Teaching as Enigma: A Role for Digression

ELiSS now publishes papers online when they are ready for publication and then organises them into a specific volume and issue number with accompanying editorial at a later point. This ensures accepted papers are published as soon as possible and also poses a novel issue for an editor, for she or he can hardly introduce papers already available and probably downloaded as if they are new to readers. Indeed, some of the papers in 6.1 have been available for some time, and rightly so. So what purpose can an editorial serve in this situation? Searching for links after the event where there is no overall theme is likely to prove unsuccessful. Perhaps the ‘editor as author’ might search for narratives within the field of higher education for a particular journal issue? In this editorial I consider validation and online course management requirements as texts forming a narrative to embed teaching and learning practices. We are pleased to publish six papers in this issue and particularly to introduce a commentary on a previous paper. Here Professor Judith Burnett, Pro Vice-Chancellor at Greenwich University, discusses the paper by Eric Harrison and Rob Mears on assessment in undergraduate sociology published last year in ELiSS 5.3 (Harrison & Mears 2013). The issue of assessment is an important one for all who work in higher education and social scientists have worked to develop lively assessments for students and to contribute to research and practice in assessment generally. Harrison and Mears showed that undergraduate students did not necessarily view assessment in positive terms and so their paper questioned how much progress has been made since the fund for development of teaching and learning (FDTL) study in 2001. Burnett takes this question forward and provides a lens through which many academics in the social sciences can continue to contribute reports on their pedagogic practice, research reports to ELiSS and other journals devoted to promoting learning and teaching in the social sciences.