On Friday, 18 of June 2010, Ron Barnett (University of London) is holding the friday lecture "Imagining the Curriculum". The lecture will be opened by Vice Rector Arthur Mettinger. Respondents are Elke Mader (Vice Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences) and Matthias Vigl (ÖH). Ron Barnett is a leading authority on the conceptual and theoretical understanding of the university and on higher education. Brigitte Kossek, Center for Teaching and Learning, interviewed the well known scholar about the educational role of large universities. |
Brigitte Kossek: In many European countries, and in particular in Austria, considerable financial pressure is being put on the already limited financial budgets of our universities while the number of students is continually rising. In your approach to Higher Education you represent students as individuals with a will to learn and not as numbers and statistical objects as it is often the case in politics. You have recently served as a Special Adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee Inquiry into Universities and Students. Could you please mention the most important points of advice you offered to the House of Commons?
Ron Barnett: I think that the key matters that I tried to get across as an adviser were those of (a) the profound differences that there are across students - I reflect now that a phrase such as 'the student body' should be outlawed! - and (b) the need to support students educationally. On the latter, immodestly I may have had some influence in the Committee making a definite point about improving feedback to students, that it should be prompt and helpful and supportive when so much feedback to students takes too long, is perfunctory, is unclear, and is even too often deflating - such that it diminishes students' will to learn.
Kossek: The University of Vienna is one of the largest universities in Central Europe. At present, about 86,000 students are enrolled in 180 courses. Our university is also the largest teaching and research institution in Austria. How would you describe the educational role of large universities at the beginning of the 21st century?
Barnett: The educational role of large universities is that of smaller universities - that of educating students. But the educational role of large and research-intensive universities presents both opportunities and challenges. The big challenge is that of effecting a positive relationship between a university's research and the teaching functions; the opportunity is that of effecting new kinds of relationship between a university's research and the teaching function …
Kossek: Taking the educational role of the university into account: Could you please outline some important factors in designing the curricula?
Barnett: I offer ten principles ('commandments'):
1) Providing real space to students (not clogging their curricula with formal teaching) - cf the idea of 'learning spaces',
2) giving students significant responsibility for achieving their own learning goals,
3) encouraging and enabling students to range across boundaries (of fields and of presentation),
4) curricula and pedagogies that call students into different states of (their) being,
5) encouraging/ facilitating students in their extra-mural learning ('lifewide learning'),
6) engagement by students on primary material (whatever that might mean in different fields), so that their experiences are 'first-handed' and offer an authentic encounter with strangeness,
7) giving students space to reflect on their experiences,
8) encouraging collaborative learning between (groups of) students, whatever that might mean in different fields,
9) explicitness (so far as practicable) in curricula, pedagogies and assessment forms and criteria and
10) helpful, timely and supportive feedback to students.
These ten 'commandments' might amount to a revolution, in which students are challenged and enabled to encounter themselves and to become authors, to a significant extent, of their own educational being and becoming - and not merely the adjuncts to academics' knowledge interests or just the recipients of 'an educational experience'. (It would mean a revolution in our concepts of 'teaching' and 'learning'.)
Kossek: What do you mean, when you speak of the end of knowledge in Higher Education in the globalized present, which you also describe as the 'age of uncertainty and of ambiguity'?
Barnett: The end of 'knowledge' is a radical way of pointing to the essentially open-ended character of 'knowledge' in modernity ('hypermodernity' as some now term it - beyond 'postmodernity'). I am attracted to Bauman's idea of the 'liquid'. We cannot abandon the concept of knowledge but it is now a liquid knowledge. This has curricula and pedagogical implications - see my ten commandments.
Kossek: Do gender, postcolonial cultural studies and/or disability studies which - from different perspectives - share a commitment to deconstruct norms and to further expand democracy in society and in institutions like universities, influence your scholarly work?
Barnett: I confess that I have not brought these perspectives much into my work. I have been more concerned with trying to develop and to identify universal categories, which would include those who are marginalised or overlooked or downvalued but would not necessarily privilege any particular category.
Kossek: The notion of being, the now of being, plays an important role in your work. Is Jacques Lacan's conception that the subject is in being essentially split and alienated relevant to your philosophical discussion of being? Could the lack of the subject - the longing to be somewhere else or to be somebody else be related to the will to learn?
Barnett: To my shame, I can't comment on Lacan, whose work I have not directly encountered. The way you have put your question is extremely provocative - in the very best sense of being provocative - and offers much on which I shall have to dwell, especially its idea of longing to be elsewhere. That is a fascinating idea.
Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of Education of the University of London. His intellectual work is strongly shaped by his particular interest in teaching and learning. He has received many high-ranking awards and is the recipient of the inaugural 'Distinguished Researcher' prize of the European Association for Institutional Research (EAIR). His complex and demanding work is a valuable and inspiring source for the university management and teachers, as well as students.
friday lecture: Ronald Barnett (University of London): "Imagining the Curriculum"
Friday, 18 of June 2010, 13.30 - 15 p.m.
University of Vienna, Stair 8, 2nd floor, Lecture Hall 50
Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring 1, 1010 Wien
Program and further information
Abstract
Dr. Brigitte Kossek works at the Center for Teaching and Learning / CTL and is responsible for the friday lectures' program.
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