Anthropology and the Educational ‘Trading Zone’

Abstract

This article suggests that the notion of an educational ‘trading zone’ is an analytically helpful way of describing a space in which ideas about learning and teaching are shared within and between disciplines. Drawing on our knowledge of anthropology and the Humanities, we suggest three possible reasons for the limited development of such zones within academia in the UK and US. The first is the relatively low status of education as a discipline, and its perceived dependence on individualist theories of learning drawn from psychology. The second is that disciplinary pedagogies are often deeply embedded in academic identity and practice, making engaging with an educational ‘trading zone’ an epistemologically unfamiliar habit. A final, and more overtly political, reason is the strategic resistance of many faculty members to engaging with the new visions of teaching ‘professionalism’ offered by ‘faculty development’ and ‘training’ units within universities. We end by exploring whether the emerging debate around the ‘scholarship of teaching and learning’ might circumvent some of these barriers.

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