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http://ahh.sagepub.com/ Education Arts and Humanities in Higher http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/4/1/9 The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/1474022205048756 2005 4: 9 Arts and Humanities in Higher Education David Mills and Mary Taylor Huber and professionalism Anthropology and the Educational 'Trading Zone': Disciplinarity, pedagogy Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com can be found at: Arts and Humanities in Higher Education Additional services and information for http://ahh.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://ahh.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions: http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/4/1/9.refs.html Citations: What is This? - Jan 18, 2005 Version of Record >> at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013 ahh.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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Page 1: Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

http://ahh.sagepub.com/Education

Arts and Humanities in Higher

http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/4/1/9The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/1474022205048756

2005 4: 9Arts and Humanities in Higher EducationDavid Mills and Mary Taylor Huber

and professionalismAnthropology and the Educational 'Trading Zone': Disciplinarity, pedagogy

  

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Arts and Humanities in Higher EducationAdditional services and information for    

  http://ahh.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

 

http://ahh.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:  

http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/4/1/9.refs.htmlCitations:  

What is This? 

- Jan 18, 2005Version of Record >>

at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GEORGE MASON UNIV on October 31, 2013ahh.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Page 2: Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

Anthropology and the Educational‘Trading Zone’

Disciplinarity, pedagogy and professionalism

dav i d m i l l sUniversity of Birmingham, UK

mary tay lor h ub e rThe Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, California, USA

ab st rac t

This article suggests that the notion of an educational ‘trading zone’ is an analyt-ically helpful way of describing a space in which ideas about learning andteaching are shared within and between disciplines. Drawing on our knowledgeof anthropology and the Humanities, we suggest three possible reasons for thelimited development of such zones within academia in the UK and US. The firstis the relatively low status of education as a discipline, and its perceived depend-ence on individualist theories of learning drawn from psychology. The second isthat disciplinary pedagogies are often deeply embedded in academic identity andpractice, making engaging with an educational ‘trading zone’ an epistemo-logically unfamiliar habit. A final, and more overtly political, reason is thestrategic resistance of many faculty members to engaging with the new visionsof teaching ‘professionalism’ offered by ‘faculty development’ and ‘training’ unitswithin universities. We end by exploring whether the emerging debate aroundthe ‘scholarship of teaching and learning’ might circumvent some of thesebarriers.

keyword s anthropology, disciplinarity, educational development, professionalism,scholarship of teaching

w e l c o m e t o t h e t ra d i n g z o n e

S O O N E R O R L AT E R , every new anthropology student encounters theArgonauts of the Western Pacific, as vividly and timelessly described by Bronislaw

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Arts & Humanities in Higher EducationCopyright © 2005 , sage publications , London,Thousand Oaks and New Delhi ISSN 1474-0222

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Malinowski in 1922. This primal ethnographic account of trading and socialrelationships in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea relentlessly drawsin the reader with its romantic evocation of an ambitious maritime expedi-tion as the islanders trade and carry out elaborate ceremonial gift exchanges.Along with the romance, the reader also learns about the different types oftrading and exchange being conducted, such as in pigs, fish and bamboo. Ofthese, it is the ritualistic ‘Kula exchange’ that the book most famously depicts.These are ceremonial, gendered and formalized exchanges of elaborate shellnecklaces and arm-bracelets, which circulate in opposite directions around theTrobriand Islands ring between high status men.

Why start an account of the relationship between education and disciplinessuch as anthropology with an account of trading in the South Pacific? Wewant to introduce the idea that academics have more in common withMelanesian principles of social life than they might think. The academicinhabitants of disciplinary archipelagos do talk and trade with each other,exchanging and borrowing ideas. But rather than directly adopt a ‘Kula ring’metaphor to understand the process of cross-disciplinary knowledgeexchange, in this article we draw on Galison’s influential concept of the‘trading zone’, which he used to explore the sharing of ideas betweendifferent experimental and theoretical subcultures of physics (Galison, 1997).

Exchanges within and across disciplines are everyday affairs for academics.Scholars in anthropology and neighbouring fields like literature and historyoften find each other’s theoretical developments helpful for their own work.Many a methodological tool from one discipline has been borrowed or appro-priated by others. Yet academics in these disciplines are rather less likely tofind themselves trading or exchanging ideas about educational practice.Whilstanthropological theories are often drawn from continental philosophy orliterary theory, it is hard to think of an educationalist acknowledged for influ-encing anthropological thought.1 Historically, this could be explained by thestrong regionalist traditions within the discipline and its interest in non-western social forms. In the US, George Spindler was one of the first scholarsto promote educational ethnographies, yet this is a field that has remained onthe margins of ‘mainstream’ anthropology and sociology (Spindler, 1955;Delamont, 2000). But this is not just about disciplinary identity politics. Onemight also put this lack of exchange down to a disinclination amongst mostestablished disciplines to critically examine the conditions of their ownproduction and reproduction.

Are these then the explanations for the limited nature of contemporaryintra- and cross-disciplinary debates in the Social Sciences and Humanitiesabout university learning and teaching? Drawing on our own experience asanthropologists and participants in these debates in the UK and US, we want

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to explore this indifference further. In doing so, we compare changing notionsof academic professionalism in the two countries. We will also examine thepossibilities that the concept of ‘scholarship of teaching and learning’ opensup for a more vigorous educational ‘trading zone’.

