Delivering the curriculum

In Chapter 2, I discussed a conceptual shift from thinking about higher education teaching being a matter of a tutor-centred process, where ‘instruction’ is the central paradigm, to one where curriculum designers see learning as the process through which students construct learning for themselves. The term ‘curriculum delivery’ for me is not so much about content being delivered as a postman delivers a parcel, but more like the process by which a midwife delivers a baby, sometimes referred to as ‘maieutics’, where the student (like the labouring woman) can be supported, advised and offered interventions when things go wrong, but in fact only the student can bring forth learning in an active rather than a passive process. Student-centred learning has implications both for curriculum delivery and assessment, with the process seen as a partnership rather than a Gradgrindian experience, where students are seen like pupils of Charles Dickens’s Gradgrind, who wanted to fill young minds with facts like little vessels being filled from a jug. Many of us in a post-modern world are uncomfortable with the concept of immutable facts in any case, since much ‘knowledge’ is subject to change as advances in understanding are made.