The School in Question: a comment

Abstract

In Germany the tradition of university autonomy goes back to Humboldt's reform rather than the privileged corporations of the middle ages. Humboldt's concept of the university is still fertile as a model and a method for today's universities. The social significance of science in the modern world, increased expenditure on higher education, and the academisation of a growing number of professions seem to undermine the traditional legitimation of university autonomy. On the other hand good new reasons for autonomy can be derived precisely from scepticism with regard to a naive belief in the progress of science and to an all‐too‐narrow professionalisation of university education. The ever closer interconnection between ‘academic’ and ‘public’ functions of the universities has led to the replacement of the traditional ‘dualistic administrative structure’ by a ‘unified'one under a rector/president. The dualism of functions has, however, reappeared in the distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘more extended’ supervision by ministers. For the future a more precise distinction between global regulations legitimately claimed by the state and self‐government within the framework thus set should be aimed at.     

Knowledge Navigators and Lifelong Learners: Producing graduates for the information society

In recent years, there has been considerable attention, at least at the policy level, to the need for graduates to be ‘lifelong learners’. Although this concept means different things in different cultural contexts, there is more or less general agreement that graduation really only marks the beginning of the graduate's need for continuing personal and professional learning, and, moreover, that it is the responsibility of universities and other institutions of higher education to equip their graduates with the skills and attitudes to help them to continue learning throughout their lives. The emergence of an information-rich ‘knowledge society’ has made this even more of an imperative. The rapid and pervasive spread of information and communication technologies, coupled with increasing globalisation, the democratisation of knowledge production—once assumed to be largely the preserve of universities—and what has been dubbed the ‘information explosion’ collectively mean that most citizens of advanced industrialised countries are, or will soon become, ‘knowledge workers’. Accordingly, many graduates, whether they work in educational or other contexts, are likely to be involved in ‘knowledge-intensive’ activities, for which they need to be prepared. But what does this mean in practice, and what are we to do about it? In 1990, the late Dr Ernest Boyer, in his book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, proposed a fourfold division of academic work into what he labelled the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship of application ; the scholarship of integration ; and, finally, the scholarship of teaching . The paper suggests that each of these four aspects of scholarship has a direct counterpart outside the university, and that, accordingly, they might be taken as a way of considering the attributes of graduates as well as of academics. The paper suggests a necessary symmetry between the teaching and other scholarly work carried out within the university and the development of such abilities and predispositions in graduates from a variety of fields who might not otherwise consider themselves to be destined for ‘scholarly’ work.     

The Offerings of Fringe Figures and Migrants

Abstract

‘The Western tradition’, as passe-partout, includes fringe figures, émigrés and migrants. Rather than looking to resources at the core of the Western tradition to overcome its own blindnesses, I am more interested in its gaps and peripheries, where other thoughts and renegade knowledges take hold. It is in the contact zones with strangers that glimpses of any culture’s philosophical blindness become possible and changes towards a different understanding of knowledge can begin. In the context of education, I am above all interested in PhD candidates who wish to draw on the bodies and modes of knowledge they bring with them to the university. Some are not well represented: Indigenous and other non-Western traditions, non-English languages, and the renegade knowledges of marginalised groups. My context is that of creative practice-led PhD theses at AUT University, Auckland (Aotearoa/New Zealand) which have made me aware of the importance of cosmopolitics to understand education in the context of entangled histories of colonisation and domination; border-crossing interdependencies; new types of conflict and new ways of building communities. My study thus explores aspects of transculturation—involving not only ethnic cultures (often the default understanding of culture) but also different disciplinary knowledge cultures. The place that no-one owns in Western tradition, the place of fringe figures, émigrés and migrants, may offer a point from which non-traditional candidates’ thoughts can lever off to build connections with their own stores of knowledge. (Non-traditional candidates belong to minorities in Western universities until about thirty years ago when traditional candidates were ‘male, from high-status social-economic backgrounds, members of majority ethnic and/or racial groups, and without disability’.) This usually means for Western supervisors that they need to recognise their ignorance towards parts of their own traditions, as well as those of their candidates. The proposition I will explore is that the emergent research of non-traditional candidates can thrive on gaps and on the fringes—provided that both candidates and supervisors are able to be porous to the unknown and ‘troubled by the presumption of equality’. The potential of the gap, the unknown, which simultaneously separates and connects candidates and supervisors, can be the beginning of generating a thing in common. This is a rich and creative place for new thought, which may open the academy to transcultural knowledge.     

Tracking the nomadic life of the educational researcher: What future for feminist public intellectuals and the performative university?

Is the idea of the liberal university dead, has the postmodern university any chance of being emancipatory, has the theory-practice divide merely collapsed in an era of ‘new knowledge work’, or has the university just become one aspect of market states and global capitalism? Knowledge-based economies locate universities as central to the commodification and management of knowledge, while at the same time the legitimacy of the university and the academic as knowledge producers is challenged by postmodernist, feminist, post-colonial and indigenous claims within a wider trend towards the ‘democratisation of knowledge’ and a new educational instrumentalism and opportunism. What becomes of the educational researcher, and indeed their professional organisations, in this changing socio-political and economic scenario? Is our role one of policy service, policy critique, technical expert or public intellectual? In particular what place is there for feminist public intellectuals in a so-called era of postfeminism and public-private convergence? The paper draws on feminist and critical perspectives to mount a case for the importance of the public intellectual in the performative postmodern university.     

