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Rethinking Teaching in the Context of Diversity

Higher education has faced profound teaching challenges in recent times, as it has delivered a widening range of courses to students of increasingly diverse backgrounds, expectations and levels of preparedness. These challenges call for a more radical shift in teaching than simply incorporating remedial support within existing teaching programmes. This paper argues that neither traditional 'knowledge delivery' models of teaching, nor a purely 'student-centred' approach, adequately addresses the challenges of student diversity. Instead, it proposes an emphasis on the sociocultural nature of learning and teaching, modelling learning as acquiring the capacity to participate in the discourses of an unfamiliar knowledge community, and teaching as supporting that participation. It explores the challenges faced by students struggling to make meaning in strange intellectual and social surroundings, and outlines ways teachers can structure courses and tasks so that very diverse cohorts of students can progress together in meeting those challenges.