Preface: Teaching Excellence as ‘Institutional Polishing’?

Taking as its starting point Barad's assertion that ‘The optic/apparatus for observations will determine what is seen’, this edited collection offers a lively and thought-provoking discussion about gendered, raced and classed implications of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in the United Kingdom's increasingly neoliberal higher education (HE) sector. The essays in this collection critically interrogate and cast doubt on the usefulness of the notion of ‘excellence’ to attempt to evaluate teaching in HE. In the process, they draw attention to the fact that mobilising unrealistic comparisons between higher education institutions (HEIs) around a reductionist conceptualisation of teaching excellence creates deficits through the inevitable difference that exists across institutions, disciplines and through the specific teaching interactions between individual lecturers and students in HE.