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

Arts, humanities and social sciences
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equivalent need to understand such breadth through their own practice (although the
nature of such programmes usually means that their students have progressed somewhat
further with this experience because of the benefit of the extra year provided by their
foundation year, or its equivalent in access courses). Since this foundation is already
compressed by the need to maximise feedback and concurrently build both knowledge
and tools of analysis, curriculum designers are commonly forced into some hard,
discretionary thinking that will focus on identifying essential components. In these
subjects, such a phase is likely to have a broad and representative content rather than a
narrow one, in order to allow the student sufficient introduction to the variety and kinds
of materials to be discovered later in more depth. At the same time, a broad content will
also provide sufficient range for the introduction of the different modes of analysis that
will be refined as the students progress.
Interrogating practice
If the foundational phase of the programme is broad based, what are the
implications for work at the subsequent levels in your discipline? Conversely,
if it is narrow (part of the inverted pyramid), what are the implications?
For a great many departments, discretionary thinking comes down to difficult and
practical choices. What can be achieved within the established resource? Can the resource
(between the three levels of the student experience) be redistributed? Should first-year
students receive more, intensive teaching, since so little time is available in which so
much needs to be established?
These questions have an added urgency for those departments that are offering an
undifferentiated second stage (that is to say where modules are not designated by
progression at levels 2 and 3, but are offered to all students at both levels). Here, even more
pressure is exerted on the first stage, since students will progress into classes in which the
expectations attached to second-year full-time students will be the same as those in their
third year. Where the curriculum designer is faced with a differentiated system at levels
2 and 3, however, there is an opportunity, and in the case of a steeply angled inverted
pyramid structure, possibly an imperative, to push introductory work up into the second
level.
Institutional infrastructure and levels
Levels are therefore useful devices for curriculum designers attempting to plot carefully
student progression. Three levels will reduce the intense pressure of the first-level
experience; they may also allow a steady gradient of assessment tasks to be plotted
similarly, to allow, for instance, the nurturing of independent research skills, or the