Present teaching stories as re-membering the humanities

Gunn, V. (2014) Present teaching stories as re-membering the humanities. Humanities, 3(3), pp. 264-282. (doi: 10.3390/h3030264)

Abstract

he ways in which Humanities scholars talk about teaching tell something about how we interact with the past of our own discipline as well as anticipate our students’ futures. In this we express collective memories as truths of learning and teaching. As cultural artifacts of our present, such stories are worthy of excavation for what they imply about ourselves as well as messages they pass onto our successors. This paper outlines “collective re-membering” as one way to understand these stories, particularly as they present in qualitative interviews commonly being used to research higher education practice in the Humanities. It defines such collective re-membering through an interweaving of Halbwachs, Ricoeur, Wertsch and Bakhtin. It proposes that a dialogic reading between this understanding of collective re-membering and qualitative data-sets enables us to both access our discursive tendencies within the Humanities and understand the impact they might have on student engagement with our disciplines, noting that when discussing learning and teaching, we engage in collectively influenced myth-making and hagiography. The paper finishes by positing that the Humanities need to change their orientation from generating myths and pious teaching sagas towards the complex and ultimately more intellectually satisfying, articulation of learning and teaching parables.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Gunn, Professor Vicky
• Authors: Gunn, V.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Education > Social Justice Place and Lifelong Education; University Services > Learning and Teaching Services Division
• Journal Name: Humanities
• Publisher: M D P I AG
• ISSN: 2076-0787
• ISSN (Online): 2076-0787
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2014 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Humanities 3(3):264-282
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License