The inner game of higher education

2. The inner game of higher education Professor Sir David Watson University of Bristol 8 January 2008 Centre for Higher Education Studies

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

4. Teaching, learning and the student estate

5. Percentage change in enrolments by subject area, 1996/7 to 2005/06

6. UK HE student numbers by mode and level, 1979 - 2005

7. Frand, “the information age mind-set” (2000) • Computers aren’t 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

8. 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).

9. Learning & teaching metaphors • Games • Craft • Conversation

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.”

15. 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 Group’s “balanced meal”

16. Contexts for learning & teaching • Research and scholarship • Employability and professional formation • Instrumental and liberal values • Academic careers

17. Discussion Institute of Education University of London 20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL Tel +44 (0)20 7612 6000 Fax +44 (0)20 7612 6126 Email info@ioe.ac.uk Web www.ioe.ac.uk