We are not the first to think about the circulation of knowledge using theanalogy of exchange relationships. Robert Merton’s classic ‘norms of science’include ‘communism’, referring to the ideal of free, frank, and open exchangeof information among scientists (Merton, 1973). More recently, educatorshave developed a notion of an ‘academic commons’ to refer to domains wherefree exchange continues, in the face of entrepreneurial intellectual propertyclaims (Knight Higher Education Collaborative, 2002). Coming closer toanthropologists’ traditional territory, some scholars have likened the ‘free’circulation of knowledge among scientists to gift exchange, as contrasted withcommodity exchange, drawing on work that cites the ethnographic record toelaborate the distinction (Hyde, 1983). The commercial imperatives increas-ingly at play within universities – and not just within the science faculties –makes this analogy a fragile one.

The metaphor that we find most useful is Peter Galison’s notion of the‘trading zone’. Galison, an influential historian of physics, uses it to describethe way in which different communities of physicists interact. He is keen toconvey a sense of the ‘extraordinary diversity of scientific cultures that partici-pate in the production of data’, and the ‘complex dynamics by whichcommon cause is made between and among them’ (Galison, 1997: 781). Forhim, the very disunities of physics, and the localized, contingent and ‘inter-calated’ relationships between different communities of scholars are exactlywhat gives the scientific project its strength. Across the history of the disci-pline Galison shows how the different traditions of ‘theorising, experiment-ing and instrument-making and engineering meet – even transform eachother’ without losing their separate identities and practices. He suggests thatdespite their often ‘vast global differences’ the ‘trading partners can hammerout a local code’ in this ‘trading zone’ where the ‘local co-ordination betweenbeliefs and actions takes place’ (1997: 782). He goes on to suggest that linguis-tic pidgins evolve as part of this cultural admixture, so even if ‘full-blown’translations between the different sub-cultures of physics and their languagesare not possible, the ‘co-ordination of action’ is. This was not always avoluntary process – he explains how the national emergency of the SecondWorld War forced American theoretical physicists to work much more closelywith engineers in successfully building a new generation of radars. And it didnot lead to a homogenization of these different sub-cultures; Galison is quickto emphasize the importance of the ‘relatively constrained nature of scientificpractice’ within traditions. In a neat visual twist, he demonstrates the changing

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spatial layout of research institutes built at different times, and the emergenceof collaborative laboratories where individuals from different traditions ofphysics would meet up, work together and exchange ideas. It is an analysisthat values the practical everyday activities of scientists as much as their theor-etical contributions, though he does not explicitly discuss the teaching ortraining of students or junior staff.

In developing this notion, Galison credits anthropologists ‘who regularlystudy unlike cultures that do interact, most notably by trade’ (Galison, 1997:783), drawing on Taussig’s (1983) example of the contradictory meaningsaccorded to money by poor Colombian peasant farmers and the landowningclasses who during the 20th century were increasingly employing them towork on the sugar-cane plantations. He notes how ‘the significance of theobjects traded – and of the trade itself – may be utterly different for the twosides’ (Galison, 1997: 803). Similarly in the trading zones of academia, analyti-cal concepts or methodological approaches can be used in very different waysand given sharply contrasting meanings and values as they are translatedbetween communities. The metaphor has an economistic resonance, but itdoes capture the active and strategic involvement of the different parties.There may be more flattering analogies, but given that academic life is increas-ingly about both entrepreneurialism and stewardship, the ‘trading zone’ is nota bad place to start.

t h e n o - t ra d e z o n e ? d i s c i p l i na r i t y a n d p ow e r

We have suggested that Galison’s notion of the ‘trading zone’ helpfullydescribes what has also been depicted as the ‘borderland’ where differentcommunities of scholars come to trade their wares (Huber and Morreale,2002: 2). We now want to ask the corollary question – why does tradingsometimes not happen within and between disciplines? In particular, we arekeen to understand the limited nature of exchanges within the educationaltrading zone. Within anthropology, the exchange has usually been one-way,with the work of anthropologists like Jean Lave (Lave and Wenger, 1991) andethnographers like Paul Willis (1977) influencing many in education. All sidesstood to gain by the exchanges that Galison describes within physics, even ifthey sought to impose constraints on the nature of exchange. But this is notalways the case. Within much of the Social Sciences and Humanities, ideasabout teaching, about the reproduction of the discipline and the training ofnew students, are exchanged in informal day-to-day conversations withindepartments or as part of institutional bureaucratic procedures. Yet they arerarely part of a broader disciplinary or cross-disciplinary educational tradingzone. If there is trade with the discipline of education, it is usually through

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a sub-group of specialists (e.g. sociologists of education) who studyeducational institutions and issues but generally not the teaching and learningof their own field.2 Why might this be?

It is certainly not because the Humanities and Social Sciences lack intel-lectual insights into teaching and learning in their own courses andprogrammes. As the collection of essays in Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarshipof Teaching and Learning (Huber and Morreale,2002) indicates,many fields offerprovocative and productive ideas on which practitioners can draw for under-standing the classroom. Psychologists, for example, can draw on that field’swealth of theory on learning and cognitive processes (Nummedal et al., 2002);sociologists can draw on their field’s work on race, class, and gender and itsunderstanding of social context (Howery, 2002); management professors candraw on the whole sub-field of organizational behaviour to think about the‘classroom as organization’ (Bilimoria and Fukami, 2002); communicationscholars can conceptualize ‘teaching as communication’ (Morreale et al.,2002).

