Towards a Pedagogy of Higher Education

Gunnlaugur Magnússon is Associate Professor of Education at the Department of Education at Uppsala University, Sweden, and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Education at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests regard education reforms, political ideals and ideologies of education, education policy, and philosophy of education.Johannes Rytzler is a Senior Lecturer at The School of Education, Communication and Culture at Mälardalen University, Sweden. He is particularly interested in analyzing educational concepts and phenomena at the intersection of Pedagogy and Didaktik.

"Gunnlaugur Magnússon and Johannes Rytzler combine the multiple perspectives of curriculum theory, policy analyses and pedagogical philosophy and explore an education-oriented theory of teaching, presenting a thought-provoking attempt which inspires new rethinking on higher education pedagogy...Profoundly theoretical, the book brings far-reaching insights into teaching in higher education and provides useful guidance for higher education teachers, administrators and policymakers to make innovations in teaching and learning."Qiufen Liu, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China"They brilliantly show how the pedagogical role of the university – what it wants with/for its subjects – has withered in higher education and thus needs to be re-claimed and re-formulated...In conclusion, "Towards a Pedagogy of Higher Education" is a timely book that brilliantly adds a Critical Didaktik -perspective to a field where profound pedagogical considerations have been overtaken by worries about how to effectively implement policy agendas...Well-written and conceptually stimulating, the book provides valuable food-for-thought-and-action for teacher-researchers in higher education and everyone working with university pedagogy."Kasper A. Sørensen, PhD student in Education, Roskilde University, Denmark"Higher education pedagogy has so far, on the whole, been surprisingly disconnected from educational scientific theory and philosophy, so Magnússon and Rytzler's book and theory on teaching in higher education is particularly welcome.... Magnússon and Rytzler's proposal for university pedagogy founded in didactics and impregnated with philosophical pedagogy deserves nothing less than a "Finally!" Finally, someone has shown how higher education pedagogy can be anchored in the theoretical foundations and terminology that other branches of educational science connect to. ...the benefit of the book is powerful and its contribution to higher education research, education and development is difficult to overestimate."Lotta Jons, Developer of University Pedagogy, Stockholm University, Sweden.

• Introduction. Part 1: The Current Paradigms of Higher Education. 1. Shifting Views on Higher Education. 2. Policy Matters. 3. University Pedagogy, the Bologna Process, and Constructive Alignment. Part 2: Reconnecting Higher Education and Pedagogy. 4 Forgotten Connections: The Central Questions of Pedagogy. 5. Rancière’s Pedagogical Paradox and the Response of Didaktik. 6 The Morphology of Teaching: Troubling Didaktik with Relational Philosophy. Part 3: Towards a Theory of Teaching in Higher Education. 7 Existential Risks and Transformative Potentials. 8 Rethinking the Paradoxes of Teacher Education with Didaktik. 9 Rethinking University Pedagogy