Has the discourse of 'Teaching/Learning' killed the radical and the spontaneous in university education?

In the past decade, a new discourse has developed within universities regarding teaching/learning. This discourse, a commitment to teaching, not (just) research, can be seen in university mission statements, strategic plans, new staff development activities, groups dedicated to teaching and learning, government funding initiatives, quality reviews, promotion and selection criteria and so on. The discourse of teaching and learning is, of course not the same thing as the actual practices, experiences and so on of being a student or teacher at a university. These activities go on within the discourse, even in opposition to it. The discourse is, then, the institutionalised system of knowledge and values. It results from the shift from a research orientation to the current, mixed teaching and research orientation in many institutions.

In this dilemma, I want to explore the following idea. The discourse of teaching and learning involves managerialism and surveillance, and is institutionally valued for making universities more profitable/efficient. Hence, spontaneous, even radical teaching practices - even if apparently in line with declared commitments to good teaching/learning - may however be impossible or increasingly irrelevant if they challenge the embedded processes and values in the discourse of teaching and learning.

Introduction

By 'discursive structures' I mean, in simple general terms, the epistemological rules by which human experience can be understood. In that process of meaning-making, the discourse comes to be the repository of values and knowledges by which a particular experience can be classified, judged and related to other experiences. The Foucauldian concept of 'discourse' requires that we recognise that the meaning of an activity or event is never evident in the thing itself (in some objective manner) but rather is constituted intersubjectively, through the shared, social resource of the language by which that thing can be described and analysed. As Foucault put it, discourses lie "between words and things", playing an essential role in the social construction of a known (and knowable) reality (1972:48-49). The words used by discourses do not merely "designate things" but "systematically form the objects of which they speak" (Foucault, 1972: 49).

Hence, the discourse of teaching/learning provides the ground on which educational practices are assessed, shared, discussed, promoted, criticised and, in the end result, implemented (as Foucault so clearly demonstrates in Discipline and Punish, discourses are not ethereal: they are constitutive of the specific actions of the social world and have material consequences - Foucault, 1975). It is to be seen primarily in the institutional forms of committees (Committee for University Teaching and Staff Development), associations (HERDSA), conferences (Teaching Learning Forum), groups as are now found at every Australian university to promote university teaching, journals, institutional practices (surveys) and policies (the inclusion of particular criteria and rules within promotions procedures), funding mechanisms, and so on. Crucially, the discourse must be analysed in terms of the ways that it assigns values and meanings to a whole range of activities undertaken in and around the higher education system, and in this analysis, we cannot forget that discourse of teaching/learning owe little to the actual practices in whose name it speaks. In the process, we can re-orient our understanding of teaching/learning away from the internal dynamics of the discourse itself and instead comprehend the governing conditions for 'knowing' and 'using' education practices that come from outside the practice of teaching and learning itself.

The relationship of the system to teaching/learning

I would not claim that those contributing to the growing intellectual apparatus of teaching/learning (as represented by events such as the Teaching Learning Forum) are unaware of the sorts of broad systemic forces which are most publicly embodied in, for example, the recently completed Review of Higher Education chaired by Roderick West. Far from it. Some of the most effective contributors to the policy debates around higher education also make important contributions to the field of research and analysis of education in 'higher education'. Moreover, the lived experience of almost every academic in the country (many of whom constitute the scholarly field of teaching/learning precisely because they are uninvolved in policy and are merely getting on with the day-to-day business of education) brings them into daily contact with the results of the economic and social climate within which universities operate. I would claim, however, that the relationship of current political constitution of the higher education system to teaching/learning is not well understood. The reason for this misunderstanding, put simply, is that the meaning of effective and innovative teaching/learning practices is too readily divorced from the system of which they are a part; the value-judgments necessary to establish why something is 'good' for higher education are thought to relate to some ideal conception of education, rather than to the historically contingent education system that we actually inhabit.

