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

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Teaching in the disciplines
and even as it does so, it is cross-fertilising with journalism, and script-writing from
performance or film studies programmes. Although change is a constant condition of
arts, humanities and social sciences, the pace of change is faster than ever before in this
growing fluidity, this proliferation of cusps between subjects, as well as in the emergence
of powerful new areas. Alternatively, the current context of change may be read less
positively as a dissolution of the disciplines (Barnett, 1994: 126–39).
Interrogating practice
To what extent do you understand your subject as a practice whose borders
are defined by particular disciplinary procedures? What do you think
students expect of the subject, and how would you explain to them its
coherence and/or its interdisciplinary connections?
The first question confronting us when we begin curriculum design is that of situating
our programme within this intellectual ferment, and although the prospect of marking
out such territory is exciting, it also has to be done with the utmost care, to ensure that
our own enthusiasm for exploration does not result in chaos or confusion for the students.
Potentially good programmes can be easily marred by the unconscious displacement of
academics’ intellectual enthusiasms, or crises, into the student experience.
So, marking out the territory is an essential first stage, but this must be done
concurrently with an understanding of the student body, and a conceptualisation of what
the whole programme may add up to. This, again, is challenging. There is a huge diversity
in student intake nationally in these areas, and in some cases this diversity has almost as
great a range in individual institutions. Academics now teach mixed-ability classes more
than they ever used to, and all the signs are that this will continue and spread – even to
institutions long accustomed to accepting only very highly qualified A level candidates.
The implications for teaching and learning in general are considerable, but there are also
very particular implications for curriculum design. Without a doubt, it is most usually
the first level of a programme that deservedly receives the most attention in all curriculum
design activities. Most academics have a clear idea about where they want their students
to be upon completion of the degree, and their understanding of their discipline is such
that they are confident about how a graduate in that discipline should be defined. Much
less certainty now attends the understanding of how undergraduates should begin their
degrees, and the reasons for this are manifold. First, the threshold of students’ knowledge
and abilities is no longer assumed to be stable or held in common (Haslem, 1998: 117–18).
Second, every department will have its own understanding of the foundational
experience required by the students. Third, institutional infrastructures and structures –
and particularly those determined by modular schemes – would exert a strong logistical
influence over what is possible. Each of these is addressed in turn below.