Anthropology, too, has much to offer, such as its insights into the embodiedand relational nature of power within social (and classroom) life; the roles ofritual, myth, and symbol in cultural processes; and the pedagogic skills ofempathy, flexibility, and imagination developed during fieldwork.3 Yet for allthis, there is a relatively limited trading zone in existence within the disci-pline (or between it and education) about teaching and learning anthropology.As sociologists, communications scholars, historians, literary scholars, and evenpsychologists can testify, anthropology is not alone in this.4 We offer threepossible reasons – status, the disciplines’ own pedagogies, and the political roleof ‘educational development’ within universities.

t h e aca d e m i c h i e ra r c h y

An immediate explanation for the lack of such exchanges is the perceivedlow status of the discipline and practice of education within the academy.This is partly because of education’s history and applied role in training schoolteachers, the majority of whom are female. Indeed, its very engagement withthe world makes it less able to protect its autonomy, expertise and mystiquein the way characteristic of other disciplines. Lagemann (2000: x, ix) describeshow, in the US, education has been regarded by other scholars as a gendered‘step-child, reluctantly tolerated at the margins of academe’ and as ‘neverhaving developed a high degree of internal coherence’. She puts this downto the mix of different disciplinary and reformist agendas that have shapedwhat she calls an ‘elusive science’. This lack of coherence and a strong disci-plinary tradition makes trading more difficult. In the UK, education has

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equally been subject to accusations about the low quality of its research base,most famously in 1997, by Chris Woodhead, then head of the school inspec-torate OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education).

Lagemann goes on to suggest that in a search for credibility in the early20th century, the discipline of education turned to quantitative and scientis-tic theories that yielded few results. More recently, we would suggest,education’s use of psychological theory to model individual learning hasfound few converts amongst disciplines more sympathetic to a contextual anddynamic account of social and educational reproduction.5 Education’smarginal status affects its ability to influence both academic theory andpractice, making academics less likely to credit the value of reading andwriting about teaching and learning. The ‘trading zones’ metaphor presumesthat bartering and exchange is mutually beneficial. However, this will only bethe case when disciplines and institutions reward critical and scholarly analysesof this aspect of academic practice. For as long as the field of teaching andlearning is seen as having limited theoretical capital and being an undervaluedcurrency, the scholarly community en masse are unlikely to get involved in thetrading zone, see it as important to the stewardship of their disciplines or tothe preparation of new generations of scholars. There are fields, like compo-sition or women’s studies in the US, in which theory and pedagogy are closelyconnected – but they are exceptions that prove the rule. At present, universi-ties in both the US and UK are beginning to offer promotions based onteaching criteria, but the influential and more tacit disciplinary reward struc-tures are likely to move rather more slowly. A contact zone can be imposed,but trading cannot be enforced.

d i s c i p l i n e s a s p e dag o g i e s

Explaining the lack of exchange as the result of the status of different disci-plines and the power hierarchies that structure academic worlds is perhaps tooeasy. We suggest a second reason: that a disciplinary identity is, by definition,a pedagogic one. This ‘discipline-specific pedagogy’ comes with a set of oftentacit assumptions about the appropriate subjectivity to be adopted by a scholarof the discipline. Certainly anthropology’s implicit pedagogy is threatened bythe more individualized and voluntarist model of learning adopted in genericeducational debates. We suggest that recognizing these different pedagogicpreconceptions, and the notions of professionalism, identity and subjectivitythat travel with them, helps one understand a broader ‘politics of reluctance’amongst anthropologists and others in the Humanities to engage withlearning and teaching issues, especially when these come wrapped in standardpsychological models. There are counter-examples, as we discuss later,

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particularly in the US, and more recently in the UK through the promotionof discipline-specific learning and teaching debates within the Learning andTeaching Support Network (Deem, 2002; Huber and Morreale, 2002). Butdiscussion of teaching still remains for many a largely ‘fugitive affair’; it maywell continue to have a ‘punctuated life’ on the ‘margins of most disciplines’(Huber, 2000: 25, 38).

This disjunction between the pedagogical styles of anthropology and thefield of education may also contribute to the fact that anthropology, likehistory and literature, has not had as rich a history of discussion and debateabout teaching and learning within its own forums as many other fields(Calder et al., 2002; Huber and Morreale, 2002; Salvatori and Donahue, 2002;Mills et al., 2004).

But does part of the problem lie with the consequences of imagining debatesaround teaching and learning as taking place within a ‘trading zone’? Is itsmodel of academic entrepreneurship and strategic exchange one that manyacademics would be reluctant to acknowledge as part of their professionalvocation? The writings of Michael Oakeshott, the conservative British politicalphilosopher who lived from 1901–1990, offer insight into this clash ofeducational and moral philosophies. During his lifetime, Oakeshott repeatedlydefended the notion of a specialist liberal education against educationalmodernizers, reformers and rationalizers of all stripes. He attacked the notionof learning being ‘liberated from an immediate concern with anything specificto be learnt’ (Oakeshott, 1989: 43), and instead argued ‘that no true andprofoundly studied techne [Greek – art] raises the distinction between acquiringa knowledge of some branch of learning and pursuing the general objects ofeducation’ (1989: 133). For Oakeshott, one learns only through specializing.

This notion of learning through disciplinary specialization insists on theinseparability of disciplinary content from a pedagogic responsibility. Onelearns how to teach by learning how to learn. As Oakeshott puts it,‘not everyscholar will have the sympathy that makes a great teacher, but every genuinescholar unavoidably imparts to those capable of recognizing it something ofhis knowledge on how to pursue learning’ (1989: 65). Whilst he does notexplicitly describe learning as a craft apprenticeship, it is repeatedly visible inhis writing:

Learning then, is acquiring the ability to feel and to think, and the pupil will neveracquire these abilities unless he has learned to listen for them and to recognize them inthe conduct and utterance of others. It cannot be learnt separately. It cannot be taughtseparately. (Oakeshott, 1989: 133, 98)

One could extrapolate that a disciplinary disposition is fundamentally also apedagogic one – it is about how one learns about, and ‘learns’ others about,a specialist body of knowledge.

