Marshall Gregory

Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Teacherly Ethos

Curriculum versus Pedagogy In considering how curriculum and teaching influence education, it is revealing to note that most faculty members treat curriculum the way bankers treat investments. They generally spend much time, planning, and careful thought on curricular matters — reasoning here, analyzing there, relying on experience, and carefully considering both the long-term and short-term dividends of knowledge—but when it comes to teaching, many faculty members operate less like bankers and more like barnstormers, flying by the seat of their pants and guiding themselves primarily by instinct or by repeating whatever worked yesterday. Few teachers feel that they have either the intellectual or professional grasp of teaching that they have of curriculum. Plato’s complaint about poets and politicians (as opposed to craftsmen or philosophers) — that they always operate by rules of thumb, even when they are brilliant, and thus can neither explain how they do what they do nor teach the doing of it to others— describes all teachers at least some of the time. All teachers need to remember that exposing students to a wellthought-out curriculum is not the same thing as educating them, if educating them means, as I think it does, helping them learn how to integrate the contents of the curriculum into their minds, hearts, and everyday lives. Much of the time, academic considerations of education bracket off to the side the allimportant fact that teaching not only influences but often determines what students make of the curriculum. A good illustration of my point is offered by

Real Teaching and Real Learning vs Narrative Myths about Education

All real classrooms are saturated in the fictional narratives about education from TV and movies that swirl about thickly and persistently in western culture, yet the influence that these fictions exert on real teachers and real students is seldom examined. This article argues that since these fictional narratives nearly always deal in recycled stereotypes of both students and teachers, and that since these stereotypes are both ubiquitous and compelling, and that since they seldom receive critical attention, the influence they exert on real teachers and real students is to mislead, confuse, and impoverish their evaluations of and expectations about the nature of genuine education.

From Shakespeare on the Page to Shakespeare on the Stage: What I Learned about Teaching in Acting Class

This chapter is about both the difficulty and the usefulness of learning to see how differently our teaching might look—not to mention how our teaching might change—if we could get a view of it from the perspective of a totally different context than the one we are most used to. I was lucky enough to receive such an eye-opening view when I took an undergraduate Shakespeare acting class for theater majors at my home university. I did not do what any other busy faculty member with good sense might have done, which would have been to take just part of the course or merely hang around the fringes. No, in keeping with my full-bore approach to almost everything, I took all of the exercises and assignments. I will never forget the elocution exercise that entailed my being rolled back and forth on a gym mat by two undergraduate women while I recited my soliloquy from Hamlet using only vowels, no consonants.

Introductory Courses, Student Ethos, and Living the Life of the Mind

The term introductory courses is perhaps unfortunate, for introduc tory is an adjective that often car ries a slight. Insofar as introductory courses implies that they are less substan tial than advanced courses, it masks the truth that students often find their intro ductory courses harder to master? because they are novices?than upper level courses they take later on. Students are always more vulnerable to failure, either perceived or real, in the initial stages of learning than they are after hav ing been seasoned by experience.

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

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:

The Politics of Difference vs the Ethics of Essentializing Looking Back and Looking Forward in Humanities Discourse about Human Nature

Now that the intensity of the Culture Wars has abated, a humanities discourse about human nature that has been practically impossible to conduct in nonpartisan terms for the last 25 years or so can be revisited and reconstructed. In an attempt to revive that discourse, the following argument critiques the extreme postmodern position of ‘constructed humanity’ and offers an argument about the necessity and usefulness of a modest version of essentialism based on the ethical claim that respect for the Other can only be made with authority when it is based on an appeal to common humanity, not when it is based on an appeal to some ad hoc, abstract principle of Difference. Yet postmodern claims about the shaping pressures of language, history, culture, gender, race, ethnicity, and class play important roles in helping us understand how a common human nature gets mediated by cultural contexts. In the end the Humanities need the perspectives of both humanists and postmodernists to keep humanistic discourse about human nature rich and productive.

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:

Forgetting, Learning, and Living: How Education Makes a Difference Even Though We Forget Most of What We Learn

Teaching is an ancient activity so thickly encrusted with multiple layers of history and conventions and narratives that it is difficult to see it with fresh eyes. American culture is awash in stories and stereotypes about schooling that range across personal anecdotes, TV programs, movies, and common stereotypes. References to these stories and stereotypes can and do pop up in nearly any venue or conversation. All of us are familiar with such images as the absent-minded humanities professor who mismatches his socks and never combs his hair, the nerdy science professor who burns acid holes in his neckties, the mean teachers, the prudes, the cool guys, the scary smart aristocratic types with a talent for humiliating students, or, finally, the sensitive teachers who (especially when played by glamorous, attractive actors) inspire their students to overcome unwanted pregnancies, abusive families, dirt-floor poverty, and school systems that have already counted them out. Our culture is so saturated with such myths, narratives, images, and stereotypes that it is difficult for real life teachers and real life students to see and own their own educational experiences.

What Is Teaching, After All?

Some readers may wonder why the chapter that asks “what is teaching, after all?” appears as Chapter 8 instead of Chapter 1. The reason is that the nuances and subtleties of the analysis I wish to offer here will resonate much more deeply (I think) now that I have taken time to discuss both my educational philosophy and many of teaching’s important dynamics in everyday classrooms. I hope my discussion here will be seen as an extension of arguments that I have been making from page one rather than as a pert and peppy way to give book buyers their money’s worth by offering a carry-away definition. Besides, my notion of what-teaching-is-after-all is not a starting point. It is a culmination, the consequence of many prior considerations.