Teaching as Enigma: A Role for Digression

ELiSS now publishes papers online when they are ready for publication and then organises them into a specific volume and issue number with accompanying editorial at a later point. This ensures accepted papers are published as soon as possible and also poses a novel issue for an editor, for she or he can hardly introduce papers already available and probably downloaded as if they are new to readers. Indeed, some of the papers in 6.1 have been available for some time, and rightly so. So what purpose can an editorial serve in this situation? Searching for links after the event where there is no overall theme is likely to prove unsuccessful. Perhaps the ‘editor as author’ might search for narratives within the field of higher education for a particular journal issue? In this editorial I consider validation and online course management requirements as texts forming a narrative to embed teaching and learning practices. We are pleased to publish six papers in this issue and particularly to introduce a commentary on a previous paper. Here Professor Judith Burnett, Pro Vice-Chancellor at Greenwich University, discusses the paper by Eric Harrison and Rob Mears on assessment in undergraduate sociology published last year in ELiSS 5.3 (Harrison & Mears 2013). The issue of assessment is an important one for all who work in higher education and social scientists have worked to develop lively assessments for students and to contribute to research and practice in assessment generally. Harrison and Mears showed that undergraduate students did not necessarily view assessment in positive terms and so their paper questioned how much progress has been made since the fund for development of teaching and learning (FDTL) study in 2001. Burnett takes this question forward and provides a lens through which many academics in the social sciences can continue to contribute reports on their pedagogic practice, research reports to ELiSS and other journals devoted to promoting learning and teaching in the social sciences.

It is pleasing to record that increasingly ELiSS is able to draw on a wide range of reviewers for papers including colleagues from across the world thereby bringing an international dimension to the work of the journal. In keeping with our desire to respond promptly and professionally to all submissions I am pleased to record thanks to an increasing number of reviewers who provide detailed feedback to authors and who complete reviews promptly. This particular issue brings together a number of papers with no obvious linking theme other than their location in higher education, their concern with a broad range of topics including professional practice, student backgrounds, online systems, and detailed examinations of classroom activity from different perspectives. Their heterogeneity is a strength, so too is the variety of subject disciplines drawn upon, including art and design, education, human rights, social work and sociology.

Lisa Zerden and her colleagues Joelle Powers and Chris Wretman are US academics and practitioners in social work. They note that social work students often find research methods teaching particularly challenging so they provide a simple but well tested classroom activity to help overcome this resistance. Many educators will identify with the issues Zerden and her colleagues raise. Jenny Louise-Lawrence explores how feminist pedagogy might be employed to overcome a dominant master discourse. Her paper shows how it takes time and a particularly conducive atmosphere to support students who might well be alienated by the dominant discourse. This is akin to ideas in Samantha Broadhead's paper with two students who completed an Access course and went on to art and design courses in higher education but experienced challenges to their self-confidence, finding the ways in which they were constructed negatively against a norm of who was expected to become HE students meant, on Broadhead's analysis, that they were treated as ‘other’. Sarah Lyndon and Bev Hale present a practice paper on online learning and their experiences with students on a childhood education course where ‘Moodle’ usage was central to the classroom experience. So, how can an editor introduce these papers? These papers have a relationship to either the validation and review process or the implementation of institution wide online learning provision through a virtual learning environment (vle). In her response to Harrison and Mears Burnett brings out some of the linkages between different parts of the university or higher education provider and how they contribute to policy developments. As she notes, students do not necessarily recognise (why should they?) some of the terms academics and administrators use for recording evaluations of experience. The paper by Darren O’Byrne on researching and teaching human rights from a personal perspective possibly comes from a different starting point. But human rights teaching as O’Byrne shows can take place on a whole course basis, the basis of his paper, or as part of a degree course where it has to be recognised and validated. O’Byrne is concerned with what he terms a ‘space of feeling’, which has much in common with the position of learners in the other papers in this issue.

