Reclaiming the Teaching Discourse in Higher Education

This book examines university teaching to encourage a move away from the singular lens of neoliberalism towards more a pluralistic stance that inspires a healthy diversity of theories and practices. University teaching is dominated by neoliberal cultures of measurement, consumerism and deficit, generating a monocultural narrative that disenfranchises the higher education teaching community. Collaborative communities of support are now perceived as performative regimes of surveillance, and existing injustices in the education system have been amplified by institutional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book offers a reappraisal of the current state of university teaching, and re-imaginings of potential futures. Inspired by emerging perspectives in educational research and building upon Biesta’s notion of the ‘rediscovery of teaching’, the book encourages an escape from accepted wisdom, liberating teaching from the bonds of reductive binary and linear thinking, and accepting the need for a plurality of theoretical perspectives.

While universities use popular terms such as student-centredness, global excellence, active learning, and so on, and will highlight key performance metrics such as student satisfaction or teaching excellence awards, the reality is that much current teaching practice is rather ‘traditional’, ‘teacher-centred’, ‘passive’, and ‘content heavy’. Despite managerial emphasis on ‘best practice’ and ‘evidence-based practice’, teaching is not reducible to a simple set of competencies and student learning is not adequately summarised as a list of graduate attributes. Teaching is relational and highly context dependent, and our discussion of teaching should recognise this. The performative culture pervading many campuses can dampen down large-scale innovation, leaving marginalised pockets of subversive collaboration and experimentation to operate below the corporate radar. Here the contributors give voice to some of those emerging ideas and challenge neoliberal orthodoxy.