University Challenge

University Challenge: Critical Issues for Teaching and Learning offers a nuanced and critical reading of university teaching, particularly the pressures under which academics in neoliberal, mass higher education must operate.

It provides exciting thinking about slow pedagogies, powerful knowledge, the assessment arms race and the concept of vanilla teaching. Eight challenges currently encountered by those who teach in higher education are carefully examined. These include: teaching to meet all students’ needs; assessment and grading; learning to teach; and space and time in academic life. The research that underpins this work came from an international study and a conceptual re-evaluation of current practices, theories and the values of teaching and higher education. The author brings a rich understanding of university teaching as a critical and values-laden process, exploring important debates about the extent and limits of teachers’ and students’ responsibility in teaching and learning.

The conceptual foundations provide a distinctive angle on some of the persistent problems which dog twenty-first-century academics working in marketised, mass higher education. This book will appeal to university teachers who wish to develop their work through scholarly enquiry and will be a resource to inform policy and management around teaching and curriculum.

Tony Harland is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is also Chair of the Ecology Board of Studies and lectures in marine ecology. Tony’s education research concerns academic and student values, and how these impact on academic work, student learning and the university.