The inner game of higher education

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The inner game of higher education

• Professor Sir David Watson
• University of Bristol 8 January 2008

Centre for Higher Education Studies
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Outline

• The student estate
• Three metaphors
• Learning and teaching in the modern university

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Teaching, learning and the student estate
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Percentage change in enrolments by subject area,
1996/7 to 2005/06
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UK HE student numbers by mode and level, 1979 -
2005
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Frand, the information age mind-set (2000)

• Computers arent technology
• Internet better than TV
• Reality no longer real
• Doing rather than knowing
• Nintendo over Logic
• Multitasking way of life
• Typing rather than handwriting
• Staying connected
• Zero tolerance for delays
• Consumer/Creator blurring

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Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
(Simon Schuster 1998).

• Students these days are, in general, nice. I
  choose the word carefully. They are not
  particularly moral or noble. Such niceness is a
  facet of democratic character when times are
  good. Neither war nor tyranny nor want has
  hardened them or made demands upon them. The
  wounds and rivalries caused by class distinction
  have disappeared along with any strong sense of
  class..Students these days are pleasant,
  friendly and if not great-souled, at least not
  particularly mean-spirited. Their primary
  preoccupation is themselves, understood in the
  narrowest sense (Bloom, 1998 82-83).

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Learning teaching metaphors

• Games
• Craft
• Conversation

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W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis,
(Jonathan Cape, 1975)

• Winning is overcoming obstacles to reach a goal,
  but the value in winning is only as great as the
  goal itself..So we arrive at the startling
  conclusion that true competition is identical
  with true cooperation.In true competition no
  person is defeated.

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Richard Sennett, Respect the formation of
character in an age of inequality, (Allen Lane,
2003.)

• Part of what makes both men rare performers is
  that they have achieved mutuality many musicians
  have the cooperative impulse, but few manage to
  translate it into sound. Even more is this true
  of social life an enormous gap exists between
  wanting to act well toward others and doing
  so..I argue that in social life as in art,
  mutuality requires expressive work. It must be
  enacted, performed.

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Richard Sennett, The culture of the new
capitalism, (Yale U. Press, 2006.)

• A person can use the words correct or right in
  describing how well something is done only if he
  or she believes in an objective standard outside
  his or her own desires, indeed outside the sphere
  of rewards from others. Getting something right,
  even though it may get you nothing, is the spirit
  of true craftsmanship.

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William Miller, Conversation a history of a
declining art, (Yale U Press, 2006).

• Quotes Michael Oakshott Conversation is an
  unrehearsed intellectual adventure, as with
  gambling, its significance lies neither in
  winning or losing, but in wagering.

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Is this the reinvention of liberal HE?

• Soft citizenship
• Values
• Worked examples
• Dearing on breadth (recommendation 16)
• The Harvard core
• The Melbourne model
• The Russell Groups balanced meal

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Contexts for learning teaching

• Research and scholarship
• Employability and professional formation
• Instrumental and liberal values
• Academic careers

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Discussion
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