Freedom to learn: a radically revised pedagogy to facilitate lifewide learning in the academic curriculum.

Higher education has progressed fairly steadily to a common pedagogical approach which centres on the idea of alignment. In this arrangement, intended learning outcomes are identified and declared; learning activities which will enable the desired learning and development to be achieved are conceived and undertaken with the support of appropriate and effective teaching; and assessment which calls for these outcomes is (ideally) carefully designed and implemented. All three elements are aligned in advance. The same principles and practices underpinned by notions of alignment have been applied to date in most of the purposeful schemes for personal development planning. In this chapter I argue that lifewide learning, wherein learning and development often occur incidentally in multiple and varied real-world situations throughout an individual’s life course, calls for a different approach, and a different pedagogy. Higher education should therefore visualise lifewide learning as an emergent phenomenon wherein the outcomes of learning emerge later on, and are often unintended. Consequently, they cannot be defined in advance of the activities through which they are formed. The main purpose of this chapter is to offer some practical ideas to support the development of pedagogies that would enable programme designers to embed in their programmes the principle and practice of lifewide education.

New Approaches to Social History. Myth, Memory and Place: Monmouth and Bath 1750-1900

Borsay, Peter, 'New Approaches to Social History. Myth, Memory and Place: Monmouth and Bath 1750-1900', Journal of Social History (2006) 39(3) pp.867-889 RAE2008

Adaptive capacity and learning to learn as leverage for social-ecological resilience

Ioan Fazey, John A. Fazey, Joern Fischer, Kate Sherren, John Warren, Reed F. Noss, Stephen R. Dovers (2007) Adaptive capacity and learning to learn as leverage for social?ecological resilience. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 5(7),375-380. RAE2008

The bigger the better? or what we know and what we still need to learn about anthracycline dose per course, dose density and cumulative dose in the treatment of breast cancer.

Clinical Trial

Why do we struggle when we try to learn a language as adults?

Whereas the acquisition of a first language is successful for normally developing individuals, native-like attainment in a language learnt as adults is not guaranteed. As far as grammar is concerned, the area that typically shows up as more problematic is that of Morphology, and more specifically, that part of Morphology related to the specific ways languages have to indicate notions like temporal location (e.g. English –-ed for past tense She walked) or person agreement (e.g. English –s for the third person singular She sings). Language students and teachers are familiar with exclamations like “Oh, after so many years I still have problems with the past tenses in Spanish!” or “I cannot cope with the masculine/feminine thing in French!” In this talk I will present two different accounts that are currently debated in the field of Second Language Acquisition about why it is not enough to memorize those “blessed endings” for us to master their use in our speech production. I will also introduce the latest study I have conducted in collaboration with colleagues, with the aim of evaluating the explanatory power of the hypotheses debated in current literature. [From the Author]