Lee Andresen

Skill, Stance, Sensibility: Three Foci in Graduate Education Studies for Academics

Paper delivered by Lee W. Andresen at the Preparing University Teachers conference, Finland, 1996

• Abstract
• Brief CV
• Preamble
• Introduction: categorisatons, imagery and metaphor
• Focus: Skills
• Focus: Stance
• Focus: Sensibility
• Ethical sensibility
• Aesthetic sensibility

Abstract

This is about the content of a graduate higher education studies curriculum for academics. It is an exercise in meta-reflection and is not concerned with the particularities of content, rather the broad thrust. The author draws on extensive experience in design, coordination, teaching and (currently) consultancy for such programs. The essay deals with three matters (the "foci") that should be present in an ideal curriculum for every quality program: viz. the cultivation of skills, of stance and of both ethical and aesthetic sensibilities. The threadbare popular notion of skills is replaced by a richer one. In respect of reflective stance, two fallacies - the technicist and the sentimentalist are criticised. Ethical sensibility is explained in terms of values, in particular those of the leader-participant relationship. Aesthetic sensibility is approached in terms of the qualities of a memorable intellectual experience. The paper argues for what a proper understanding of each of these "foci" should comprise, drawing on a diverse literature in education, ethics and aesthetics. Each is related to the Aristotelian knowledge categories of the technical, the practical and the emancipatory.

Brief CV

Lee Andresen has worked in Academic Development for over fifteen years at the University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia and has been an active member of HERDSA over that time. He was responsible for designing and coordinating for the first five years the Program of Higher Education Studies for academics at the UNSW, which was the first of its kind in Australia. He retired from the University in 1994 and currently continues Academic Development work as a self-employed consultant, principally supporting and advising Academic Development staff in a number of Universities who are establishing graduate programs of education studies for academics. He is also consultant to several large-scale course review projects in major Australian universities. He has published widely on experiential learning, effective teaching in higher education, and the nature of academic development. His current interests include ethics in education and the roles and responsibilities of academic developers.

Preamble

This is an essay in meta-reflection. It is a retrospect, an ex post facto consideration, of what certain events have taught me, and also of what I can now say I think I understand about a task I once carried out. As is generally the case in life (we all know how youth is wasted on the young) had I known some of these things then, I would probably have done it all somewhat (though not too) differently. Perhaps, though, rather better.

The events in question are five years involvement in designing, coordinating and teaching a postgraduate program on higher education for academics at the University of New South Wales. Accounts of that program's actual curriculum have been published elsewhere [i]. I am not concerned with those details nor is what follows a description of that program's curriculum implementation. I want to go beyond those particularities, adding subsequent experience, study, and reflection to hindsight. I will imagine what that curriculum might have been, and speculate on what any quality curriculum for academics could be [ii].

Introduction: categorisations, imagery and metaphor

John Dewey taught us to beware of dichotomies; from that it is a small step to also beware over-rigid, too-sharp classifications in any matter related to human nature and human affairs [iii]. I first need to explain my title, because it prefigures a particular kind of categorising I am going to use (curriculum is, after all, a human not a technological affair). Getting this right is going to be essential to understanding everything that follows.

My initial choice of "focus" as a descriptor invoked two equally plausible pictures. First, that of a camera or binocular lens system which has three focussing positions. When any one object (at its own distance) is brought into focus, other things become fuzzy. Sharp perception of (attention to) the "in-focus" matter becomes possible; it can be contemplated as a thing-in- itself (a world of its own) for the time being. But - change the focus and a different set of objects appear sharply in view - the previously clear ones now fuzzy. The locus of attention (contemplation, awareness, appreciation) turns to the new thing [iv].

A second picture, equally felicitous, is that of three flashlights, each bringing its centre of brightness to a different point of focus on the landscape in front of us. Though the bright central part of each beam lights (with special brilliance) its own particular objects, it also sends out a broader zone of illumination which spreads across everything. When all three shine on their own centres of focus, the wider glows emanating from them overlap and mix over the entire landscape. Three become indistinguishably one in rendering the "big" picture visible, whilst remaining distinct in rendering bright their own centres of focus (attention).

