Academics Adrift in Late Modernity – A Way Forward

THURSDAY 29 JANUARY, 3:00-4:30PM
IN COUNCIL CHAMBERS

This lecture is about academic teaching and student learning. It acknowledges that education today runs the risk of becoming solely a contribution to economic growth as it is delivered according to prescribed outcomes. Knowledge is thus commodified, pre-planned, and measured against the monetary investments made.
In opposition to this, this lecture takes a stand for academic thinking, learning as a cognitive labour, and teaching as a means to support student learning and personal development. Academic teaching should be a profound activity in need of constant development and refinement.
However, higher education organisations of today are in many ways in bad shape to defend such academic values. They largely depend on often-isolated individuals and thus become vulnerable to external forces and divide-and-conquer strategies. It is here the lecture suggests a way forward.
The case put forward as an argument describes a European research-intensive institution with 45 000 students where evidence of measurable effects on student learning have been achieved. The institution has deployed Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as a strategy. It includes pedagogical courses supporting individual teachers’ ability to observe and analyse context-specific teaching situations in combination with arenas where teachers go public, discuss, and are rewarded for their contributions to an institution-wide conversation on teaching and student learning.
The lecture further outlines how these measures through an intensified campus-wide academic conversation support collegiality, academic freedom, critical thinking, and scientific inquiry. The result is a strengthened organization, both in its capacity to support student learning and to withstand external pressure.