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

Arts, humanities and social sciences
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Interrogating practice
How can curricula be designed so as to serve the needs of students and tutors
in monitoring progress in the early stages? What are the best practical means
of providing feedback to students that will allow them to identify strengths
and weaknesses?
Students’ threshold knowledge and ability
The majority of students in these disciplines will be coming from a school or college
experience with a highly structured learning environment, which apportions tasks and
assessments in a phased programme of learning. Others will be coming from access
courses, or the equivalent, which are traditionally more intimate learning environments
in which peer and tutor support are key elements. In addition, most of them will be
impelled to follow disciplines in the arts, humanities and social sciences not as a means
to a specific end, but because they have elected for an education of personal development
which marks them out as an individual, and not simply as a consumer of knowledge
and skills. In this education, pleasure and satisfaction, those orphans of a utilitarian
educational policy, are essential motivators, and they will have been developed in, and
practised by, the students in many different curriculum contexts. Here, then, is a series
of challenges for the curriculum designer: the students will find themselves in a learning
environment that treats them as independent learners expected to construct, for the most
part, their own particular interests and responses within the broad remit of their modules;
they will find themselves less supported by peers or schooling; they will be seeking,
amidst this, to sustain and develop further the pleasures and satisfaction that probably
governed their choice of degree. All the time, during the first year, they will want to know
how they are doing; their lecturers, in the meantime, will be concerned to know much the
same thing, perhaps from another perspective. Feedback, therefore, is all-important, and
is a vital agency to be used in the complex acculturation of the student in the early stages
of higher education, where the new cultural forces at play are particularly volatile (see
Barnett, 1990: 95–109).
Each department, ideally, will be agreed on how their students should develop in the
first level of their study. Most will want to be assured that, whatever the students’ prior
experience, they will be well prepared for the second and third levels of their degrees, and
able to choose an appropriate and coherent pattern of study where choice is an option.
For most academics in these disciplines, the design of the early stages of the curriculum
should be governed by the need to achieve an optimum balance between a grounding in
knowledge and the establishment of the necessary tools of analysis, including the
acquisition of a critical, theoretical or analytical vocabulary.