Slow food, slow reading, slow thinking… In this age of hectic information and shifting metrics, we long for slowness. For space and time to think. Every college teacher has faced an administrator asking her to log her research and preparation hours as slots on the diary.What about our students, who increasingly also log into a school type hourly timetable?
Is this nostalgia or a spur for another model? What could slow Higher Education look like?
What is striking is that over the past two decades more and more research on learning (both our students and our own) has shown that learning is a complex, multi-faceted and iterative process – not a simple linear one divided into neat, crisp blocks. And yet even in the most research-intensive universities this research is often ignored. Slow learning, as described here, is not just nostalgia, it is simply the only approach that makes sense. In the absence of this approach we may ‘achieve’ in the sense of produce outcomes, but not achieve in the sense of realise our potential – both within ourselves and our potential contribution to wider society.