A philosophical defence of the university lecture

ABSTRACT

As a host of published books, journal articles and opinion pieces attest, the university lecture is now distinctly out of step with contemporary Higher Education discourse. Academics across university disciplines confidently proclaim the format’s obsolescence, arguing that only inertia and familiarity could satisfactorily account for the lecture’s survival. We propose in this paper to offer a philosophical revisiting of this most maligned of pedagogical forms. Drawing on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, we argue for the lecture not as a mode of dissemination but as a mode of address. On this model, the lecture is to be understood as a special form of human encounter where the voice of one is modulated specifically for the hearing of another. Thus, we propose in this paper to offer a philosophical defence of traditional university teaching. We argue that this defence has particular relevance for teaching and learning in the Humanities.

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophy of education
• higher education
• pedagogy
• the lecture
• Stanley Cavell

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our use of the term ‘performative’ in this context is meant to illustrate Lyotard’s more negative sense of the term as well as the pejorative sense of the term in everyday or ordinary speech. Of course, for J.L. Austin, the term ‘performative’ does not in itself connote a negative but merely indicates a particular range of utterances – those that carry out an action.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Fulford

Amanda Fulford is Professor of Philosophy of Education, and Associate Dean for Research and Impact at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK. She teaches postgraduate students in professional learning and supervises doctoral students. Her research interests are in philosophy of education, the philosophy of higher education, and public and community philosophy. Her publications include Philosophy and Theory in Education: Writing in the Margin, with Naomi Hodgson (Routledge 2016) and the forthcoming Philosophy and Community: Theories, Practices and Possibilities (edited with Grace Lockrobin and Richard Smith for Bloomsbury). She is co-editor of the ‘Debating Higher Education’ series with Springer, and has published numerous articles in international, peer-reviewed journals. She currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, and on the Governing Council of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE).

Áine Mahon

Dr Áine Mahon is Assistant Professor in the School of Education at University College Dublin. Her primary research areas are Philosophy of Education and Philosophy of Literature. Áine’s first monograph, The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. With Andrew Taylor of the University of Edinburgh, she has edited Stanley Cavell, Literature and Film: The Idea of America (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), and with Clara Fischer of University College Dublin, she has edited Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).