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

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Teaching in the disciplines
Grounding is important for the students’ future location of their own work within the
broad map; tools of analysis provide the essential means by which students can define
themselves confidently as active learners, since the primary materials (texts, documents,
data) are converted from an inert condition into the constituents of new meanings and
ideas through the students’ own work. Precisely how either area is designed will be
determined by the particular programme’s character and purpose, which may range from
the highly theoretical through to the pragmatic. What is essential here is that this character,
or philosophy, should be clearly visible to the student, and not something that he or she
is left to work out through arbitrary encounters with tutors of different preferences.
Most universities and colleges now work under the pressure of a system in which space
in their buildings and infrastructure is measured and accounted for in relation to student
numbers and activities. In addition, a great many universities and colleges run modular
schemes which offer student choice both within and across discipline areas. These
common features have large and different effects on the teaching and learning of subject
disciplines that should be acknowledged, and taken into account at the point of
curriculum design: what it is that can be studied cannot be divorced from how it will be
taught, and that, in turn, depends on the availability of resources and time. A curriculum
designer may, for excellent reasons, require four-hour blocks of time only to discover that
a modular timetable prohibits this; similarly, rooms where small groups of students can
work in pairs or fours with adequate facilities may not be available. A further complication
for the disciplines is that many degree structures now require or encourage
students to explore a wide discipline base in their first year, thus minimising the time
available for the foundational phase. Such structures have (probably unbeknown to
themselves) produced a graphic template for curriculum design within the disciplines
that is an inverted pyramid, with students’ subject experience growing from a narrow
base to a broad tip across the three years of their degree.
Foundational experience
Having explored these three critical elements impacting upon the start of students’
studies, we can recombine them into a composite picture, and then develop this across
the extent of the degree programme. Where students are studying a combination of
subjects (and very large numbers of students are in these disciplines, particularly during
the first year, or level), the inverted pyramid, or its near equivalent, is the key factor to be
addressed, since it means that there is only a small proportion of the students’ total study
time available for the foundational phase in each subject. And in the arts, humanities and
social sciences this foundational phase is commonly understood to be, of necessity, rich
in content. Students studying English will usually be introduced to a range of genres,
and some historical contexts, as well as methods of understanding; students of history
will explore a range of periods and locations, or one rich period in depth, so as to maximise
understanding of the different kinds of historical analysis, as well as comprehending the
nature of sources, and historiography. Students of the practical arts will have an