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Many in the Humanities and Social Sciences will have sympathy with thisvision of the intangible and embodied aspects of learning. For Oakeshott, anunderstanding of how one learns (as well as what one learns) is embodiedand communicated within disciplinary ‘communities of practice’ (Lave andWenger, 1991) – a model of learning somewhat at variance with the relent-less explicitness of the psychologists and the educationalists. Both models havetheir value: Oakeshott’s may be more suitable for the intimate apprenticeship-type relationship a research student has to a supervisor, whilst the educationalmodel is perhaps more appropriate for a group of undergraduates with verylittle experience of, or even interest in, a discipline-based training. In aneducation sector (particularly in the UK) under pressure to adopt a moreinstrumentalist approach to learning, is it any surprise that many academicsshould choose to identify with the former model? For Oakeshott, one’s disci-plinary specialism and scholarly disposition are intertwined. How differentthis is to a blanket admonition to make explicit the ‘learning outcomes’ weexpect our students to have. Or, as Biggs (2003: 13) puts it, when it is ‘clearto students what is “appropriate”, what the objectives are, where all can seewhere they are supposed to be going; students experience the felt need to getthere’. A disciplinary disposition might demur, being far less sure about theend-point and how precisely one gets there.

This demurral should not be taken as an excuse for the kinds of mystifi-cation and obscurity that can exclude all but the most advantaged studentsfrom participation in academic life (see Bourdieu et al., 1994). After all, ex-plicitness need not be simple-minded, a point that Gerald Graff (1992) hasbeen making for years in his admonition to instructors in the Humanities andSocial Sciences to ‘teach the conflicts’ as a way of helping students gain entréeto the nature of academic discourse. In his recent book, Clueless in Academe,Graff (2003: 44) argues that there are arts of ‘intellectualizing’ that cross-cutmany academic disciplines, ‘that often seem second nature to teachers and A-students but come across to many students as bizarre, counterintuitive, ordownright nonsensical’. In particular, he points to the need for instructors tobe explicit about ‘the academic faith in the singular virtue of finding problemsin subjects . . . the idea that, below their apparent surface, texts harbor deepmeanings that cry out for interpretation, analysis, and debate’ (2003: 45).

Explicitness, even about such basics as Graff ’s ‘problem problem’, can takemany forms – and ‘just telling’ is surely an insufficient pedagogy. How mightwe best ‘scaffold’ (to borrow some helpful language from educationalists) thepractices of intellectualizing that characterize our disciplines? And hereOakeshott’s wrestling with the forms of embodiment and subjectivity adoptedby discipline-based scholars, especially in the Humanities, can help us learnmore about the limits of the ‘trading zone’ model. As a researcher, one is

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constantly seeking to learn, inquire into, assimilate, absorb and share ideas –thinking is almost, by definition, trading. Such learning can occur in writing,in informal conversations, or in the to-and-fro of ideas and concepts in aresearch seminar. As a teacher, at least as many discipline specialists conceiveand have experienced it, one’s task is to communicate and enthuse studentswith a passion for the subject, and the pedagogic relationship is less obviouslytwo-way. The notion of the scholarship of teaching, first articulated by Boyer(1990), is intended to put one back into that inquiring, listening, absorbingand sharing role. Yet this inevitably occurs at one step removed from one’slearnt disciplinary embodiment. This new conversation about cultivating apedagogical imagination is occurring at a ‘meta-level’ in relation to theprimary dispositions we have in our disciplinary practice.

The rise of educational development

A third and final reason for the lack of trading between education and thedisciplines may have less to do with the ideas being exchanged and more todo with relations between the traders themselves. In particular, it is importantto consider the sudden efflorescence and impact of a new field and cadre ofpeople concerned specifically to promote awareness of educational debateswithin universities. Recent years have seen a rapid growth in what hasbecome known in the UK as ‘educational development’ and in the US as‘faculty development’. Its growth has been especially marked in the UK, asgovernment-funded policy reforms have proliferated over the last decade,encouraging (and obligating) universities to promote the ‘professional’ statusof teaching and learning.

Gosling (1996) suggests that Southampton University’s ‘Teaching andMedia Services’ unit was one of the first, established in 1975, but that the late1980s and early 1990s saw a huge growth in their presence within institutions.By 1996, nearly all the 53 universities who responded to his survey had a unitof some form (Gosling, 1996, 2001). Many of them have played a key role inthe implementation of what he calls the ‘UK’s national quality systems’ – araft of initiatives coming out of the Dearing Report (National Committeeof Inquiry into Education, 1997) that sought to raise teaching standards andshape the content and delivery of teaching within the disciplines. Theseincluded subject benchmarks, written degree programme specifications andprogress files – individual portfolios to record one’s learning.

Gosling (2001: 39) suggests that the role of these units is ‘to create anenvironment in which debate can flourish about what constitutes goodpractice and how that may vary across different contexts and for differenttypes of students’. Their remit is not just about promoting and developing

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learning, teaching and assessment, but also about ‘enquiring and researchinginto higher education itself ’. As a result, educational development has increas-ingly come to see itself as a discipline, a field of scholarship specializing inresearch on universities (Eggins and MacDonald, 2003). As Gosling notes, thefield is an increasingly confident one. In 2005 at least 70 university-based‘Centres of Excellence in Teaching and Learning’ will be given majorfunding, many of which will work with educational development units.

