Lee Shulman's concept of signature pedagogies in the professions has captured the imagination of many researchers and educators. In higher education, the concept has been extended to teaching in particular disciplines, and it is here argued that the concept of signature pedagogy can be usefully extended to an influential teaching system in the humanities: the Oxford tutorial. Some of the specific aspects of the tutorial system, and the habits of teaching and learning that tutors and students develop are described; and some of the limitations of the term 'signature pedagogy' for this case are also identified. The term 'powerful pedagogy' is proposed as a useful extension of 'signature pedagogy', to identify ambivalent features of influential teaching systems.

This article draws on a pedagogical case study in order to reflect on the value of using a Humanities disciplinary practice (the 'close reading' of literary studies) as a method of educational enquiry and to provide a worked example of this approach. We explore the introduction of a pedagogic strategy -students writing abstracts for essays and sharing them in advance of group discussion -into the tutorial at the University of Oxford, and an evaluation of it. We then read the student 'texts' (written abstracts and evaluation forms) more closely, to problematize the initial evaluation findings and reveal hidden aspects of student learning and the teaching relationship. We reflect upon our approach and suggest some of the difficulties and advantages of 'close reading' student texts while achieving scholarly 'distance' as a pedagogic research practice. In addition, we explore further the relations between social science and humanities approaches to educational enquiry.

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