Practicalized Pedagogy for Research Students

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Public policy debate in higher education is dominated by planning for and reviews of macro trends. This paper adopts the alternative approach of viewing the process emanating out of the Roberts Review from the developing practitioner’s perspective.

The theoretical background is John McDowell’s project to rescue the place of Reason in the fundamental conception of the World, a place which is threatened by the advancement of science and technology conceived as the domain purely of experts who might be tempted to assume a value-free environment, and a place which is beyond the horizon of, for instance, Richard Dawkins understanding of the “public understanding of science” and, for instance, Willard van Orman Quine’s “naturalized epistemology”. We require, for a rich enough conception of skills, critical adoption of Michael Luntley’s framework for considering the nature of practice, a dichotomy in terms of the “thick” practice of state of the art expertise and the “thin” practice of, for example, presenting your field to non-specialists.

Part of the account of the practice of novice researchers will need to be articulated in the form of its place in society and human values but we shall explore further the real implications of this, in particular for true autonomy for the individual practitioner. The approach of coaxing out of novice and developing practitioners what it is that they are achieving through their studies and their work is the means to provide for their autonomy. This autonomy needs to be understood in the positive, Kantian sense, so including this sense of value as well as freedom to explore new avenues of scientific, and by analogy other academic, enquiry. This also emphasises the place of consciousness in the development process, once the anti-Enlightenment challenge is met from the protagonist in Heinrich von Kleist’s “Das Marionettentheater”.

The individual focus, initially through conceptual analysis but with a view to empirically oriented qualitative methods, allows us also to consider the nature of personal development and to articulate the attributes the individual can take up and take away from higher degree study, to translate into other walks of like. A deficit model of skills as discrete concrete requirements which (otherwise lacking) students need to acquire through training expert led top down provision for an externally defined stakeholder would take away the opportunity for the development of autonomy in the relevant sense.