Welcome to ELiSS, Enhancing Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences, and the latest issue for Summer 2010, Volume 3 Issue 1.

From the editorial:

"Teaching and learning is not a single or indeed separate event or aspect of higher education – it exists in and through diverse complex relations with groups of different people. The presentation by departments of the proposed student experience in their areas at open days is often so wide of the mark that it would be laughable if it were not always set in thrall to the gods of consumption measures! To try to limit learning and teaching to something that happens between tutors and students in classrooms or online is to delimit and over-simplify teaching; so too is to deny that it is often painful and sometimes threatening, particularly if the teaching is good. It is equally as problematic to subsume learning and teaching as a bit-part player in the overall drama of ‘the student experience’. With the latter, we have a welcome cast of characters from all over the institution, a plot determined by outside agencies, while props and accessories are provided at their own cost by academics. The result is often an avoidance of the genuine complexity that underlies teaching."

Read further in the editorial, and we hope you enjoy the papers in this issue.