Disciplines, discourse and Orientalism: the implications for postgraduate certificates in learning and teaching in higher education

Despite national requirements for accredited teaching qualifications to promote understanding of ‘how students learn, both generally and in the subject’ (HEA, 2006), there is a lack of literature internationally on disciplinary differences in student learning in higher education. Academics at a UK research intensive university were asked to report on the existence of literature or folkloric knowledge concerned with how students learnt in their subject. No relevant literature or folklore were identified but responses did demonstrate a discourse in which the academics constructed their discipline as ‘better’ than other disciplines: the finding with which the present paper is concerned. The discourse of the distinctiveness and superiority of ones own discipline can be understood as a form of ‘Orientalism’. A postcolonial analysis of the discourse of disciplinary relationships offers a partial explanation for challenges made to the validity of cross-university activities, such as postgraduate certificates in learning and teaching

Educational Development and Strategic Planning

Teaching is an intervention which allows someone to learn as fully as they are able. Universities and colleges should provide students with the structures and support they need to learn, and recognise and minimise the barriers to learning which do not relate to a student‟s ability. We are still only part of the way along the journey of understanding what we need to provide our students with in order to enable them to learn best, what kinds of interventions can and should be made, what skills and attributes are needed by teachers and leaders in post compulsory education. Strategic planning in educational development is about finding out what should be done to improve our provision for students, and putting the resources and infrastructure in place to enable those changes to happen

In my discipline, or interdisciplinary?

Shân Wareing discusses the relationship between ‘generic’ and ‘subject-specific’ training

Measuring the Success of Active Blended Learning

Active blended learning (ABL) is a defining aspect of the University of Northampton and has generated national and global interest. Within a few months of the author taking up a senior leadership position with the university, ABL was a significant positive factor in the university's ability to lock down the campus in response to COVID-19 and deliver education remotely. However, there is a scarcity of evaluation of ABL to provide evidence of the scale of its adoption in the university, its forms in different academic disciplines, its impact on different groups of students, and how to improve its effectiveness. Ideally, evaluation is always integral to pedagogic initiatives. It is however a reality that evaluation comes with challenges. This chapter explores why evaluation is so important and also so difficult. It proposes a way forward in the context of ABL by combining nationally available metrics with small-scale case studies