Learning and Teaching 

About: Learning and Teaching is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Higher education & Teaching method. It has an ISSN identifier of 1755-2273. It is also open access. Over the lifetime, 189 publications have been published receiving 1024 citations.

In/Difference in the neoliberalised university

Abstract: In this article the authors take up the invitation to respond to the previous articles in the special issue. They discuss why it is so difficult to speak and write about gender and sexuality, and difference more generally, in the neoliberalised university. They make the case that the neoliberal university engages and uses categorical difference, and the individuals inhabiting these, mainly for auditing purposes. The authors develop the argument that despite the enterprise university’s official commitments to diversity and inclusion, it remains indifferent to difference, understood as openness to becoming different, to differenciation in a Deleuzian sense. Difference is privatised and depoliticised and is only acceptable if it is useful and exploitable in pre-specified ways and if it conforms to and facilitates neoliberal agendas.

Report on a field visit to Mondragón University: a cooperative experience/experiment

Abstract: Mondragon is at the centre of one of the largest groups of co-operatives in the world and in 1997 set up what is probably the only co-operative university in existence. This highly successful university has a solidary economy, effective methods of knowledge generation and transfer, and is expanding. Among its unique features are fl at hierarchies and forms of self-management, community engagement and student participation built on an overall concept of solidarity of the stakeholders. Davydd Greenwood spent many years in the 1980s doing action research with people from the co-operatives, exploring organisational cultures and their effects on people-management strategies. Some of his contacts were extremely generous in making time to meet us and arrange interviews with others who could tell us about the co-operative university from different perspectives. Over two days, we were given a tour of the headquarters of the umbrella organisation for the co-operatives, called MONDRAGON, and met the former personnel director of one of the major co-operative companies to introduce us to the history and concepts of the movement. The rector and vice rector of Mondragon University made a whole morning available to present information and answer our questions with great generosity and openness. We then met a dean of one of the faculties, two lecturers from another faculty, and a lecturer from the third faculty who was also a member of the Social Council.

Understanding the transnational higher education landscape: Shifting positionality and the complexities of partnership

Abstract: This article presents a comprehensive review of research on transnational higher education published between 2006 and 2014. It aims to provide an overview of a highly complex field that is both nascent and shifting, with research developing unevenly and concentrated in particular areas. This overview will enable academics working in transnational higher education to place their practice in the wider context of socio-political and cultural discourses. The review adopts the concept of positionality, which defines individuals and/or groups not in terms of fixed identities but by their shifting location within networks of relationships as a means of understanding the changing landscape.