CARL GOMBRICH - BLOG

I’ve been bigging up interdisciplinarity and generalism as something we must look to provide in UK HE alongside more traditional subject/discipline-based degrees. The most viewed blogs that are closely related to these topics are here, here and here. However, in the interest of balance, there are two pieces of cautionary advice I wish to offer alongside championing these approaches in HE. 1. You can’t have everything Although we may wish to increase breadth, there is simply n

There is a growing interest in what is called Design for Learning. I am reading a nice book on the subject by Julie Dirksen, and Aaron Sams (who is usually credited, along with Jonathan Bergmann, with establishing the ‘flipped’ classroom), discusses UDL (Universal Design for Learning) here at this video post. In engineering, where design has always been implicit, there is renewed explicit focus on all aspects of design, including the aesthetic, and UCL’s Anthony Finkelstein w

‘I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member’, so said Groucho – as Woody Allen tells us in Annie Hall, if you can’t get to the original quote. Since I blogged on interdisciplinarity and individuation last week I’ve been thinking about the logical consequences of a move in education which allows people to individuate their learning to such a degree that each personal combination is unique. There is a possibility here that those of us educated in this way

A tweet about this conference on ‘Promises’ has me thinking about interdisciplinarity in education: the promises it holds and the risks that come with those promises. The beauty of what an interdisciplinary eduction offers is essentially one of individuation. As such it feels contemporary, relevant and desirable. It is part of a long line of political and social developments in democracy and individual freedoms. What we all would like, surely, is to learn what we want, how we