FW: References on the shift from 'teaching' to 'teaching and learning'

 

 

Hi all,

 

I wanted to say a very belated thankyou to everyone who responded to my request back in March for references, literature, ideas etc. about the terminological shift from ‘teaching’ to ‘teaching and learning’. It really helped me develop my ideas, which I’m going to be presenting at the SRHE conference in Newport on Thursday. The paper is at https://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2017/abstracts/0143.pdf, and the abstract is below. The general discussion was helpful, the specific references people gave me were:

·         The Dearing Report

·         Barr and Tagg (1995) ‘From teaching to learning’

·         Biesta (2005) ‘Against learning’

·         Anderson (2006) British Universities: Past and present

·         Biesta (2012) ‘Giving teaching back to education’

·         Dolence and Norris (1995) Transforming higher education: A vision for learning in the 21^st Century

·         Oblinger (1998) The future compatible campus

 

In terms of personal recollections, for most people it was the mid-90s when they first encountered the phrase ‘teaching and learning’ (or ‘learning and teaching’), though there was one as far back as 1985. Google’s Ngram Viewer (which tracks word usage in books) does suggest an explosion of uses of ‘teaching and learning’ in the mid-80s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=teaching+and+learning%2C+learning+and+teaching&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cteaching%20and%20learning%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Clearning%20and%20teaching%3B%2Cc0

 

Abstract: The tyranny of ‘teaching and learning’

 

Over the course of the last few decades, the acknowledgement of the primacy of learning has in large part led

to the replacement of the word ‘teaching’ by the phrase ‘teaching and learning’ (or ‘learning and teaching’). This

paper argues that the ubiquitous conjunction of teaching and learning has two implications: that they always

occur together, and that they are of equal value. Drawing on the philosophical literature on the ambiguous

nature of the concept of learning, the paper aims to show that those two implications are in direct conflict with

the ideas that motivated the shift away from teaching in the first place. The repetitive conjunction of teaching

and learning undermines the important efforts to give learning its rightful place, and we should give more

thought to how we talk about higher education rather than repeat self-defeating slogans.

 

Thanks everyone for all the help!

 

Best wishes,

 

Alex

 

Dr Alex Buckley SFHEA

Learning Enhancement Adviser

Education Enhancement

University of Strathclyde

T: +44 (0)141 548 3673

 

The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, number SC015263.