Arts and Humanities in Higher Education recent issues

Editorial: Boundaries, Signature Pedagogies and Theorizing

Parker, J., Chambers, E., Huber, M., Phipps, A. — 2008-05-20

Lost Horizons: The Humanities in South Africa (Part 1)

Vale, P. — 2008-05-20

Politics chartered the development of the Humanities in South Africa. Under the apartheid system three separate traditions — English-speaking, Afrikaner and Homeland —co-existed, albeit uneasily, in separate institutional forms. As apartheid crumbled in the 1980s, the Humanities, by drawing the three traditions together, established a growing voice in what would follow its demise. But the Humanities were blind-sided by the rise and power of neo-liberal globalization which now commands the discourse on public policy in the `New' South Africa. The `New' South Africa is different from what was once imagined, and Humanities are on the back foot.

Boundaries of Humanities: Writing Medical Humanities

Bolton, G. — 2008-05-20

Literature and medicine is a discipline within medical humanities, which challenges medicine to reconfigure its scientific model to become interdisciplinary, and be disciplined by arts and humanities as well as science. The psychological, emotional, spiritual and physical are inextricably linked in people, inevitably entailing provisionality, disturbance and lack of certainty, and lack of closure and therefore of control. Arts and humanities approaches can foster significant interpretive enquiry into illness, disability, suffering, and care. Reflective expressive writing, undertaken and engaged with critically, and particularly when explorative of narrative and metaphor, can enable professionally developmental enquiry into values, ethics, identity and responsibilities. This article offers examples of reflexivity, reflection, and disciplined questioning of the narrative and perspectival nature of medical and healthcare clinicians' experience. Creative writing is a focus, as art can observe and connect from unconventional angles.

Teaching English for Special Purposes in Iran: Problems and suggestions

Hayati, A. M. — 2008-05-20

The academic requirement for students majoring in fields other than English to pass English for Special or Specific Purposes (ESP) courses at university level has led to a rapid growth of such classes in Iran. However, despite this growth, not much literature on the practical aspects of these classes is available. The aim of the present article is to throw light on the problems of teaching ESP in Iran, beginning with a discussion of some key notions about the discipline. After evaluating the problems of ESP programs, some practical suggestions for improvement are made.

Cross-currents of Pedagogy and Technology: A Forum on Digital Storytelling and Cultural Critique: Introduction

Coventry, M. — 2008-05-20

Digital Storytelling and American Studies: Critical trajectories from the emotional to the epistemological

Oppermann, M. — 2008-05-20

In recent years, digital storytelling has emerged as an alternative medium of knowledge production for students in American studies. A growing number of faculty are creating assignments which combine methodological markers of American studies and reinvented notions of critical pedagogy in a multimedia learning environment. Based on an analysis of student learning and interviews with student producers of digital stories, this essay investigates the potential of digital storytelling for the development of voice and intellectual depth at the intersection of affective and cognitive dimensions of learning. Evidence from student-produced digital stories suggests that affective developmental processes can enable epistemological expertise instead of opposing it. In the same way, the multimedia authoring process does not obscure traditional forms of expert research and scholarship, but makes expert strategies visible and explicit.

Digital Storytelling as a Signature Pedagogy for the New Humanities

Benmayor, R. — 2008-05-20

This essay argues that digital storytelling is a hybrid, multimedia narrative form that enables critical and creative theorizing. As an assets-based social pedagogy, digital storytelling constructs a safe and empowering space for cross-cultural collaboration and learning. As illustration, the essay analyzes in detail one student story, using as primary evidence the story script, visual images from the digital story, and excerpts from a recorded interview with the author. It concludes that the process of digital story making and theorizing empowers and transforms students intellectually, creatively and culturally. Thus, digital storytelling can be seen as a signature pedagogy for the new Humanities in the 21st century.

