The University of Learning

Beyond Quality and Competence

John Bowden, Ference Marton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134312023
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Universities are rarely structured to facilitate learning and when they are, it is often done so in a limited way. This book looks at the theory and practice of learning and how universities can improve their quality and competence. It tackles the past failure of the quality and competence movements and advocates a move towards 'Universities of Learning'. The authors advocate an integration of elements that are often dealt with separately - theory and practice, teaching and research, and the levels of institution and individual - and handle these dimensions of integration in conjunction with each other. This new paperback edition will be essential reading for all those who are concerned with improving learning in higher education. It includes an updated preface that takes account of developments since the publication of the hardback edition.

Part One
A Place for Learning

Chapter 1
The idea of the university

The University of Teaching and the University of Research

In the late nineteenth century, well before the celebration was supposed to take place, a committee in Bologna chaired by the famous poet Giosué Carducci suggested 1888 as the eight-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the University in Bologna. In fact no university had actually been founded in Bologna in 1088. The argument the committee put forward instead was that there was evidence for arrangements existing that year for teaching law independently of the religious schools of Bologna.

That still would not have made Bologna the first university because physicians were already being taught in a medical school in Salerno in the tenth century.¹ However, if the existence of a corporate body were taken as the sole criterion then Bologna would be the oldest university because, towards the end of the twelfth century, foreign students of law grouped themselves in nations, thereby forming the first organizational framework for a university. A short time later, in 1208, students and teachers of various disciplines formed a single corporate body in Paris. In the thirteenth century, associations of students in Bologna and associations of teachers and students in Paris were granted special liberties and privileges for the form of higher education called studium generale, which subsequently became the university (Rüegg, 1992).

There is a theme running through these examples. The medieval university was in fact the University of Teaching. It was not until the nineteenth century, with the foundation of the new university in Berlin in 1809, that Wilhelm von Humboldt introduced the concept of the University of Research, characterized by the interrelatedness of teaching and research, the independent status of staff (Lehrfreiheit) and students’ free choice of subjects to study (Lernfreiheit).

In his inaugural lecture as the first elected rector of the new university in Berlin, Johan Gottlieb Fichte defined the university, in the elevated manner so characteristic for German idealism of his time, as ‘…the visible representation of humankind’s immortality: the university is the institutional appearance of truth, the place where each age consciously and methodically hands down its highest intellectual formation to the coming ages’ (Papastephanou, in press).

The University of Teaching and Research or the University of Learning

So universities at different times prior to the twentieth century can be characterized as Universities of Teaching or Universities of Research. During the twentieth century, the conjunction of teaching and research has become the most distinctive aspect of the university and today’s university could be styled as the University of Teaching and Research. We argue in this book that, as we move into the twenty-first century, the university should be characterized as the University of Learning.

Teaching contributes to students’ learning, to their developing knowledge, which is new to them but not necessarily new to others. On the other hand, research is about developing knowledge that is new in an absolute sense: nobody has developed it previously. We can therefore talk about two forms of knowledge formation—learning on the individual and learning on the collective level—and can then try to find the nature of the relationship between them, instead of looking for the relationship between teaching and research.

Student learning is not only, and probably not even mainly, a function of teaching; students develop knowledge by various means and teaching is simply one of those. Of course, developing entirely new knowledge is also a learning experience for those involved in its development. However, in research, human knowledge in its entirety is also widened and humanity learns, so that we can see research as resulting in learning on the collective level as compared to what students are doing, where the focus is on widening their own knowledge or learning on the individual level. If we accept the thesis that knowledge formation is the main task of the university and that knowledge formation comprises two forms of learning, the statement in the preface, ‘the university is a place for learning’ appears very reasonable.

The most passionate statement made about the idea of the university was formulated in 1873 by John Henry Newman, often referred to as ‘Cardinal Newman’. In The Idea of a University he declares that a university is ‘a place of teaching universal knowledge’, thereby thoroughly challenging the Humboldtian notion of the research university. ‘[If the university is primarily about] scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students’ (Newman, 1873).

