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

Arts, humanities and social sciences
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CONCEPTS
Broadly, the arts and humanities have this in common: they understand themselves to be
an education not primarily structured around the imparting of skills and competences,
but one primarily structured around a series of engagements with a body of knowledge
or (in the case of the practical arts) a body of practice. Although these ‘bodies’ are very
difficult to define or delimit in precise terms, and are continuously disputed by academics
and practitioners, this wide definition holds true.
Of course, a distinction such as this is to an extent artificial. Engaging with knowledge,
or practice, requires the acquisition of methods of understanding, and those in turn
require technical comprehension (in the analysis of language or data, for instance, or in
the understanding of the processes whereby artefacts are made). A student cannot
‘naturally’ engage. He or she must learn the disciplines that govern, or make sense of, the
ways in which we can approach and negotiate knowledge, and this learning could indeed
be legitimately described as accomplishment in ‘skills’. But it is not the imparting of this
accomplishment, primarily, which governs the concept of the educational experience.
Here we discover a major paradox. For just as we cannot fix the centre of the education
in skills, or the range of abilities needed to acquire and negotiate knowledge, neither –
surprisingly – can it be fixed in the other quantity of my definition, the body of knowledge
or practice. This is awkward, frustrating even, but it is essential to understand this if we
are then to comprehend the key aspects of teaching and learning in the arts, humanities
and social sciences. For across the whole spectrum, these subjects are concerned with acts
of continuous reinterpretation and revision. Hence the use of the word ‘engagement’.
These subjects break up the bifurcation, or the conventional grammar, of knowledge and
understanding, just as they break up the equivalent relations between teaching and
learning. Let us explore this for a moment, beginning with the latter pairing.
It was not so long ago that our understanding of classroom practice in higher education
was dominated by notions of teaching. Then the term ‘teaching and learning’ came into
being as a means of acknowledging the student experience both within and beyond the
classroom, and this, commonly, is now inverted (with a somewhat overbearing political
correctness) to become ‘learning and teaching’, in order to give emphasis to the most
powerful armature of the educational experience. Yet whichever way around this phrase
is put, it is an awkward instrument, implying a division between the two elements that
is uncomfortable. At its crudest, this division implies (for instance) an active projection
(teaching) and a passive consumption (learning); or, less crude, synthesis and assimilation
(learning) related to, or deriving from, an activity directed at, or to, or between, the
two primary subjects (teaching the student, teaching the subject). It is clear that these
linguistic structures, or even simply the vocabularies, are forcing awkward divisions.
The term ‘teaching and learning’ can of course refer to an undivided practice involving
both tutor and student: in such cases the force of the conjunction (‘and’) has to be read
very strongly as a unifying force, rather than a yoking together of discrete elements. But
even when this is the intention, the terms are still sufficiently powerful to imply their
separate functions.