The relation between teaching and learning in higher education has always been complex. However there is a growing tendency to dichotomise and over-simplify this relationship. Teaching is often seen, especially in UK contexts, as didactic and teacher-centred and therefore bad. Learning, by contrast, is coming to be viewed as student-centred and therefore good. Instead this presentation offers yet questions the usefulness of a model which sees teacher-mentoring of reflective essaying as a possible means towards valuing both teaching and learning in higher education. The model draws its inspiration from an eclectic range of practitioners and theorists including Becker, Bruner, Derrida, Dewey, Hillocks, Hyland, Kolb and Rorty. The main conceptual elements of this cyclical model are (1) reading or deconstructing texts; (2) essaying or constructing texts; (3) reflecting (on) or reconstructing texts; (4) sharing and/or co-constructing texts. The elements in this conceptual array (rather than framework) are presented in the form of gerunds or verbal nouns in order to emphasise their qualities as active and continuing processes rather than as closed or finished products. Also, despite being presented here in numerical order, the processes which shape the array are not intended to be in a rigid series where, for example, essaying must follow reading and must precede reflecting. Neither reading nor essaying nor reflecting (on) nor sharing texts nor, for that matter, teaching and learning, can or should be pressed into an unsuitably constraining, inflexible and pre-determined mould. The presentation will proceed discursively and reflectively by questioning and provisionally evaluating the potential usefulness of this model for promoting learning in higher education. It will do so through a critical examination of the model’s contributing conceptual elements: reading and deconstructing; essaying and constructing; reflecting and reconstructing; sharing and co-constructing. 'Essaying' is a unifying concept in the model since it suggests that students and scholar-teachers should conceptualise their writing as a way of trying to learn through critically reflecting on the texts they deconstruct, construct, re-construct and co-construct.

The research methodology used may be characterised as that of critically reflective analysis or 'essaying'

'Essaying' is a unifying concept in the model since it suggests that students and scholar-teachers should conceptualise their writing as a way of trying to learn through critically reflecting on the texts they deconstruct, construct, re-construct and co-construct.