An appropriate imagery is important to my purposes in this essay. I rather like another metaphor which might have been superior to "focussing". It comes from Stefan Strasser's magnificent opus The Phenomenology of Feeling (Das Gemut) [v]. This is the strange imagery of "living strata", as in the strata-of-a-life or the strata-of-being.

In Strasser we start with the picture of inanimate strata, as in a sedimentary rock system. Each stratum resting above others depends on all below for support - for very existence, since without them it cannot have come into being (nothing to be deposited upon). We next consider the strata as living - as in the stages of a life (childhood, adolescence, adulthood, maturity, old age) or - as Strasser uses it - the strata involved in the experience of "the heart" (mood, impulse, attraction/repulsion, evaluation, symbolic representation).

Not only does each depend on all previous strata/stages for existence (destroy one and nothing can follow), but each later is "contained" within each earlier. Any stratum (at whatever level) holds the entire potential, the promise, of all that will follow it. In living strata, change one, and you change everything that follows. A stratum, as alive (part of lived existence), draws constantly from the continuous flow of nourishment that all earlier strata provide for sustenance. Each living stratum is unique yet indispensably part of the common whole, the totality that is a life.

I think it is rather like that with my three categories. They are not three boxes, houses, countries, or worlds. They are three focuses within one continuous landscape; three living strata within one continuous organic formation. Three stages/strata in one unbroken/unbreakable whole - the curriculum. Look at one - for the time being the others recede in our perceptual field. But they are always there. Shine light on one - the whole becomes illuminated. Ignore one - the whole is undernourished. Study one - see every other one prefigured.

Living strata are hierarchical. Earlier stages are not merely foundations, and do not merely contain/ prefigure/ potentiate all higher stages. Higher stages exist not merely in their own right but as the culmination of whatever each lower stage promises. There is a direction, a vectorial quality. Progression through the stages leads to greater sophistication, complexity, intrinsic value, beyond whatever came before - made possible and sustained, however, only by what went before.

Despite the value of the "stage" imagery, there are dangers in pressing the metaphor too far. It could seduce us into thinking that one stage must be sequentially "prior" to another. That could be a recommendation for curriculum sequencing. Nothing could be further from my intentions. Whilst I think there is an hierarchy of value associated with my "foci", I deny that this (or any other quality) imposes a sequence or order to be followed in teaching [vi]. All three foci deserve attention at all times, whenever opportunity allows.

It seems likely that these three "foci" serendipitously mirror the three ancient (Aristotelian) classifications of knowledge/action: the Technical, the Practical and the Transformative [vii]. I won't make too much of that - it is speculative and I wouldn't want my main thesis to founder on disputes about some "abstract extension". I shall however mention it in passing when appropriate: if valid, it enriches the account substantially.

This has been a long but necessary preamble. In what space remains I shall do two things:- first, describe each focus, stressing the proper way of understanding what it represents, then argue for its appropriate Aristotelian category and relate it to my chosen metaphor/imagery.

Focus: Skills

It would be tedious to rehearse the too-familiar discourse about skills (vocational, transferable etc) that enjoys ideological ascendancy in the Western Higher Education world of the 'nineties - and of the increasingly tragic consequences of this [viii]. But for those whose vocation is to become (or continue as) a university academic, who study to improve themselves in that vocation, some observations about skills are useful.

First, "to be skilled" or to carry out one's work "skilfully" is in anyone's language a desirable thing. One cannot be against becoming skilful or demonstrating skill [ix].

Second, whatever the territory of "skills" comprises, it is very broad; some skills belong to different orders than others. That is not to despise or ignore the need for lower-order "technical" skills (Intelligible speech, legible board-writing, ability to operate a projector - these are not trivial. Their absence is a sign that something is wrong). But neither can we rank them equally with others which are clearly higher, more complex, more sophisticated (facilitating groups using John Heron's analysis [x]; designing explanations using George Brown's research [xi]).

Third, knowing-how (performative competence) and knowing-that (propositional knowledge) do by and large belong together - it is hard to locate significant areas of knowing-how devoid of knowing-that; some teaching skills are embedded in particularly rich discourses of propositional knowledge (lecturing, group-facilitation, study-advising).