Despite the larger size of US higher education, the rise of ‘faculty develop-ment’ has been less robust than in the UK, perhaps because the accreditation,governance and funding of US colleges and universities are less determinedby central government policy than their counterparts in the UK. Lewis’shistory of faculty development in the USA sees it as first triggered by studentrebellions in the 1960s against ‘irrelevant courses and uninspired teaching’(Lewis, 1996: 27; see also Tiberius, 2002). Lewis suggests that the recession ofthe 1970s and a reduction in staff turnover in universities led to a growinginterest in innovative teaching methods as a way of ‘maintaining institutionalvitality’ and inspiring an increasingly diverse student body. She shows how inthe 1970s and early 1980s colleges and universities began establishing facultyand instructional development programmes, a number of which were basedon the model offered by the Centre for Research on Teaching and Learningat the University of Michigan, one of the first formal faculty developmentunits in the US, founded in 1962. While there has been remarkable growthin the numbers of such units and in the variety of programmes and servicesthey offer in support of teaching and learning, faculty development in the UShas not achieved the same level of institutional centrality that it has in theUK. Indeed, the vulnerability of faculty development units to the shiftingwinds of university politics is exemplified by the recent closing of a 30-year-old Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Nebraska in 2002(Bartlett, 2002; see also Gumport, 2002).

Even where education development has been successfully institutionalized,however, its influence on faculty members has been mixed. Whilst individualacademics benefit from, and go on record as valuing their encounters withthese units, those in the Humanities and Social Sciences seem to have a collec-tively negative perception of them. There is more to this than just anotheraspect of the academic identity game – ‘they’re not like us’. In older UK andUS universities and colleges with a strong faculty tradition, developers’ workhas often been seen as a bureaucratic irrelevance by discipline-basedacademics. In the newer UK universities, where these centres promotedisliked government initiatives, educational development has becomeunpopular amongst academic staff sceptical of a growing managerialism.Some academics are also uncomfortable about the judgmental connotations

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of the term ‘development’, which can assume the necessity of change ratherthan first exploring its implications.

Matters of content and style can also complicate relations betweeneducational development and discipline-based academics. In a survey ofcourses offered by educational development units to new teachers in the UK,Bourner and colleagues found, unsurprisingly, that their content reflectedtheoretical debates in education, such as notions of the ‘reflective practitioner’,and placed ‘more emphasis on widening participants’ repertoire of teachingand learning methods than on developing competence in performing theexisting repertoire’ (Bourner et al., 2002: 39). They also point out that courseparticipants are often ‘exposed to an educational philosophy giving primacyto “student-development” over “subject development”’. Such emphases maybe inevitable given the background of the course facilitators, but they revealwhy people might resent the lack of recognition of their discipline’s ownpedagogy, especially when such courses are compulsory.

One reason for the frustration felt towards staff-development courses is thatthe supposedly ‘generic’ educational approach they often espouse is actuallybased on a particular disciplinary epistemology. Theories of, for example,‘deep’ and ‘surface’ learning are based primarily on theoretical debates withinthe discipline of psychology. As Malcolm and Zukas note, the learnerfrequently appears as an anonymous, decontextualized, degendered beingwhose principal distinguishing characteristics are ‘personality’ and ‘learningstyle’ (Malcolm and Zukas, 2001). Many in the Humanities and SocialSciences disparage the models of subjectivity, selfhood and relationalityoffered by such courses.

Although some disciplines’ implicit pedagogies are more congruent withthose adopted by education, resistance to generic (rather than discipline-based) educational development goes across the disciplinary spectrum. Forexample, Alan Jenkins, a geographer who became an educational developerat Oxford Brookes University, recounts:

I have had many encounters in which colleagues in the disciplines question the value,the emphases and the credibility of what educational developers have to offer . . . indiscussions they will comment upon how education developers, in their perception, failto recognize or to value [their] disciplinary concerns. ( Jenkins, 1996: 51)6

The US literature in this field sometimes reflects the fraught disciplinaryrelationships that can result, especially when educationalists and psychologistsact as though they are the proprietors of wisdom in this field. In a recentexample, Halpern and Hakel (2003: 38) argue that ‘the study of humancognition is an empirical science with a solid theoretical foundation andresearch-based applications that we can and should be using in college

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classrooms’. Their use of the rhetoric of science in this argument (‘empiri-cally validated principles’) combined with that of responsibility and guilt (‘wecan have a lifelong effect on what our students remember, and consequentlyon what they will think and do. Or we can have a minimal effect’) can havean alienating impact (2003: 41). Those whose approach to pedagogic issues isstrongly informed by their own disciplinary training can easily dismiss suchrhetoric as a refusal of dialogue (and trade).

In the US, this tension between educational development specialists andpractising teachers is reproduced within a number of fields – especially inexisting subspecialties in the Sciences, such as mathematics education orchemistry education (see Banchoff and Salem, 2002; Coppola and Jacobs,2002). There have been ruffled feathers around the emergence of a scholar-ship of teaching and learning in which mathematics or chemistry lecturersmight critically engage with these debates on their own, and even do theirown version of classroom research rather than just ‘adapting’ the findings ormaterials created by the education ‘specialists’. Yet much is to be gained bybuilding, not burning bridges between specialists and the ‘mainstream’. Whenpractising teachers themselves start asking questions about pedagogy, they mayturn to the specialists within their own and neighbouring fields for insight;such specialists can in turn learn from the kinds of questions and answers thatarise in the classrooms and laboratories of their colleagues.

