northedge, andrew - enabling participation in academic discourse

7/28/2019 Northedge, Andrew - Enabling Participation in Academic Discourse

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Teaching in Higher Education, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2003, pp. 169180

Enabling Participation in Academic

DiscourseANDREW NORTHEDGESchool of Health and Social Welfare, Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes,

UK

ABSTRACT Enthusiasm for replacing the didactic authoritarian pedagogue with the learning

facilitator has seemed to call into question the role of the teacher as subject expert. Yet students

need an insiders expertise to support them in gaining access to the academic discourses they seek

to become conversant with. The teacher, as subject expert, has three key roles to play in enabling

learning: lending the capacity to participate in meaning, designing well planned excursions into

unfamiliar discursive terrain and coaching students in speaking the academic discourse. Each

demands the skill and insight of an established and fluent member of the relevant academic

community. These three roles are explored, using examples to demonstrate how they can be

enacted successfully.

The Teachers Role as Subject Expert

For many committed higher education teachers, who looked back on wasted hours

of inattentive boredom during their own education, the blossoming of the student-

centred learning movement in the 1970s offered the potential of a joyous release

from the grind of delivering information crammed lectures. Carl Rogers, for exam-

ple, in Freedom to Learn (Rogers, 1969), called on teachers to step off the lecture

treadmill and rely instead on students natural inclination to learn, by providing

unthreatening opportunities to explore their own interests. The more enthusiastic

advocates of student centredness became deeply suspicious of the activity of teach-

ing. Indeed, the whole idea that people could be taught anything was challenged.

Learning, it was argued, is a process initiated and accomplished by the student; the

teachers true role is to facilitate this learning. The less the teacher talks the more

the students learn was a popular precept for leaders of tutorial discussions. Taken

to its logical conclusion, this seemed to imply that a truly virtuous teacher would say

nothing at all, thus ensuring the maximum possible learning for the students. Times,

of course, changed. The expansion of higher education, without matching growth of

funding, led to an emphasis on efficient delivery to large classes, while greater

concern for accountability has required detailed specification of educational out-comes and increasingly structured learning programmes. The image of a silent


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170 A. Northedge

teacher waiting patiently for learning to combust spontaneously and then follow its

natural course seems quaintly remote.

Nevertheless, within the educationist fraternity the notion of the facilitator has

survived from that time, along with a suspicion of heavily teacher led programmes.

Whereas the University of London used to have a University Teaching MethodsUnit, such a title would be unthinkable now. Learning must always be placed before

teaching, as in The Institute for Learning and Teaching. However, if teaching is

now a subordinate activity to learning, what does that imply for the status of

teaching as a core component of the profession of lecturing? Is teaching a respectable

activity for highly qualified adults, if it is of lesser significance than the learning

activity of their inexperienced and unqualified students? Are there professional skills

of teaching that one can be proud to have acquired? Does ones subject expertise

make a critical teaching contribution within the learning process? Or ought one to

go no further than be grateful to ones students for having had the will and ability

to learn within the programme one has laid before them?My own experience in classrooms has largely been in Open University tutorials

and summer schools. Early on I found that adult students strongly resisted the

notion of my hovering in the background, gently facilitating. Some pointed out that

they were paying good money to be taught. They wanted to use their hard won

study hours learning what educated people know, not exploring collaboratively

with uneducated peers. Meanwhile, as a long-time developer of distance education

materials, I have had no choice, but to work with almost entirely teacher-led

programmes. Yet these programmes, when effectively designed and written, appear

to have been successful both in terms of course results and student satisfaction.

Adult OU students, many with chequered educational backgrounds, tend to be

studying in order to catch up; to put themselves on an equal footing with graduate

colleagues and friends. They want to be able to read the same books and articles as

them, and join in their discussions. They want to work their way into a relevant

knowledge community and be accepted as legitimate participants. To this end, they

want their teachers to take the initiative in helping them get there and they do not

want them to hold back from using their expertise.

