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

310 ❘
Teaching in the disciplines
training required for oral assessments and presentations. Without levels, such diversity
is not always possible, since there can be no acknowledgement of a stage in which some
carefully accounted risk can be attached to the development of new techniques, which
will then, in turn, be assessed when the student is properly prepared. Although there are
doubtless imaginative ways around this, undifferentiated systems tend to be conservative
in assessment styles, honing very high levels of abilities in specific areas, and founded
upon a homogeneous student body, usually very highly qualified.
There is resistance to progressive-level structures in these disciplines in some quarters
which stems from the essential nature of learning that they share, described at the
beginning of this chapter. Since we are dealing here with content-laden bodies of
knowledge, whose division into manageable portions is to a certain extent arbitrary, or
conceptual, and not based on a linear knowledge pattern in which one stage necessarily
predicates another, then levels are not, specifically, appropriate. Once a foundation has
been established, there is no reason to suppose (for example) that the study of Picasso is
intrinsically any more difficult than the study of Turner, or that the study of postcolonial
ideologies is any more difficult than the study of medieval theology. While some credence
would be attributed to the notion that some primary materials are more difficult, or less
accessible, than some others, this does not immediately convert into the assumption that
they might be, intrinsically, third-level subjects. Academics in these subjects therefore
have strong intellectual grounds for their resistance to models of learning which derive
from content rigidly ordered by standard prerequisites.
Interrogating practice
What is the rationale for progression in the programmes with which you are
familiar? Is there, in your discipline, a convention or an understanding of the
order of topics for study?
TEACHING AND LEARNING
Over the past decade or so, those teaching in the arts, humanities and social sciences have
found their student numbers increasing at a high rate. Most of this increase occurred in
the early 1990s, mirroring expansion within the sector as a whole. One effect of this was
to stimulate reflection on student learning, as tutors discovered that the traditional
techniques on which they had hitherto relied, predominantly the lecture, the seminar
and the tutorial, were proving less effective. The prime reason for this, of course, was
the group size: as tutors struggled to maintain high levels of participative discussion
with their students, they discovered, unsurprisingly, that the seminar was not to be
indefinitely distended, and that whole group discussion around a nominated theme