Fourth, the notion of "skilful teaching" is a much richer, more expansive notion than mere "technically competent". Consider two examples: Stephen Brookfield's wonderful book The Skilful Teacher is the description of someone who, in pursuit of a vocation, is far more than merely technically competent [xii]. Ronald Barnett's analysis of skills in The Limits of Competence takes us into the same territory [xiii]. Consider his four criteria for application of the term "skill":- (1) (There exists) a situation of some complexity; (2) (We observe or demonstrate) a performance that addresses the situation, is deliberate and not just a matter of chance; (3) (the performer makes) an assessment that the performance has met the demands of the situation and (4) (there is) a sense that the performance was commendable:

The very application of skills calls for prior judgements both as to the boundaries and nature of the situation and over the range and character of the skills appropriate to the situation ... Higher education, accordingly, is a meta-education, in which students develop the emancipatory qualities to call upon a range of skills in the context of their reading of a situation. (58)

Such accounts make no bones about the inseparableness of values, standards, judgements, criticism, interpretation, taste, and reflective stance from the deceptively simple business of "being skilful" - in teaching or in any other vocation. If we do have a focus on skills, as I believe we must, a proper understanding of what that means takes us beyond the merely technical and into the realm of the practical (values/judgements). In Barnett's words that is already into the world of emancipation - personal and social transformation. So much for being "merely skilful"!

Focussing on teaching skills-in-context, recognising the values that intersect and are latent in it, and the possibilities for transformation inherent in the skilful application of all we know that is good, transcends by far the merely "technical curriculum". It encompasses all three Aristotelian categories of knowing. For the skilful educator who understands this richer reading of the notion of "skills", every "teaching skills" session becomes one in which virtually everything of value, meaning and significance in higher education can - potentially - be addressed. Its challenge has little if anything do with "training", "demonstrating" or "modelling". The problems are knowing how and where to stop the discussion, or how to cover everything important in higher education in two hours!

Focus: Stance

The idea of stance, like that of mood, suggests something pervasive, covering and colouring the whole experience. Since pervasion is integral to the notion, the question becomes, not whether stance but what stance? I shall restrict attention to a critique of today's dominant discourse about stance, namely that a graduate program for academics should be reflective. This is (as Donald Schon has taught us) a particular epistemological stance - a way of regarding professional knowledge [xiv].

What, then, is a proper understanding of "being reflective" for academics studying teaching and learning? The notion is easily seduced into technicism or sentimentality or both [xv]. A proper understanding of a reflective stance is not technicist (a failure of method); and it transcends sentimentality (a failure of intentions).

Hear Maxine Greene quoting Physicist Max Bohr at this point [xvi].

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement [the world of the sciences]. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth [the world of the humanities] (93, parentheses mine)

So, what do we mean by technicist failure of method? Gordon Taylor has helped focus my own mind about that [xvii].

An essay topic in a first year World War II history course at my university asks in part 'When in your view did the war in Europe begin?' In your view! How does one even begin to make sense of this question if it is a fact (endorsed in every popular account, and part of our culture's store of basic knowledge) that the beginning of the war = Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939? In short, propositional knowledge demands far more from the student than a store of popular equations. (66, emphasis mine)

I like the phrase "store of popular equations". A reflective stance resists reducing educational know-how or know-that to a "store of popular equations" (nostrums, techniques, formulae, incantations).

The technicist merely undertakes - however impeccably and with whatever amount of flourish and style - to produce portfolios, learning journals, reflective essays as such (these things are no doubt good and useful for many purposes other than intellectual development- I am not about to ridicule them). The beyond-technicist approach to reflectivity, in returning to the "scene of the crime", asks relevant questions in pursuit of worthwhile understanding, open-minded towards whatever may emerge (the subverting of one's most precious mythology). A proper understanding of "stance" is that it must, first, be critical - easier to say than do, and a major challenge to curriculum design.

"Sentimentalist" points to a distinct but related indicator of an inadequate understanding of "reflective". If being reflective includes thinking back over one's actions a proper understanding would be one that includes criticising the motivation or intention underlying the reflective act. Sentimentalism returns in order to merely enjoy/ savour, the pleasure/success, of an event or to (masochistically) re-live its discomfort/failure. That may be a necessary link in a longer chain (I am not arguing against it as such) but if the process stops there, I question its lasting learning value.

