Dr James Atherton

National Teaching Fellow 2004 Institution at the time of Award: De Montfort University James Atherton is semi-retired, but now undertakes sessional work for the School of Education of the University of Bedfordshire, and works half-time for the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development at Oxford Brookes (for the rest of the 08-09 academic year). His background is in teaching mature students on professional courses in social work and education, including having been the programme leader for the MA in Learning and Teaching at De Montfort University. As part of this work he developed web-based resources for course members, which have since grown to attract over a million unique visitors a year from all over the world, and are now complemented by a blog which tries both to model professional reflection, and to provide an occasionally idiosyncratic commentary on issues related to learning and teaching. A sceptic about individual learning styles, he is nonetheless very interested in the impact of both formal and informal social and group factors on student learning, in hidden curricula and classroom cultures. Having devised and run blended learning programmes, he is similarly interested in the impact of the transmission media on students' understanding. He believes that the increasingly tight specification of curricula which besets much higher education--particularly in professional studies--militates against students acquiring the contextual learning, perspectives and values which characterise mature graduates. In collaboration with colleagues from the UK and US, he has presented internationally on several of these themes, and most recently is exploring the implications of the emergent ideas of threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge for the acquisition of professional identities, not only theoretically but also in practical course design and planning.