Living the discourse of teaching and learning in higher education: participants of the post graduate certificate in teaching and learning in the creative arts

From experience and the literature I knew that many academic staff in higher education resented being forced to study teaching. Working as a teacher educator on the in-house Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching at an art and design university I wondered if course participants felt the same. Thus, I determined to research the lived experience of volunteer course alumni and set out to develop a study whereby the research participants constituted the figures in the contextual ground. The epistemological conceptualisation of the bricolage by Kincheloe and Berry, (2004) provided the methodological framework. I employed different methodologies and methods according to the intention of each chapter. Using a Foucaultian approach to discourse analysis enabled identification of the prevailing political and institutional discourse of teaching and learning as well as constructions of objects and subjects of the discourse through policy and in the literature. As an object of the discourse of learning and teaching in higher education I compared the PGC LT at my institution with generic course structures before moving on to consider the subjects of the discourse; the research participants and myself in relation to the subjectivities prevalent in the literature. From unstructured interviews, visual and written portraits as narratives of course alumni experience were developed. The findings employed post-colonial metaphors of ‘otherness’ to illustrate the lived experience of many course participants and myself. As the implications of living a discourse designed to normalise and subjectify emerged I was able to identify a less assertive knowledge-base from which to operate