What does a non-sentimental stance require? Primarily willingness/openness towards being found out. Oscar Wilde once warned that to be intelligible is to be found out. To be adequately intelligible or explicable to oneself in reflecting on one's work is, potentially, to find oneself out. Facing the thinness of one's reasons-for-action, narrowness of vision, things one forgot to consider. It is to experience the sense of wonderment of how little one actually knows (even about the very thing one knows best). Hear Michael Leunig, Australia's wisest philosopher-cartoonist, in the "Curly-Pyjama Letters" [xviii] -

I am writing to report a great and wonderful discovery. It is the discovery of my own stupidity and what a marvellous and enjoyable thing it is for me ... my poor, long suffering, beautiful stupidity - friend of childhood, I have found you at last and I am coming home ... Ps. I'm still quite clever too.

Embedding reflectivity as a focus of stance (as skills are embedded as a focus for practical action) will require to be modelled - enacted authentically - in the life and work of the teacher, the curriculum-guide. This is challenge enough in the case of skills. It is damnably torturous in the case of stance.

Stance - if approached as rigorously critical, non-sentimental reflectivity - would lead to a curriculum as far from a technical training course as one could imagine. It would exemplify a graduate seminar program of the most intellectually robust and searching kind. The stance would permeate the whole, but also be mirrored in the stance of the course leaders themselves towards their work, as well as all assessment obligations for students. Think of the ramifications of that - they are not for the faint-hearted.

Gordon Taylor can help me explain the connection between this stance and the Aristotelian knowledge categories [xix]:

(The Practical means) 'moral knowledge', 'practical knowledge' or simply 'understanding' ... some sense of [their] social, moral and practical everyday dimensions of meaning can be grasped if we think initially of the understanding that can develop between a group of people in an unforseen or unplanned situation - say the members of a football team, whose individual ball skills are a clearly separable phenomenon from their ability to combine and to act in response to a fluid and less than predictable situation .. [what we mean by the Practical is] a common focus on doing what is best in the circumstances - on dealing with the content and context of immediate and highly variable practical situations which demand action from us. (55, parenthesis mine)

As Joe Schwab established three decades ago, all curriculum lies in the realm of the "Practical" [xx] - not amenable to "popular equations" or "technical fixes", comprising always the material for non-sentimental reflection (to ask why? why not? how else? and everything else the critical mind asks about human events). This is Donald Schon's "murky swamp" [xxi]. It is also the territory of Alasdair Macintyre's "Fortuna" [xxii]. And it is the very stuff of all the Social and Human Studies (I resist calling them Sciences). For such stuff as this the appropriate scholarly attitude is to plan, experience, critically reflect, and then plan again, maybe to eventually make some sense out of bits here and there in learning from the intransigent, recalcitrant mess we call human events.

Focus: Sensibility

My plan to describe three "foci" for the curriculum is intended to demonstrate that each (however it may occasionally demand our exclusive attention) is immanent in, saturating, the whole. Removing one item of possible focus reduces the brightness, the luminance, of the entire project. We can choose to look at skills narrowly, but on a proper understanding everything we study in (higher) education has to do with becoming a more skilful teacher. Skill is both ethical and aesthetic, as well as utilitarian. Stance can be regarded as stance simpliciter, in its own narrow right (when we introduce reflective journal writing) but that for-the-time-being focus cannot disguise the fact that stance - properly understood - is present everywhere, in everything teachers/leaders demonstrate and in every response students/participants give.

So it is with sensibility - a notion so broad, elusive, fuzzy, as to demand tightening and defining at the start. But however defined, sensibility remains a characteristic of the educator (and of the curriculum) that permeates every aspect of what happens. The practical problem is how to find appropriate points within a program at which to address it in its own right - to give it a name (or names) and to make it part of the subject's discourse. I shall discuss two sensibilities which (arguably) will prove to include all possible others: ethical sensibility and aesthetic sensibility.

Ethical sensibility

Ethics is where the world of value (the relative worthwhileness or goodness of things) intercepts/invades/encounters the world of everyday facts and events [xxiii]. An education curriculum having an active focus on ethical sensibility will ask questions about the relative worthwhileness, goodness - that is to say, the value - of anything under discussion (one dare not ever presume they will be answered). This often occurs at points where the question of justification - why do that? - is being asked about a teacher's actions - whether towards students or towards subject-knowledge.