In teasing out the strands of academics’ ambivalence towards educational(or faculty) development, we began to understand an important distinctionbetween the UK and the US – the differential valuing of the notion of‘professionalism’ in higher education. Larson (1977) provides the classicaccount of the rise of the notion of the professional in both countries. Thistakes a particular twist within universities. Lewis, in her short history offaculty development initiatives in the US, notes how one group ofeducationalists famously disparaged higher education teaching as akin to a‘pedagogical amateur’s hour’ (Lewis, 1996: 28). Many British observers areequally concerned by attempts to reconfigure university teaching as an‘expert’ activity. As Jan Parker notes:

. . . to British ears, of course, ‘amateur’ has a rather fine ring – lover of the subject – and‘expert’ sounds a little clinical. I want an expert to fix my washing machine but I’m notsure I actually want to be taught, or have my children taught, by experts. What I do wantis scholars equally and simultaneously thoughtful about their research and their teaching,such that each feeds the other; who are equally reflective, imaginative and scholarly abouttheir work, whether it be designing a curriculum or assessment strategy, or writing apaper for an academic or a pedagogic conference. (Parker, 2003: 142)

To the ears of many faculty members in the US, being ‘reflective, imaginative,and scholarly’ about their work as teachers is exactly what the concept of

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‘professionalism’ entails! (See also Sullivan, 1995.) Part of the tension here isin the different connotations of ‘professionalism’ and ‘expertise’ on either sideof the Atlantic.

Unfortunately the risks of imposing a disparaged form of ‘professionalism’on academics seem not to concern the British Government, whose recentWhite Paper implies that teaching is not treated seriously enough byacademics. It insists that ‘in order that teaching in higher education is treatedseriously as a profession in its own right, and that teachers are given the skillsthey need, we expect that national professional standards will be agreed by2004–05, through [a] proposed new teaching quality academy’ (Departmentfor Education and Skills, 2003: §4.14). Obliging all new lecturers to take anaccredited generic course in university teaching from 2005 does not in itselfcreate professionalism.

This one-size-fits-all view of higher education pedagogy is exactly whathas driven the rise of ‘educational developers’ and their claim to objective,pan-disciplinary expertise. For Webb, academic developers should be seen as‘academics par excellence, or, in other words, not as para-professionals, but asmeta-professionals’ (Webb, 1996: 14). Oakeshott, amongst others, woulddisagree – ‘the world of learning needs no extraneous cement to hold ittogether; its parts move in a single magnetic field’ (Oakeshott, 1989: 98). ForOakeshott, there can be no such thing as a ‘meta-professional’.

The shifting relationship between vocation and expertise is complex, andhas implications for the status of academics and for the teaching of the disci-plines. Brint argues that, over the last 30 years, one can see a growing shiftfrom ‘social trustee professionalism’ to ‘expert professionalism’, wherein ‘thetechnical and moral aspects of professionalism’ have been split, with the moraland non-market aspects of professionalism becoming steadily less important(Brint, 1994: 11). One could argue that anthropologists, like other academics,would resist this simple dichotomy – most would imagine themselves asexperts in their own field, with all the command of disciplinary knowledge,practices and dispositions that this involves.Yet they would also wish to invokea sense of professionalism as a moral vocation to challenge any move towardsstandardization. Increasingly, both forms of professionalism shape academicpractice. Given the rise of audit culture and its emphasis on academic produc-tivity, even humanities academics have to develop an increasingly entrepre-neurial approach to knowledge production. In the commodified university inwhich one’s research reputation gives one both social and economic capital,a commitment to learning and teaching has limited exchange value for theindividual scholar.

Does this mean that as academics we cannot both stand by our liberalprinciples and survive within a neo-liberal university environment? Is this a

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zero-sum game? In the final part of this article we suggest that anthropolo-gists (and scholars in other fields) can augment their disciplinary expertise byengaging in a scholarship of teaching and learning. We also insist that ourdisciplinary calling, identity, or vocation remains key to our pedagogicalimagination. Both can be endangered or lost when faced with imposedformalizations from other authorities or fields.

c r e at i n g a s c h o l a r s h i p o f t e ac h i n g a n dl e a r n i n g

The nascent movement to develop a scholarship of teaching and learning canbe seen as one way of side-stepping the tensions that surround the politiciza-tion of learning and teaching policies within the UK, and between educationand the disciplines in the US. The impetus emerges from Boyer’s pioneeringwork on the four different forms of academic scholarship that are integral partsof academic practice – the scholarships of discovery (research), teaching, inte-gration and application (Boyer, 1990). The agenda developed first in the US,where the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning(CASTL), part of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,with its partners on campus and in the scholarly societies, has fostered debatesabout pedagogy in higher education as part of a growing interest in thescholarship of learning and teaching. Building on Boyer and on Shulman’swork on pedagogical content knowledge, Huber and other colleagues havedeveloped the notion that each discipline has its own ‘style’, influencing theway scholarship is talked about, and they demonstrate that conversations acrossmany different disciplines can serve to elucidate this style and share ideas(Grossman et al., 1989; Huber and Morreale, 2002). Rather than insist that thedisciplines trade only with (read: learn from) educationalists, the aim is toencourage dialogues about teaching and learning across the full spectrum ofdisciplines. The autonomy and academic status provided by the backing of aCarnegie philanthropy is one factor in the movement’s success.

The movement also has a growing number of adherents in the UK,especially within the government funded but disciplinary-based Learning andTeaching Support Network (LTSN, now part of the Higher EducationAcademy). Healey (2000) makes the case for fostering disciplinary under-standings of terms like scholarship, whilst Jenkins et al. (2003) see the scholar-ship of learning and teaching as a way of reshaping the research-teachingnexus.