In general terms, teaching/learning is seen by those academics who identify themselves as part of this scholarly field in two ways, each of which enacts a rather simplistic epistemological relationship between the particularities of educational practice and the general system within which it takes place.[1] First, teaching/learning is thought of as a refuge from the vicissitudes of financial cutbacks and concomitant threats to some idealised notion of 'quality' education.[2] Better teaching practices are valuable and worth pursuing because they enable academics to 'forget' (even as they are driven by) changes which are reshaping the fundamental conception of 'the university'; the effort and resources expended on teaching/learning come to represent one of the few 'advances' in government higher education policy at a time of many reverses. Second, teaching/learning is seen as a brave new frontier of developments which will give students the educational experience best suited to the needs of life in the world of global late capitalism. Here, better teaching practices indicate an acceptance of reality, a surrender (perhaps willingly) to late twentieth century socio-economic conditions. Their value comes from the completeness of the 'fit' between those conditions and educational activities.

What both of these approaches do (in very different ways of course) is to distance from teaching/learning the essential components of the contemporary conditions of higher education which actually make it possible to 'think' teaching/learning. The very fact that, generally, we no longer refer to 'teaching' or 'learning' but instead conceptualise the business of education as a relationship between the two, opens the door for a very different analysis of university education based on understanding the relations of power between the various groups and individuals who now, as education policy puts it, are 'stakeholders' in higher education. For, fundamentally, the analysis of discourse is about the critical examination of the way that people's identities and lives are governed by their interactions on the basis of knowledge about 'things' (such as, for example, a tutorial). If we are to explore how radical spontaneity might not be possible within the current discourse of teaching/learning, then we must understand how subjective relationships between students and teachers are governed by that discourse.

Teaching/learning and the knowledge-product

In the everyday transactions between students and academics (which we tend to understand as being the 'stuff' of teaching/learning), the key subject positions are not merely those of some generalised and essential intellectual interchange between pupil and teacher in which the primary goal (as most teaching/learning advice would have it at the moment) is for the pupil to somehow become the teacher. Rather they are fundamentally political and economic. Students, mostly unwilling, act as the customers; Teachers, mostly unwillingly, act as the producers; at the same time, students represent society and teachers the governance of that market-driven society. These subject-positions are both the consequence of the current, commodified conditions of higher education and the necessary everyday 'experience' which makes the idea that universities are just one more sort of business in global capitalism seem 'normal' and 'obvious'.

Spontaneity and the discourse of teaching/learning

Thus, in trying to understand spontaneity in higher education, we might take many pathways and assess the claims that can be made from a variety of experiences and observations. But, at the very least, we must remember that we are in a forum that is complicit, to some extent, in sustaining consumerist education and education for consumerism, through the discourse of teaching/learning's role in implementing the subjectivities outlined above. We should begin this dilemma, then, by recognising that the meaning of spontaneity and our assessment of its possibilities and operations must take place with due recognition to the way that the discourse of teaching/learning (within which we conduct that assessment) specifies and knows educational practices so that they might play their part in the ongoing regimes of power that make up world of late capitalism.

References

Edosomwan, Johnson (1988). Productivity and Quality Improvement. Bedford, UK: IFS.

Foucault, Michel (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel (1979). Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon.

Hunter, Ian (1994). Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, bureaucracy, criticism. St Leonards, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin.

Notes

1. There is an analogous, simplistic relationship for many other academics, those refusing to be part of the teaching/learning discourse (for example, people who refuse to undertake student evaluations), in which teaching/learning is recognised solely as an 'agent' of those political forces. While I take analytical inspiration from this position (for it enables me to recognise my own role - small though it may be - in contributing to the changes in higher education (many of which I am profoundly opposed to even as I enact them), I don't have time here to explore it in detail.

2. That John Howard presides over the current round of cuts should not be taken as a sign of something new. Howard's influence on higher education extends as far back as 1975 when, as Treasurer in the Fraser government, he began a process of cuts to higher education which were then taken further by ALP governments under Hawke and Keating. It is fitting, if not at all comforting, that Howard seems destined to complete these cuts to the point where no element of equity and intellectual creativity will remain free from the return of the razor gang.

3. I use government here in its Foucauldian sense: see Hunter, 1994.