To make ethical sensibility an explicit education curriculum focus is not merely useful - it is necessary. Unless this focus is respected, honoured, activated, the project is not education at all - it is merely training. It is unworthy of being studied at a University. This is Ronald Barnett's thesis in The Limits of Competence [xxiv]

... a higher education cannot be skills based. In a genuinely higher education skills will, at most, form part of the repertoire of capacities to be developed ... a higher education designed around skills is no higher education. It is the substitution of technique for insight; of strategic reason for communicative reason; and of behaviour for wisdom (58,61)

There is a deeper, more demanding interpretation of ethical sensibility. It involves the relationship between Leader and Participants - how they perceive, and thereby act towards, one another. Consider words of Martin Buber's about human relationships (quoted by Maxine Greene) to help make this point [xxv]:

... Only when the individual knows the other in all his otherness as himself, as man and from there breaks through to the other, has he broken through his solitude in a strict and transforming meeting. It is obvious that such an event can only take place if the person is stirred up as a person ... there is genuine relation only between genuine persons" [xxvi] (I and Thou, cited on 69)

Greene mentions Merleau-Ponty's observation that the "existence of other people is a difficulty and an outrage for objective thought". This takes Greene very close to what I think is the ultimate frontier of ethical sensibility in curriculum implementation:-

... [the teacher] can discover, at appropriate moments, what it is to meet [a] student's gaze and become aware of their existence as [one's] own gaze comes in contact with theirs. An encounter of this sort - an I-Thou encounter - always occurs in a present moment ... in such a dialogic relation, the teacher can experience being a learner; he can become, in a distinctive fashion, a learner ... The teacher, no longer relying on slogans or abstractions, will have to decide how to conceive man. He will have to decide if and when he can take the risk of dialogue while intentionally working to help students learn. But in the course of making such decisions he will become more intensely conscious of himself as person and as teacher (94, parentheses mine)

Adopting an adequately understood ethical sensibility towards students takes us inevitably into the Aristotelian knowledge-domain of the transformative. This is not to deny that a focus on skills, or on stance - each properly understood - can also take us at least within reach of the transformative in education. But the third focus - on ethical sensibility - understood in terms of the transformative potential of the authentic (dialogic) relationship between teacher and student takes us fully into the transformative realm.

One could finish there, but recent events and private researching have shown me a second, closely-connected focus; one that belongs together with the ethical, feeding into (and out of) it. That last - possibly surprising - focus is aesthetic sensibility in teaching and learning.

Aesthetic sensibility

To adopt the ethical perspective is to attempt to see (contemplate) - the entire world - the totality of conscious existence - as a "bounded whole" [xxvii]. That is, to make sense of our own life and actions in the context of all that is, the whole picture, not ignoring anything having a claim upon us. This is of course the work of a God - we only aspire to it. We do so (fallibly) in each attempt to be virtuous, to do - or become - whatever is "good".

Such a view of ethics is analogous, a perfect parallel, to a particular view of aesthetics. Hence the act of aesthetic appreciation involves the contemplation of a particular object (thing or event) in a similar fashion - as a "bounded whole". We see (contemplate) the object extracted from (standing in sharp focus out of) the rest of the world. We appreciate it for its own sake. The object being contemplated (the thing of beauty) becomes - for the time being - our entire conscious world. We then "delight" in it, solely for what it is - the aesthetic moment.

The question rings out loudly; so what? Connecting aesthetics with education is hazardous - certainly unexpected but I attempt it fortified by some successful earlier attempts by others - in particular by Elliott Eisner's writings on evaluation as connoisseurship [xxviii] and Joseph Axelrod's The University Teacher as Artist [xxix]:-

There are thousands ... (teaching) in American colleges and universities today who feel imprisoned in the academic labyrinth and long to escape ... the best means of escape is similar to the method employed by Daedalus - a turning "toward unknown arts" ... The university teacher will not escape the labyrinth by following its passageways. Like Daedalus he must turn to art. Only as a teacher-artist can the professor make his flight to freedom (2,3)

The act of teaching - for our purposes, any deliberate act to implement a curriculum intention - should be seen and judged not merely for its utility (Did they learn? Did they value it?), nor merely for its propriety (Was it honourable? Was it just and equitable?)' but also for its beauty (Was it appropriate? Did it have admirable aesthetic qualities? Was it a delight to experience and (in retrospect) to contemplate?).