Engaging Gender: Student application of theory through digital storytelling

Coventry, M. — 2008-05-20

Enabling students' engagement with gender theory can be a difficult task. One of the best ways to help students learn difficult conceptual material, such as theoretical texts, is to provide them with opportunities to state and restate those ideas in multiple ways and through multiple means. Digital storytelling provides an effective pedagogy that enhances this process of stating and restating, forcing students to express themselves in the `new language' of multimedia. Through a detailed reading of one student's work the essay proposes a taxonomy for novice uses of theory, ranging from summary to development of theoretical symbols. I then argue that digital storytelling uniquely enables students to illustrate and apply difficult conceptual material. In some cases, the visual form can even open up new possibilities for the application and refinement of concepts.

Slowing Down, Talking Back, and Moving Forward: Some reflections on digital storytelling in the humanities curriculum

Leon, S. M. — 2008-05-20

Humanities teachers in higher education strive to locate and implement pedagogical approaches that allow our students to deepen their inquiry, to make significant intellectual connections, and to carry those questions and insights across the curriculum. Digital storytelling is one of those pedagogical approaches. Digital storytelling can create an intervention in the educational experience of students from a variety of perspectives and at a variety of levels. The process of slowing down to create purposefully in the new medium of the digital story, through timing, imagery, music and narrative, has enabled students to position themselves in the cultural and theoretical conversation. Claiming that space of authority, they are not only better situated to read and respond to others' work, but also to create their own.

Editorial: Humanities and European Science Looking Forward

Parker, J., Chambers, E., Phipps, A. — 2008-01-08

Agonistic Struggle: Master slave dialogues in humanities supervision

Grant, B. M. — 2008-01-08

Hegel's master and slave is a significant archetype for graduate research supervision. The master—slave relation vividly exemplifies the hierarchical bond that ties supervisor and student together. Such a confronting view of supervision provides a counterbalance to contemporary emphases on equality between supervisor and student. In what follows, I use Zali Gurevitch's interpretation (`Dialectical dialogue', 2001, British Journal of Sociology) of Hegel's master and slave (Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807) to analyse an extract of supervision dialogue between a supervisor and a Masters student in the Humanities. My analysis shows the mundaneness of the master—slave relation in action. This mundaneness derives from supervision's institutional underpinnings and contributes to the relative invisibility of the master—slave relation as an influential dynamic. In closing, I argue that this investigation usefully draws our attention to the third player in supervision, the thesis, and that master—slave dynamics may have both disturbing and helpful effects for supervisor and student.

The Resistance to Teaching

Varsos, G. — 2008-01-08

This article focuses on the figure of the university teacher of literature, viewed as an agent that possesses knowledge and transmits it via its oral word. The approach is historical and theoretical. The first part examines how different types of teaching are linked to different phases of the development of the university institution, from the formation of its modern idea in the 19th century to the drastic changes it is undergoing today. Particular attention is given to the idea of national culture as it connects to the modern functions of written language. The second part examines how literature as a domain of teachable knowledge emerges and develops within the modern university institution. It discusses, in particular, how teaching practices today can be affected by the epistemological ramifications of the demise of the cultural authority that modernity had invested in literature.

A Space for Academic Play: Student learning journals as transitional writing

Creme, P. — 2008-01-08

This article builds on the author's previous research on student learning journals to explore how their use can give students a `space' to engage meaningfully and in their own way with their university work. Drawing on the psychoanalytical concept of transitional space and on notions of narrative, it is argued that the student learning journal can be seen as a hybrid genre of writing positioned between `life narrative' and the `university essay'. At the same time, journal writing can invite the writer to make a psychic shift into the transitional space that enables adult play and creative activity. The discussion includes analyses of extracts from students' learning journals.

'Great Expectations': The motivational profile of Hungarian English language students

Kormos, J., Csizer, K., Menyhart, A., Torok, D. — 2008-01-08

In this article we investigate what characterizes the language learning motivation of Hungarian English language students in terms of Dörnyei and Ottó's process model of motivation (Motivation in Action, 1998). We used a mixed-method research design, in which qualitative interviews conducted with 20 students were supplemented with questionnaire data gained from 100 participants in order to have a better understanding of the apparent discrepancy between students' and society's expectations of teaching English Language at tertiary level and the present educational system in Hungary. The ambivalent nature of English language students' motivational profile was found to reflect this situation. The interview data revealed that the respondents had very favourable motivational characteristics but they did not invest sufficient energy in maintaining and improving their language competence. This is explained with reference to a low level of learner autonomy primarily caused by teacher-centered instruction.

