Dominant Discourses in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives, Cartographies and Practice

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This book examines the dominant discourses in higher education. From the moment teachers enter higher education, they are met with dominant discourses that are often adopted uncritically, including concepts such as teaching excellence, student voice, and student engagement. Teachers are also met with simplistic binaries such as teaching vs. research, quantitative vs. qualitative research, and constructivists vs. positivists. Kinchin and Gravett suggest that this may present a distorted view, contributing to the disconnect between the aims and observable practice of higher education. Rather than celebrating difference, dominant discourses tend to seek similarities in an attempt to simplify and manage the environment. In this book, the authors share their belief that teaching and learning should be a thoughtful endeavour. Thinking with a breadth of theories, the authors explore the overlaps between different perspectives in order to offer a richer and more inclusive interrogation of the dominant discourses that pervade higher education. Offering methodological approaches to explore these perspectives, the authors bring together academics working in different parts of the university and examine the concept of a rich cartography, considering how this can offer meaning within higher education research and practice.

Reviews

Anyone concerned about the current state and future direction of teaching and learning in higher education should gain a great deal from this book, even if they don't agree with all of it. Ian and Karen have done us all a service in distilling contemporary methodological and theoretical thinking, and in demonstrating its relevance. * Malcolm Tight, Professor of Higher Education, Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK *
This book is accomplished, provocative, and inspiring. It should act as a call to arms to all of us working, studying or just interested in higher education to re-think, reframe, challenge or resist those dominant discourses which frame academias teaching and learning practices, especially those which left unchallenged may be antithetical to the achievement of fairness, social justice or widening participation. * Jacqueline Stevenson, Professor of Sociology of Education, University of Leeds, UK *
Kinchin and Gravett provoke us to go between and beyond accepted binaries in higher education research and scholarship. Through theory, research and reflections on practice they aim to disorient and disrupt comforting dichotomies, but also offer a map to think, and do, higher education more reflectively. * Camille Kandiko Howson, Associate Professor of Education, Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship, Imperial College London, UK *

Author Bio

Ian M. Kinchin is Professor in Higher Education in the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK. Karen Gravett is Senior Lecturer in Higher Education in the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK.