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Campbell, Nakissa (2024) Through a Gramscian lens: academic experiences of the implementation of blended learning change management programmes in UK post-1992 universities. Doctoral thesis, London Metropolitan University.
This research reveals the extent to which academics in post-1992 universities experience blended learning change programmes. The thesis focuses on how institutions encourage academics to adopt the preferred blended learning approach to teaching with technologies and investigates the extent to which academic staff are involved in initiating, designing, and implementing blended learning programmes within their respective post-1992 institutions. The study highlights academic perceptions of institutional expectations for blended learning and examines whether these expectations align with their pedagogical values and beliefs. The thesis further examines Antonio Gramsci's (1891-1937) relations of force regarding the relationship between institutions and academic staff. His theory focuses on the power imbalances and political and conceptual distinctions embedded within the tapestry of hegemony. As this study sought to understand the tensions between academics positioned as subaltern and post-1992 universities positioned as the dominant hegemonic narrative, it reveals the complexities and contradictions inherent in these dynamics. The findings suggest that while there is a push towards adopting new blended learning pedagogical approaches, the underlying power structures and historical context create significant challenges alongside perceptions of academic resistance to blended learning change. Notably, resistance to technological change in twenty-first-century higher education, compounded by the pandemic, has led to a nuanced understanding of this notion of resistance. As such, while academic resistance to change may sometimes mean refusal to accept the change, this study, through Gramsci, draws out the complex nature of change, focusing not so much on academic resistance but on a type of resistance that endeavours to understand the conditions upon which blended learning change takes shape. The study finds that while academic resistance to blended learning change is perceived as a form of refusal, on closer inspection, there is a fine distinction between unwillingness to change verses challenging change. It is evident that participants value knowledge, information, and collaboration with their institutions. Therefore, the study finds that resistance is not a refusal but a call for more knowledge and information. A Gramscian perspective provides a unique and interesting perspective from which to understand these realities.
The impact of this study in contributing to the broader debate on blended learning is that academics and institutions may find ways to collaborate and, as such, work together to implement meaningful and transformational change. The impact on the existing body of knowledge when using Gramsci's hegemony is that the study can be replicated to enhance other blended learning research. In applying Gramsci's hegemony, the study revealed a much more nuanced understanding of the challenges and inequitable practices within higher education, which could be dismantled.
This research aims to inform academics, post-1992 institutions, policymakers and other educators in higher education about the contextual benefits and limitations that occur during the blended learning change process. The study implements an interpretivist paradigm within a qualitative methodology because there was an interest in the multiplicity of voices and participants' subjective realities during the process of blended learning change. The sample consisted of twenty-seven academics working in post-1992 universities across the UK. The data was collected using semi-structured interviews and coded using a thematic analysis.
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