Higher Education and the Pedagogies of Communicating Elite Knowledge in 1970s Britain

Résumé 0

This essay situates ‘A305: History of Architecture and Design 1890-1939’ in its social, educational, and pedagogical contexts. It argues that the Open University (OU) was a creature of its time, conceived and established in the late 1960s and early 1970s when progressive ideas about education received robust political support, due to the ‘technocratic’ promise of higher education and a burgeoning ‘democratic’ demand for higher education stimulated by the Robbins Report of 1963. In this climate A305 took shape, advancing seemingly quite radical approaches to the teaching and learning of the ‘traditional’ subject matter of architectural history. However, this essay will show that A305 drew on well-established pedagogical methods for communicating elite and vocational knowledges to uninitiated and remote learners. Many of these methods had been trialled and experimented with across a range of educational settings, including the BBC, in the preceding decades. But the novel institutional infrastructure, political support, staff energy, and unique student demographics combined to make the OU the ideal space for the development of a ‘product’ such as A305, in the ‘convulsive’ social moment of 1970s Britain.