I really enjoy leading a postgraduate unit called Exploring Contemporary Issues. When I plan the unit, I think about how I can help students look at the world differently.
Most of my students already have substantial experience of education, either as teachers, healthcare professionals, academics or other professionals working within educational settings. I teach a post graduate unit called Exploring Contemporary Issues in Health Professions Education. I am the unit director.
My learners already have their own ways of understanding how education works. What I want to offer them is the opportunity to step back from those familiar ways of thinking and look at them through a different lens.
For me, this is where social theory becomes particularly powerful. I want students to understand that an educational issue rarely has one straightforward explanation. The way we define a problem, the language we use to describe it and the assumptions we make about it all shape what we see. So rather than asking students simply to identify an issue in education, I encourage them to ask different questions: Who defines this as a problem? Whose perspective dominates? What assumptions underpin the way we understand it? And what might we see if we approached the same issue from another theoretical perspective?
I introduce students to thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir because her work gives them a way to question assumptions that might otherwise remain invisible. Her discussion of women as the ‘Other’ provides a useful lens for thinking about gender, identity, and power. Rather than treating gender inequality as simply a matter of individual attitudes or behaviours, students can begin to consider how societies construct one group as the norm and position another as different. This opens up new ways of thinking about issues such as representation, leadership, professional identity and whose experiences receive recognition within education.
I also introduce Michel Foucault and his ideas about discourse and power. Foucault gives students another way to examine things that can initially appear quite ordinary or neutral. For example, we might describe a student as ‘disengaged’. We use the word so easily that we rarely stop to question what it actually means. Who decides what counts as engagement? What behaviours do we associate with an engaged student? What assumptions do we make about students who do not conform to those expectations? And what happens when particular ways of describing students become so familiar that we begin to treat them as objective truths?
This video introduces Foucault’s ideas.
These are the kinds of questions I want students to start asking. I don’t teach theory simply so that students can demonstrate that they know who Foucault or de Beauvoir were. I want them to learn how to think with theory. There is a significant difference between knowing about a theorist and using their ideas to make sense of something happening in the world around you. I want students to develop the confidence to pick up a theoretical lens and ask, ‘What does this allow me to see that I couldn’t see before?’
This has become an important part of how I approach planning the unit. I think carefully about the intellectual journey I want students to take. I don’t want to overwhelm them with theoretical concepts or turn the unit into a history of social theory. Instead, I want to introduce ideas that they can take away and use in their own professional and academic lives. A concept might help them think differently about their own teaching, curriculum planning or the way a particular group of students gets described.
I often think that the most interesting moment in teaching comes when something clicks. A student might have spent years working within an educational environment and developed a familiar explanation for why something happens. Then they encounter a theoretical idea that disrupts that explanation. Suddenly, something they have seen many times before looks different. They might say, ‘I’ve never thought about it like that before.’ For me, that moment captures what postgraduate education can do at its best.
This is also why I think contemporary issues need theory. We can become very good at describing what is happening in education without necessarily understanding the deeper social processes that shape it. Theory gives us some distance from the immediate issue. It allows us to move beyond description and ask questions about power, inequality, identity, knowledge and the social structures that influence educational experiences.
It also reminds us that many issues that appear new have much older roots. A contemporary debate about education might connect to longstanding ideas about gender, class, race, neurodiversity or authority. Looking at these issues through different theoretical perspectives can reveal those connections and challenge the assumption that the way things are is simply the way things have to be.
I want my students to leave with a greater curiosity about the world around them. I want them to question language that seems neutral, notice assumptions that previously went unchallenged and recognise that different perspectives can produce very different understandings of the same issue.
Ultimately, as a sociologist, I see my role as giving students more ways of seeing.
A theoretical lens does not necessarily give us the answer. Instead, it can change the questions we ask. And sometimes changing the question is the first step towards seeing an issue in an entirely different way.
This is why I love sharing sociology, and teaching!
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