Higher Education 33: 351–353, 1997.

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Book Reviews

Graham Webb 1996. Understanding Staff Development. Buckingham: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. ix + 124 pp. £45.00 (Hb.) £15.99 (Pb.) ISBN 0-335-19289-0. (Hb.) ISBN 0-335-19288-2. (Pb.) The specific focus of Graham Webb’s stocktaking attentions is the ‘educational development’ subset of staff development, which has to do with teaching and learning rather than the research, administration, and human resources areas. Not altogether surprisingly, in a professional enterprise that has relatively rapidly ‘moved from cottage industry to institutional necessity’ (p. 2), the tendency has been for efforts to concentrate mostly on practical activities, expanding knowledge about key concerns, and seeking out some secure anchorage points. So it is both timely and invigorating to have a critical spotlight turned in an informed and lively way on educational development’s ‘theoretical underpinnings and pervasive themes’. Webb, who is currently Director of the Higher Education Development Centre at the University of Otago, brings a strong background in philosophy coupled with considerable experience in the field, to the task of opening up for reconsideration the idea of ‘development’ itself, notions such as ‘reflective practice’, ‘deep and surface learning’ and ‘action research’, and issues to do with professionalism. He seeks to expose weaknesses in the rationales, practices and prescriptions that educational development characteristically produces, and to indicate how it could benefit from an expanded repertoire of orientations, including the philosophical tradition of ‘understanding’ and post-modernist ideas. The opening challenge is to the positivism embedded in the perception of staff development as ‘a science for the improvement of its clients according to a recognised standard of knowledge’ (p. 10). By tracing the origins of positivism in the Enlightenment and the growth of close links with the idea of progress, Webb is able to draw attention to the evolutionary theory and biological metaphors which permeate educational and staff development. While some might want to argue that a positivist orientation is as much (or more) the consensual expectation of ‘outsiders’ as the operating assumption of ‘insiders’, practitioners have been inclined to embrace rather than resist the ‘development’ label. And relatively few have chosen to grapple energetically

352 in public forums with the implications of critiques of positivism for how we go about our work. Moreover, since ‘one of the central messages of this book is that ‘development’ is [or should be] a site for contestation : : : encounter and dispute’ (p. 32), the author can only be encouraged by any disagreement the reader is prompted to have with some of his detailed observations and personal views. For there is an engaged and energetic quality to this book that helps counterbalance the more didactic aspects represented by the series of overviews of historical background and particular philosophical positions. These outline sketches generally have the intended and valuable effect of making the debate accessible to a wide audience, though readers with specialist knowledge may sometimes consider their renditions of complex patterns of thought unduly bare-bones or clear-cut. It also works best when they are integrated into constructing a chapter’s argument, rather than tacked on afterwards as happens towards the end of the book. Webb moves from the legacy of positivism, and setting aside ‘the ghosts of the past’, to trying to establish what he sees as the substantial underacknowledged debt which educational and staff development owe to a broadly construed hermeneutical tradition. Webb’s viewpoint is that a humanistic approach needs to be rooted in recognition of the intrinsic nature of human beings and their existence in the world, so that the stress on individual autonomy, personal responsibility and capacity for self-directed growth, and the staff developer’s role in working with others, learning from them and enhancing self-understanding is not endorsed merely as an instrumental effectiveness strategy. In advocating a more explicit and widespread prominence in academic writings of the human side of staff development, the author is tilting at a reasonably open door. But in some quarters his very large hermeneutics banner, together with its associated vocabulary, may be less readily accommodated. As Webb’s exposition reaches mid-way key issues remain centre stage. For example, what constitutes ‘better’ teaching and learning and, once identified, how can it be effectively fostered by educational development endeavours? How is the setting and pursuit of agendas affected by the unequal distribution of power? Insights into such questions are sought by travelling beyond understandings of our shared humanity to the ‘domain of critical hermeneutics or critical theory’ in the fourth chapter subtitled ‘staff development for a better world’. It turns out however that neither critical theory nor ‘action research’, despite their widespread popularity within the educational community, is judged to provide an adequate vehicle for progressing educational development. The attraction of the rational voluntary group which will promote an emancipatory equality, and encourages a moral high ground stance,

353 is claimed by Webb to mask a new package of intellectual and procedural orthodoxies. Whilst not doubting that good educational developments can be effected thereby, Webb advocates a healthy scepticism ‘against the ebullient claims and drive to conformity of critical theorists and action researchers’ (p. 76). He wants to promote an openness to the notion of multiple claims to understanding, which he maintains is what post-modernism can contribute. For Webb the hallmarks of post-modernity are the perceived inadequacy of grand organising principles and the abandonment of the firm ground they previously afforded. The consequential lack of assured foundations, which Webb welcomes, is necessarily unsettling. But it also brings opportunities for liberation from myopic theories and practice, in staff development as elsewhere, and the formulation of more pragmatic, flexible approaches. The sense of anticlimax which for me accompanied Webb’s sketching in of the way ahead, in commonplace not visionary terms, served to confirm his arguments about the pervasive and persistent appeal of meta narratives, including phenomenography, and the price entailed in wholesale acceptance of their limitations. For it is all too easy to think that as practitioners we do already ‘dismiss the totalizing effect’ of grand theoretical blueprints, retaining ‘the flexibility to step from one to another’, adopting views or theories depending ‘upon the interests [intentions?] of the developer and the demands of the local context’ (p. 81). The concluding chapter seeks to bring together the argumentative threads, to offer a ‘review of the review’, and to reflect on the nature of professional relationships. Somewhat disappointingly Webb does not take the opportunity to explore further the potentially contentious parallels drawn earlier between developer/client and teacher/student relationships. Nor does he consider relating his account of the philosophical landscape of educational development to the available literature about how professions develop. But he does tellingly alert us to the dangers of ‘a drive to professionalism that will lead to conformity and fear of difference, rather than contest and innovation’ (p. 109), and urges the taking of diverse paths as we attend to our own personal development. The important question which Webb articulates throughout is whether our most cherished viewpoints are simply ‘comfort zones’ or do they indeed have ‘imprisoning characteristics’? KATE DAY Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment, University of Edinburgh