This book aims to show how a meta-theory of critical realism can be applied to research about pedagogy in the changing landscape of higher education in England. It introduces some of the key ideas of critical realism, and its potential to clarify complex issues that arise in research. This book draws on a critical realist study of structure/agency interactions in three contrasting higher education institutions. Seven case studies of lecturers, over the three universities, are considered to explore the interplay of (...) global, national and institutional structures and processes in their everyday working lives and the extent of their agency in these settings. Conceptual approaches to pedagogy are developed through an application of critical realism to the nature of knowledge, human agency and structure-agency interactions against the changing landscape in higher education at global, national and institutional levels. The book offers a way out of the current malaise in educational research which appears to be stuck between empiricist reductionism and hermeneutic interpretive positions. Highlighting the importance of ontological analyses, this book explores a realist approach to learning, pedagogy and knowledge in English higher education and will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in education, critical realism and philosophy more generally. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFaced with the marketization of Higher Education in England, pedagogy is under pressure in ways that often undermine lecturers’ deeply held values. For instance, this pressure results in the reduction of significant aspects of teaching to narrow metrics and requires universities to operate within intrusive structures that subordinate their pedagogical aims to profit-orientated objectives. In this paper, I analyse the way that people can preserve their agency in this pedagogical context. I guide my analysis with a framework that combines critical (...) realism with Aristotelian virtue ethics and MacIntyre’s ideas of qualities within human practices. I suggest the kinds of qualities that might assist faculty to preserve and advance rich pedagogical projects in the current circumstances. Finally, I use a critical realist morphogenetic approach to argue that people may be able to resist losing their way when faced with ubiquitous performativity regimes. (shrink)

This article extends Georg Lukács’s theorization pertaining to historical fiction by considering a novel written in response to colonial conditions. It treats Abdulhalim Sharar’s Urdu Malik al-‘Aziz and Virginia (1888) as a case where a fictional version of the encounter between Muslims and Christians during the crusades in the twelfth century is used to counter the colonial Indian present in the nineteenth century. I suggest that novels such as Sharar’s exemplify a vein of global thought since the nineteenth century that (...) resisted historicism but without abandoning the notion that the past was real. Deploying a genre that came to the fore in colonial conditions, Sharar imagines an alternative future by narrating the past otherwise via fiction. (shrink)