We have argued that education, in both the UK and US, is a low-statusfield that few in other disciplines know much about, and that amongstacademics, faculty development units are relatively unpopular, relatively

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powerless, or both. This creates both problems and opportunities for facultymembers in institutions who take up the scholarship of teaching and learning.The problem is that often colleagues in their departments and disciplines donot see the value of taking pedagogy too seriously. The opportunity is thatteaching and learning are nonetheless still considered morally importantpursuits, especially when undertaken with a sense of empowering students(however ‘empowerment’ is understood). So those who do take up thescholarship of teaching and learning often do so with an activist’s sense ofengagement and a scholar’s sense that they are discovering, inventing, andparticipating in the development of something intellectually exciting andnew. It has a bottom-up feel: going against the grain takes some courage andinvolves risk (see Huber, 2000, 2004; Hutchings, 2000).

This trading, then, has something of the ‘informal economy’ – in disci-plinary terms it is a rather illicit, under-the-counter affair. It propels peopleinto the trading zone(s), looking for colleagues, ideas, references and so onthat might inspire their own thinking. Sometimes it leads them to literaturein education or psychology, sometimes to literature on teaching and learningin neighbouring fields, and sometimes to other more unpredictable places. Itmight lead somebody to Gadamer or to Bourdieu, or to find out whatcolleagues in history or mathematics are doing. Here, trading is more akin tonocturnal smuggling raids – not something carried out in the cold light ofday. In fact, one of the aspirations of leaders in the movement to develop ascholarship of teaching and learning is to establish more forums within andacross disciplines, where issues are discussed openly, differences aired, andconcepts, methods, and literatures exchanged. The essays of the scholarsincluded in Huber and Morreale (2002) capture the potential for sharinginsights and learning from other approaches.

The scholarship of teaching and learning invites disciplinary faculty toapproach their teaching and their students’ learning with a sense of ‘problem’in mind – the same ‘intellectualizing’ move that Graff sees more broadly inacademic culture. This may involve a sense that one’s pedagogy is notworking, or that one would like to try out something new, but it may alsoinvolve ‘problems’ of a more descriptive or visionary sort: what, in fact, aremy students learning, or what kinds of learning might be desirable, possible?(See also Hutchings, 2000: 4–6.) In one of the foundational essays exploringthis territory, Bass notes:

Changing the status of the problem in teaching from terminal remediation to ongoinginvestigation is precisely what the scholarship of teaching is all about. How might we makethe problematization of teaching a matter of regular communal discourse? How might wethink of teaching practice, and the evidence of student learning, as problems to be in-vestigated, analysed, represented, and debated? (Bass, 1999: Introductory section, para. 1)

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Although this problematization of teaching and learning is, as we haveargued, at a ‘meta’ level to the standard disciplinary practice of scholars inmost fields, it need not be divorced from it. For one thing, all the activitiesthat Bass evokes – investigation, analysis, representation, debate – are deeplyembedded within the disciplines and can be marshalled to develop a peda-gogical imagination attuned to the knowledge practices of one’s field. One’sdiscipline may also have other kinds of intellectual capital to draw on: theor-etical, conceptual, empirical literatures that are ‘experience-near’ to scholarswho are taking a close look at pedagogy for the first time.

And this is where the ‘trading zone’ analogy seems to work best, becausein following the threads of a pedagogical problem one will almost certainlyfind oneself reading a literature other than one’s ‘own’. It may be from closelyrelated fields – anthropologists, for example, may find themselves travellingamong historians, literary critics, or sociologists. But it may also be from moredistant disciplines – engineering or even physics. Of course, the psychologistsor educationalists are also likely to have something to offer. Hutchings’ (2000)collection of essays from scholars of teaching and learning documents manysuch borrowings and domestications – including a chemist’s use of physicistEric Mazur’s (1997) notion of ‘concept questions’ (Jacobs, 2000); a compara-tive literature scholar’s acknowledgement of sceptical questions about herconcept of ‘difficulty’ (itself influenced by the philosopher Gadamer) posedby colleagues in sociology (Salvatori, 2000); a management professor’s use ofwork by educationalists on cooperative-learning in higher education andteamwork in primary and secondary education (Fukami, 2000). Historianshave been inspired by the work of cognitive psychologist Sam Wineburg(1992, 2001) on the ways that novices and experts read historical documents(Calder et al., 2002). Walker insightfully describes how cross-disciplinarycollaborations on learning and teaching carefully facilitated by educationaldevelopers can also lead to productive insights (Walker, 2001; see also Cousinet al., 2003).

One of the criticisms made of this movement is that it risks creating, onceagain, a whole new professional and disciplinary field, replete with confer-ences, databases, journals and ‘experts’. Parker questions whether opening upvital dialogues about teaching and learning are best ‘achieved by regulated andprofessional pedagogic scholarship’ (Parker, 2003: 142). She rightly points outthat teaching is a complex and unfinished social process that is often‘downright messy’. We would agree. Our response? Provided the scholarshipof teaching and learning keeps close to the specifics of the classroom inquestion, it will remain true to the complex domain of practice. Academicshave always to guard against a drift into abstraction and theoreticism.7

Provided we can hold on to the moral dimensions of academic practice that

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we argued for earlier, messiness and professionalism are not necessarily at odds.Indeed, perhaps academic professionalism in the Humanities is the ability tograpple with complexity. We would suggest that a professional approach – inboth the senses we have discussed – to the scholarship of teaching andlearning offers visibility, status and legitimacy to the informal dialogues andtrading that will continue within departments and institutions.

