The involvement of the teacher in the development of learning materials

Until quite recently, due largely to their reliance on commercially produced textbooks, teachers had played little or no part in the preparation of learning materials, Mr Clarke observed. For the most part they had been content to accept the assistance they received from educational publishers. Only since the late 1950's and early 1960's when the programmed learning movement and the drive for curriculum development gathered momentum had reasonably large numbers of teachers become involved in this kind of work. Both the programmed texts and the major curriculum projects during this period shared certain common features: (a) the insistence on the change from a passive (receptive) to an active (inquiring) role on the part of the learner, (b) by the need for a prior statement of objectives and (c) the need for systematic evaluation as a built-in requirement for the lsearning process.     

Access and targeting: an exploration of a contradiction

To attempt to understand Access to Higher Education provision as an educational social movement is to become caught up in a dialectial dilemma. Is Access allied to the older radical traditions of adult education through a collective emancipatory role or is its role to serve the educational needs of the individual student and/or the economic needs of society? Research carried out at the University of Exeter has shown that while there is a strong rhetoric within the Access movement that supports the more emancipatory approach, practitioners contradict this when questioned about the prime purpose of Access. Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony can be used to address this contradiction by examining how sub‐cultures, such as the group of Access practitioners, create a mosaic of meaning or a reality map which is drawn from the conflicting ideologies which surround them.