In a Times Higher Education article that purports to ask whether student-centred learning is (a) “a sound practice based on mutually respectful shared scholarship” or (b) “a managerialist fad that fails to stretch the brightest,” the anecdotal arguments of Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology, are given top billing.  Here’s what he has to say:

“It is very serious to me that in many places handing out lecture notes is now the default position,” he says. “Courses are designed so that students don’t have to go to a library any more; the reading is either online or available to them on handouts.

“When I was an undergraduate, I had some of my most intensely important experiences because I had to go to the library. You would go into the basement to search for books, and as you rooted through you would find other books next to the ones you were looking for; before long you would start to get a sense of the discipline that you were a part of.

“But now the library is a place students go for coffee. (Libraries) have been redesigned as drop-in centres for networking, and that symbolises, especially in the social sciences and the arts, the problem we are facing” …

He argues that it can short-change brighter students who, he says, do not want to be mollycoddled. “The more reflective students can be very cynical - they tell you this is not what they signed up for. It is only the weaker students who see any kind of virtue in this.

“Every year you speak to the better students and they are wary of these innovations. They would like to be challenged, they would like to be stretched and held to account, and that requires the academic to take the initiative, to initiate that process, and sometimes they feel they’re not getting enough of that.

“One of the defining features of higher education - the intellectual relationship between academics and students - is being recycled as a secondary school teacher-pupil relationship, where teachers have to acquiesce to pupils more. That doesn’t benefit the pupils at all; it involves them without challenging or stimulating them.”

What are your thoughts?  Should lecturers hand out notes?  Is there something wrong with having readings available online?  Are our disciplines less disciplined than when Furedi was a lad?  Are brighter students challenged?  Do you use the library as a cafe?

On that note, the new MQ library will feature a lovely spot for a cuppa.  Watch this video to hear what some MQ students want.  Are these guys are indicative of what Furedi calls the “problem” we are facing?

Filed under: Engagement, Learning Environments, Students by Agnes Bosanquet