Understanding the relationship between
research and teaching

I have been exploring a vision of higher education institutions as places where academics work in partnership with students as members of inclusive scholarly knowledge-building communities where teaching and research are integrated. I have been looking at pedagogical trends that are pointing in this direction. Yet this has meant examining the political, economic and social factors that inhibit such developments.

I would like to think that the distinctions between teaching, learning and research could break down and that the academy could become a place where both academics and students in their different ways develop the strategies, techniques, tools, knowledge and experience needed to address complex, important and difficult problems of the world today.

Yet this means confronting elements of the academic world that work against the integration of academics and students. I have found the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu helpful in understanding how conflicts in values and entrenched hierarchies confine academics' ability to go beyond the divide between teaching and research. In this paper I will suggest that in order to establish new pedagogies and new research strategies based on redefined relationships between research and teaching we need to develop the capacity for critically reflexive examination of the way the academy operates. I will show how this is happening through the process of engaging academics and students in the scholarship of teaching and learning and suggest that only if this happens can universities develop inclusive scholarly knowledge building communities.