It has often been acknowledged that teaching in higher education is
afforded a relatively low status when compared to its more lucrative relation,
research, and this is echoed in the literature (e.g. Weimer, 1997; DfES, 2003
in Young, 2006). Teaching awards are
reputed to provide many benefits to institutions and participating academic
staff. Research indicates that teachers in higher education need recognition
for their teaching efforts, respond positively to this recognition, and that
teaching awards are one effective way of recognising and rewarding teaching
(e.g. Ruedrich et al. 1992, 1986; Dinham and Scott, 2003). It is also acknowledged that when good
teaching is rewarded, academic staff will remain committed to the improvement
of teaching (Carusetta, 2001). This is not to suggest that the concept of the
teaching award is universally ratified and supported (cf. Layton and Brown, 2011). Difficulties are reported, for example, in
respect of identifying what teaching awards actually endorse (e.g. Chism,
2006). Other research has worked on identifying how to refine systems for
recognising excellence, and interrogate, in a constructive way, the assumptions
on which these systems are built (e.g. Skelton, 2004). Some recent commentary
asks whether teaching awards and similar initiatives might actually lower the
status of teaching despite best efforts to the contrary (see Macfarlane, 2011).
The underlying challenge for the educational developers tasked with
implementing the teaching award initiative described in this chapter was to
establish a professionally useful process in a national (and global)
environment of ‘entrepreneurialism, managerialism, massification, commercialism
and reductionism’ (ibid.: 163), a
system which would have, and be perceived to have, academic and professional
integrity. This system, which arose as part of a cross-institutional strategy
of a conglomerate of higher education institutes, was re-imagined as a process which would, to as large an
extent as possible, mitigate aspects of the ‘game’ of academic development, as
Layton and Brown (2011: 164) would have it, where, admittedly, ‘irresolvable,
profound and unremitting contradictions hold sway’.