Jan Parker

Reconceptualising the curriculum: from commodification to transformation

This article inveighs against the prevalent commodified discourse in Higher Education especially as it impacts on curriculum planning, quality assurance and learner typologies. It expresses a concern that educational research, in offering models drawn, but now divorced from, practice, may contribute to this negative impact. As an example, a polarised model distinguishing features of ‘traditional’ from ‘emerging’ curricula is criticised as contributing to this commodification; as diminishing the status of university teachers, as offering an instrument to reductive quality assurance systems and as militating against the disciplines operating as communities of practice. In contradistinction to this dichotomizing model, but extrapolating from the same article, a ‘both/and’ model outlining elements of process- and discipline community-based ‘transformational curricula’ is offered. It is perhaps impossible to write about the evils of externalised models and reductively abstract discourse without contribut ing to that very effect. The article therefore ends with two voices which are not those of educational researchers.

Writing, Revising and Practising the Disciplines: Carnegie, Cornell and the scholarship of teaching

Two centres of pedagogic excellence and innovation, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Cornell University’s Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines are influencing ideas and pedagogic practice outside as well as inside the US. The movement for scholarship of teaching which resulted in and is developed by the Carnegie’s Scholars Program, demands status and energy to be devoted to the proper study of university teaching and learning. ‘Writing in the Disciplines’ at Cornell evolved from generic composition classes to a distinctive programme which covers all undergraduate subjects and levels and all levels of Faculty in the corporate endeavour to ‘write the discipline’. The article considers the implication for Arts and Humanities in higher education and for disciplinarity itself of their programmes and of three important and thought provoking books produced by the two centres.

Diversity and the Academy.

This essay comes from pondering the relationship, queried in the Call for this Special Issue, between the ‘language of diversity’ and the ‘embracing of different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing’ in the university. The issue of diversity is usually a sociological rather than an epistemological one—the access to and inclusion in higher education of individuals from under-represented groups, groups defined by previous education qualifications, class, ethnicity or gender. But the presumption of access courses, at least, is that such personal diversity, once (hopefully) welcomed into the university, is then normalised (inter alia, Lillis & Turner, 2001). So the Call, by linking the two, raises two questions explored here—should the university be a place of heterodoxies rather than orthodoxy: should it embrace different ways of knowing? And, what should be done with personal, diverse and potentially troublesome ways of knowing?

Future Priorities of the Humanities in Europe: What Have the Humanities to Offer?: Report of a round table conference held to draft a manifesto for the European Commissioner and working papers for the EC Working Party on Future Priorities for Humanities Research

Humanities-based speakers and delegates to the European Commission conference on ‘Social Sciences and Humanities in Europe: New Challenges, New Opportunities’ gathered at the end of the meeting to develop a proactive Humanities special interest group. For, as Professor Gabriele Griffin said in her keynote speech to the conference (published in this journal, 5[3]), the Arts and Humanities have a great deal more to offer than the European research community and the Commissioner for Research are aware. The result was a round-table conference organized by the Humanities higher Education Research Group, the international group based in and supported by the Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology, to which senior humanities scholars and members of the EC Working Party on Future Priorities for the Humanities were invited. The outcomes were: a manifesto to go to the European Commissioner for Research; and agenda-setting papers for the Working Party’s consideration. But as everybody there said afterwards, so much more was achieved – wide-ranging and inspiring discussion about the nature and function of the Arts and Humanities and of research; heated argument about what Europe ought to know about the Humanities and what the Humanities ought to know and say about itself.

By way of conclusion: some general implications of Patchworking

In reflecting on our students’ experiences, we reflect also on our own experiences as teachers and assessors. The point has been made again and again that to change the assessment of a course changes also the teaching and learning on that course. The result is that in the case studies as well as in the opening chapter and our ‘retrospective discussion’ there are challenges to received ideas about the provinces of and interaction between the ‘Big 3’ elements of pedagogy: Teaching, Learning and Assessment. This ‘quasi-conclusion’ is a patchwork of comments and claims about the nature and larger implications of ‘patchworking’ from the preceding articles and the records of discussions which we as a team of researchers have held over the nearly three years of the project.

Learning from the Patchwork Text process – a retrospective discussion

After about two years of work with the Patchwork Text process in our different contexts, and after writing our individual case studies, we decided we would like to put together a ‘joint statement’ about what we had learned. Given the quite different directions in which each of us had taken the original general idea, this was itself necessarily conceived as a sort of Patchwork. We decided we would individually prepare a statement of specific ideas that had emerged from our own work, but present them in a spoken forum, so that discussion of points of difference and overlap could take place. The occasion was tape-recorded and transcribed, and the transcription was then edited, to convert the inevitable vagaries of speech into a readable text.

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

Humanities Higher Education: New Models, New Challenges

This chapter argues that challenges from outside the university system have run concurrent with challenges from within — about the nature of knowledge, the discipline as a structurer of that knowledge and about the purpose of higher education — by philosophers of education and philosophers of language. It argues that a new model is needed: one that comes from the domain of the Humanities and is based on humanities’ distinct pedagogy. It suggests, moreover, that the construction of such a new model, if based on a clear and appropriate understanding of the relationship of knowledge to skill acquisition in the humanities, can provide a much-needed rationale for Higher Education as a whole.

Academics' virtual identities

The article discusses considerations on the virtual identities and relationships created between students and teachers through Internet, such as Facebook and Web 2.0, in the academic environment. It points out the disadvantages inherent to the new wave of communications through computer technologies in which academics and students communicate virtually. It states that whether the purpose of which the technology is intended to use is purely education, students and teachers may become curious to use it in any other ways out of education which, as history tells, could damage the integrity and reputation of both communicators, failing the purpose of education.

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: