Ellie Chambers

Editorial: Looking Back, Looking Forward...

T H E S TA RT O F T H E journal’s fourth volume seems a good moment for reflection. Immediately striking is that, since our first issue, the wider higher education context in which we all work has changed hardly at all. In that issue’s editorial we marked out a number of influential trends which have, as it were, only become trendier: ‘massification’, coupled with reduced resource for teaching; a dominant discourse of the marketplace; a related ‘instrumental’ pedagogic discourse of measurable ‘learning outcomes’ and of ‘transferable skills’; increased resource for and dependence on C&ITs in teaching, and the emergence of a ‘blended’ form of education for all. In that context, by contrast we argued that ‘. . . teaching is not a matter of efficiency or productivity or professional skill but of creating value; pedagogy is not a technique applied to subject matter but a systematic exploration of the discipline’s vital processes’. We re-affirm those beliefs here, along with our aims for the journal’s development – ‘no less than a challenge to our whole community to reassess the value and values of a higher education in the Arts and Humanities, and the various pedagogic modes that deliver it’. Since that first issue certain common socio-political, pedagogic and research concerns have certainly emerged: the place of Arts and Humanities higher education in contemporary society, the ‘global’ market; curriculum formation and change; access to higher education, the transition from secondary schooling; re-examining established teaching-learning methods and evaluating new ones (‘theory in practice’, practice-based, collaborative, problem-based, cross-cultural, and online methods); new approaches to developing students’ writing and to assessment; gender issues; existential issues; issues surrounding identity, multi-disciplinarity, distance education. . . . And, not least, the distinctiveness and value of our academic domain, its many disciplines and fields (to date including Art, Art History, Cultural Studies, Design, European Studies, History, Humanities Computing, Language, Literature, Law, Modern Languages, Music, Performing Arts, Philosophy, Theatre Studies). In

The evaluation of a new method of operative competence assessment for surgical trainees

Recent high profile cases of surgical incompetence have damaged public confidence and resulted in the demand for more explicit checks throughout professional practice. The current system of assessing the operative skills of higher surgical trainees (HSTs) involves a single tick-box on the Record of In-service Training Assessment (RITA) form. The form gives no guidance to the trainer as to the expected range of procedures, makes no distinction between each year of training and allows no indication of progress (or otherwise) through the training system. The trainees logbook is reviewed at the annual assessment, but this record of experience gained does not necessarily reflect the competence level achieved. While operative ability is only one of the skills that the trainee surgeon must acquire, it is a core competency which is not formally assessed at any point in the present system. A new assessment instrument known as the Operative Competence system was developed from previously suggested methods in response to this need.

Editorial: the AHHE Journal:

W E L C O M E T O this first issue of AHHE. The idea of a journal dedicated to arts and humanities higher education was conceived some years ago, among members of the Humanities Higher Education Research Group (HERG) at the UK Open University. Now, many conversations, conferences, HAN1 Newsletters and enthusiastic emails later, we are delighted at last to feel the weight of it in our hands. Established in 1992, the HERG had been conducting research into aspects of humanities pedagogy, notably in Classical Studies, European Studies, Literature and Philosophy, with little prospect of publication in the few ‘applied’ higher education journals and none at all in the many ‘pure’ discipline-specific journals.2 How then was our work to reach the community of arts and humanities lecturers/faculty in UK universities and internationally? Furthermore, how might we promote greater interest in the Arts and Humanities among higher education policy makers and bureaucrats, and also help attract further resource for our research and teaching? As (anonymous) reviewers of the ensuing journal proposal put it, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education could be:

Editorial:Transforming Boundaries

Q U E S T I O N , from the Open University Institute of Educational Technology’s Director of Research: ‘Why is a humanities module – as an element of a planned curriculum – any different from a learning object?’Why, in other words, do we think that the Arts and Humanities have a distinct methodology which, crucially, is drawn from and shapes our teaching and learning? The answer should have been: ‘Read AHHE, especially this issue’. The answer that was actually given, by one of the AHHE editors, was:

Successful University Teaching in Times of Diversity

This book, edited by Nicola Rolls, Senior Lecturer at Charles Darwin University (Australia), Andrew Northedge and Ellie Chambers, Emeritus Professors at the Open University (UK), suggests practical tips with solid theoretical foundations aimed at equipping university teachers with transferable skills to enable them to face a multitude of challenges in current diverse university contexts. Throughout the book, there is a strong emphasis on the important underlying role of language and communication for learning and engaging with academic knowledge. Given the clear emphasis on academic language and learning, this book is to be highly recommended to academic language and learning practitioners, not only for their own teaching, but also in their efforts to work collaboratively with subject academics across all disciplines.