The original exponents of student-centred teaching did great service in exposing

deep faults in traditional university teaching and introduced important shifts in

orientation. Teaching should always be student-centred, in the sense of payingattention to the learning processes fostered within each student. However, there are

dangers in an uncritical embrace of student-centredness, if it undermines the role of

the teacher, and undersells the immense contribution of the academy and academic

knowledge. This paper argues that it is it possible for teachers to pass on their

knowledge of the subject without reverting to the tedium of didactic monologues. It

is necessary that they develop skills in being student-centred but at the same time

speak as subject experts and take the lead in the teaching/learning process. To be

student-orientated is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient. The teachers capa-

bilities as subject expert are a resource vital to their students progress. Failure to

recognise this leads to weak, unfocused teaching.This paper follows on from its companion publication, Rethinking Teaching in


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Enabling Participation in Academic Discourse 171

the Context of Diversity (Northedge, 2003). It works from that papers modelling of

learning as a process of acquiring the capacity to participate in the specialist

discourse of a knowledge community. Similarly, it draws examples from the

UK Open University course K100: understanding health and social care. In the first

paper, I explored the social and cultural challenges facing students as they attemptto enter an academic knowledge community. In this paper, I consider the intellec-

tual challenges students face in attempting to make sense of a knowledge com-

munitys specialist discourse and the teachers role in helping them tackle these

challenges.

The Challenge of Making Meaning within an Unfamiliar Discourse

In discussions with groups of beginning students one common experience they

report is the frustration of picking up a book with an interesting title and thenfinding that nothing inside makes sense. Their eyes scan the words, most of which

are familiar, but no meaning goes in. Struggling through even the first page or two

is a huge and seemingly fruitless effort. Here, is an example of the kind of text a

student may encounter. It is the opening of an article in a K100 book of collected

readings.

The Medical/Social Boundary

The boundary between the medical and the social is a shifting one,

constructed in complex ways that reflect both institutional and ideologicalfactors. (Twigg, 1998, p. 227)

What does this sentence mean to a newcomer to care discourse? In everyday life a

medical is a physical examination and a social is a gathering. Why would a

boundary need to be constructed between themlet alone a complex and shifting

one? What is an institutional factor, let alone an ideological one? To most beginning

students this sentence is impenetrable. Yet it makes immediate sense to experienced

members of the care community. They are well aware that because care services are

broadly divided into a relatively well-funded, long professionalised and well re-

spected medical sector and a poorly-funded, neglected and often derided social

sector, much hangs on whether a persons need for care is defined as medical or

socialthat politics and finance lurk behind the way the terms are employed. For

example, if budgets are tight, then redefining some health care needs as social care

needs is a way, potentially, of easing the strain. So Twiggs sentence springs directly

from an area of debate with which experienced members of the care community are

familiar. It would scarcely occur to them that the meaning of the medical or the

social could be in doubt, though they might be hard pressed if asked to define

exactly what either means in this context. Even if they were not sure of the precise

meaning of institutional and ideological, they would be able to read on withoutpause, because they know the general drift of the arguments surrounding the


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172 A. Northedge

medical-social divide. As they continued they would soon get into what is being

said.

What undermines newcomers efforts to understand a sentence like this is the

backdrop of unspoken assumptions, which provides the frame of reference within

which it is meaningful.

