Whose Agency? Skills, Academics and Students in the Social Sciences.

Marketisation and a discourse centred on employability in higher education has resulted in a severe loss of ownership for the academic and their students in the Social Sciences. Despite our commitment to active learning we argue that the move towards innovative teaching methods and skills has occasioned a loss of key, related skills, especially those associated with traditional learning methods. The emphasis on “active”, driven by ideas about student satisfaction, efficiency and quality assurance has pushed the academic to the sidelines of the teaching and learning debate, resulting in a superficial implementation of the student-centred teaching and learning literature, to the detriment of Higher Education. Instead of fixing what others claimed to be broken but was not, the academic in the Social Sciences should reclaim their agency.