Newsletter Issue 2 - Summer 2005

• Education stories in the Media
• Jenny Moon - Putting Writing at the Centre
• Ruth Leitch - Outstanding dissertation award
• Continuation of Cover Story Editorial
• Student Writing Award Scheme - the winners
• Development Grants - The Next Steps
• In Conversation with...Alison Fox
• PDP Are you ready?

Editorial by Dr Tony Brown:

"The Higher Education Academy has taken for its mantra “Enhancing the student experience” and ESCalate is no exception to its adoption. Discussions did surface for a brief while as to whether this implied the learning experience of the student or something more. What is at the heart of the difficulty in England, and I restrict my comments to this one region of the UK, is that we do not have a pedagogy that offers a coherent discourse for talking about the experience of students in higher education. ‘… in England, pedagogy is commonly used in a … restricted sense, to equate with the practice of teaching’ (Alexander , 2004:p.9). In what follows, I have borrowed from Alexander’s writing on redefining pedagogy, recasting it in the context of higher education. There remains an unhelpful duality of whether to emphasise learning or teaching, exemplified by discussions about which of the two words should appear first in job titles, university institutional policy and on websites. There is a challenge for the writer of course, when writing to practitioners about developing an alternative pedagogy. It is to avoid unintentionally privileging teachers and teaching over the other elements of pedagogy..."