`What have the Humanities to Offer 21st-Century Europe?': Reflections of a note taker

Parker, J. — 2008-01-08

The Humanities have much to offer 21st-century Europe, in terms of both method and issues which may complement and correct those of Science and Social Science. These include, for instance, humanities' generation of plural narratives and plural explanations, of attention to singularity and complexity, and to others' sensibilities and ways of knowing. These disciplines provide higher order skills needed to engage and engage with the New Europe — rhetorical and communication skills, networked knowledge sharing, responsive and responsible citizenship. In interdisciplinary partnership with `hard' science research, the Humanities can offer ways of dealing with particularity and imagination, with issues of identity and sensibility, with encountering the other. At the same time, the humanities' own complex interpretative narratives and ability to generate and cope with complexity are vitalizing and enabling in a fearful, complex and supercomplex world.

Book Review: The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector. A Study of Policies, Initiatives and Attitudes 1976 2006, Richard Hylton. Bath: ICIA, 2007. 168 pp. ISBN 0 86197 136 1, {pound}14.95 (pbk)

Perryman, L.-A. — 2008-01-08

Conference Report: `Way too much fun'?

Perryman, L.-A. — 2008-01-08

Editorial: Knowledge Transfer in the Arts and Humanities

Phipps, A. a., Parker, J., Chambers, E. — 2007-09-17

Academic Hospitality

Phipps, A., Barnett, R. — 2007-09-17

Academic hospitality is a feature of academic life. It takes many forms. It takes material form in the hosting of academics giving papers. It takes epistemological form in the welcome of new ideas. It takes linguistic form in the translation of academic work into other languages, and it takes touristic form through the welcome and generosity with which academic visitors are received. These forms intersect each other and may co-exist at any one time. In the midst of the different forms of academic hospitality other matters surface. What is at stake when we give and receive academic hospitality? With travel being increasingly commonplace in academic life what forms of welcome and of hosting are emerging? Who is welcomed with open arms and who is not? What are the proper limits of academic hospitality? What of the stranger in our midst? What is the language of hospitality? What of virtual academic hospitality? What are the rules of the ceremonies of academic welcome? And what of the academic guest? How might we understand the modes and forms of academic hospitality? This article examines recent theories of hospitality and academic life in order to assess the potential, the rules and the limits for hospitality in an academy subject to rapid change and movement of ideas, bodies and space.

Doing SoTL in Medieval History A cross-Atlantic dialogue

Gunn, V., Shopkow, L. — 2007-09-17

This article, presented as a dialogue between the authors, explores what they perceive as critical areas of teaching and learning in the discipline of Medieval Studies. Within the discussion, notions of relevance and usefulness, widening access, and epistemological assumptions about the discipline are discussed and related to the practice of teaching the subject. The authors reflect on these notions in terms of the maintenance of traditional methods at undergraduate level despite an apparently changing student body. The question of whether changing the methods of research as well as teaching would alter both the nature of learning and the nature of the discipline is also raised. The authors conclude that the SoTL (scholarship of teaching and learning) of an established subject area such as Medieval Studies needs to reflect on the epistemology of the subject in all its practices, not just teaching but also research methods.

Studying Philology Today

Castanyer, L. B. — 2007-09-17

As higher education is currently undergoing a radical transformation throughout Europe, philological studies face challenges from both inside and outside the discipline, some of which put into question the very existence of the field. This article investigates whether this crisis can also be seen as an opportunity for a profound rethinking of the field, not only necessary for its survival but also more effective with regards to its original goals in the context of a humanistic education. The author sees the advent of digital technologies and new concepts of textuality as a positive development and draws on her experience in virtual teaching at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), seeking for new conceptual frameworks through which the quality of literary teaching and learning in higher education may be improved.

