Introduction

In the 21st Century knowledge will become increasingly less valuable and prized as the currency of education. The separation between knowledge and learning will become wider. Technology will make access to knowledge easier than ever before, for more people than ever before. It will become the role of Higher Education (HE) to provide higher order learning skills as well as, and eventually rather than, knowledge of subject disciplines. Of course, it has always been more valuable to be able to say what a poem might mean than to recite it, but in a knowledge and information-rich world these skills of analysis and interpretation will be at a higher premium. The implications of this for teachers in HE are far reaching. The knowledge transmission model will be dead. The CD Rom and other digital devices will be the source of much knowledge and information. The need for the teacher’s role to become one of mediator, mentor, listener, facilitator, interpreter and critical friend will be real and pressing. As Barnett states when reviewing the profound changes that have occurred in university education:

There are not one or two but multiple knowledges. Process knowledge, tacit knowledge, action learning, experiential learning. All these terms point to the multiplication of our ways of knowing in the modern world. The point is not that the sites of knowledge production are proliferating; it is that the academy’s definitions of knowledge are increasingly challenged. (Barnett, 1997, p. 3)

Those who express contempt, confusion or professional insult at having their teaching role described as above will nevertheless have to become practitioners of this approach, if not advocates of it. They may take comfort however that such an approach rescues education from its recent past concern with imposing facts, and liberates the teacher and student by requiring a creative engagement with those facts and a renewed seeking out of that knowledge. In 1854, through Mr Gradgrind, Dickens in Hard Times satirized the value of an obsession with ‘facts’ in education. Facts were all the lumpen proletariat could manage. At the threshold of the 21st century, aiming as we are at mass participation in HE, we should perhaps re-appraise the situation. Credit accumulation and transfer

systems, or CATS as they are often referred to, and the parallel curriculum framework based on modular systems are part of that re-appraisal. In many ways they liberate the student and teacher, in other ways they constrain them.