Editorial: Journal Power!

T H E 2 0 04 I N T E R N AT I O N A L C O N F E R E N C E on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) opened with a powerful statement about the importance of journals, including the AHHE journal. This plenary session, chaired by Barbara Cambridge, the outgoing, long-serving and influential President of the American Association of Higher Education, invited journal editors to explain their role in shaping what is, and can be, published and in influencing the SOTL agenda by creating a forum for new types of research. It was a welcome validation of the role of journals in enabling new and thoughtful approaches to our disciplines’ teaching, curriculum and priorities. Indeed, for thoughtful scholar–teachers, or teacherly scholars – those whose teaching informs and stimulates their disciplinary ideas, who work outside the often convergent, conservative disciplinary research agenda – such channels of communication and dissemination are vital. (AHHE is unusual in including new scholars in the conversation, in its recent New Voices section. The Editors encourage senior readers to invite their less established colleagues to contribute to it, and to communicate encouragingly with those who do.) In this issue of the journal such fresh thinking includes the philosopher Robin Barrow’s contribution to discussion of the distinctiveness of the Humanities, as he explores notions of brain, mind and language. Ultimately, he favours ‘Education conceived of as the development of mind . . .’: desirable, he says, for both its ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ value. ‘And’, he continues,‘in contradiction to the explicit views of many politicians and even academics today, schools and universities should be contributing to this aim rather than aiming at ever narrower academic training, or, worse still, nonacademic training’. Towards development of mind, he concludes, the Humanities (rather than psychology), and especially literature, have a particular and important part to play: ‘There is a ghost in the machine and novelists make it their business to understand ghosts’. Alan Booth makes an exemplary scholarly contribution to the Scholarship of Teaching history. He argues that a ‘hierarchical’ model of scholarship in which research is most highly valued relegates teaching ‘to the status of a

Editorial: Communities of Practice

I N O U R first Editorial we described the Journal’s antecedents and tried to articulate our conception of its role in arts and humanities higher education. (And, we are delighted to say, the first issue of AHHE has been entered for the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers/Charlesworth Awards – win or lose, we are very pleased just to have been nominated.) In that Editorial we referred to certain formative features of contemporary higher education systems, including among other things a burgeoning of applications of computer-telephone technologies and of interest in innovative forms of student assessment. We wrote there:

Research into Teaching and Learning: Beginning Philosophy

This chapter, a version of a paper first published in a journal for teachers of Philosophy in higher education in the US, concerns current conceptions of the teaching of the discipline and makes many recommendations for change. The analysis is based on questionnaire and interview studies of (some 1,000) mainly adult students of the subject at introductory level, and draws on the author’s experience as a student and tutor of Philosophy and as an educational adviser working with subject specialists to create undergraduate courses in distance education mode. The chapter is included in this volume as an example of the kind of contribution researchers into humanities higher education may make to pedagogic understanding and practice, through interpretation of students’ experiences of study and mediation between them and ‘front-line’ teachers of undergraduates; accordingly, the chapter directly addresses teachers of Philosophy. It also provides an instance of critical humanistic practice in action and the application of pedagogic theories of discourse (see Chapter 1 of this volume).

Access, Distance Education and the Humanities

This chapter addresses the earliest stages of higher education and, in particular, issues surrounding the preparation of adult students from non-traditional backgrounds for undergraduate study in the humanities. It raises questions about the content and methods of humanities teaching, based on the experience of developing an ‘access to the humanities’ course by distance learning at the UK Open University (UKOU). Drawing on examples from this programme, the chapter promotes a ‘discourse model’ of teaching and learning and discusses the practical consequences of applying a theoretical framework in which learning is conceived as a socio-cultural process of making meaning.