The sensibility at work here - the aesthetic - is, I believe, applicable to the whole of educational work as a criterion (yet another indicator?) of excellence (of quality, for those who understand only the current group-think). As such, I urge it to be acknowledged and honoured as a focus of sensibility in our graduate curricula for university academics, in the hope that those who study in our programs may be inspired to similarly honour it in their own teaching.

In Art as Experience Dewey notes that aesthetic refers to "... experience as appreciative, perceiving, and enjoying" [xxx]. (Michael Oakeshott improves on this by making "delight" the aesthetic criterion). Dewey proposes three ways of distinguishing between "having a memorable experience" and "having everyday (mundane) experiences". All are applicable to the evaluation of an educational experience, hence as criteria for a "quality" curriculum:-

The "memorable" (which can be called trans-mundane, to contrast it with the merely mundane, the forgettable) ...

• runs its course to fulfilment, reaches a consummation (is organised, definitely not "chaotic")
• emotional elements are not merely present but are essential to providing an account of what has been happening
• it represents a unity as a whole - a completeness, a beginning and an ending, and a sense of meaning in whatever is compassed by these boundaries.

This is not sufficient to qualify the memorable experience as an "aesthetic" one (its interest is practical, whereas that of the purely aesthetic experience is trans-practical). But in becoming a memorable experience, it is its aesthetic qualities (wholeness, unity, completeness, the essential nature of its emotional elements) that achieve this "transcendence".

We are not arguing that educational acts or experiences are to be works of art. But that they are to be memorable. And that means having qualities which are among those that qualify other experiences as "purely aesthetic". Such qualities can be present (in an appropriate design) in any educational experience. This is what we mean by aesthetic sensibility in education. A memorable intellectual experience is to be savoured not merely because of its utility, not merely because of its ethical qualities, but also because of qualities that make it memorable, complete, emotionally congruent, unified, beyond the mundane, aesthetically satisfying - in short, a thing of educational beauty.

I think I differ from Axelrod here, for I find no reason to believe such qualities need be restricted to humanities education - they belong everywhere, and are even more desperately needed in science and technical education. Our curriculum must address them. Perhaps those teachers whose work is most fondly remembered (and is this not what we desire?) are those who - whatever else they demonstrate in excellence - know how to make the intellectual experiences of higher education a delight to be part of.

That is, I think, what Oakeshott has in mind:-

... for many centuries in the intellectual history of Europe, contemplation, understood as a purely receptive experience of real entities, occupied the highest place in the hierarchy of human experiences, scientific inquiry regarded as, at best, preparatory to it, and practical engagements as mere distractions. In recent centuries the conversation (of mankind, in which all the universes of discourse meet and are heard) both in public and within ourselves, has become boring because it has become engrossed by two voices, the voice of practical activity and the voice of 'science': to know and to contrive are our pre-eminent occupations ... To rescue the conversation (of mankind) from the bog into which it has fallen and to restore to it some of its lost freedom of movement ... my proposal is to consider again the voice of poetry: to consider it as it speaks in the conversation ... The voice of poetry is one which speaks in the idiom of ... 'contemplating' or 'delighting' ... the image in contemplation is neither pleasurable nor painful ... imagining is 'contemplating', 'fact' and 'non-fact' do not appear (and the images we imagine) are neither 'useful' nor 'useless' ... poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted amongst our wheat." [xxxi]

This is the ultimately transformative vision. Imagine the transformation accomplished by simply the entry of poetry (the Platonic poetics, a sense of the possibilities of imagination) into our sterile corporate institutions; of a sense of the beautiful, of delight, into our utilitarian, economically rational, over-managed knowledge-factories, our tediously mundane vocational-competency directed classrooms. I close with some prophetic words of Joseph Axelrod's:

... by the time we enter the twenty-first century, the lecturer-artist and the teacher-craftsman will have become obsolete. Only the teacher-artist will survive [xxxii]. (230)

Footnotes and References:

[i] Andresen, L. (1995). Accredited Courses in Teaching and Learning. In Angela Brew ed. Directions in Staff Development. Buckingham: SRHE & Open University Press.
See also Andresen, L. and Nightingale, P (1993). Openness, Distance and Learner Autonomy - Turning an Idea into Reality in Postgraduate Professional Education. Media and Technology for Human Resource Development 6(1), 33-40.