Digression and narrative

I want to suggest that an editorial coming after the publication of papers forms a ‘digression’ where digressing is a deliberate activity. The term often suggests something non-serious, leading away from the main point. A teacher or author(or both) is expected to have clear points but where there is a drifting away, students and readers may become puzzled and bemused. I want to recover digression as a deliberative activity of value to teaching and learning. Taking Ross Chambers' ideas (Chambers 1984, 1999) on digression together with Barthes' ideas on codes (Barthes 1975), pedagogic practices can become worthwhile digressions seeking to create an awareness of permeability and malleability of contexts. The editorial as digression plays with this and seeks to comment briefly on how authors are part of a necessary digression. The digressive can be approached from its Latin root ‘dis-gradi’ – a stepping aside, but not necessarily a stepping aside to provide an overview or commentary, important though that is. Rather, I want to suggest the digression serves multiple purposes, one of which is a move away from a starting point, for digression is a deliberate feature of a piece of writing or talk once the setting or scene has been introduced; it takes us in a new direction with only a few, often disguised, links back to the starting point. Let us see pedagogic digression as a shift or move away from something that has already started. In this editorial that starting point is a validation event. To amplify ‘digression’ I draw upon Barthes' five codes briefly summarised thus: the hermeneutic code seeks to answer a question, explore and address an enigma, and as such is not reversible; the second code consists of the ‘semes’ or signifiers whose use I explore briefly. An early example of this code in Barthes' analysis of Balzac's short story Sarrasine, is that of gender signifiers used to connote complexity and ambiguity. Third, we have the ‘symbolic grouping’ (1975, p19) by which events are attributed a symbolic value and as we shall see validation and course documents acquire this coding. Then there is the proairetic code, which forms a series of actions in sequence and like the hermeneutic code is not reversible. I shall suggest learning outcomes often fulfil this coding requirement. Finally, the cultural code references bodies of knowledge assumed and used in a culture; in this editorial the cultural code includes the expectations placed on both validation and the movement of modules or courses into possible online delivery. In line with Barthes' analysis these five codes only will be referred to. Of course there are differences between Barthes' analysis of a literary text and what is appropriate in the analysis of institutional documents. My point is that we can draw on Barthes' codings as a heuristic to point to how digressions can work to reveal elements of the enigma of teaching and learning. Of course my approach is tentative and far from being fully developed. It does not attempt to account for everything in the papers published and, indeed, is a guide, a way of looking at papers which have no particular linkage between them. We should also note that three of the codes are reversible. Thus the frequent cry of ‘we need to change the culture!’ as a call for reversibility. Much of the contest in HE as elsewhere is over claims for a reverse to be made, not necessarily as a regressive feature, for reverse can be highly positive.

An initial question here is to ask what some of the starting points for courses and modules might be and how staff and students encounter such beginnings? That question arises because the context our authors share is that of the day-to-day activity in classrooms: using an online setting, establishing purposive relations against dominant discourses, exploring the implications of assessment strategies, improving students' confidence and familiarity with research methods teaching. In previous issues of the journal the context involved employability, internationalisation and online learning. In all issues of the journal the papers have been concerned with matters of pedagogic and academic interest to the social sciences. This time the context is that of the everyday and the presence of pedagogy through the multitude of decisions learners and teachers make, although our authors are not concerned with the particular starting point of validation in their papers.

How can we describe this context of the everyday? I suggest that there is a frequently visible official higher education narrative telling a number of stories, stories that are not without difficulties and challenges, but nevertheless these stories implicate, give rise to and sustain discourses. The stories taken together contribute to a cultural code. In this issue we concentrate primarily on the UK although Zerden's paper on social work training at graduate level brings in a US viewpoint and one that many elsewhere in the world will recognise.

Official stories of how the management and organisation of day-to-day teaching and learning delivery in UK higher education has developed over the last twenty years might include accounts of modularisation, patterns of validation and review, processes to handle changing professional requirements, strategies for research-active teaching, involvement of students in research, responses to and incorporation of both research council and professional body requirements, government policies usually mediated through funding council strategies, a range of professional requirements including a growing history of enhancement strategies and projects. We can take but one of these now for consideration here: the development of a module or course with its validation, delivery and evaluation including delivery through use of a virtual learning environment (vle) for at least part of the delivery. Perhaps the module was introduced to enable students to benefit from staff research expertise, or their professional expertise. Perhaps it was introduced following a tradition of teaching inquiry in a department or university, or from staff enthusiasms and response to student feedback. Indeed, the module may have been introduced to meet benchmark and or professional body requirements. Perhaps the department is mindful of particularly successful modules and their potential take up by students who will complete evaluations, for position in National Student Survey (NSS) tables matter too. Maybe an enhancement strategy or specific teaching award practice lay behind the development. Whichever of these and the many other possible starting points we can assert that validation and course approval marks a point of beginning, an institutionally recognised start point. Approval is normally given for a specific period of time and the module comes to exist through this process even though it may be a revalidation process. Module descriptions tend to follow a common framework: module title, credit details, module aims, learning outcomes, approaches to teaching and learning, course content, assessment approaches and details, possible assessment criteria, outline reading list. Further details of assessment and module organisation are often attached through related documentation. At the same time the module probably has an online presence through a vle that hosts lecture notes, resources, possible wikis, student group work and of course assessment submission. The module descriptor, a programme specification and an online presence operate together. Thus we have to consider the presence of modules and courses in institutional online environments as part of the overall starting point.

