Theories of Transformative Higher Education

In this thesis, I present five new theories for transformative higher education as my contribution to knowledge in the field of Education. These theories specifically provide away of viewing learning and teaching, and academic support for postgraduate learners and are as follows: (1) A Sense of an Academic Self, (2) A Trio of Actors, (3) Enabling Learning,(4) Coping with Uncertainty, and (5) Clear Fields—Muddied Fields. To be able to offer these theories, I examined the contemporary HE teaching and learning scene, and compared my experiences of it as a practitioner with what was in the literature. Taking the ontological position as an interpretivist and the methodological position as a Symbolic Interactionist, I made use of the concepts of Field and Disposition from Bourdieu’s Habitus to act as vital thinking tools to conceptualise and realise theories. In effect, I adopted a practice-based,
constructivist, grounded theory approach. With this approach, the starting point was not empirical studies derived from a traditional literature review but from musings and puzzles, collected from years of reflective teaching practice. In consequence, no narrow research questions were carved out of or honed from literature as might be expected. This does not mean that literature is absent or unimportant in the thesis. In fact, literature was very important to this study, only used in two non-traditional ways. The first of these was to contextualise constructed theories pre-analysis and then secondly to situate and advance theories post-analysis.