Confronted with the thoroughgoing marketisation of education, scholars have revisited the nature of pedagogy. The work of Immanuel Kant is a resource for critiquing the channelling of the transformation of self and society into rapacious consumerism. Kant's exploration of the connection between inner freedom and political freedom has been recast as pedagogy of the oppressed. Countering the dismissal of the Enlightenment as an accomplice of colonialism and imperialism, Kantian pedagogy is enlisted in the struggle against the forces undermining the very (...) structure of liberal democracy and humanity on a global scale. This essay points to the limitations of this revindication on the grounds that it leaves undisturbed the formative complicities at work in the current crisis, complicities all too familiar to those who teach and learn. (shrink)

This paper argues for an action-oriented conception of learning in higher education: one which marries higher order learning with apprenticeship in knowledge work. It introduces epistemic tasks, forms and fluency as constructs that are useful in giving a more precise meaning to ideas about collaboration in knowledge construction. Discussion is seen as central to collaborative knowledge work and we examine the role of discussion in supporting weaker and stronger interpretations of collaborative knowledge construction.

This article discusses the conceptualisation, organisation and philosophical orientation of academic history culture in UK higher education. It problematises the extent to which a dominant history culture in UK universities implies and uncritically reproduces normative understandings about the subject; about its epistemological standing, sociopolitical functions, and the presumed cultural value of the discipline practices that students learn to perform. We suggest that current conceptions of history degree curricula are overly thin and organised around a dominant managerialist discourse of skills, personal (...) development and learning outcomes. In a historicised world, in which history-focused behaviour has a crucial, ideological, affirmatory role, and in which historical narratives have a privileged cognitive function, we argue that it is critical for university history students to be able to deconstruct the processes by which history legitimises itself, and reinforces matrices of power in our societies. The positioning of history in higher education as a form of technocratic managerialism closes down spaces in which students can explore the potential of historical practices as a means of engaging with issues of current sociopolitical and ethical concern. We ask in this article, is this what we want an academic history culture to do? (shrink)