c o n c lu s i o n

Anthropology’s iconoclastic and eclectic ‘disciplinary style’ makes it attractiveto others. Its theoretical currency is an appealing one, and many have madeuse of its methodological approaches.Yet this trading relationship is not alwaysan easy one. Anthropologists in particular often voice unhappiness with theappropriation of ‘the ethnographic method’ by other fields, especially whenthey formalize it beyond recognition while still calling on the authority andmystique of its ‘home’ discipline. Yet going beyond resentment, this could bean opportunity to explore precisely how ‘our’ own practices are transformedby others, and what this can tell us about our own epistemologies and thenature of academic ‘trading’. Pedagogy is fundamentally about communi-cating and building upon the ideas of others, and one might argue that everyclassroom is also a trading zone. For anthropologists and others in the Human-ities, schooled in a model of autonomous and independent inquiry, pedagogyis too precious to leave to others. But the scholarship of teaching and learningalso suggests that it is too precious to leave to itself.

ac k nowle dg e m e nt s

This essay began as a conversation between the two authors at the Association ofSocial Anthropologists (UK) decennial conference in July 2003, comparing theattitudes of our home discipline – anthropology – to pedagogic debates in theUK and US. We have sought to retain the flavour of that discussion. We thankPat Hutchings and William Sullivan of The Carnegie Foundation for theAdvancement of Teaching for their timely and critical readings of an earlier draft.We are also grateful for suggestions from Mick Healey and an anonymouscolleague, who served as reviewers for Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.

note s

1. In making this case, we adopt a narrow definition of the academic disciplineof education. There have been psychologists and philosophers of education whohave influenced anthropologists, but few educationalists per se.

2. Work published in the respected US journal Anthropology and Education tendsto consist of ethnographic studies of learning and teaching in formal educational

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settings such as schools, with particular attention to cross-cultural dynamics andsocial hierarchies.

3. See, for example, work that is beginning to appear through initiativessponsored by the Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics (C-SAP) partof the Higher Education Academy Network (e.g. Mills and Harris, 2004). Incontributions to a two-volume pan-European collection on learning and teachinganthropology (Drackle, Edgar and Schippers, 2003; Drackle and Edgar, 2004),Wright (2004) compares educationalists’ concept of reflection and anthropolo-gists’ ideas of reflexivity in relation to her own students’ learning, whilst Colemanand Simpson (2004) reflect on changes in anthropology’s pedagogies. In the US,to cite two examples, Downey and Lucena have done ethnography in the engi-neering school where they teach, deploying anthropological notions of the personto explore how the ‘knowledge content of engineering related to the socialdimensions of engineering personhood’ (1997: 119). Meanwhile, in a recent issueof the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, several anthropologistsdiscuss their use of anthropological understandings of reflexivity, communitydevelopment, ethnicity, and the like, in designing service-learning programmes(Keene et al., 2004).

4. See the essays in Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning(Huber and Morreale, 2002). Some of these disciplines are more engaged in cross-disciplinary exchange (especially with education) than in exchange within thefield itself. For example, the discipline of psychology is fully intertwined witheducational research, but that does not mean that there is a fully developededucational trading zone among psychologists in regard to the teaching andlearning of their own field, nor that psychologists always use that theory indesigning their own university courses. Further, ‘it would be a mistake . . . toassume that this research serves exclusively, or even commonly, as the starting pointfor scholarly work on teaching and learning in psychology. Rather, the drivingforce among psychologists behind inquiry into teaching and learning most oftenis found in what Hoshmand (1994) describes as “problems of practice”’(Nummedal et al., 2002: 172).

5. This is not to say that education itself has not explored the potential of moresociologically (and anthropologically) imaginative accounts – only that they arenot the dominant approaches. For recent discussions, see Shulman’s ‘Disciplinesof inquiry in education: A new overview’ (1997) and the National ResearchCouncil’s Scientific Research in Education (2002).

6. We have painted a rather negative picture here, and recognize the achieve-ments of disciplinary-specific approaches to teaching, educational developmentand research in the UK, such as those promoted by the Learning and TeachingSupport Network (incorporated into the new Higher Education Academy in2004 along with the ILT – Institute for Learning and Teaching in HigherEducation). The National Network for Teaching and Learning Anthropology(NNTLA) also hosted many workshops and events during the 1990s (seeMascerenhas-Keyes with Wright, 1995). And the international Improving StudentLearning (ISL) conference hosted by the Oxford Brookes Centre for Staff andLearning Development (OCSD) over the last 12 years (see Jenkins, 1996; Rust,2000; Healey and Jenkins, 2003) has also provided a valuable forum for discussion.

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7. Salvatori and Donahue (2002) are critical of some tendencies within compo-sition to mimic the abstract theoretical discourse of literary criticism, and toabandon the close attention to particular students and particular teaching strategieswith which so much of its own capital has been built.

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b i og raph i cal note s

DAV I D M I L L S is Anthropology Co-ordinator at Sociology, Anthropology,Politics (C-SAP), part of the Higher Education Academy. His research interestsinclude the political history of anthropology and the relationship betweenuniversities, disciplines and pedagogy. He has edited Teaching Rites and Wrongs:Universities and the Making of Anthropologists with Mark Harris (2004). Address:Sociology, Anthropology, Politics (C-SAP), University of Birmingham, Edgbaston,Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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M A RY TAY L O R H U B E R is a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation, whereshe works with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching andLearning (CASTL) and directs Carnegie’s Integrative Learning Project. Trained asa cultural anthropologist, Huber directed the research program on Cultures ofTeaching in Higher Education, which gave birth both to her co-edited volume,Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2002) and her newbook, Balancing Acts: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers(2004). Address: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 51Vista Lane, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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