Read more
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword, Catherine Manathunga (University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia)
Part I: Considering the Landscape
1. Thinking beyond Neoliberal Discourses
2. Thinking and Doing with Theory
Part II: Putting Theory to Work
3. Positioning the Student
4. The University Environment
5. Ecologies of Teaching and Ecosystems of Learning
6. Expertise in Context
Part III: Emerging Polyvalent Lines of Flight
7. Contested Concepts in Higher Education
8. Concept Mapping
9. After Method
10. Towards a Relational Pedagogy
References
Index
About the author
Ian M. Kinchin is Professor in Higher Education in the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK.Karen Gravett is Associate Professor in Higher Education at the University of Surrey, UK.
Summary
This book examines the dominant discourses in higher education. From the moment teachers enter higher education, they are met with dominant discourses that are often adopted uncritically, including concepts such as teaching excellence, student voice, and student engagement. Teachers are also met with simplistic binaries such as teaching vs. research, quantitative vs. qualitative research, and constructivists vs. positivists. Kinchin and Gravett suggest that this may present a distorted view, contributing to the disconnect between the aims and observable practice of higher education. Rather than celebrating difference, dominant discourses tend to seek similarities in an attempt to simplify and manage the environment.
In this book, the authors share their belief that teaching and learning should be a thoughtful endeavour. Thinking with a breadth of theories, the authors explore the overlaps between different perspectives in order to offer a richer and more inclusive interrogation of the dominant discourses that pervade higher education. Offering methodological approaches to explore these perspectives, the authors bring together academics working in different parts of the university and examine the concept of a ‘rich cartography’, considering how this can offer meaning within higher education research and practice.
Foreword
Examines the dominant discourses in higher education that can potentially overcome the binaries in perspectives commonly used, offering fresh perspectives and mapping multiple sector issues
Additional text
Kinchin and Gravett provoke us to go between and beyond accepted binaries in higher education research and scholarship. Through theory, research and reflections on practice they aim to disorient and disrupt comforting dichotomies, but also offer a map to think, and do, higher education more reflectively.