[ii] I am indebted to Academic Development colleagues in several universities for consultancies generously offered to me since 1994. It has been a source of continuing insights to have been able to be critical friend, advisor and supporter in various ways to the graduate program development projects at Griffith, New England and Murdoch Universities, the Australian National University, and The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

[iii] Dewey, J. (1910). How we Think. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath & Co. see also Shulman, L.S. (1988). The dangers of dichotomous thinking in education. In Peter Grimmett and Gaalen Erickson eds. Reflection in Teacher Education. Columbia University, N.Y.: Teachers College Press.

[iv] This kind of categorisation-without-fragmenting is, I suspect, closely akin to the Gestaltist notion of perceptual foregrounding and backgrounding.

[v] Strasser S. (1977). Phenomenology of Feeling: An Essay on the Phenomena of the Heart. transl. R.E. Wood. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

[vi] In any case, structures of knowledge (which is my concern here) are neither necessary nor sufficient as curriculum prescriptions. If useful, they are only one of a number of factors determining choice and sequencing in a curriculum.

[vii] See, eg, Carr, W. (1989). Introduction: Understanding Quality in teaching. In Wilfred Carr ed. Quality in Teaching: Arguments for a Reflective Profession. London & New York: The Falmer Press.
See also Grundy, S. (1987) Curriculum: Product or Praxis? London: The Falmer Press.

[viii] eg Professor Don Aitken's observation that "Today's undergraduate students ... seem almost indifferent to the notion that they are at university to be educated ... The leisured undergraduate, able to read widely outside his or her formal studies, is a thing of the past ... (the universities) are there to provide society with highly trained workers". The Weekend Australian, Feb 10-11, 1996 (previously in Quadrant, Jan-Feb 1996).

[ix] Barnett, R. (1994). The Limits of Competence: Knowledge, Higher Education and Society. Buckingham: SRHE & Open University Press.

[x] Heron, J. (1986). Six Category Intervention Analysis, 2nd ed., University of Surrey: Human Potential Research Project.

[xi] Brown, G. (1978). Lecturing and Explaining. London: Methuen
also Brown, G. and Atkins, M. (1988). Effective Teaching in Higher Education. London: Methuen.

[xii] Brookfield, S. (1990). The Skilful Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

[xiii] Barnett, R. op. cit.

[xiv] Schon, D.A. (1990). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco and Oxford: Jossey-Bass.

[xv] I am indebted (here and elsewhere) to some rich conversations with Peter Taylor of Griffith University on this and some other related issues.

[xvi] Greene, M. (1973). Teacher as Stranger. Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth.

[xvii] Taylor, G. (1990). The notion of skill: an hermeneutical perspective. In Eighth Australasian Learning and Language Conference (Collected Papers). Brisbane: QUT Counselling Services.

[xviii] I haven't traced the publication source of this series: the cartoon was given to me by a friend and probably appeared only in a newspaper, not in a published collection.

[xix] see Taylor, G. op cit.

[xx] Schwab, J.J. (1969). The Practical: A Language for Curriculum. School Review 78, 1-24.

[xxi] see Schon, D.A. op cit

[xxii] MacIntyre, A. (1985). After Virtue, (2nd ed.). London: Duckworth. pp 93, 105.

[xxiii] Murdoch, I. (1993). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin Books.

[xxiv] Barnett, R. op cit

[xxv] Greene, M. op cit

[xxvi] I have no objection to political correctness in using gender-inclusive language when the language is one's own (or one's students) but my policy is to refrain from politically-correcting other people's language in publications I am citing. I regret if this offends some who think one should do differently.

[xxvii] see Murdoch, I. op cit. pp 26-27, the reference is to Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916.

[xxviii] eg Eisner, E.W. (1979). The Educational Imagination. New York: Macmillan.

[xxix] Axelrod, J. (1973). The University Teacher as Artist: Towards an Aesthetics of Teaching with Emphasis on the Humanities. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

[xxx] Dewey, J. (1934) Art as Experience. New York.
See also Bernstein, R.J. ed. On Experience, Nature and Freedom: Representative Selections from John Dewey. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Chap VII "Having an Experience", also Levi, A.W. (1957) The Varieties of Experience.

[xxxi] Oakeshott, M. (1962). Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen. See the chapter "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind"

[xxxii] Axelrod, J. op cit.