Getting critical about ‘tradition’

Prof Bruce Macfarlane

Dean, Faculty of Education and Human Development, EdUHK

In the 1990s my doctoral supervisor, Professor Ron Barnett, mentioned that it is better not to use the word ‘traditional’ when writing about higher education. I was somewhat non-plussed about this advice at the time but have since come to appreciate his wisdom. Afterall, do we really know and have a common understanding about what is a ‘traditional’ university, student, academic, curriculum, or teaching method for that matter? How time-bound and context-laden must any justification be to make such a claim meaningful?

Hands up. I have been as guilty as anyone in using the T word with insufficient care but a few years ago, as a participant-free way of doing research during lockdown, I started to casually word search back copies of Studies in Higher Education to see just how common this tendency is. What started out as idol curiosity ended up as an analysis of almost 7,000 usages of the words ‘tradition’ and ‘traditional’ in all issues of Studies between 1976 and 2021 (Macfarlane & Yeung, 2023). Two thirds of all papers published during this period used tradition and related terms at least once as a descriptive, pejorative or occasionally positive term. Descriptive usages are invariably based on assumptions of a shared understanding and are often open to misinterpretation and downright inaccuracy, such as ‘traditional research university’. The T word is also frequently othered as the unfashionable half in dualisms such as ‘traditional and innovative’ teaching methods.

But what, someone may ask, is the problem with this type of usage? Firstly, assumptions of shared understanding means, for example, that the term ‘non-traditional’ attracts considerably more explanation than ‘traditional’, as in ‘non-traditional student’. Secondly, over the years the phrase ‘traditional teaching method’ has been used as a wholly negative label for certain forms of teaching and assessment, notably the lecture, the seminar, the tutorial, the unseen written examination and so on, while the allegedly ‘new’ or ‘innovative’ alternatives, such as problem-based learning, peer assessment and portfolio assessment, are juxtaposed as wonderfully virtuous alternatives. I say allegedly as some of these approaches have been around in the literature for a very long time but claims to their novelty remain, such as the flipped classroom. What is classified as ‘traditional teaching’ is constantly shifting too, from ‘teacher-centred’ forms of instruction thirty years ago to face-to-face provision in the Covid and post-Covid era.

Am I being too pedantic? I don’t think so. The ever more empirical nature of writing about teaching in higher education compared with thirty years ago has made little difference to how often the T word is asserted. This reinforces my observation that it is invariably about lazy rhetoric or subtle campaigning for our pet preferences, even in data driven work. We need to think much more carefully and critically before using the T word rather than treating it as a convenient go-to.

Reference

Macfarlane, B. & Yeung, J. (2023) The (re)invention of tradition in higher education research: 1976-2021, Studies in Higher Education, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2023.2237691