by Dr. Allie Clemans, PhD
Faculty of Education,
Monash University, Australia
The university setting speaks loudly to me about power! It represents an institution that prepares people for their professions or consolidates their ongoing participation in one. This work, of admission or exclusion from a profession is powerful work. The university is a place for hallowed knowledge, for its own sake. At best, such knowledge can reframe or affirm practice in powerful ways. At its worst, it can denigrate, deny or ignore practical knowledge for supposedly falling short of the rigour that theory brings. Often... teaching and learning within higher education falls easily into the trap of ‘telling’, reinforcing the ‘authority’ and power of the institution.I suggest that the university has the potential to realise the enabling dimension of its power through the teaching and learning practices it promotes. Often, however, teaching and learning within higher education falls easily into the trap of ‘telling’, reinforcing the ‘authority’ and power of the institution. How, then, does Dialogue Education (DE) fit into this context and in what ways has it helped me as an academic to enable the power of the university?
I will highlight just a few ways:
- Conducting a Learning and Resources Needs Assessment (LNRA) brings me inevitably into relationship with learners. It turns the generic ‘student’ into a person working in a particular context with particular learning needs. This relationship mandates me to connect my expertise to theirs, in ways that resonate with them.
- Identifying achievement-based objectives for each session I teach means that the (powerful) knowledge I bring as an academic cannot simply be imposed for its own sake. It demands that its educational purposes be made explicit and justified to my learners by how it will ‘matter’ to them.
- Understanding my educational designs and their implementation as a deliberative act is powerful. It makes me more aware of the space for my consultative and directive voices. Best of all, it establishes the ground for fertile questions to be posed with learners such that they, too, recognise their power and powerlessness in their learning and workplace contexts.
Both the symbolism and material realities of bringing DE to life in a higher education setting enables learners to access and add to the powerful knowledge that is part of the university. My experience has been that the university does not easily shed it powerful and elitist inheritances. Its teaching and learning practices often bear these out. The stance of Dialogue Education, however, interrupts these in ways that propel the university towards realising its powerful enabling potential by establishing authentic interaction with the learners and professions that it develops.
Allie Clemans is a graduate of GLP's
Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach course.
She is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Monash University in Australia.
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