Review

This book is a passionate and rigorous, clear-headed and joyful exposition of teaching and learning in a changing environment. It is the result of a two-year collaboration between six colleagues at the University of Glasgow and seeks to both outline the results of this particular collaboration while providing an enthusiastic and personal testament to the value of the collaborative approach. Five of the six contributors undertook this project as part of a secondment to the university’s Teaching and Learning Service. These five remained department-based teaching academics and all were also established researchers in their own disciplines: Computer Science (Quintin Cutts), Hispanic Studies (Mike Gonzalez), Management Studies (Chris Warhurst), German (Alison Phipps) and Electrical Engineering (Judy Wilkinson). They were given an allowance of 10% of their time over two years to work on the projects and collaboration outlined in this book. The sixth member of the group, and editor of the book, was Melanie Walker, then Director of the Teaching and Learning Service. While Walker clearly came to the project with a background in educational development and the associated literature and debates, the book covers the journey of the other collaborators as they learnt, shared and grew in confidence, talking about and reflecting on their own teaching. Indicative of the spirit behind this collaboration the six named themselves the ‘Barcelona Group’, finding a metaphor for their activity in the architecture, aesthetics and regeneration of the city of Barcelona. The very personal nature of the venture is brought home by the accounts of the various research projects, all being in the first person and by the inclusion of quotes from emails, dinners and other interaction between the group. This helps to create the sense of witnessing collaboration in action: