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

Arts, humanities and social sciences
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or topic became more and more difficult. In subjects where the principle of learning itself
relies so heavily on participation in discussion, and the exchange of ideas between peers,
the advent of high student numbers, combining with the erosion of the unit of resource,
produced something close to a crisis in the understanding of how students were to be
best taught.
A whole stream of new techniques began to be adopted in the face of this difficulty, and
these are perhaps best described as regenerative rather than revolutionary, since most
were concerned not to alter radically the aim of the learning experience, but to sustain and
continue to develop its best aspects. As a result, most subjects are now still operating
within a framework of teaching delineated by the lecture, the seminar and the workshop
(supplemented by tutorials in specific cases). These terms are capable between them of
classifying most of the formal teaching contact, but, in reality, they cover a wide repertoire
of teaching techniques. It is also the case that in themselves, lectures and seminars do not
adequately describe the current learning environment, which, in practice, is made up of
a much wider range of elements, many of which have developed as a response to
harnessing technology to enhance the learning process. Disciplines such as history and
archaeology were early advocates of the benefits to be accrued from the use of IT, and are
discussed at length in the first edition of this Handbook (Cowman and Grace, 1999). Case
study 2 looks at the harnessing of technology to support the teaching of philosophy.
Case study 2: Teaching the history of modern philosophy
I tell my students that philosophy is an activity that they can learn only by doing.
This applies as much to its history as to any other aspect of the subject. Struggling
through a difficult primary text is like climbing a mountain – and if I were
teaching them mountaineering, they would feel cheated if all I did was to show
them pictures of the view from the summit, and describe the wrong routes taken
by other mountaineers. They need to get their boots on, and work up a sweat.
In teaching the history of philosophy, the easiest method (for teachers and
students alike) is for teachers to give the students their own interpretation of the
text. But then the students have no need or motive to read the text itself, and they
are left feeling cheated. It isn’t reasonable to expect them to plough through page
after page of material which they don’t have the background knowledge to
understand. So how can they be helped? As with mountaineering, one can help
by removing unnecessary obstacles, and by guiding them through the difficulties
that remain.
One unnecessary obstacle for philosophy students (though not necessarily for
students in other humanities disciplines) is linguistic. When I first gave a course
comparing Descartes and Hobbes, students complained that they couldn’t