Tracing pedagogic frailty in arts and humanities education: An autoethnographic perspective

This paper offers an approach to support the development of reflective teaching practice among university academics that can be used to promote dialogue about quality enhancement and the student experience. Pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching within universities by helping to maintain a simultaneous focus on key areas that are thought to impede development of pedagogy. These areas and the links that have been proposed to connect them are interrogated here through the dialogic analysis of a framed autoethnographic narrative produced by a community ‘insider’ who has considerable experience of teaching within the arts and humanities. This person-centred methodology acknowledges the subjective nature of teaching and gives voice to important stories that otherwise might not be heard formally, and allows an academic to rehearse this voice individually before comparing it with others in the institution.