A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

20
Key aspects of
teaching and
learning in arts,
humanities and
social sciences
Philip W. Martin
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this chapter is not to provide a catalogue of classroom techniques, but to
ask a series of questions about what it is that we do in the classroom, and why we do it.
Two axioms provide the basis for this chapter. First, at the centre is placed the student as
active subject. That is to say that there is no presumption here, at any point, that passive
learning, or the consumption of knowledge, is at all possible within the arts and
humanities. No colleague teaching in these areas would demur from the legitimacy of
this axiom, yet, at the same time, some would also see it as an ideal proposition. Second,
arts, humanities and social sciences are disciplinary fields which are heavily value-laden.
That all education may be value-laden is doubtless a contention to be taken seriously (see
Rowland, 2000: 112–14) but the point to be stressed is that the academic subject areas
addressed in this chapter are cored through and through with ethical issues, social
concerns, judgement, and the recognition of human agency, in a way that hotel and
catering management, for example, cannot be, and in a way that physics, for example,
may not be. So discussion of teaching and learning in these subject areas consistently
acknowledges the high degree of volatility that derives from a rich constitutional
chemistry: in these classrooms the validity of personal opinion, subjectivity, individual
experience and creative scepticism mix with judgements about right and wrong, truth and
untruth, order and chaos. Our task as teachers is to ensure that such judgements as emerge
are best provided for by being well informed, and that this threshold of information is
also served by a schooling in argument, the careful presentation and interpretation of
evidence, and the identification of the valuable questions that need to be asked.
❘
300
❘