![]() I think we need to continuously modernise our teaching methods and challenge ourselves against the scale of appropriate-to-fogey. But is this fair? Are we, in fact, like monks bemoaning our novice’s poor use of colour as the presses churn out a new way of representing meaning? I wonder if our role is to reflect young people’s way of doing things now, as well as their way of learning – not the ways of previous generations including ours. Pictures, diagrams, memes, video and worse, we engage with reluctantly and any slip of syntax or grammar is regarded as a slip of logic. ![]() Appropriate to fogeyĪs academics, we tend to value ideas that are presented in text, and particularly in well-written text. But our real challenge is: How we do this, because at the moment, and self-evidently, we are very easy to ignore. In teaching, it allows us to give students a toolkit for the unknown (a phrase I owe to a good friend and borrow shamelessly), which is the only possible response to the shouted assertions of the day. In research, this allows us to drive discourse and innovation across the whole ambit of study that we undertake. It would, clearly, be left-field for me as a vice chancellor to suggest that higher education institutions are no longer relevant – but it is only proper to question their utility, and only fair to ask about their efficacy over the last few years.Īs all of us who love universities know, our role is to ask the next, effective, question. This is a topic I’ve been thinking long and hard about over the past few months, especially as we hurtle towards a post-Brexit world (or not…) of uncertainty and fear. In the post-Trump, near Brexit, world where knowledge, understanding, truth and even facts become slippery, society needs the skills a university can teach more than ever.īut are we teaching in a way that actually satisfies the needs of society and of our students? And is the whole experience of university being aligned to support our students as they learn?
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