Becoming a Music Student Investigating the skills and attitudes of students beginning a Music degree

Burland, K., Pitts, S. — 2007-09-17

This article reports a project designed to foster first-year music students' academic study skills and to investigate their expectations and experiences of starting at university. Data gathered through questionnaires, diaries and in-class tasks reveal the change in learning strategies and musical identity the students experience in their first semester of the music degree course. Academic work and anxieties about workload and assessment challenge the focus on performing which has previously been the students' main source of musical involvement, necessitating a redefinition of what it means to be musically successful. These findings are discussed in the broader context of musicians' life-span development, and the article concludes with some implications for practice in higher education and beyond.

Fusing Horizons A Grammatical Design Approach for the Arts and Humanities: Using rules, contingency and hermeneutics in design education

Bruton, D. — 2007-09-17

This article argues that grammatical thinking within a framework of phenomenological hermeneutics assists designing and may properly be used as a fundamental teaching approach for an interdisciplinary art and design studio. Furthermore, it argues that the theme of grammatical design awareness could be considered as a generic issue across all disciplines in the Arts and Humanities. It calls for a more explicit teaching of grammar, both in terms of understanding and application, and provides a case study to indicate how this might be achieved. It highlights the value of both schematic and formal systems when using notions of rules, grammar and contingency to assist and augment traditional pedagogical approaches used in design education. It recognizes the value of grammatical visual thinking and argues that an interdisciplinary `grammatical design studio' may provide a valuable foundation for the development of design thinking processes that offer transparency, consistency, creativity and reflectivity.

The Internationalization of History Teaching through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Creating institutions to unite the efforts of a discipline

Pace, D. — 2007-09-17

Over the past decade historians and educational researchers in the UK, Australia, the USA and Canada have been devoting ever increasing energy to the systematic exploration of the learning of history at the college level. Now members of the discipline have come together to nurture and to disseminate this new scholarship of teaching and learning history. They have created an international society, a website, and an electronic newsletter that should be of interest to those in other disciplines who are concerned with bringing some of the rigor they honor in traditional research to the problems they face in the classroom.

Teaching Literature in Open and Distance Learning: A comparative survey of literary education in nine European ODL universities

Natsina, A. — 2007-05-10

The teaching of literature is inextr icably connected with face-to-face initiation into the enjoyment of and cr itical thinking about literar y texts. In this respect, the increasingly g rowing sector of Open and Distance Lear ning in higher education poses a significant challenge for literar y studies, no less so as it addresses an emergent student body compr ised mostly of mature students with significantly divergent backg rounds and expectations. The article traces the different answers provided to these challenges by nine European ODL universities. By discussing their objectives and methods along the axes of cur r iculum design, educational mater ial and educational procedures, this comparative survey attempts to describe an emergent profile of literar y studies as well as help promote dialogue about the practice of literar y instruction in higher education. The survey is based on the outcomes of a two-and-a-half-year research prog ramme undertaken by the research team `OpenLit', operating under the auspices of the School of Humanities at the Hellenic Open University.

Tradition, Discipline, Literary History

Kargiotis, D. — 2007-05-10

In its attempt to respond to changing historical realities the university has undergone significant transformations, most of which, however, have focused on teaching material, tools, methods or practices adapted to the new demands. Taking as a case study the literary disciplines, this article focuses on the theoretical, mostly implicit, presuppositions that often underlie attempts at institutional innovations. To put the educational process at the center of attention has often meant that a certain view of the epistemic object itself has been largely presupposed; this article attempts to unearth an unquestioned essentialism of the object, by showing how this has, to an extent, been constituted against a certain relativism of the processes that create it. Indeed, the educational setting and its space carry a set of implications for the object of study — that is, literature — that should not remain unaddressed.

