| |
Challenging Higher Education: knowledge, policy and practice
Higher education is facing fundamental challenges to its purposes and role in society, stimulated by the shift from elite to mass and now near universal provision in many national contexts. There are shifting civic and economic expectations to which higher education is being asked to respond. At the policy level, the extent to which mass participation can promote social and economic mobility is being seriously questioned as is the boundary between ‘higher’ education and other parts of the post-secondary sector. The role and purposes of higher education are also subject to challenge from a conceptual or knowledge perspective. Here, there are challenges to Western ideas of the university posed by alternative traditions and philosophies, closely connected with cultures, countries and regions where higher education is expanding rapidly. At a practice level, the nature of academic identity is being challenged as the synoptic role ‘unbundles’ into sub-specialisms. There is a continuing search to find ways to teach our students more flexibly, and questions about how we ought to evaluate the quality and ‘impact’ of our research. These and many other issues face higher education practitioners, policy makers, managers and researchers. They reflect challenges arising both from within and outside the academy.The 2009 SRHE Conference will embrace three specific themes illuminating these challenges. Examples include the following:
Knowledge
Challenges to:
- Western, liberal conceptions of higher education through alternate local, national and cultural traditions (eg Asian, indigenous)
- the role of academic disciplines in knowledge creation as a result of the growth of knowledge created in its applied context (eg ‘mode 2’, professional)
- educational orthodoxies in respect to knowledge creation and learning presented from alternate theoretical or disciplinary positions
Policy
Challenges to:
- the funding of continued expansion of higher education and the extent to which mass participation can produce social and economic mobility
- the boundary between ‘higher’ education and other post-secondary sectors and institutions (eg schools, community and further education colleges)
- the role and status of public higher education in the context of expanding provision by private and corporate universities
- the way universities should engage with employers, civic and community groups, and balance their commitments to local, regional and global communities
- the structure of the higher education curriculum through radical reform initiatives (eg Melbourne Model) and the Bologna process
Practice
Challenges to:
- the way student expectations are understood, evaluated and met
- the way academic achievement is recorded and presented in response to demands to improve fairness, clarity and comparability (eg degree classifications)
- the synoptic academic role resulting from the blurring of practice boundaries between academic and professional support staff
- the balance between teaching and research functions within the academic role in the context of performance management measures and quality audit
- the use of learning spaces as demand grows for flexibility and informality to support an increasingly bespoke and work-based curriculum
- the role of research in the university as a result of growing expectations with respect to its subsequent use and applications
Professor Bruce Macfarlane
Conference Chair SRHE Conference 2009
 Top
|
|
|
| Look for yourself or colleagues enjoying themselves at the SRHE Conference 2008.
If you were not there see what you missed! |
| VIEW PICTURES HERE |
|
