Making Sense of Teaching in Difficult Times

Thinking about teaching in educational terms has become increasingly difficult because of the conceptions of higher education that predominate in both policy and public debate. Framing the benefits of higher education simply as an economic good poses particular difficulties for making educational sense of teaching. Moreover, the assumptions about social mobility, usefulness, and the economic advantages of higher education, upon which these conceptions are based, can no longer be taken for granted.

The chapters in this book all wrestle with understandings of education and teaching experiences in changing global, national, and institutional contexts. They explore questions of difference and privilege, the social transformation of teaching through transforming teachers, contestations of global citizenship and interculturality, learning and sensibilities of self-in-the-world, the relationship between programme content and student decision-making, divergent conceptions of learning in international education, and subject-centred approaches to embodied teaching. The book considers the value of disciplinary tools of analysis in addressing contextual challenges in developing societies, connections between pedagogies, autonomy and intercultural classrooms, and ways of countering the marketization of higher education through online teaching communities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Teaching in Higher Education.

Penny Jane Burke is Global Innovation Chair of Equity at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she is Co-Director of the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education. She is also Professor of Education at Roehampton University, London, UK, where she is Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Institute-UK, and Research in Inequalities, Societies & Education. She has published extensively in the field of equity in higher education, including Accessing Education effectively widening participation (2002), The Right to Higher Education: Beyond widening participation (2012), and Reconceptualising Lifelong Learning: Feminist Interventions (with Sue Jackson, 2007). She is the Access and Widening Participation Network co-convenor for the Society for Research in Higher Education, and Editor of Teaching in Higher Education.

Suellen Shay is Associate Professor and Dean in the Centre for Higher Education Development at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her career has spanned a range of types of educational development work, including language development, curriculum development, and staff and institutional development. Her research brings the theoretical frameworks of sociology of education to higher education with specific focus on knowledge and curriculum. She is co-editor of Knowledge-building: Educational Studies in Legitimation Code Theory (with Karl Maton and Sue Hood, 2015) and has published in a range of higher education journals. She is principle investigator in a multi-institutional research project on undergraduate curriculum reform in South Africa. She is one of the executive editors of Teaching in Higher Education.