Higher Education Academy Engineering Subject Centre

In the world of engineering there are theories that can be used for building a bridge, designing a chemical reactor or improving the aerodynamics of an aeroplane. It is probably then quite reasonable to assume that education theory will deliver some straight answers on how to conduct teaching or how to improve learning. If this were possible then this guide would offer you a set of rules to apply to your teaching and you could head off happy and secure. However, if you have spent any time working with students, for example giving a lecture and then seeing what students write in a test, you will already have that nagging feeling that improving teaching might in some odd way be more complex than designing an aeroplane.

In the field of social science where education finds itself there are indeed some who would claim to have formulated universal and general rules.The problem is not that these aren’t true, but that when you are working in this mode you tend not to come up with particularly interesting or useful insights. For example, it has been shown that schools with students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds¹ have, on average, poorer academic outputs compared to those with students from wealthier backgrounds . Most teachers already know this. But how can we start to understand what is happening here so that we might be able to subvert the inevitability of such outcomes? Here we need to make different demands of theory.

There can be considered to be two types of theory in the social sciences². Firstly, there is the kind of theory that we are familiar with in the natural sciences and engineering: a set of general statements about the world that we can either prove or disprove empirically. As noted above, this kind of theory is often not terribly helpful in education.The second kind of theory is described as a set of‘thinking tools’,concepts or heuristics that one can use to offer new ways of looking at the world, to suggest new lines of enquiry or action. Here we do not have a set of right answers waiting for passive transfer to new contexts; each new user of this thinking tool will have to put it to use in solving their own problems. You need to consider your own situation, look into the guide and choose the tool that seems best suited to your needs. On the one hand this can be daunting; on the other hand anything less than an academic engagement would be an unlikely way to go about your work as an engineering academic.

Further insight as to why the ‘engineering model’ of theory is not necessarily applicable to teaching can be found in the observation that teaching is ‘practical’ rather than ‘technical’ in nature:‘it is a matter of making judgements rather than following rules’³. There might be some educational problems that are amenable to technical solutions but most are not. It has been suggested that ‘enlightenment’ rather than ‘engineering’ could work as a model for how we should think productively about education theory⁴.

Building on the assertion that teaching is about making insightful judgements rather than applying technical solutions, this guide focuses primarily on learning theory. It is student learning that is at the heart of our enterprise, and any starting point for improving teaching needs, therefore, to focus on learning⁵.This is not to discount the value of theorising teaching, curriculum, institutions, etc., but merely to assert that thinking about learning is a good starting point, especially if you are aiming to develop new insights into what is happening in your classroom and course.

So we now have an invitation to engage with education theory, to find those thinking tools that seem most applicable to our context and to use these to develop our teaching practice, to understand our students and to design our educational systems. ‘There is nothing so practical as a good theory’ was stated by the social scientist Kurt Lewin⁶ and this will be a useful mantra for the journey.

1. For a detailed meta-analysis of these studies see White (1982).
2. (Mouzelis, 1995).
3. (Hammersley, 1997, p. 147).
4. It is also acknowledged here that many of the traditional ways of thinking about science and engineering knowledge have been contested in recent times, and it can certainly be argued that good engineering solutions are highly contextual and not simple transfers of theoretical knowledge from one domain to the other.
5. (Ramsden, 2003).
6. (Lewin, 1951).