THE GATHERING STORM

Education, and especially higher education, is perennially in a state of crisis and arguably every generation has its enfant terrible proclaiming the end of education as we know it. Having witnessed the death of one system or another, the students of one generation then become the instructors of the next and happily settle down to teach them in the very manner in which they themselves were taught (Goffe and Kauper 2014; Schmidt et al. 2015). Yet today, the rapid development of technology and social media has had a profound effect not only on the way in which the current generation of students learns and approaches knowledge but also challenges the very relationship between teacher and student (Tess 2013). With readily available information at their fingertips, and a perhaps misplaced belief in the all-encompassing power of technology, millennials increasingly seek their knowledge from sources other than their instructors. At the same time, academic teaching has largely been side-lined by the imperative to “publish or perish,” in effect becoming an unfortunate side effect of the profession. Contact teaching – understood as seminars and tutorials, where students and instructors interact – is increasingly outsourced to underpaid, overworked PhD students or non-tenure track instructors with professors wheeled out to perform superstar lectures (Chakrabortty and Weale 2016).

All of this has combined to create something of a perfect storm in academia, with a growing rift between generations in terms of their approach and regard for academic teaching. The present paper is intended to be exploratory and aims to examine some of the current challenges faced by scholars engaged in the classroom and didactic activities. The paper draws on direct observation and active research we have conducted in recent years while teaching within both international study programmes and curricula addressed to Polish students, particularly in the context of the introduction of a competency-based framework for teaching and assessment in Poland. The article also relies on collating both journalistic and academic sources constituting a significant research “knowledge base” related to pedagogical issues faced in higher education.