This article focuses on the figure of the university teacher of literature, viewed as an agent that possesses knowledge and transmits it via its oral word. The approach is historical and theoretical. The first part examines how different types of teaching are linked to different phases of the development of the university institution, from the…

This article discusses the changing role of literature in the contemporary media landscape. Literary scholarship may well maintain its importance in the digitalizing world, but this requires it to engage in an open dialogue with cultural and media studies. It is important that more attention is paid to contemporary literature as well as to new…

This article, presented as a dialogue between the authors, explores what they perceive as critical areas of teaching and learning in the discipline of Medieval Studies. Within the discussion, notions of relevance and usefulness, widening access, and epistemological assumptions about the discipline are discussed and related to the practice of…

This article presents an experiment in teaching literature at Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman. As I was required to teach two sections of the same course, "Introduction to Drama", I decided to teach one section entirely face-to-face and to supplement my classroom teaching in the other section with online elements. While online…

Over the past decade historians and educational researchers in the UK, Australia, the USA and Canada have been devoting ever increasing energy to the systematic exploration of the learning of history at the college level. Now members of the discipline have come together to nurture and to disseminate this new scholarship of teaching and learning…

The study of the history of the English language can help students become aware of major issues in several academic fields, including history, literature, political science, anthropology, communication, economics, the Arts, and, of course, languages and linguistics. Even though instructors may not have an especially broad background in the…

Sketched in somewhat general terms, there are two basic ways of going about teaching ethics: (1) the moral indoctrination approach, which is essentially a rote learning exercise; and (2) the moral engagement approach, which emphasizes listening to others in an open-minded manner and coming to carefully considered conclusions only after thoughtful…

One question guided this experimental study: What impact does the change from teacher training to educational research have on university teachers' methodology and attitudes to teaching? To find answers to this question, the researchers selected five teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at the language centre of a private university on…

This article proposes an approach to teaching and learning in the university arts sector that is able to accommodate and assess creative process alongside practice. In arguing thus, romanticized notions of "the spontaneous artist" are exposed to scrutiny, and the creative process itself is made subject to analysis. Notwithstanding its focus on the…

This article addresses the complex issue of lecturers' subject knowledge and teaching. It explores the subject knowledge models of Banks, Leach and Moon (expressed in their chapter "New understandings of teachers' pedagogic knowledge", in J. Leach and B. Moon's edited work "Learners and Pedagogy," 1999) and of Grossman, Wilson and Shulman (see…

Two university English seminars were video-recorded to provide data for a pilot project investigating how English is produced or "actualized" in teaching and learning encounters. The project is positioned within three contexts: national policy about higher education teaching; current research about higher education pedagogy; and, the history and…