexus in a Portuguese research-oriented university.
Highlights
In order to determine how far these changes have reached the Portuguese higher education institutions, Santiago and collaborators (2014) highlight the importance of analyzing academics’ perceptions on this matter
This paper reports on a study conducted as part of an action-research project – INTEGRA I&E - aiming to promote the research and teaching (R&T) nexus at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of a Research University in Lisbon, Portugal (Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, ISCTE-IUL)
In order to fill in this gap, and have a broader and integrative understanding of the R&T nexus, we aimed to explore it at different levels of the curricular and organizational structure (e.g. ISCTE-IUL/Social Sciences and Humanities (SSSH), Research Centers, Departments, Courses and Classes)
Summary
In order to determine how far these changes have reached the Portuguese higher education institutions, Santiago and collaborators (2014) highlight the importance of analyzing academics’ perceptions on this matter. By conducting a large scale survey, which explored 1320 Portuguese academics’ perceptions regarding the relationship between R&T, Santiago and collaborators (2014) determined most participants considered that research reinforces teaching, but they perceived spending more hours per week in teaching than in research, creating a tension between the two. This suggests that, in Portugal, the political and institutional discourses on R&T are not entirely reflected in academics’ reported practices and agendas. The R&T nexus is more often considered to be more tenuous and harder to achieve in the so-called “hard” disciplines, where research is more often conceived as an act of “discovering new grounds” and focused on producing external outputs (e.g. Chemistry, Physics) than in “soft” disciplines, like social sciences and humanities (e.g. Psychology, Anthropology), where research is conceived as process of observing and gathering information to answer questions and increase understanding of the social world (e.g. Brew 2003; Neumann, Parry and Becher 2002; Robertson 2007; Alpay and Verschoor 2014)
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