There have been many changes to these processes over time despite the apparent similarity of the documentation. One factor that has changed process and outcome has been a renewed emphasis on the enhancement of teaching, the use of formal requirements such as learning outcomes to enable teachers and students to do new and different things. Validation requirements in the 1990s and, indeed, more recently were not always able to support group project learning, varying forms of placement activity and cross-institutional project work. There will be many who will recall arguments in validation over interpretation of learning outcomes and a feeling of constriction. Change there has been and undoubtedly national projects such as the Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) as well as teaching awards and project work sponsored by bodies such as HEA and subject bodies has led to a greater congruence between capturing what teachers want to do and what formal requirements permit. Burnett draws on this background in her comments on how assessment is set between different policy initiatives and requirements.

I have laboured this preliminary account of the institutional story because it is so much a taken for granted part of life for tutors, administrators, students and managers. It can be seen as a story particularly in the bringing together of individual and group narratives. Power relations suffuse the stories – who is able to exert control and tell the story is an important question. What narratives and local stories are missed out when particular forms of control are exerted? Articles in this issue help explore these questions. Louise-Lawrence explores some of the local stories of students on gender studies modules who meet issues of power while Broadhead raises directly issues of power over the classification of students and their experiences. The institutional validation and delivery stories are often variants on a theme that seeks ‘texts in a demonstrative oscillation, equalising them under the scrutiny of an indifferent science, forcing them to rejoin inductively, the Copy from which we will then make them derive’ (Barthes 1975, p3). The practices of validation and the ensuing written documents form such copies. While many journal articles explore the processes of achieving validation outcomes, sometimes critiquing the processes involved, a more interesting focus is that of students and tutors working in classrooms suffused with these requirements as a cultural code. What is noticeable about the official narratives is their perplexity over the qualities of teaching as enigma. The reduction of apparent contrasts of meaning, the search for a defined set of possible meanings albeit realised in a multitude of ways, a flattening of narratives has sometimes become a feature of institutional validation and course design practice. I say ‘sometimes’ because the tension between this flattening towards a ‘readerly text’ in Barthes' terms and much institutional practice directed towards the individuality, the shared group experience of exciting learning has led to the ‘writerly’ possibilities Barthes emphasises. As I indicated immediately above, many of the teaching enhancement initiatives over the last twenty years have enabled discourses of teaching and learning to emerge which resist such flattening. They emphasise and draw attention to teaching as an enigma and as a quality difficult to define and locate. Each of the papers in this issue has its own codings and they do not share a common hermeneutic code. What they convey is a sense of successful teaching and learning as enigmatic and of value.

The hermeneutic code is a key building block for Barthes as it sets out the enigma within the text, never directly revealing it but often pursuing divergent paths towards its realisation. We can locate the papers in this issue in the way they draw attention to enigmatic qualities of teaching and learning. I want to treat teaching and learning as an enigma whose realisation is usually through digression. The hermeneutic code resists an easy revealing of the enigma of learning and teaching, hence digressions adapt and change the story. Digressions in our sense are authoritative; they carry the weight of research evidence, careful examination of data and the experiences of those involved.

Papers in this issue

The hermeneutic code in Zerden et al.'s paper is that of developing and holding up the enigma of the successful research methods course where students become involved, excited about how methods apply to their lives and to their professional work. Its enigmatic quality lies in its fragility and constant risk of never being achieved. This sense of fragility as part of a hermeneutic coding is also found in the papers by Louise-Lawrence and Broadhead.