The meaning of any fact, proposition or encounter is relative to the

frame of reference in terms of which it is construed. (Bruner, 1996a, p. 13)

It is not so much a lack knowledge of specific items of information that holds them

back, as a sense of the general context from which they might launch an effort to

comprehend what is being said. In ordinary life, the flow of events around us

supplies enough of a frame of reference to enable us to understand immediately

most of what is said. However, academic discourses work with propositional mean-

ings of a decontextualised and abstract nature. Propositional meanings dependon rules and structures (Bruner, 1996b, p. 98), and on the frame of reference

supplied by implicit questions and purposes shared within the knowledge com-

munity. They do not derive from an immediate situation. Propositional meanings

offer great power of generalisation and prediction, but they are harder for the

mind to work with than direct contextual meanings. This is because the mind

must cope with holding the frame of reference at the same time as pursuing a line

of analysis. For example, to follow the meaning of Twiggs sentence, you have to

hold in mind that we are talking broadly about structures, policies and practice in

the world of care services. For students, this frame of reference is even more

challenging to grasp than the substance of what is said in a particular utterance.Frames are indeterminate and elusive and are called into play by subtle signals. (A

frame of reference only comes into being as the backdrop to debates within the

knowledge community and is continually metamorphosing as knowledge moves on.)

Moreover, frames of reference are rarely referred to, being simply taken for granted

by members of the knowledge community, so that students get very few clues to help

them.

If students are unable to make a sentence such as Twiggs meaningful, because

they do not have appropriate frames of reference within their repertoires, how can

they acquire the necessary framing? Unfortunately, the primary means is to partici-pate in the very discourse that they are unable to make sense of. This is a classic

dilemma for students. They find themselves locked outunable to make sense of

utterances they encounter because they cannot place them within the implicit frames

of reference, but equally unable to make progress with internalising these frames of

reference because they cannot engage with the utterances through which the frames

are made manifest. This is why students need teachers. The teacher, as a speaker of

the specialist discourse, is able to lend students the capacity to frame meanings they cannot

yet produce independently. This is the first of three key roles the teacher can play in

enabling students to engage with a specialist discourse, all three of which depend on

the teachers expertise as a speaker of the discourse and member of the knowledgecommunity.


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Roles of the Teacher in Supporting Participation in Specialist Discourse

Lending the Capacity to Frame Specialist Meanings

Conversation depends on our extraordinarily subtle ability to share frames of

reference. We understand what is being said to the extent that we are able to intuitwhat it is being said about. In everyday conversation when the frame of reference

shifts in the middle of a speakers utterance, we are generally able to follow the shift

effortlessly. As another person takes a turn, the frame of reference will tend to shift

again, and again we follow. Conversation is an extremely flexible way of making

meaning jointly with others. This capacity to frame and generate meaning together

with others is otherwise known as intersubjectivity. Jerome Bruner points out that

teaching rests upon our astonishingly well developed talent for intersubjectivity

the human ability to understand the minds of others (Bruner, 1996a, p. 20). (Note

that intersubjectivity is not limited to face-to-face encounters. Writing and reading

together constitute a form of intersubjectivity, though an asynchronous and lop-sided form.) Teachers are able to lend students the capacity to frame the meanings

of a specialist discourse by opening up conversations with them and sharing in a

flow of meaning. As students join with the teacher in sharing meaning they also

share something of the frame of reference that sustains it. They come to experience

how the framing works, what kind of framing it is. While they may not be able to

reconstruct the framing very effectively in their own thoughts when the teacher is

absent, they will have enhanced their ability to share meanings with authors of texts

on the same topic. It is through repeatedly sharing in meaning making with speakers

of the specialist discourse that students come to internalise the frames of reference

which are taken for granted within the knowledge community. So how is this sharing

of meanings achieved in practice?

Constructing conditions of intersubjectivity. In a teaching act, the teachers first task is

to initiate a state of intersubjectivity with the students. At the simplest level this

means capturing their attention. However, it also means establishing a common

focus for some shared meaning making. To take an example from the K100 course,

one section begins with a story about a young couple, Jim and Marianne, who are

homeless drug users (K100 Course Team, 1998). On the opening page is a large

striking photograph of a healthy looking young man injecting himself. This immedi-ately creates a compelling frame of reference, before a word has been read. What is

he injecting? Why? Is this a moral tale? There follows a brief sketch of the

backgrounds of Jim and Marianne. This builds up a more elaborate frame of

reference, which students can easily share with the author without any knowledge of

specialist care discourses. Then in a series of instalments scattered through the text,

the story of the two unfolds, as they encounter various dilemmas, each of which

exposes key issues in the delivery of community level care. Much of the information

and explanation presented in the text is about legislation, policy, local government

structures, procedures and documentation, and is potentially very tedious and

confusing. However, at every point this difficult material is introduced in the contextof addressing Jim and Mariannes needs. Activities are included that ask students to


