A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education

It is customary, in a Foreword, to begin by sketching a large context in which the book in question might be comprehended and then perhaps to pick out one or two of its key features and end by affirming the value of the book in front of the reader. On this occasion, I shall reverse this order. Let me start, therefore, by asserting that A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education is both a splendid book and, for all those who care about higher education and universities, a crucially important book. That assertion actually contains a number of suggestions on my part. One is that this book offers important insights separately for higher education and for universities, that is to say both for students and their learning on the one hand and for universities as organisations on the other hand. Every page is packed with insights and practical suggestions for advancing students' learning and their wider experience: that is immediately evident. Furthermore, in the Connected Curriculum idea, there are the makings of a coherent vision and plan of action for institu-tional transformation. At the centre of the Connected Curriculum idea lies the hope and, indeed, the demonstration that it is possible, within universities, to improve the relationship between teaching and research. In a sense, of course, this thought should never have needed to be uttered. For 200 years, since the modern idea of the university was born at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, it has been taken for granted in many quarters that a distinguishing feature of universities is that they be institutions that not only are spaces of both teaching and research but also that those two functions are intimately intertwined. However, for the past three decades or so, huge forces (national and global) have tended to pull research and teaching apart; and so the matter of their relationship has become a matter of wide concern. It might be tempting to address this matter in a rather limited way, looking at the actual relationships between research and teaching - which, characteristically, may be expected to vary even within the same university - and focusing on a particular aspect, in trying to bring the two activities closer to each other. (The question has to be asked: just why should the Pro- Vice- Chancellors for Teaching and for Research ever talk to each other? After all, in many universities, their roles have become quite separate.) A huge virtue of A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education is, to the contrary, that it sees, in this issue of the rela-tionship between teaching and research, the profound and much wider matter as to what it is actually to be a university. This book, therefore, contains - albeit subtly - a vision for the university in the twenty- first century. Connectedness lies at the heart of this vision. There are no less than twelve dimensions of connectedness that can be glimpsed here, namely connections: 1)Between disciplines 2)Between the academy and the wider world 3)Between research and teaching 4)Between theory and practice 5)Between the student and teacher/lecturer/professor 6) Between the student in her/ his interior being - and in his/ her being in the wider world 7)Between the student and other students 8) Between the student and her/his disciplines - that is, being authentically and intimately connected epistemologically and ontologically 9)Between the various components of the curriculum 10) Between the student's own multiple understandings of and per-spectives on the world 11) Between different areas - or components - of the complex organization that constitutes the university 12) Between different aspects of the wider society, especially those associated with society's learning processes.