Scholarship on learning and teaching

The next issue of the journal on scholarship on teaching and learning has just been posted. The articles sound very erudite but I wonder if it more of the same vacuous 'aren't I doing well' variety. So I am thinking here of what we might mean by scholarship on learning and teaching. Learning and teaching seems to me to attract big money for of insignificant papers.

Why is it 'scholarship' and not 'research'? Is scholarship work at a lower level? Scholarship is one of those nonsense words, since it refers to the low-level act of being schooled; yet to be called a scholar is an accolade, higher perhaps than being a researcher. Anyhow, we wish to examine learning and teaching rigorously to make a contribution both to evaluating whether we succeed, and to do it better.

Teaching is the act of enabling the learner to learn. It is not about crowd control, or dramatic performances. It is not about anger and temper tantrums and other controlling strategies; it is about honesty, respect, dialogue and motivation.

Research might imply that the researcher is observing some other teacher and learners, whilst scholarship might embrace rigorous evaluation of one's own practice. Research could be so defined, but can be straight-laced sometimes.

So, on learning and teaching. We are not talking about learning parrot-fashion, though I did learn things 50 years ago that I can still recite. We are talking about embedded learning, with understanding. Learning that changes me, corrects my errors, redirects my vision. It worries me that no teacher I ever had managed to do this for me. Learning had to come from within, and the most I could expect of teachers is to not get in the way. Which they invariably did. Perhaps the mistake is the word 'teacher'? Teach is something you do to someone, force information into someone, drill someone with new skills. 'Learn' must therefore be passive and not active, to do as one is instructed. This never worked for me. Learning is something I do, not something someone does to me. If someone helps me learn that is fine. Rare, but fine. Our task with the young is to turn them on to learning, to curiosity, to constructiveness. Schools are structured around the fill-and-test model, requiring memorization. So schools devalue learning and over-value teaching and its processes, of worksheets, control and tests. Billions of pounds spent on the wrong things.

So if I am to write a paper on learning, I have to be smarter. Where does learning occur? What facilitates it? What whets our critical edge? What causes us to say, 'You must be joking?'. Research into learning has to be subversive, to disbelieve the rhetoric of authority claims and expertise claims. In a sense even of truth claims?

If education is not helping our youngsters to be critical, it is a waste of time. It needs to build children up to contribute to developing the quality of their world over the next century. It is not about declaring them failures.