QAA – Student as Producer

The QAA has recently commissioned a series of papers to promote discussion about the ways in which research-engaged teaching might enhance the quality of teaching and learning in Higher Education. The paper below has been written by colleagues from the Reinvention Centre, where Mike Neary was founding Director.

Rethinking the values of higher education – the student as collaborator and producer?
Undergraduate research as a case study

Dr Paul Taylor and Danny Wilding
The Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research,
University of Warwick

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (1940).

Student as Producer is based on a number of intellectual projects, including critical social theory. Walter Benjamin (1892 -1940) was a central figure among a group of critical social theorists writing in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. His article, Author as Producer (1934), is a key text for the development of Student as Producer

Tag: QAA

Student as Producer: The Quality Agenda