Louise-Lawrence explores how a feminist pedagogy can operate in surroundings where it is often set against a master discourse, that of the frequently gendered and dominant organisational form loosely but regularly expressed through validation documents. Her inquiry is rooted in the everyday life of the classroom. The hermeneutic code here is a seemingly fragile one because the dominant narrative and an associated master discourse are particularly powerful. This raises a point Barthes recognises – the shifts and turns between story or narrative and discourse. Taking institutional pedagogic discourse here as the outcome of the elements of a validation document that expresses ideas on teaching and learning, Barthes' codes encode this discourse. Thus where Zerden's students met an activity requiring an appraisal of an everyday experience – marketing a cake – Louise-Lawrence's students become aware of a different coding as they question, or rather, are helped to question the dominant discourse. Again the hermeneutic coding of the enigmatic quality of feminist pedagogy brings out an inclusive but elusive quality to teaching. Broadhead's paper looks at the experience of particular students, those who have taken an Access course and gone on to art and design courses in higher education. Her paper is informed particularly by Bernstein's use of code. The discourses invoked differ from those explored by Louise-Lawrence and Broadhead brings out how power operates directly in classrooms as her case study informants reflect on their experiences. There is more than one hermeneutic code in all the papers but what Broadhead's paper shares with those of Zerden et al. and Louise-Lawrence is the enigmatic quality of teaching that is inclusive, value-based, learner centred and so often difficult to realise despite the promises of documentation. O’Byrne's paper deals directly with what might be a hermeneutic code for human rights and its teaching, showing that the joy of teaching it is exactly that the hermeneutic code is enigmatic, not given in advance and must result through learner activity and indeed much of the learning may be difficult and painful.

Lyndon and Hale in their practice paper review the use of the vle in HE classrooms. The educational, administrative, technical parts of vle usage come together to create a series of practices now found in most universities. They point to the now well established advantages and successful outcomes from vle usage and they draw attention to some of the new demands made on academic staff. Their particular innovations and uses of ‘Moodle’ provide the focus for an evaluative study. This in itself is important as institutions understandably require evaluations to be conducted in order to assess how and where funding should be distributed. What Lyndon and Hale bring out is the closeness of this evaluative and instructional discourse to the activities of classrooms. The hermeneutic code here brings these elements together while the proairetic code brings out a set of action requirements tutors and students have to fulfil. This paper particularly brings out some of the difficulties experienced by all in using vles. As such it brings into focus institutional demands which is necessary and it also shows how teaching and learning presents an enigmatic quality. How do you capture the transformational experience of student learning? In capturing it how do you present it in ways which can be recognised and accommodated within educational stories told by institutions? For Lyndon and Hale the snapshot evaluation is a starting point and their paper brings out how the semes associated with vle construct students as successful or unsuccessful learners, eg through number of uses of the online forums.

Barthes suggests that two of the codes, the hermeneutic and the proairetic, are irreversible while the others can involve reversibility and a variety of changes. Thus what is symbolic in one context may take a different value in another. This contributes to Barthes' interest in the plurality and openness of texts. O’Byrne addresses this directly referring to the need for a multiplicity of disciplinary discourses. A particularly telling example in his paper of openness drawing on the proairetic comes from the student who disappointed her teachers by refusing to study in line with her A-levels at a ‘top’ UK institution choosing instead to study psychology at another leading London institution where she was an academic success. However, a period abroad in India changed her view of the world, of what was important in the world and what was important for her. She left to study human rights at O’Byrne's institution. The proairetic is irreversible – she cannot go back. But what is given instead is a way into a range of discourses each building upon others. Doubtless to her original teachers her path may seem to be digressive but what she does is to draw on the digressions she met to reformulate her hermeneutic code of importance and values.

The semic code can take different values in different contexts and show reversibility as Barthes demonstrates through the gendered indeterminacy of Sarassine in the short story he analyses. The semic value of a vle in Lyndon and Hales' paper is not accepted unconditionally; their review shows a number of the controversies in play. This links with Harrison and Mears's paper where the use of a vle for the organisation of assessment was a feature. The vle has assumed a number of symbolic values shifting over time and becoming reversible. Lyndon and Hale show how the use of Moodle has supported this. Burnett's paper is a contribution to an ongoing theme in higher education. As a response to a previously published paper it widens terms of debate and focuses in on particular issues. Burnett could be said to look below and behind the hermeneutic code in place for assessment and to bring together some of what might be termed semic and proairetic codes although of course she does not operate with this tradition. To suggest these six papers are digressions may indirectly suggest they are of less worth than others. Far from it, for I suggest their effectiveness lies in a digressive quality.

