Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

Graduate supervision is a pedagogy that remakes students into the disciplined subjects of scholars and researchers. While the supervision relation is structured by the fixed and asymmetrical institutional positions of supervisor and student, pedagogic interactions between the two can also have a dynamic, playful and more mutual character. At these times, supervisor and student interact over the compelling topic of the thesis. In this article, which draws on the work of Gurevitch (2001), such moments are characterized as improvisation. A supervision dialogue between a humanities supervisor and student pair is used to illustrate and explore the productive, if risky, possibilities that attend improvisation in supervision. Despite its riskiness, however, this creative mode of supervision may itself be in danger as institutional environments increasingly value timely completions, safe projects, and directive modes of supervision.

Driven largely by efficiency imperatives, many universities have come to adopt a managerialist approach to research over the last several years. University administrators have become actively concerned with the traditionally long times taken to complete a PhD and high attrition rates. Consequently, the PhD, and PhD students’ experience of struggle when writing a PhD, is now often framed by universities as a problem to be managed. This framing is problematic if we consider that, for many students, the personally demanding nature of the PhD is central to the research process. In the first part of this article I discuss the contemporary administrative response to the PhD. I then go on to discuss the lived experience of writing a PhD, from the students’ point of view, drawing on my own and other students’ accounts. I utilize the writings of Maurice Blanchot in my analysis, who views the personal ups and downs of writing as integral to knowledge production.

Based on a review of its historical evolution and the contributions of significant writers in the field, this article addresses perennial questions of purpose, content and pedagogy in education in the arts and humanities and, more broadly, liberal education. Taking cognizance of the educational significance of service-learning and practical knowledge, it calls for a revitalization of arts and humanities education by drawing on elements of feminist theory as expounded by Jane Roland Martin and the emphasis on praxis, service and pedagogy in the writings of Paulo Freire, Ira Shor and others in the tradition of critical pedagogy.

This narrative account describes and analyzes the story of resistance to aesthetic education in an undergraduate pre-service teacher education program. After carefully listening to the students’ resistance to the Lincoln Center Institute’s aesthetic education component of their student teacher experience, the author designs a curriculum initiative to address the questions of relevance and application of aesthetic education in pre-service teacher preparation. This article follows the initiation, development, implementation, and evaluation of the aesthetic art initiative. Framed by Young’s (1997) understanding of ‘asymmetrical reciprocity’, the author suggests that three layers of asymmetry — instructor asymmetry, departmental asymmetry, and institutional asymmetry — may have influenced the pre-service teachers’ engagement with aesthetic education. This autoethnographic account asserts that embracing resistance and asymmetry may be important to the development of aesthetic education with pre-service teachers, and also yields insight into the ways contextual features of higher education may influence educational experiences.

Employability has become a global buzz-word: instructors in higher education are increasingly being called upon to produce highly employable students who will in turn contribute to the financial capital of the country’s economy. For vocational subjects and degrees for which clear links to industry may be envisaged (such as IT, Business, Technology and Science) the challenge is surmountable. However, it remains for non-vocational subjects, and especially degree programmes in the Arts and Humanities, to prove their merit in this demand-based climate. While sceptics may be worried that endeavours to adapt an academic discipline to the needs of economic utility may effectively dilute the academic content of a degree programme, this article suggests that this need not be the case. By focusing on modules which utilize non-traditional forms of assessment and delivery, the article will demonstrate that embedding employability can actually enhance academic standards while simultaneously offering students a broader choice of learning and teaching experiences.

I argue that creating interfaces between the humanities and cognitive sciences would be intellectually stimulating for both groups. More specifically for the humanities: they might gain challenging and rewarding avenues of inquiry, attract more funding, and advance their position in the 21st-century universities and among the general public, if they engage in interface projects with cognitive science and other disciplines that seek to improve our understanding of what it means to be human. I discuss a potential research framework of non-linear dynamics for such interfaces, and argue that it alleviates some of the concerns of reductionism and determinism that scholars in the humanities might have in relation to the scientific approach. I also discuss some general examples from the study of human speech of how successful interfaces have been built and might be extended to other areas relevant to the humanities.

Can we creatively bring our intellectual interests to bear on how we talk about teaching? Can our teaching shape how we understand and go about our scholarship? This article addresses and attempts to bridge the scholarly and the pedagogical imperatives of our profession through the methodically unmethodical process that Theodor Adorno identified as central to the literary essay. Composed in two parts, each with a distinct voice, the article performs the very kind of non-traditional scholarship it calls for by considering what it is we do and what it is we are as teachers from a phenomenological perspective.