Howard Woodhouse

The Rhythm of the University: Part One - Teaching, Learning, and Administering in the Whiteheadian Vein

This is the first of two articles examining Alfred North Whiteheads notion of the rhythm of the university. Here, I concentrate on the rhythm of teaching and learning, the importance of academic freedom to an imaginative faculty, and the relationship between Whiteheads own pedagogy and his considerable administrative practice. My purpose is to show how his views enlarge our understanding of universities today.

Women and Science Education in Cameroon: Some Critical Reflections

Ten Cameroonian women were interviewed in order to find out how they had managed to become scientists and science educators. We talked to them about the kinds of support they had been given by their families, how science was taught in schools both in the past and at present, and whether or not they thought it possible to integrated science and African traditional thought in schools and universities. We used a framework incorporating the concepts of gender and social class in order to interpret their views. On this basis, we understood why these women tended to underestimate the importance of institutional discrimination in science and to conceive of the norms of professionalism as unsurpassable. In contrast, we suggest that women in Cameroon will only be able to participate fully when their own experience and ways of knowing are incorporated into the teaching and structures of science.

Tradition or Modernity? The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness Among Women Science Educators in Cameroon

Building on an earlier article in which I analyzed the views of women scientists and science educators in Cameroon, West Africa (Woodhouse & Ndongko, 1993), I reflect upon the ways in which these same science educators managed to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, attributed by Alfred North Whitehead to the abstractions of 17th-century physics.On the one hand, the women in our study tried to make their science teaching as concrete as possible by introducing examples from African traditional medicine that were familiar to their students. On the other, they undermined these laudable efforts by consistently diminishing the value of traditional indigenous healing, for they regarded the abstractions of scientific methodology as real in a way that such treatments were not. I argue that this is a prime example of the fallacy.Furthermore, the only way in which these women science educators could imagine that African traditional healers would be accepted by the scientific community was to become professionals by adopting the abstract methodology of science, which falls foul of the fallacy in the first place. Only then could their various traditional treatments be assimilated to the market and developed commercially by multinational corporations. I argue that this overlooks the ways in which such corporations appropriate the cultural and intellectual property of traditional healers in Cameroon and elsewhere. Moreover, their reasoning is based once again on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, accepting the abstractions of the market as real, while disregarding the value of indigenous knowledge itself.

The hidden curriculum and beyond: A Nigerian case study

Abstract The authors offer an operational definition of the curriculum as reflecting the interests of certain groups in society. Then follows a historical analysis of the curriculum in Nigeria through ‘traditional’, colonial, and post-colonial times. From this analysis the authors infer that at each stage of development, a hidden curriculum operated to socialise the young into the dominant norms of society. In contemporary Nigeria, the schools socialise the young to accept the ideology of development, according to which gradual social equality will be brought about through schooling. Finally, they suggest that the main means to overcoming the hidden curriculum is through the liberating potential of knowledge itself. The normative component of knowledge as liberation has been taken up by certain Nigerian intellectuals in their professional organisations, offering the hope of a freer society.

Northrop Frye on Academic Freedom: A Critique.

This paper argues that Northrop Fryes concept of academic freedom is based on an epistemological dualism that separates knowledge from experience. The former comprises a set of unchanging myths that the critic must apprehend by attuning himself to the objective laws of his discipline. The latter constantly changes and has no bearing on knowledge whatsoever. This distinction severely limits Fryes account of academic freedom by excluding the following fundamental aspects of knowledge: experience, value judgments, teacher-student dialogue, rational argument, interdisciplinary inquiry, and any critical interrogation of his own scheme of understanding. As a result, Frye unduly limits the academic freedom of both faculty and students. His account is inadequate and should be rejected.

Literacy: A Process of Interpreting the World as a Text

Abstract Literacy today means developing a technical skill on an electronic machine. (French 1990)

Moral and Religious Education for Nigeria.

Abstract The paper considers moral and religious education programmes appropriate for Nigeria. Starting with a brief analysis of the current crisis in moral, spiritual and political beliefs, the paper progresses by analysing traditional Nigerian education and the approach to moral education which it advocated. It then analyses the epistemological underpinnings of traditional moral education as well as the social institutions supporting it. A brief section outlining certain shortcomings in traditional education follows. This is then followed by a consideration of contemporary approaches to both moral and religious education by focussing on the question of the possible independence of moral from religious education. Having agreed with certain writers that the two are independent, the paper concludes with a sub‐section on the aims of moral education as a distinct activity.