Putting Graham's name into Google Scholar I came up with another couple of fascinating articles:
- "Towards a pragmatic scholarship of academic development", Quality Assurance in Education, 9, 3, 2001
- "Integrating culture and higher education: a pragmatist approach", European Educational Research Journal, 2, 4, 2003
This showed me it's often worth just following up an article by an author to see where else it takes you. Graham's particularly interesting as much of his writing has been since he retired as Director of the University Centre for Learning and Teaching at what is now Anglia Ruskin University. He writes in an electic style about a range of topics which should interest us all.
Similarly, I've been following up on Ron Barnett's writing and re-found "Learning for an unknown future", Higher Education Research and Development, 23, 3 2004. This could perhaps form the basis of a Thursday morning seminar in the LTI as, despite its quite challenging language, the ideas are really fundamental to our views about curriculum design and pedagogy. There's a particularly useful diagram on pedagogical options which has two axes - educational development/educational transformation and low risk/high risk. The educational transformation/high risk quadrant presents the university with real issues about the nature of the curriculum (not least in relation to accreditation and professional bodies) and the pedagogies used.
Next on my pile is another Ron Barnett article: Coate, K, Barnett, R & Williams, G: "Relationships between teaching and research in Higher Education in England", Higher Education Quarterly, 55, 2, 2001.
What all this reading has also reminded me is that, whilst I do it regularly, I'm not sure how common place it is for us to scan the journals pages on the LITS catalogue and share interesting articles with each other. We perhaps need to develop some annotated bibliographies around some major topics to do with pedagogy, research, scholarship, etc.
Another useful activity would be for us to share some of the literatures used in the Academic Practice and Academic Innovations teams. I suspect that we might see a greater range of authors and countries coming from AI as I'm not sure that in AP there's not enough use made of the North American literature. The same probably goes for journals as well. Any comments?
Is anyone out there and reading (he writes in a somewhat plaintive 'voice')?
4 comments:
yes, we are reading it, and yes, you are right about the Ron Barnett article - it is the sort of thing we should discuss. Re the language, what do you expect from Mr supercomplexity???
Hi Ranald
Your plaintive call for contact has reached us, don't worry! Ali Purves, Abbi and I are sat here now on a Friday afternoon reading both your leisure and work sites. As a devoted cat lover I have to say I find all these dog photos and dog references slightly off-putting, and Pauls' mention of Crufts, but I'm going to put all that to one side! Sounds like you've got lots of new material, reading, thinking to inform your professorial lecture. Looking out of the LTI window onto sunshine and blue skies, but not quite as warm as where you are.
Any news on seeing Alison?
Still here too...I think the idea of sharing literatures makes a lot of sense - and there are some areas (e.g. things like social network theory) where there's a lot of overlap.
We've also been developing an online bibliography (and paper based collection) of educational change literature which are open for everyone to use.
In the cat/dog debate I'd like to request a picture of any monkeys you see on your travels...
Thanks for the comments, folks - and the proof that there is someone out there reading!
Abbi/Anne - see the leisure blog for latest on animals ...
I'm staying with Alison in Christchurch next weekend and then running an Open Space session for the project I'm involved with on Monday.
Post a Comment