Much more recently Sheldon Rothblatt challenged the very idea that the university has an idea, that is, an essential kernel. He argues that at least the American university is no university at all. It is a multiversity, attempting to combine all the different ideas of the university. Highly sensitive to whatever might be imposed upon it ‘…from above by a central administrative system and a board of trustees, or outside in the form of public opinion or legislative pressure, it is carrying out…on a single campus the functions of the polytechnic, a normal school, a college of arts and crafts, a technological college, law and medical schools, a business school, research institutes and departments, College of Letters and Science (or College of Arts and Sciences)…’ (Rothblatt, 1997). The American university is not so much ‘…a city on the hill, an outpost of dedication and devotions [but more like] a city of the plain, culturally and ethnically heterogeneous, full of milling crowds, jugglers and tumblers…with suburbs and sub-cultures, separate neighbourhoods, galleries, concert halls and museums’ Rothblatt, 1997) .²

In response to Rothblatt’s formidable assault on the idea of ‘the idea of the university’ we would argue that learning is the defining element of the university. We cannot conceive the university without the element of learning. But in order to distinguish it from other institutions dealing with learning, such as the school, we would add that it combines learning on the collective and individual level, that is, it comprises both research and studying, or at least it is an interface between the two, by making knowledge developed by the few available to the many.

Conceptualized in this way the university is not primarily about the reproduction of the collective mind (ie the complex of all the different ways in which we are capable of thinking about the world), but it is about expanding, widening and transforming the collective mind. The Humboldtian concept of Bildung refers to the process of self-formation, that is how individuals form and transform themselves. In analogy with this, the university is the most vital instrument in the process by which the collective mind is formed and transformed through its diverse ways of grasping the world.

The collective mind is universal in the sense that it cuts across and comprises cultural differences distributed in space as well as in time. The collective mind is the home of everyone: we all contribute to it, we live it, we are it. The different ways of thinking about the world are all linked together. We can grow into them and we can embody them but they always transcend the individual bearers. In this sense none is greater, none is lesser.

The university is frequently said to have three main functions: teaching, research and community service. The third of these tasks has been appropriately labelled by the current Swedish Minister of Education, Carl Tham, as the third task’. This refers to being oriented to, co-operating with and serving the society of which the university is a part. In our view, this is also achieved by bringing about learning on the collective and individual level. The third task is not so much about doing something different, but more about doing what the university does anyway, except doing it for and with particular individuals or groups in the community (Tydén, 1997 made this very point recently). It is about serving more immediate community interests, therefore we might refer to it as learning at the local level.

We have therefore chosen learning—learning with certain characteristics— as the critical feature of the university. Although informed by past and present practices, it is a definition that we are asserting. This is what we think the university should be like.

If we accept this definition, which this book is here to develop, we may find that no existing institutions of higher education are entirely about learning and that none are entirely without it. So, in spite of what we said about distinguishing universities from schools, our definition cannot be used for sorting current institutions of higher education into those which are universities and those which are not. But we can use the definition for sorting out components of institutions of higher education which are university-like and those which are not. Accordingly, we would like to contribute to making all institutions of higher education more like ‘universities of learning’.

Defining the university in terms of the conjunction between teaching and research goes back to the traditional European university with a professor, surrounded by a fairly small group of disciples, engaged in lectures, discussions, sitting in the sun, and drinking beer perhaps. The professors were keen on talking about their own research, and the traditional professor was the conjunction of teaching and research.

But the traditional professor is not around any more. During this century the number of students has increased exponentially, while the size of the staff has not grown in proportion. Moreover, we are at the dawn of a more electronically distributed and internationalized higher education. So the relationship between different levels of learning (collective and individual) cannot rest on face-to-face contact. Rather, this relationship has to be maintained in the space of ideas: with students learning new ways of seeing, including recent additions to collective learning, through any of a range of means, from human to electronic.

Learning

The most important thing about institutional forms of learning, such as studying at university, is that they are supposed to prepare students for handling situations in the future, situations which are often very much unlike the situations in which students are being prepared. These future situations are more or less unknown. The more rapidly the world changes, the less can be said about them and the more unknown they become. And the world is changing more and more rapidly, many would say. The instrument we have for preparing students for an increasingly unknown future is our current knowledge. We have to prepare them for the unknown, by means of the known and we have to work out how that can be done.

