Coaching for Reflection

Introduction

The recent Covid-19 pandemic and its ongoing repercussions, alongside threats of global viruses in the future, has necessitated the need for business organisations and universities now and in the future to further embed digital technologies in their practice (Sumpter 2023). As digital technologies have opened up the opportunity for Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) in the classroom and provided further opportunities for distance and online learning, the emphasis in higher education has increasingly focused on employability skills (Barkas and Dixon-Todd 2023,Trowler 2020, 2021). A concern for educators, however, over the past few decades, is how best to balance the need for graduates and professionals to gain deep knowledge of their chosen subject area but also develop skills for the world of work (Brown and Carusso, 2013, Barkas and Armstrong 2021, Sumpter 2023).

Sustainability, change and digitally enhanced learning will continue to gain in emphasis in the future of education and create new systems or ‘sagas’. In his Burton R. Clark Lecture, Scott (2022) emboldens Clark’s concept of ‘saga’ to explain the foregrounding of dominant ideologies in higher education (HE) at any given time. We now borrow the term saga to refer to the current dominant saga of the employability and skills discourse in higher education and argue, in support of Scott (2022) that the education must be brought back to the centre of HE. The way to do this is to integrate reflection in a humanities framework to provide the context for students to understand and demonstrate what they can give rather than take from the future world (Biesta, 2021).

In this chapter, we argue that one of the ways this balance can be addressed is by finding more opportunities in the curriculum for students to be in the subject and reflect on their understanding and reasons for their decisions (Formica and Edmunson, 2020). Integrating coaching for reflection within the curriculum is key to helping prepare students to address the changing demands of the world and future employment. To present our viewpoints we thus embody our thesis around the work of Biesta (2021) who argues that educators today, and in the future, must support students so they can learn how to understand themselves. In his book, ‘World-centred education: A view for the present’, Biesta (2021) builds on a long-standing debate in education ‘between those who argue that education should be child-or student-centred and those who argue that it should be subject-matter-or curriculum centred’. Biesta (2021) argues that education should not be turned into subjectification because, students, learning and teaching are all existential matters and not objects. In his work, Biesta (2021) shows the importance of an existential orientation in teaching practices to provide the conditions of learning that can encourage the transmission of knowledge and skills. He argues that to be student-centred we must look to understand what students can give to the world. To learn to know what the world is asking of them, rather than what they can take from the world. Creating scenarios whereby students can explore and reflect on their position in the uncertain world of the modern era, is not just about professional identity, it is about their identity as a human ‘being’ (Formica and Edmunson, 2020) in the 21st century.