UK Centre for Materials Education
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Academics appear to me to have parallel lives. They spend much of their waking hours measuring, modelling, discovering, theorising and debating their ideas with colleagues. This, they call research. They are learning new knowledge about the world they live in. The other part of their job involves teaching the students what they know about that part of the knowledge in their charge. They are helping the students to learn knowledge that is new for them. Learning is in fact the space in which these two, usually conflicting activities should coincide. However, rarely do we consider the link between research and teaching to include the process of knowledge building. Often those Academics who are least interested in 'teaching' are very motivated by 'knowledge building' processes in research. It is hoped that by raising an awareness about the crucial and as yet implicit links between research and teaching, that some of these Academics can contribute to the enhancement of student learning, in a profound way.
Bowden and Marton, (1998) define learning on the individual level as what happens in the process of study and learning on the collective level as what happens through research. However, they are concerned that there is not enough relationship between these two processes of learning and see that the study of learning processes is now dealt with in separated disciplines from the knowledge to be learnt.
'Through the course of history, questions relating to how knowledge is formed have become separated from different domains of knowledge - of whatever kind.' (Bowden and Marton, p285)
Hence sociologists, philosophers, educationalists, psychologists, historians and management scientists, who study the process of knowledge generation: how it is explored, discussed, presented, taught and used, seem to have become separated from those researchers of the knowledge content itself.
For the purpose of this paper we will consider an intimate relation between learning and knowing or becoming knowledgeable about something. It is my belief that enabling Academics to reflect on the knowledge they negotiate and on the process of negotiation itself, they will be able to help students live the spirit of discovery. What students will learn within the University will then be more akin to how to think like a scientist, an educator or a sociologist, rather than only how to pass exams.
It is proposed to bring together a group of interested LTSN centres and associated lecturing staff, to consider the notions described above. They would create an interdisciplinary forum to act as a catalyst for the process of bringing together those Academics that study the process of developing the knowledge, with those that study the content which needs to be 'known'. It is hoped that this one day meeting will involve interactive talks and panel discussions on a variety of associated themes, leading to the formation of a small network of committed practitioners from a range of LTSN centres. This network could promote further debate, collaborative research and ultimately enhance the scholarship of learning or 'knowledge building' within a different community of scholars, those usually focussed on their research alone.
In order to explore the processes of knowledge formation or transfer of knowledge, from one context to another or from one person to another, I wish to use a metaphor taken from the physical sciences in my own area of research. This is so I can make explicit my way of looking at this concept, something which is necessary for us all to do, in order to build knowledge. Consider for a moment a reinforced plastic. In fibre glass for instance, the force or load is placed on the material, which comprises plastic reinforced by glass fibres. The load first given to the plastic must pass over onto the fibre, in order that the latter might take the load, thus providing the reinforcement. Any inefficiency in this will cause the material to be weaker than it could be. This meeting looks at the transposition of 'facts', rather than force, across interfaces of all kinds and in this introduction, I will use this example as a metaphor for the negotiation of facts, travelling through and between any particular medium, whether it be text, culture, discipline or image.
In order to do this I want to begin by expanding on the different models of the interface currently discussed and represented as the 'outcome space'. The outcome space is the range of current possible ways of understanding the 'interface' and will be used here as a negotiated 'fact'. The ways of understanding may be represented by dimensions, ranging from one view to the extreme other view. There may be several different dimensions. For the interface, for example, four have been found (Baillie, 2000).
Dimension 1 - Scale
Scale is either ignored, assuming global to equal local, or the relationship global- local is emphasised
Dimension 2 - Focus
The focus may be on the object being transferred from or that being transferred to, the sum of both, the difference between the two or the new combination which is formed.
Dimension 3 - Concept and Object
The interface is seen as an object that has a size and can be measured, or it is a concept that can only be measured in association with other objects, or it is a concept that can only be referred to by the use of metaphor or analogy, or it is a concept that only exists under certain conditions
Dimension 4 - Value and Purpose
The value of the interface is related to purpose and application or it has inherent value in itself
We choose to take the interface as a metaphor for the dialogic construction of knowledge resulting in outcome spaces full of simultaneously valid 'facts. It can represent the negotiation of multiple validities.
However, in order to understand how to facilitate this negotiation in different spheres we take a look at how these concepts are understood in a variety of disciplines. In this way, the very nature of this meeting becomes a negotiation of understanding of the concept of 'transposition of facts', between the researchers and teachers of multiple disciplines and cultures, concerning very different 'facts'.
Although the above dimensions were developed in relation to the physical world and specifically that of a material interface, we can see already the analogies which are possible for all forms of 'transposition'. We could ask the questions of each case study and context:
The case studies represented in this conference, will explore transposition as a framework for exploring how formal concepts and practices acquire new meanings or enact different effects as they move across cultures, between researcher and student, scientist and artist, and across disciplines.
