Event details

Background and rationale

Despite the emerging policy interest in the quality of teaching in the UK University – the Teaching Excellence Framework – the question whether and to what extent the university can (still) be a place for education rather than just a place for training and the production of useful knowledge remains important and urgent. In this series of three one-day seminars we bring together scholars from a range of disciplines and backgrounds to consider these questions, taking professional education across a range of professions as a focal point for analysis and discussion. In the first seminar we focus on policy, exploring how policies and policy developments are impacting on the educational remit of the university and on how this works out in fields of professional education. In the second seminar we focus on research, asking to which degree and in what ways research – both on the professions and as a mode of professional education itself – is impacting on the educational remit of the university. In the third seminar, we turn to the humanities, asking what the humanities are doing and might be doing in domains of professional education in light of the educational remit of the university. In the background of these discusses are wider questions about what the university is and what the university is for and how the educational remit of the university might be articulated and justified.

Seminar 2: IF RESEARCH IS THE ANSWER, WHAT WAS THE QUESTION? RESEARCH, PROFESSIONS, AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION

Over the past decades many professional fields have encountered a demand for becoming (more) evidence-based. In some cases such demands have emerged from inside particular professions; in other cases such demands have been articulated by policy-makers and regulators. Partly as a result of this, but also emerging out of older traditions of reflective practice and action research, research has not only gained an important place in professional fields and practices but has also become a major ‘mode’ of professional education itself. We can see these developments in such fields as nursing and teaching and their impact on nurse education and teacher education. The second seminar day focuses on the exploration of these developments, by looking, on the one hand, at how different notions and conceptions of research are impact on professional fields and practices and, on the other hand, on the impact this is having on the shape(s) and form(s) of professional education in the university. Is the rise of particular forms of research enhancing the educational dimensions of professional education or does it form a threat? These questions will require both careful documentation and analysis of trends and developments and critical evaluation of possibilities and risks. We will focus on three fields: teaching and teacher education; nursing and nurse education; and social work and the education of social workers.

Speakers:

Prof Helen Gunter, University of Manchester

Prof Michel Vandenbroeck, Ghent University

Prof Terry Wrigley, Northumbria University

Prof Pavel Zgaga, University of Ljubljana

Facilitators:
Dr Ourania Filippakou, Brunel University London

Dr David Aldridge, Brunel University London

Prof Gert Biesta, Brunel University London

This is seminar 2 of a series of 3.

Seminar 1 : QUESTIONING TRAJECTORIES: POLITICS, POLICIES AND HIGHER EDUCATION, 14th March 2018

Seminar 3. HUMANISING EDUCATION: HUMANITIES, PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION AND THE UNIVERSITY, 16^th October 2018