ABSTRACT
Higher education learning has, over the past two decades, become increasingly concerned with the acquisition of transferable technical skills, competencies, and employability. This chapter focuses upon the emergence of a range of structural and managerial constraints within higher education. It examines the political and educational ideologies which dominate the debates around the purposes of higher education, the economic framework within which lifelong learning is interpreted and the emergence of particular versions of quality monitoring. The chapter looks at the institutionalisation of control systems in forms of managerialism. Feminist pedagogy has been developed in opposition to the traditional hierarchical relationship between teacher and taught. It acknowledges that social identity is constituted through hierarchical knowledges and power relations. In this construction, social relations are highlighted, in the belief that pedagogy is not something one does 'to' people, but rather, it is a complex interaction of at least three agencies- the teacher, the learner and the knowledge they produce together.
