Short abstract:

Showing the shifting concerns with research-based teaching in the face of performance governance arrangements, this paper questions declamatory discourses of transformation in higher education, calling instead for approaches that acknowledge intricate assemblages and unforeseen circumstances.

Long abstract:

Over the last three decades, concerns with invigorating the links between research and teaching have re-emerged in scholarly and political debates about higher education. In Denmark, as elsewhere, this re-emergence happened during a period when new modes of governing focusing on measuring and incentivizing performance became predominant in higher education. This paper explores how notions of research-based education – and research-based teaching - emerged as a matter of concern from the 1990s and trace their (re)creations in Danish university politics and practice.

The paper examines efforts to link research and education as a problem space, drawing on a compositional methodology, which combines policy documents, newspaper articles, oral history and scholarly work in higher education with ethnographic material from a recent initiative aimed at integrating research into teaching within a research-intensive university.

Elucidating the multiple re-creations of research-based education and teaching, the paper shows that a key concern in realizing research-based teaching in local practices today, relate to engaging students in research and inquiry rather than what is being measured in the exam. It argues that the recent re-invention of research-based teaching is not a simple transformation but entangled in a broader complex of educational policies and practices.

By examining the implications of performance governance arrangements on research-based teaching, the paper questions declamatory discourses of transformation in higher education, calling instead for approaches that acknowledge the intricate assemblages and unforeseen circumstances shaping the re-creation of higher education.