Creating Meaningful Learning Spaces Through Phenomenological Strategies

Abstract

As teachers with more than thirty years of experience, we have found ourselves returning to our understandings of the nature of the teacher-student relationship and indeed the priority of this relationship for teaching and learning in Higher Education. As academic colleagues in the same School of Education, we have found ourselves asking questions that we consider important about our pedagogical practices, questions that call us into an ongoing dialogue:• What might we have taken for granted about the teacher-student relationship? • Have we unintentionally slipped into privileging transactional models ofteaching and learning? • Have we lost sight of the holistic and experiential nature of teaching andlearning, whether intentional or otherwise? • What is the nature of the student’s first year experiences within a university? • As teaching staff in a university, how well do we hear students’ voices inrelation to our learning intentions? • Have our learning expectations, assessment requirements and the fixationfor the ‘evidence’ of learning constrained the creativity and innovation for those who teach in Higher Education?