Cybertext Challenge: Teaching literature in the digital world

Koskimaa, R. — 2007-05-10

This article discusses the changing role of literature in the contemporary media landscape. Literary scholarship may well maintain its importance in the digitalizing world, but this requires it to engage in an open dialogue with cultural and media studies. It is important that more attention is paid to contemporary literature as well as to new media offering significant pedagogical possibilities, which should be better acknowledged. The article's main focus is on the emerging field of digital literature. Cybertextuality, especially, is fundamentally changing our notions of the integrity of a literary work, reading, writing and interpretation. I attempt to describe and put into context one sample case of cybertextuality, The Impermanence Agent by Noah Wardrip-Fruin et al. Finally, I discuss some of the practical problems faced by teachers who introduce digital literature in their classrooms.

Decolonizing the (Distance) Curriculum

Walder, D. — 2007-05-10

Postcolonial theory remains part of the challenge of literary theory to curriculum development. As the author's personal history suggests, it is more than simply another way of reading and interpretation, but enables an engagement with, a bearing witness to, the gross inequalities of the world today. Drama is a good example, evidenced by the production and impact of South African Athol Fugard's work — introduced as a set text for the first time in an Open University course, while becoming part of the author's published research. The positive response to Fugard made possible the inclusion of substantial new areas of literature in a modern literature course coinciding with the global changes of the late I980s, in turn aiding the inclusion of postcolonial writings and theory in the departmental curriculum and raising awareness of issues outside the students' immediate experience. The texts studied demand an understanding beyond merely formal or `close' critical readings, and it is teachers' responsibility to be alive to the claims of contemporary history and politics.

Teaching Literature Gay-affirmatively: A homosexual individuation story

Sadownick, D. G. — 2007-05-10

This article explores the possibility of a `homosexual hermeneutic' by which the great literary works of the western canon can be taught. This `interpretative methodology' is based in the author's own individuation process as gay. The author details his personal journey from engulfment in heteronormativity to the first crisis of his homosexual adolescence whereby he suffers a severe illness and learns, with the help of a teacher, to apprehend the homosexuality hidden in Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser and so on. Psychological problems caused by co-dependency, homophobia and postmodernism eventually lead the author to embark on a gay-centered analysis wherein he learns how to descend into the inner world of internalized homophobia to encounter the `double' of the transformational psyche. This homosexual death-and-rebirth motif is discussed as ubiquitously present in literature, informing the individuation not just of gay-identified individuals but of all those who seek self-knowledge.

B-learning for Literary Studies in the European Space of Higher Education: Research at Universidad Complutense Madrid

Lopez-Varela, A., Sanz, A. — 2007-05-10

This report presents the work of LEETHi (Spanish and European Literatures from Text to Hypertext ), a research group based at Universidad Complutense Madrid, whose projects have focused on the teaching of literature from an intercultural perspective while also helping students to develop competence in information literacy, following the impact of entrepreneurial activities on the academic research system. These projects address the potential role that the Social Sciences and Humanities (Education and Literature, in particular) can play with regard to the imminent development of a European knowledge-based society and its educational, ethical and social implications. Hypertextual models are employed by LEETHi to create new educational spaces that can generate novel learning processes and new forms of production of information and transmission of knowledge, according to European Convergence didactic patterns. The report focuses particularly on the practical outcomes of LEETHi's projects.

Teaching Literature Online to Arab Students: Using technology to overcome cultural restrictions

Heble, A. — 2007-05-10

This article presents an experiment in teaching literature at Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman. As I was required to teach two sections of the same course, `Introduction to Drama', I decided to teach one section entirely face-to-face and to supplement my classroom teaching in the other section with online elements. While online teaching did not have a significant effect on the student's final exam results, it certainly seems to have helped them overcome some of the more intangible cultural restrictions that they function within and to have allowed them to engage in an active and uninhibited exchange of opinions and ideas across genders.

Book Review: Teaching and Learning English Literature, E.A. Chambers and M. Gregory. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2006. xii + 228 pp. ISBN I3--978--076I9--4I72--9, {pound}I7.99 (pbk). ISBN 978--076I9--4I7I--2, {pound}55.00 (hbk)

Ryan, P. — 2007-05-10