Learning, Teaching and Assessment in College Based Higher Education

This chapter pays attention to a series of micro encounters in teaching and learning in the CBHE sector to explore discourses of knowledge-making, identity building and student becoming. We bring together research vignettes drawn from collaborative and participatory research work we have undertaken with students and colleagues in CBHE contexts over the last decade to explore the themes and concepts about teaching and learning in CBHE that emerge when setting them side by side. Rather than attempt to characterize CBHE we draw attention to the ways in which teaching and learning in CBHE is best seen as a set of socio-cultural practices deeply embedded in wider discourses of higher education. These are often framed by ideas about social and cultural capitals, vocationalism, employability and notions of skills acquisition and expertise. We argue that these discourses tend to play out particular ways of being and doing (paradigms and ontologies) for teachers and students to create an 'institutional habitus' that structures ‘the possible field of action’ (Foucault, 1982:221in Dreyfus et al, 1983) and patterns (and limits/curtails) 'what might be played' (Foucault ibid). We consider the implications for social justice and the potential impacts and affects for students with little family experience of higher education. As an alternative framework we explore the potential of CBHE as a uniquely 'between'/other/third space within which new possibilities for the being and doing of teaching and learning (new paradigms and ontologies) might be imagined. Towards a conclusion we consider the conditions of possibility required to imagine new ways of playing.