Improving teaching and learning in higher education: The case for a relational perspective

The article argues for a particular view of teaching and learning in higher education. A relational perspective links the improvement of the professional practice of teaching with research into student learning. It offers an alternative to paradigms which reduce the complex relations between students, subject content, and teaching to characteristics of instruction and of students, and whose findings and prescriptions often appear distant from everyday teaching problems. Learning in institutional settings is bound up with content and context; isolating general mechanisms that ‘good learners˚s use to learn any subject matter may be less than helpful. A relational perspective conceptualises the teaching and learning process holistically. It involves inquiry into and reflection on how students learn specific subject matter in particular contexts. The results are used to amend teaching and assessment. The perspective has far-reaching implications for staff development and the quality of teaching in higher education.