Defining a discipline

Professor Alasdair Blair is Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor Education at De Montfort University. Alasdair served on the Advisory Group for the Subject Benchmark Statement for Politics and International Relations (2023) and currently serves as a Deputy Chair for the review of the Subject Benchmark Statement for Public Policy and Public Administration (2024-25).

A Subject Benchmark Statement (SBS) is incredibly important because it provides a framing point for discussions about how a discipline composes itself, and how it sits in relation to cognate disciplines and to wider learning, teaching, assessment and quality processes.

When I started out as an academic, higher education institutions and the academic schools and departments within them tended to be smaller and more closely connected – in ways which often promoted closer consideration and discussion of what constituted a discipline. These days, however, those interactions have often been subsumed into larger structures which often constitute more than one discipline.

At the same time, we've quite rightly in recent years welcomed into the university fold an influx of colleagues with backgrounds in industry and professional practice who haven't had the opportunity to serve the kind of academic apprenticeships which postgraduate students and junior lecturers of my generation did.

While these new voices undoubtedly enrich and revitalise our disciplines, it can sometimes prove a steep learning curve for lecturers who've not had the benefit of those years of incremental collegial mentoring which once helped us to learn the tools and tricks of the trade.

In these contexts, the Subject Benchmark Statement has assumed a renewed value in both formulating and introducing those areas of content which we see as core to a discipline's curriculum, as well as in describing effective approaches to those areas.

Those approaches and emphases continue to evolve, just as any discipline encompasses a diverse set of perspectives. It's of course impossible to capture absolutely everything – as the core content of a subject continues to shift and grow and sprout new appendages.

Subject Benchmark Statements help educators old and new get a grip – and keep a grip – on the value at the heart of their disciplines. They're hugely useful in defining and defending a discipline – and that can be particularly important in a higher education environment that's proven rather choppy of late. As the conditions in which disciplines – and a sector more broadly – operate experience unprecedented degrees of change, it's important to be able to articulate a shared understanding of the key features – like beacons – of those disciplines, although (and because) these are beacons, or buoys, which can drift over time.

When, for example, I started out as a politics academic, we did relatively little in terms of data and statistics – though of course we had psephologists like Sir John Curtice, who specialises in those aspects of our discipline. By contrast, most politics students are nowadays exposed to such statistical methods from an early stage in their studies – at the point at which students of my generation were once deeply embroiled in debates about the conflicts between communism and capitalism.

The emphases and boundaries of disciplines also change. 'Politics and International Relations' can, for example, still serve an umbrella term for a single subject but might also diverge into two – or possibly more – separate disciplines.

We continue to see similar developments and debates in the ongoing growth of other disciplines in ways which underpin their rich diversity – a dynamic core underpinning and epitomised by (but hardly unique to) such subjects as sociology, psychology, economics and geography. Disciplinary boundaries are often contested – and those debates are often both vital and fruitful.

A geography student may, for example, be fascinated by geological striations, cumulonimbus clouds or oxbow lakes – and they may also, with equal value and purpose, be interested in demography, human ecology or the geography of urban landscapes.

Our debates as to how best to encompass and place our disciplines are inherently healthy – and are indeed essential to the endurance of those disciplines. Each Subject Benchmark Statement provides a forum through which these dialogues may productively take place – and a platform through which they may usefully be articulated. It crucially draws together a plurality of voices and perspectives – not just from one institution or one nation – through an explicit emphasis on inclusivity and diversity of representation.

An SBS isn't trying to prescribe a required or even an ideal approach to a subject's curriculum or to the delivery and assessment of that content. It's about recognising and appreciating the fact that each subject is taught in varied ways and in many different contexts – and in ways appropriate to those contexts.

The disciplinary emphases, sizes, structures and geographical conditions of different providers and departments will be important in determining such local approaches. Some will, for instance, favour theoretical approaches – while others may be more practice-led.

An SBS is most helpful in providing an opportunity for subjects to reflect on those areas in which they do well and on those where they might do better. It's not a matter of compliance but helps subject teams to identify ways to enhance what they do, through sharing effective approaches across their discipline, less a rigid template than a palette which enables them to consider key questions and to foster important discussions.

It also helps people outside a discipline to understand the value, purpose and contribution of that discipline – in short, its raison d'être.

We live in a culture which has witnessed, over the last few decades, an erosion of those elements which many of us believe make up an educated society. It's all too easy in a soundbite-driven world to jump on the bandwagon of talk about so-called 'Mickey Mouse degrees' and to forget the core worth and point of our academic disciplines. The Subject Benchmark Statement, in its own way, can help us recall and rearticulate these things – as part of a shared understanding of the responsibility of higher education to enhance our societies and our lives.

Subject Benchmark Statements serve, as such, both as key reference points for educators, students, professional bodies and employers, and as broader points of elucidation and education, public articulations of what a discipline represents and offers, and what it aspires to be.

In my involvement in the creation of these living and evolving documents, I've been keen to write about these processes to promote engagement in their formulation and, of course, their ongoing use.

The work of Subject Benchmark Statements is important to the development of all our disciplines. Long may it go on.