“I’ll show you differences”: Skills, creativity and meaning

This article arises out of critical contemplation of skills in relation to Higher Education pedagogy as it relates to the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. As the emphasis on skills dominates more and more of the discourse about pedagogy in Higher Education, the article aims to make some critical comments about the reductionist approach to education that easily becomes part of skills discourse. In addition to criticising instrumentalist deployment of skills in Higher Education policy, the article also considers the supposedly most ‘radical’ perspective on the idea of skill which is implicit in enactivists’ accounts of the embedding of sensorimotor action in cognition. It is argued that such a perspective is undermined by its insistence on a model of direct human-environment which brackets creativity, anticipation and the future. The article suggests that such a perspective would be illumined by dialogue with Ernst Bloch’s concept of the ‘not-yet’.

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