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174 A. Northedge

interpret the information and explanations, and consider what is appropriate to the

case. At one stage in the story Mariannes use of needles leads to infection

culminating in the amputation of her leg, while Jim suffers a stroke. This shifts them

from the social to the medical side of the medical/social divide. Later the couple

leave hospital for community housing and so move back across the divide. Thesemoves allow various aspects of the medical/social divide to be explored. By this point

the students have internalised an adequate frame of reference to tackle the Twigg

text referred to above. They are ready to engage in intersubjectivity with Twigg, not

because they have had words such as institutional or ideological explained to them,

but because the general concerns of the debate are now active in their thoughts.

I have outlined this case, not because such use of case material is unusual,

but to explore how it works. It is very difficult to initiate or maintain intersubj-

ectivity with students through a straightforward exposition of the complexities

of community level care. For students the frame of reference will keep slipping

out of focus, because the terms used within the care community do not carry

sufficient meaning for them. By contrast, the Jim and Marianne story provides a

strong and stable framing throughout the text and one which students can easily

share. In other words, the story helps to construct conditions of intersubjectivity.

Bruner argues that stories generate a primitive form of meaning which is shared

more or less effortlessly (Bruner, 1996b). In contrast to the sharing of rule-

based propositional meaning, which can easily break down, stories reliably generate

stable shared meaning. This makes them excellent vehicles in teaching, where

students are necessarily venturing into realms in which the framing of meaning is

problematic for them. Stories are a superb device for initiating and sustainingintersubjectivity.

Leading excursions from familiar discourse into specialist discourse. Early in the dis-

cussion of Jim and Mariannes case students are asked such questions as What is

your attitude to Jim and Marianne at this point? These make immediate sense

within everyday discourse. However, as the discussion develops, new issues are

raised that are specific to specialist care discourse, such as the impact of the

medical/social divide upon Jim and Mariannes experience of care services. Thus, a

discussion which at the outset is framed within the terms of everyday discourse

gradually becomes reframed within specialist discourse, allowing students to experi-

ence the making of meaning within the specialist discourse.

This manoeuvre is very basic to teaching. Shared meaning is initiated within a

discourse familiar to students. Then, by posing questions and introducing new

elements, the students are taken on an excursion into the specialist discourse, to

experience how meaning is made there. In this way, they apprehend how the

specialist discourse worksits purposes and processes: the nature of the questions

asked, the forms of evidence and argument employed, the types of conclusions

arrived at and the history of previous debates. These are structuring features of the

specialist discourse and are fundamental to understanding it. Students internalisethem primarily through participation, rather than from explicit explanation.


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Planning Excursions from Familiar into Specialist Discourse

If teaching is understood as a series of excursions into specialist discourse, then a

second key role of the teacher is to plan these excursions. It is important to ensure

that students encounter a suitable range of issues, debates and voices to enable them

to develop a sense of the nature of the knowledge community and its discoursesitsparticipants, its values and preoccupations, and its modes of speech and argument.

For example, the Jim and Marianne case was chosen because it opens up a range of

important issues within current care discourse. These issues are carefully separated

out and addressed sequentially, so that the concepts and arguments they invoke can

be explored systematically. This exploration is partly achieved through activities

inserted in the text which draw students into active debate. Here is how the

sequence develops:

After the first instalment of the Jim and Marianne story, students are asked to

write notes about their attitudes and feelings towards these two people, having

identified them as drug users.

