Making Sense of Teaching in Difficult Times

Thinking about teaching in educational terms has become increasingly difficult because of the dominant conceptions of higher education and the fact that assumptions about social mobility, usefulness, and the economic advantages of higher education can no longer be taken for granted. This book explores understandings of education and teaching experiences in changing global, national, and institutional contexts, and considers the value of disciplinary tools of analysis, connections between pedagogies, autonomy and intercultural classes, and countering the marketization of higher education through online teaching. This book was published as a special issue of Teaching in Higher Education.

Thinking about teaching in educational terms has become increasingly difficult because of the conceptions of higher education that predominate in both policy and public debate. Framing the benefits of higher education simply as an economic good poses particular difficulties for making educational sense of teaching. Moreover, the assumptions about social mobility, usefulness, and the economic advantages of higher education, upon which these conceptions are based, can no longer be taken for granted.

The chapters in this book all wrestle with understandings of education and teaching experiences in changing global, national, and institutional contexts. They explore questions of difference and privilege, the social transformation of teaching through transforming teachers, contestations of global citizenship and interculturality, learning and sensibilities of self-in-the-world, the relationship between programme content and student decision-making, divergent conceptions of learning in international education, and subject-centred approaches to embodied teaching. The book considers the value of disciplinary tools of analysis in addressing contextual challenges in developing societies, connections between pedagogies, autonomy and intercultural classrooms, and ways of countering the marketization of higher education through online teaching communities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Teaching in Higher Education.