Being a Teacher in Higher Education (review)

Peter Knight's Being a Teacher in Higher Education gives us a glimpse into the future of the faculty role in a rapidly changing higher education. The book is richly informed by research drawing from a wide-ranging and impressively diverse body of literature. His bringing together the depth of research on teaching and learning from the United Kingdom with the growing body of research being generated in Australia and North America is particularly helpful. The international convergence found in the research cited in this book is fully evident, but so are the striking differences—revealed in the use of language and his many fascinating observations about teaching in the British context.

Knight addresses the life of the teacher in higher education as a "whole person" and places the teaching role in a web of interrelated systems. Speaking of his "connectionist perspective," as he puts it, he states: "Professional learning may best be understood as something that happens in working through systems and communities" (p. 217). Although attracted to complexity theory, Knight deals with the everyday challenges of being a teacher in a concrete and revealing way. His chapters on the early-career experience, issues of motivation, maintaining teaching vitality, and part-time teaching address serious although mundane problems with which most faculty struggle.

It is in Part 2, "Teaching Practices," that Knight takes us into an approach to teaching that is more familiar among the "academic staff" of British universities but which represents a vision of the future that U.S. faculty will find uncomfortable at first glance. The author assumes that "being a good teacher . . . is very much about being a good designer of tasks and a sensitive facilitator of student engagement with them" (p. 124). Little is said about where the faculty receive their degrees or what the faculty know; the emphasis is on the "whole learning environment." Knight provides us with a thorough research-base leading toward an increased emphasis on the professionalization of teaching (my phrase, not his), where academic professionals will have their primary identity as teachers, not as biologists, historians, or psychologists. Being a Teacher in Higher Education is a rigorous introduction to this primary professional identification—a not-too-subtle shift in thinking about what it means to be a faculty member, particularly in the American context.

Peter Knight builds on Lee Shulman's effort to integrate the intellectual substance of a field and the teaching process (p. 23). Knight incorporates Shulman's seven types of knowledge, including an emphasis on "pedagogical content knowledge," and introduces the distinction—developed later at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching—between scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning. This I admire and appreciate. In Knight's treatment of being a teacher, however, the principal knowledge base for the teacher in higher education has more to do with collaborative design, curriculum construction, facilitation of learning, and shaping the whole learning environment than being grounded in the substance of a particular discipline. From this perspective, the faculty member's field of study has become the larger environmental design, setting the context for learning. This is what I see as moving higher education toward the professionalization of teaching.

Knight is pointing us in the right direction in his focus on, for instance, deep learning versus surface learning. His chapters on instruction and learning tasks are especially rich. These chapters introduce us to a knowledge base that most teachers in American higher education know little about and introduces the teacher to an approach to learning that all faculty need to know. Whether many faculty in the American context will have the patience and the willingness to commit to taking on this new professional responsibility is doubtful. It will involve reframing what it means to be an academic...