‘Darkness on the edge of town’ (or how higher education has improved…)

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Notes

This Editorial is based on a keynote address delivered at the 2014 ceremony to present Australian Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, held on Friday 19th September in the State Library of South Australia, Adelaide. The title is drawn from Bruce Springsteen's fourth album. I would like to thank the JGHE reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

^1. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire refers to traditional pedagogy as the “banking model” because it treats students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, rather like a piggy bank is filled with coins. By contrast, he argues that learners should be regarded as co-creators of knowledge.

^2. Lest critics think I live in some fantasy land, let me also observe that higher education institutions have demonstrated consistently their willingness to exploit willing staff as comprehensively as possible through, for example, the sort of demands I discussed in the introductory paragraph. “Managing” those tendencies remains an individual and managerial challenge.