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

Arts, humanities and social sciences
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The description of active and engaged students involved in the contestation of knowledge
may sound rather too much like a highly idealised notion of a community of learning
without hierarchies or differentiations, in which a liberal or postmodern philosophy
denies the validity of knowledge, because it can only ever be provisional, or relative. And
perhaps in its most abstract sense, the concepts described amount to something of the
kind. But we do not live in an abstract universe. We live in a material one, and the
materialisation of these concepts, most obviously in the construction of a curriculum, in
classroom practice, in the three or four years of a conventional undergraduate education,
requires a good pragmatic response that is still capable of acknowledging the intellectual
underpinning of our subjects. In this sense, perhaps, we can distinguish between the
subject (as a concept) and the discipline (as a practice). Our first task, therefore, is to decide
on strategies that are fit for purpose, and to consider curriculum design, and the context
that such a design provides for the teaching which brings it to life.
CURRICULA AND CURRICULUM DESIGN
Designing curricula is in itself a predicate of change, since it offers the opportunity to
reflect on past practice and assumptions, usually through the stimuli of student and staff
feedback on the one hand, and research-generated change on the other. At the same time,
because it is essential to conceive of the student as active participant, curricula need to
be designed with the desiderata that the students following the curriculum should be
stimulated by it. For some, or perhaps now only a benighted few, curriculum design is
an odd, new concept. Believing that the values of the subject are sacrosanct and should
therefore remain undisturbed, they might prefer, therefore, to teach the subject as a reified
object (rather than a field of human activity), regardless of its context (an insistence, in
other words, on teaching the subject rather than the students). Quite apart from this being
an indefensible stance in the face of cultural and intellectual change, it is pedagogically
irresponsible in its denial of the need to recognise the student and the contextualisation
of student learning. Curricula in the arts, humanities and social sciences have a
wide variation, for the scope of study is enormous. First, there are the conventional
subdivisions within the conventional disciplines, which include cultural and period
divisions, there are also subdisciplines (e.g. within language and linguistics), and in the
practical arts, divisions of genre (e.g. drawing, performance, painting, printmaking,
sculpture, ceramics). Second, there are interdisciplinary areas, some growing out of
marriages between subjects (e.g. literature and history); others the result of relatively
recent political, social or technological/cultural developments (gender studies on the one
hand, media studies on the other); yet more that derive from theoretical challenges to
conventionally conceived areas (there are, for example, many people working within the
broad province of ‘English’ who will see themselves, primarily, as cultural historians, or
cultural critics). Third, there are new, distinct areas growing out of more conventional
regions of practice: thus visual culture is developing out of media and cultural studies
on the one hand, and art history on the other; creative writing is developing out of English,