Abstract
The 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.
Highlights
Debates about what the Humanities are for and what it is they should teach and foster in universities seem to have become ubiquitous in the last decade [1,4,5,6,7]
If we examine what our qualitative data-sets suggest about our agendas related to the links between research, teaching and graduate attributes, what is exhibited maps onto evidence of how collective re-memories function, including: (1) Toleration of distortion; (2) Smoothing over of paradoxes; (3) Inattention to omissions
Both case studies explore particular propensities in the qualitative data sets as well as the secondary literature on the nature of our disciplines: a leaning towards myth-making in terms of the pedagogy of the Humanities being intrinsically reciprocal and an inclination to saga-making with respect to educational agendas that we associate with any emphasis on the utility of higher education
Summary
“It is not easy to describe the distinctive nature of scholarship in Humanities. We do collaborate all the time, ; it’s just that most of our collaborators are dead.” ([1], p. 149). The sentences above create and make public imaginary limits on how the Humanities seem to understand themselves They enclose the nature of our collaboration in a rhetoric of uniqueness (uniquely indescribable but somehow linked to an interaction with the dead), cultivating boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. If. Munt is right and stories allow for identification with and recognition of one another, which in turn results in a coherent web or network, our stories (and not just our practices) about learning and teaching have the capacity to foster both belonging and alienation. As such those of us dwelling in history, classics, literature, philosophy, theology have an ethical responsibility to analyse them and consider their possible effect on our students’ learning (as well as the conceptual construction of our disciplines)
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