Lecturing in crisis? A genealogy of lectures across European medieval universities and Chinese academies

Lectures remain contested in contemporary pedagogical discourse in Europe and beyond. Yet, they are omnipresent in universities. This historical review takes a genealogical approach to interrogate how the past may be influencing the present paradoxical framing of lecturing in higher education. Through a comparative lens and drawing on a multilingual corpus of sources, the paper explores how historical discourse portrays the development of lectures in medieval European universities and contemporaneous Chinese academies. In both contexts, lecturing is revealed to derive from religious templates and to establish an osmotic relationship with an underlying textual tradition. The comparison between the two contexts leads to the identification of four trajectories of descent highlighting the ritual dimension of the lecture, the unstable relationships between lecturers, students, and the underlying textual tradition, the lecture as a space that promotes different types of learning, and the cycling of content through texts and lectures. These lines may explain the persistence of lecturing and the ambivalence towards it in pedagogical discourse. The genealogical perspective provided by this paper contributes to the awareness of long-forgotten historical influences that still have a bearing on the practice of lecturing and need to be addressed in order to reform it.