Aims and objectives of staff

Abstract

The theme of the paper is that curricula and teaching methods will have to be modified to meet the challenge of mass higher education, and that, if they are to be modified, then the constraints operating on them will need to be known. Among those constraints may prove to be the ideas and attitudes of faculty the aims and objectives of teaching staff in higher education. Researchers at the University of Lancaster, sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust, have been enquiring through depth interviews into the objectives of teaching staff in English universities and colleges. 1 The research attempts to thread a middle way between a level of discussion which is concerned with such objectives as "the pursuit of truth" and the "advancement of knowledge" and the "real world" level of informal, transitory and unofficial goals of individuals. In brief, lecturers were found to be very willing to discuss their teaching objectives, but ev.en a superficial analysis showed a circularity and lack of content and substance in the reasons advanced by many of them for the curricula and teaching methods adopted. Indeed, operational decisions about courses were taken for largely pragmatic and occasional reasons. The self-concept of lecturers, whether in polytechnic or university, relied heavily on the subject or professional specialism: there was thus a certain specialist identity among teaching staff which cut across the binary divisions of higher education. If the substance of the interviews with British lecturers is reduced to its bare essentials then it is true that all the lecturers acknowledged a common objective. A successful student, they asserted, is one who showed a "critical intelligence" a student who could handle theory, manipulate concepts, and draw up a convincing argument according to the rules of the specialism. There were no "right" conclusions for a student to reach, rather conclusions that were reasoned and well presented. Teaching staff were convinced that it was only a minority of students in higher education who could be expected to display successfully this "critical intelligence"