They are also asked to speculate about the possible reactions of health profes-

sionals to people carrying the labels of addict and homeless.

This leads on to a discussion of the morality of allocating scarce resource to self

harming clients. Students are asked to think about the obligations of a doctor

faced with the prospect of taking on patients such Jim and Marianne, who are

likely to be expensive and unpopular with other patients.

Students are then asked to read a personal account by a doctor of the

experience of being repeatedly called out by a patient at unreasonable hours,and the moral dilemmas this presents (widening the horizon, beyond Jim and

Marianne).

They are asked to make notes about the doctors obligations to individual

patients, on the one hand, and to the community, on the other.

A number of general points are briefly raised in the text, concerning moral

issues and legal entitlements.

After this students are asked to imagine themselves as members of a health

authority having to make a choice about spending on a drug rehabilitation unit,

or beds for acute psychiatric care. The issues this raises are discussed.

The whole discussion up to this point is rounded up and summarised as a setof key points. These are expressed as simple propositions, not vague discursive

observations. This is important because students are grappling with unfamiliar

propositional knowledge and need to be very clear what is and is not being

said.

Here, students have reached a resting point on their excursion into care discourse;

a chance to look around and see what the countryside looks like in this new

discursive environment; to look back at where the journey started from and what

ground has been covered. A further instalment of the Jim and Marianne story then

leads off the next stage of the excursion. A new sequence of carefully selected issuesis opened up through activities and broadened through reference to other materials.


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176 A. Northedge

After another resting point, where the discussion is again rounded up, there is a third

instalment of the story, which leads, amongst other things, to a discussion of the

medical/social divide, and its impact on Jim and Marianne.

Clearly, the case is much more than a story. Its content represents a very

deliberate selection and organisation of incident and detail, to enable students tofollow a flow of discussion and participate in significant debates. Without such a

device, many beginning students would find the framing of these debates too

difficult, whereas with it they are able to participate. Meanwhile, students more

familiar with care discourse can participate in the Jim and Marianne material at a

more sophisticated level. The case is based on real people and presents dilemmas

that would challenge any carer. In thinking about the issues it raises, more experi-

enced students can make links to their own daily actions and decision making, thus

entering into the in-text activities in a more vigorously generative and convergent

mode (Northedge, 2003).

Note that the above is a strongly teacher-led learning sequence. It is far from anopen-ended, student-centred approach. Students are not left to explore their own

interests and draw their own conclusions from Jim and Mariannes case, limited as

they would be by their personal knowledge of drug users and treatments, and their

own personal preconceptions and concerns. Instead, they are led along a path

carefully constructed to expose them to issues that the teacher, as a speaker of the

specialist discourse, knows to be significant within that discourse. Furthermore, they

are invited to think about these issues in ways that correspond to the thinking of

experts within the care community. Students are invited to build from their personal

knowledge and experience as they encounter materials and activities, but they build

to a design planned by the teacher with the specific aim of linking them to significant

debates.

Consequently, their knowledge can, if they choose, continue to grow through

further participation. If, by contrast, students are essentially encouraged to follow

the collective inclinations and ideas of a peer group, however much progress they

may seem to achieve, when that peer group disbands at the end of the course its

members will be left at a dead end, holding ideas that connect to no active or

significant knowledge community.

Designing a vigorous flow of meaning. Developing a teaching sequence of the kindoutlined above has parallels with writing a play. You have an audience from very

different backgrounds, who will arrive at the theatre with very varied thoughts in

mind. However, you do not call their thoughts into line with an opening announce-

ment of the main themes of play. Instead, you open with an intriguing scene, and

some words and actions to establish the kind of situation it is. As events begin to

unfold and characters comment on them, themes begin to emerge. The story is told

by the events and the characters reactions to them, not by direct exposition.

