Quality and Trust: at the heart of what we do, a selection of papers from the 6th european Quality assurance forum 17-19 november 2011 hosted by the university of antwerp and artesis university College antwerp, Belgium. Edited by: Lucien Bollaert, Fiona Crozier, Josep Grifoll , Áine Hyland, Tia Loukkola, Barbara Michalk, Allan Päll, Fernando Miguel Galán Palomares and Bjørn stensaker. Download
Quality and Trust: at the heart of what we do (6th EQAF).
III. Concluding remarks
Discussing ‘quality’ and ‘trust’: an analysis of the EQAF 2011 contributions
By Heinz Lechleiter (Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, former Director of Quality (2005-2010), Dublin City University, Ireland).
Introduction The following essay is based on an examination of the abstracts submitted and accepted for the European Quality Assurance Forum 2011 in Antwerp. The bulk of the material presented here was prepared before the EQAF 2011. However, some elements of the papers, workshops, plenary sessions and discussions at the Forum have been incorporated. The essay is a written version of a workshop given at the Forum but the original intention was to present a conference preview to the diverse group of participants (students, institutions, agencies, government and industry representatives, and others) with the aim of creating an overview, of positioning all contributions in the overall context of the Forum, and of highlighting areas for discussion that emerge from the analysis.
Abstracts are an interesting text form. They select, simplify and condense highly complex realities and in doing that include certain aspects of these realities and exclude others, highlight certain aspects and the background of others (cf. Fairclough, 2005, pp. 10). Conference abstracts serve two further purposes: one is “to convince the reviewers that the associated paper should be accepted for presentation at the conference” (Martin-Martin, 2005, p. 6) and the other is to ‘sell’ the paper or workshop described in the abstract to the conference participants and to entice them to attend the corresponding session. For these reasons, the combined abstracts are likely to make up a body of text that captures the current state of development and thinking in the area of quality in higher education.
In the analysis, I seek to show what picture emerges as a result of the necessary simplifications and reductions in the abstracts, point to what is being highlighted, try to reveal what is side-lined, and attempt to crystallise these aspects into points of discussion that may help to advance the debate. It should be noted that some of the Points of Discussion (PoD) are triggered by findings but have been extended to take the wider context into consideration.
The methods used for the analysis were taken from corpus linguistics, text linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Frequency lists and concordances (i.e. clusters of words in their context) were produced by a software application called WordSmith. The abstracts were treated as one text in order to establish emerging patterns but individual abstracts could be traced when necessary. The analysis was carried out in a number of stages which are roughly reflected in the following sections, each leading into a PoD.
Analysis First, a simple overview of word frequency was created. Overall, there are 29 abstracts, 24 of these for papers and 5 for workshops. Together they contain 5080 words (tokens), of which 1288 are different words (types). As is always the case, function words such as ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘and’, ‘in’ and ‘to’ top the list by a wide margin; these words may appear negligible but they do contain interesting information and I will come back to one of them (‘on’) in the last section. To begin with, however, we turn our attention to the content words. The most frequent by a wide margin is ‘quality’ in position 6 on the frequency list with 121 occurrences (written as 6/121), followed by ‘education’ (9/60), ‘assurance’ (10/56), ‘higher’ (15/45), and ‘students’ (17/37). In the comparison between ‘teaching’ (65/11) and ‘learning’ (39/18) the latter clearly wins out creating the impression that the shift from an input to an output perspective in higher education is well under way, with all that entails for the academic community (cf. PoD 2). The abstracts mention nearly fi ve times as many ‘problems’ and ‘challenges’ (9) as ‘solutions’ (2); remarkably, both mentions of ‘solutions’ occur in student contributions.
The Forum title Quality and Trust: at the heart of what we do delivers the cue for the next step in the analysis. It puts the words ‘quality’, ‘trust’ and ‘we’ centre-stage and the focus of attention will be on each of them in turn.
