Perhaps that should be “what should an honours program be?” I’m involved in developing a school wide honours program, which is tricky as there are a lot of very diverse disciplines and undergraduate courses involved. There is a man with a van amount of paperwork that needs to be done for approval which I’m working through, as well as a variety of consultations and the like that need to be undertaken. As is pretty usual with these matters the compliance documentation pays much more attention to demonstrating industry need and viability than demonstrating good pedagogy or research outcomes. Disappointing, but not surprising, and not unreasonable I guess given the cost of running a program so you need to know it will have students, rather than running it just because it is a great idea.
As part of this process I’m holding a second planning day, partly to help people get on board with what honours is (being a once upon a time institute of technology we have many staff who think that spending another year at university after they have delivered their industry wisdom to a student is just, well not daft, but dangerously intellectual), and then the harder problems of how and why it should be taught. To help conversations like this I provide or seed the debate with some points, so that we don’t spend half the day thinking up these points, but can use them as launching pads.
So, here we go. (Insert sound of tentative rolling up of academic sleeves.)
- honours should always have research outcomes
- honours research requires the investigation of a dense or messy problem
- a dense problem is something that you don’t already know the answer to yet
- a dense and messy problem requires you to change your understanding to address it
- such problems can be theoretical writing, they can be about practice, they can be about making, they can also arise in doing each of these things
- the investigation of this dense and messy problem can be via thesis, project or via practice
- the investigation will produce outcomes that can be in the form of a thesis, a project and exegesis, or a portfolio and exegesis
- all honours students are expected (and required) to be able to write to their work
- all honours students are expected to read, and utilise in their practice, relevant theories
- a theory is a proposition that is grounded in, and arises within, an informed practice of thinking
- this thinking might not only be in words, but the exegesis requires you to use words
That’s the first list. I’ll see what it feels like in a few days. Also need a similar list about learning and teaching outcomes, or models. If you get this figured out first, and people on board, then you have a map for how to teach honours, this matters much much more than the specifics of what you actually then teach. That keeps changing. The deep structure of the why of the teaching, that’s the pointy end. Most academics don’t get this, being content experts and all.
Tags: honours, Lifes Little Pieces, pedagogy