Moreover, each audience member constructs the story and themes according to

their own ideas, and personal experience so that, at the end of the play, each takes

away rather different messages. These are not explicit, tightly constructed messages;they are resources for thinking. Situations and issues from the play will return to the


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audience members minds as they think about other things and further messages will

emerge.

Good learning is like this. Students participate in a compelling flow of thoughts,

many of which form only fleetingly and incompletely before the meaning moves on.

Later, however, as the students participate in other flows of thought, elements fromthe half realised thoughts will return and be incorporated. Because knowing is a

dynamic process, located in flows of meaning, learning experiences need also to be

constituted as vigorous flows of meaning. Though teachers tend to favour patient

explanation, this is often too static and too specific to work for students.

Explanation generally achieves more in the mind of the teacher, where it is being

actively generated, than in the minds of students. A strong flow of debate is much

more likely to enable new knowing, particularly with a diverse student body.

The importance of plot. Building on the theatre analogy, good teaching requires a

strong plot. Teachers, because they are aware of the propositional structure of theirknowledge, tend to emphasise logical connections and systematic covering of the

ground. They design treatments of the subject that look satisfyingly neat from the

expert perspective. However, students lack the frames of reference to make the

logical connections or to appreciate the thoroughness of the treatment. What sticks

in their minds are moments when it all made sensethe striking example, the

intriguing activity. Instead of thinking of a topic in the syllabus as ground to be

covered it can be thought of as a set of circumstances, characters and events

around which a plot can be woven. Thus, the Jim and Marianne case was presented

as a sequence of situations with associated activities, rather than as a sequence of

points to be delivered. Indeed, this is how students remember it. They express

enthusiasm for the material and write fluently about it in essays and exams, using the

specific events of the case as pegs on which to hang their discussion. The material

only works, however, because of its strong plot. As a jumble of loosely related

materials and activities, it would be just another pile of stuff to learn.

The importance of storyline. However, plot alone is not enough. It must also be well

delivered. A well maintained storylinea coherent, continuous flow of evolving

meaningis fundamental to successful teaching. Teachers often pay insufficient

attention to this. They leap from one frame of reference to another without noticing,because the discourse is so well established in their thoughts that its frames of

reference seem natural and obvious. Yet at each shift their students lose the flow of

meaning and break intersubjective contact with the teacher. In effect the whole

teaching manoeuvre breaks down. Skills in constructing and sustaining a storyline

are crucial in lending students the capacity to frame new meanings.

It is worth noting here that plot and storyline are important issues for those

working with the new electronic teaching media. Websites and CD-ROMs provide

outstanding access to information. However, the limitless freedom they offer to

branch off in all kinds of directions is also a potential weakness. It tends to work

against narrative flow. If students know what questions they want to ask, the Internetcan lead to a wealth of information. However, if their real need is to acquire new


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178 A. Northedge

frames of reference and to locate their thoughts within a different discourse, flipping

from screen to screen of a series of websites may not take them very far. On the

account presented here, a coherent controlled teaching narrative is vital, but as yet,

narratives appear to be underdeveloped in pedagogic uses of ICT.

Coaching in Speaking and Writing the Discourse

I suggested earlier that the teacher, as an accomplished speaker of the relevant

specialist discourse, has three key roles. The first is to lend the capacity to frame

meanings within the specialist discourse. The second is to plan, organise and lead

excursions into the specialist discourse. Now we turn to the third, which is to coach

students in speaking the discourse competently, both orally and in writing. If K100

students, for example, are to participate in the care community, they not only need

to be able to make sense of what is said and written within care discourses, they

must also be able to speak and write for themselves. To be taken seriously within thecommunity, their use of concepts, terms, and modes of argument must be appropri-

ate. Their grasp of the frames of reference within which terms like the medical, the

social and the medical/social divide are used must be sufficient to allow them to

generate legitimate meanings of their own, using these terms. To acquire this

fluency, they need opportunities to speak and write the discourse in the presence

of a competent speaker who can, by responding, help to shape their usage.