We are trying to enable students to engage in effective action in relation to purposes and criteria which they have accepted as their own. This action takes place in various situations, and each situation can be viewed in different ways. We act and react to a situation as we see it and the way we see it decides how we act. Effective action requires an effective way of seeing. The central point of this book is that the most important form of learning is that which enables us to see something in the world in a different way. We see effectively when we discern the aspects of the situation critical to our acts and take them into consideration, often all of them at the same time. This is further explained in the remainder of this chapter, but more completely in Chapter 2.

We can prepare our students for effective action by enabling them to see certain situations in certain ways. By developing their seeing, by developing the eyes through which they see things: the photographer’s eyes, the physician’s eyes, the forester’s eyes. New ways of seeing might occasionally replace old ways of seeing. Once we have seen a pattern in an ambiguous picture it may be difficult to ‘unsee’ it. This is nicely illustrated by a student talking about an experience of understanding:

Understanding is the interconnection of lots of disparate things—the way it all hangs together. The feeling that you understand how the whole thing is connected up—you can make sense of it internally… It is as though one’s mind has finally ‘locked in’ to the pattern… If you really understand something, why it works, and what the idea is behind it, you cannot not understand it afterwards—you cannot ‘de-understand’ it!(Entwistle and Entwistle, 1992)

Mostly however, by learning, we widen the range of possibilities of seeing the same thing. Our world grows richer and we have more options for our actions. Not all learning is of this kind of qualitative shift. But it is the kind of learning we are dealing with in this book and throughout the chapters we argue why it is important and discuss how it can be brought about.

We need to consider what it means to see something in a certain way. An effective way of seeing a situation means that all the aspects of the situation which are necessary for handling it effectively are discerned and are taken into consideration. In general, a way of seeing can be characterized in terms of aspects discerned and taken into consideration. Or, even more simply, in terms of a particular pattern of aspects.

Whether or not some particular aspects of a situation are discerned makes the difference between one way of seeing the situation and another, a qualitatively different way of seeing it. Why is it then that a particular aspect is discerned by some, but not by others? Answering this question amounts to answering (at least partially) the question of why we see things differently and why we act differently.

To discern an aspect is to differentiate among the various aspects and focus on the one most relevant to the situation. Without variation there is no discernment. We do not think in a conscious way about breathing until we get a virus or walk into a smoke-filled room. Learning in terms of changes in or widening of our ways of seeing the world can be understood in terms of discernment, simultaneity and variation. Thanks to the variation, we experience and discern critical aspects of the situations or phenomena we have to handle and, to the extent that these critical aspects are focused on simultaneously, a pattern emerges. Thanks to having experienced a varying past we become capable of handling a varying future.

Approaches to learning

Students do not react to the learning environment as such, they react to the learning environment as it is experienced by them. They experience the learning environment in accordance with their way of handling it—or the other way around: they handle the learning environment in accordance with their experience of it. This is just another example of the dialectical relationship between ways of seeing (in this case, experiencing the learning situation) and ways of acting (in this case, handling the learning situation). Approaches to learning comprise both. Differences between approaches to learning are differences in what the learners are focusing on, what they are trying to achieve and how they are going about it.

When adopting a surface approach to learning, the learners are focusing on surface characteristics of the situation, on the very wording of a text being read, of the argument put forward, on figures in a problem, on formulas to be used for solving the problem. They want to be able to answer the questions they are anticipating and they will probably fail even though they are trying so hard (they would also fail, of course, if they did not try at all). They will fail because they are not focusing on the meaning of the text.

When adopting a deep approach to learning the learners are focusing on the object of learning, they are trying to get hold of the phenomenon dealt with in the text they are reading or in the presentation they are listening to. In problem solving they are initially trying to grasp the problem. And, paradoxically enough, because they do not immediately aim at being able to recall a text or to come up with an answer to the problem given, they will probably be better off when it comes to recalling the text or...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part One: A Place for Learning
• Part Two: Aspects of Learning
• Part Three: The University of the Students
• Part Four: A Learning University
• References