Freedom to Learn

Bruce Macfarlane is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Southampton, UK.

• 1. The hidden curriculum 2. Student rights 3. A paradox 4. The performative turn 5. Participative performativity 6. Bodily performativity 7. Emotional performativity 8. Reclaiming student-centred

"[T]his is a powerful book, for both the higher education theorist and the university practitioner. The ideas provide a refreshingly alternative perspective on some common and dominant concepts that have guided teaching and learning for the last 30 years or so…Macfarlane’s book spoke to my feelings of unease about my practice and the difficulties of being a university teacher." — Higher Education"This is a brilliant and devastating book which, if listened to and acted on, presages profound changes in higher education, world-wide. Beautifully and engagingly written [...] Freedom to Learn presents an indictment of much contemporary thinking about ‘engaging’ students and their ‘learning experiences’ [...] This is a book that should become required reading not only for vice-chancellors, and all involved in ‘improving’ teaching and learning in universities, but for anyone with any responsibility towards shaping higher education." — Professor Emeritus Ronald Barnett, University College London Institute of Education (UK)"Bruce Macfarlane writes about student rights and freedoms. He has produced a beautifully argued and accessible account that provides an alternative view to the ideological framing of student learning that has dominated higher education over the last 30 years. Anyone interested in student learning should read this book." — Professor Tony Harland, University of Otago (New Zealand)"Macfarlane's critique of the bodily, participatory and emotional performativity increasingly expected of students is at least a significant corrective and may lead to a substantial rethinking of one of the major recent developments in higher education teaching-learning." — Professor Gavin Moodie, University of Toronto (Canada)"A perceptive analysis of students’ freedom to learn flexibly in an era of performativity. An incisive re-imagination of student academic freedom, interweaving conceptual thought and empirical data. Another tour-de-force from the prolific keyboard of Bruce Macfarlane." — Professor David Carless, University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong)"This book presents a measured, insightful and comprehensively researched analysis of a topic that appears, either by design or default, to have been largely taboo to date. I found the book a great read, and strongly recommend it." — Professor Emeritus Royce Sadler, Griffith University (Australia)