When the student speaks in class or writes an assignment the teacher is in a

position to guess the discursive context the students are starting from, sense the

intended meaning of their utterances, and (taking advantage of the powers of

intersubjective framing) respond in a way which shows the student how to refocus

their propositions in line with mainstream usage within the discourse.

Writing. Coached practice in framing legitimate meanings within the discourse

can be achieved through both oral discussion and writing. However, because of the

textual character of academic discourse, coaching in writing is particularly

significant. This is insufficiently recognised. Marking written work tends to be

understood as grading and correcting. Yet, while both of these are important,

more important for the students development is some kind of answering response

to the meanings they have attempted to generate. Commentary in the form of briefremarks or questions gives important clues as to how ideas might be reframed to

achieve greater force and clarity within the terms of the discourse.

Ideally, this coaching relationship should start early in a course and be sustained

on a regular basis. Newcomers to a discourse need to practise little and often,

rather than undertaking large assignments infrequently. Assignment tasks should be

framed so as to enable students to position themselves within the discourse and

generate worthwhile thoughts of their own. For example, K100 students have been

set the essay question What does the case of Jim and Marianne tell us about

problems of access to local care services? This allows newcomers to care discourse

to position their thoughts inside the case context, to reconsider the analysis theyundertook, whilst studying and to generalise it more widely. Instead of simply


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recycling extracts from accounts by experts, they have a base from which to think

themselves into the issues and arguments.

Speaking. Classroom discussion also plays a significant role in coaching students

in speaking the discourse. It allows students to share in the groups intersubjectiveframing of debates, and to participate directly or vicariously in shifting that framing

around as they bring their usage of the specialist discourse into sharper focus. The

teacher coaches by reframing ideas that emerge within the group, to make them

work within the terms of the specialist discourse. Of course, the teacher also serves

as a live model of how the discourse is spoken. By seizing upon an issue and

analysing it in the students presence, the teacher shows how thoughts are composed

and arguments developed to meet the needs of the moment.

Conclusion

This paper has aimed to show how a sociocultural account of the teachers role

allows a balance to be struck between, on the one hand, the traditional heavy focus

on delivering knowledge and, on the other, the danger with student-centred

approaches of underplaying the significance of the teachers specialist knowledge

and skills. In identifying the relevant specialist discourse and its associated discourse

community as the source of knowledge, this model of teaching gives the teachers

academic expertise a central place in the teaching/learning process, whilst also

recognising that teaching must begin where the student is. By harnessing our talent

for intersubjectivity, teachers can temporarily lend students the capacity to framemeanings they lack the experience to frame for themselves. Secondly, by designing

carefully plotted narrative excursions into expert discourse teachers can help stu-

dents to accumulate a working knowledge of the characteristics of the discourse, so

that they can make their way around it for themselves. Thirdly, through dialogue,

teachers can coach students in speaking the discourse, so that they can come to

function as competent members of the knowledge community. HE needs neither

teachers who spout knowledge endlessly, nor teachers who set their own knowledge

aside for fear of distorting the students learning experience. Rather it needs teachers

who know how to use their academic knowledge to guide and support travelling

bands of diverse students as they learn to participate in unfamiliar knowledgecommunities and acquire usage of their powerful discourses.

REFERENCES

BRUNER, J.S. (1996a) The Culture of Education (Cambridge, Harvard University Press).

BRUNER, J.S. (1996b) Frames for thinking: ways of making meaning, in: D. OLSON & N.

TORRANCE (Eds) Modes of Thought: explorations in culture and cognition (Cambridge, Cam-

bridge University Press).

K100 COURSE TEAM (1998) Unit 10, Accessing Community Services, K100 Understanding Health

and Social Care (Buckingham, Open University).

NORTHEDGE, A. (2003) Rethinking teaching in the context of diversity, Teaching in Higher

Education, 8, pp. 1732.


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