Digression

The dominant hermeneutic stories behind validation and the implementation of online learning are of course often messy and contested but they are also capable of elaboration and provide support too for what teachers do in classrooms and other settings. I do not analyse in any detail the codings discussed above in relation to the five papers other than to note each has its own hermeneutic code. This particular code operates here at different degrees of distance from classrooms. The papers by Lyndon and Hale and Zerden et al. explore activities close to the events that took place and so have a quality of being at first hand. Their work may well contribute to new directions and developments within their institutions. In both cases the work is at a comparatively early stage and so actions (proairetic code) have an irreversible quality. As cultural codings impact on the lives of students and teachers then other possibilities may be envisaged. Their digressive quality is that of an initiative that seeks to clarify what can be achieved. They are close to the validation and online set up narratives but they occupy a gap or point of distance where they show there are questions and issues that are not always foreseen in the original institutional stories. The papers by Louise-Lawrence and Broadhead are contextualised within existing courses' processes. The authors reflect on the activities of students in their respective contexts. In these two papers there is emphasis on the symbolic. Broadhead draws on the theories of Bernstein and others while Louise-Lawrence draws on feminist pedagogy. Their work forms part of a continuity within those particular fields of research and both papers provide important digressions to the dominant validation story. They too bring out gaps and missing elements to the regular institutional stories but what is noticeable here is that for both authors the cultural and symbolic codes are particularly important and so the proaretic code runs down particular lines. Broadhead's students explore a lack of confidence whereas Louise-Lawrence's students explore group activity and its impact on their individual actions in classrooms. The two contexts are different: Broadhead's students are on their own and reflect on past experiences while Louise-Lawrence's are working as a group with her as teacher. In both papers the background of the validation requirement is present but this time the digression is at a different point. The cultural codes in play bring different theorisations forward and also offer direct challenges to local and institutional practices.

Human rights forms a contested area or space. For some it may form a digressive strategy and we can suggest that the managers at O’Byrne's institution treated the course as a digression that moved away from what they felt was required, perhaps in terms of student numbers, demands made by the course, or indeed with reference to any of the features mentioned above under validation and review. What O’Byrne's paper offers is the glimpse of what students gained from the course, some of which are doubtless similar to what the students in Louise-Lawrence's course gained too. These glimpses lie outside the official stories although they are often drawn upon in student evidence to validation committees. But what the account and the student experiences bring out is the way digressive knowledge is challenging and ever more so when it is supported by pedagogies attuned both to difference and to enabling students to explore permeable contexts. The semes in O’Byrne's paper bring together disparate knowledge that is organised through discourses which is a particular feature of the academic paper as opposed to a literary work. The particular semes in his paper work together to bring out a capacity for the human and how it is realised in a particular academic field. Addressing confrontation, formal positions is a given feature of the field. In fact these aspects of human experience are found in the other papers published here.

In commenting on Harrison and Mears' paper, Burnett operates on a wider canvas than the single institution case study or contribution to student experience because she brings in sector-wide issues, as indeed we find in the original paper. What she does is to work within the framework referred to above which of course frames the paper she comments upon. By looking at how different initiatives and accompanying processes interact she brings out areas of difficulty and areas where social science has much to contribute. In particular she brings out a role for a subject association, the British Sociological Association (BSA).

Journal articles do not claim verisimilitude with what happens in classrooms or other settings. A research paper might claim to present a faithful representation of data and a mode of analysis while a policy paper might claim represent an analysis of a policy initiative. The case of institutional documentation is interesting because it is almost by definition fiction. I do not make that claim as a negative feature. The issue lies in the distance between what is contained in documentation and what is actually experienced being more or less constant for the documentation so producing a readerly text. Readerly texts by and large offer a constant distance between themselves and learners and tutors. To intrude on that distance, to shorten or lengthen it is given by digression. It is in digression that we suddenly swoop to a close up of something not contained in the readerly text or alternatively suddenly move out to a panoramic view of any number of possible sites, be they policy networks or specific initiatives. It is in and through digression that authors on teaching can bring out the writerly aspects of a setting. Digression has to be managed, for if it is incoherent no one will read it or will give up on the text. If digression does not relate to a key point or given coding then again it loses focus. The hermeneutic coding of a digression is always a response to a potential view of the world. The papers in this volume all contribute to creating either a writerly response or the creation of spaces where the writerly can flourish.

In conclusion, this editorial has drawn on Barthes' theory of codings alongside a view of the value of digression. Effective pedagogy takes a digressive form because it starts from a given point whether it be a validation document and event or implementation of an online environment and then works with such requirements but offers us challenges and new insights. Pedagogy that simply seeks to undermine institutional and sector requirements is of little value and offers students negative experiences. But pedagogies that challenge, work with and where necessary work against institutional approaches are valuable. What they bring out is the enigmatic quality of teaching which is flattened by official stories and often hidden behind discourses of effectivity and remediation. It is this enigmatic quality of teaching and learning that is central to the work of this journal.