It is one of the fundamental principles of text linguistics that words (expressions, grammatical features etc.) can never be looked at in isolation as it is their context and the situation that invests them with their meaning. Therefore we will try to get to know the term ‘quality’ by the company it keeps. In the EQAF 2011 abstracts the word ‘quality’ is combined with ‘assurance’ 55 times. All other combinations are much less frequent; they are with ‘management’ (7); ‘enhancement’, ‘process(es)’, ‘system(s)’ (4 each), and with ‘evaluation’ (3). Two absences need to be noted: neither ‘quality improvement’ (although there is one occurrence of ‘improvement of quality’) nor ‘quality culture’ feature in the abstracts. Taking into consideration that in the conference announcement a direct connection was made between ‘improvement’ and ‘trust’ the absence of the compound ‘quality improvement’ seems to contain a story.
Staying with ‘quality’ but changing the perspective, the next question asked of the abstracts was: the quality of what? There are ten combinations of ‘quality of’. Four of them are single instances of ‘services’, ‘structures’, ‘student experience’ and ‘implemented changes’. The other six can be grouped under the heading of ‘education’ (including ‘teaching’ and ‘course planning’), confi rming the close connection between education and quality. Taken together with the change of emphasis from ‘teaching’ to ‘learning’, from subject-specifi c knowledge to transferable skills, from directed to autonomous learning, a tendency emerges that has consequences both for the role of academics and students. In the discussions at the Forum the possibility of a devaluation of the teaching role was mentioned. The change to a learning focus gives the students a proactive role in the learning process, but how can their role in relation to education be described without reverting to the passive voice?
Next under the linguistic microscope is the term ‘trust’. There are 25 occurrences of the word in all the abstracts, all of them as nouns (as in ‘the trust’, as opposed to ‘we trust’), and with a very uneven distribution. ‘Trust’ appears in only four of the 24 papers (with nine mentions in one paper), whereas it is used in three of the fi ve analysed workshop abstracts. This indicates perhaps not surprisingly, that the workshops are more closely related to the Forum title than the papers. However, it is not only how often but in what way the term ‘trust’ is used that has some revelatory power. It has to do with the presence or absence of trust.
There is a relatively restricted number of words (predominantly verbs) the noun ‘trust’ can be combined with. The words combined with ‘trust’ in the abstracts can be divided into four subgroups. One group has to do with the fostering of existing trust (strengthen, assure, foster, contribute to), another with the creation of trust where it was not previously present (achieve, create, build, establish). All of these verbs can also be easily combined with the term ‘quality’ and have frequently been used in this way. There are two more groups, however, used in combination with ‘trust’ that have to do with loss of trust (reinstate, re-establish, regain; loss) and an outright opposite or antonym (distrust, mistrust; suspiciousness). It is my contention that one would be hard pressed to fi nd examples for instances speaking about the regaining of quality in any of the many institutional or other reports that have been published. Where antonyms are concerned, they can often be helpful in clarifying issues (for example clarifying the meaning of ‘old’ by supplying one of its antonyms ‘new’, ‘young’, or ‘modern’).
Conclusion It has been the aim of this analysis and interpretation of the conference abstracts to create an overview of the European Quality Assurance Forum 2011 and to enable contributors to the Forum and other interested groups and individuals to survey and map the areas of interest, but also the lesser explored areas, in quality. The analysis has yielded a set of questions that will hopefully advance discussions in the future and will contribute to the development of a quality culture in higher education in Europe and further afield.
Although by no means exhaustive, the analysis is indicative of the potential that the application of a linguistic approach can have in the framework of discussions about quality in higher education and, indeed, elsewhere. Treating the conference abstracts as a valuable resource, it can act both as a mirror, enabling self-refl ection, and as a window, enabling views from the inside out, and from the outside into the world of quality in higher education.
References Collins Cobuild, 1990, English Grammar, (Collins, London and Glasgow).
Fairclough, N., 2005, Critical discourse analysis, Marges Linguistiques, 9, pp. 76-94.
Johnson, M., 1989, The body in the mind. The bodily basis of meaning, imagination and reason, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., 1980, Metaphors We Live By, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
Martin-Martin, P., 2005, The Rhetoric of the Abstract in English and Spanish Scientific Discourse: A Cross-Cultural Genre-Analytic Approach, (Bern, Peter Lang).
Maslow, A.H., 1943, A Theory of Human Motivation, Psychological Review, 50(4), pp. 370-96.
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See also 7th European Quality Assurance Forum - Tallinn, 6th European Quality Assurance Forum - Antwerp, 5th European Quality Assurance Forum (EQAF) - Lyon.
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