Producing global citizens for the future: space,discourse and curricular reform

This article inquires into discourses of globalisation as they are put to use to accelerate higher education’s seemingly ready acquiescence to the demands of the market. We maintain that globalisation operates as a way to reason about space that produces images and narratives of universities, knowledge and students. We focus our analysis on curriculum reform as a way universities materialise the seemingly abstract economic logic of the so-called ‘knowledge society’ at the level of student-citizens, who are to be educated to become economic globalisation’s next agents. In order to locate curriculum’s productive role within university respatialisation, we offer a discourse analysis of the circulation of ideas about globalisation and higher education through intergovernmental and national documents, which take material form in a US state university system’s attempted curricular reform of its general education core. We inquire into the ways space, as a rationality, acts to create systems of reasoning about institutions, knowledges and subjects that furthers the production of a neoliberal global imaginary.     

Decolonising the curriculum: using graduate qualities to embed Indigenous knowledges at the academic cultural interface

The context of this paper is a strategy at a large Australian university that involves embedding a new graduate quality ‘cultural competence’ and lifting the profile of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, experiences and histories. It has been argued that the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges is essential for the decolonisation of our higher education institutions. Decolonisation involves removing the barriers that have silenced non-Western voices in our ‘multi-cultural’ higher education system and combatting the epistemic injustices of a system dominated by Western thought. In this paper, we suggest that our university’s suite of graduate qualities can provide a locus for work at the cultural interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges. While these qualities may be firmly embedded within Western ways of knowing, being and doing, they can nonetheless be used to interrogate and revisit Western disciplinary knowledge construction and pedagogy so as to help bring about institutional change.     

Discursive constructions of equity in Australian higher education: Imagined worlds and the case of people seeking asylum

There is a strong rationale for people seeking asylum and refugees given temporary protection to be key beneficiaries of Australian higher education equity practices. However, despite the extreme precarity they face, this group remains among the most educationally disadvantaged populations in Australia. Here, we use critical discourse analysis to examine the publicly available statements of 38 Australian universities to identify discursive representations of equity practices and connections, with our analytic gaze focused through the lens of people seeking asylum. Using a three-part analytic heuristic examining ‘statements’, ‘practices’ and ‘connections’, we offer a critical discourse analysis of how each public university expresses its commitment to the equity agenda in powerful stakeholder-facing documents—such as annual reports, strategic plans and media releases—and we compare this analysis against institutional stated practices with regard to people seeking asylum. In identifying misalignments between equity statements and stated practices, we suggest that institutional equity narratives articulate ‘imagined worlds’, in which all marginalised groups can access higher education. We argue that now is the time to move beyond these ‘imagined worlds’, to enact stated commitments to universal education, by instituting real and effective practices to facilitate equitable access to Australian higher education for people seeking asylum.     

In the wake of the quake: Teaching the emergency

Abstract

The university today finds itself in a global state of emergency, at once financial, military and ecological. Teaching must assume this emergency as premise and responsibility: it must consider the grounds of the classroom, both figurative and literal, and generate emergent lines of inquiry that address the pressing global and local situation. For us, that means that teaching must take the university’s grounds of supposedly universal knowledge to be constitutively unstable and to require a reflexive teaching method that puts in question disciplinary fields and discursive modalities of knowledge. And it must take in the physical grounds of the university too—because local space is increasingly articulated by technocapital interests that are fully implicated in this global state of emergency. Thus, we do not seek stability amidst such turbulence, but rather a seismotic overturning of the grounds of the university or, rather, a returning to its ground, through the deepened sense of purpose and place that ‘teaching the emergency’ provides.     

Doctoring the knowledge worker

In this paper I examine the impact of the new ‘knowledge economy’ on contemporary doctoral education. I argue that the knowledge economy promotes a view of knowledge and knowledge workers that fundamentally challenges the idea of a university as a community of autonomous scholars transmitting and adding to society's ‘stock of knowledge’. The paper examines and then dismisses the proposition that professional doctorates are the principal vehicle through which ‘working knowledge’ is incorporated into doctoral education. While professional doctorates may have been tactically useful for universities, there are broader transformations in doctoral education that transcend the professional doctorate/Ph.D. distinction. I argue that as doctoral education adopts the practices of ‘self’ pertinent to the knowledge economy, the ‘subject’ of doctoral education shifts from that of the ‘autonomous student’ to that of the ‘enterprising self’.     

Universities in ‘the condition of publicity’: how LSE engages with the wider world

This article analyses how one institution, the London School of Economics under Anthony Giddens’s directorship, sought to occupy the ‘condition of publicity’ that is increasingly a prerequisite for university success in ‘knowledge‐society’ contexts. In particular, we illustrate how the LSE has sought to develop a brand and practice that is policy‐relevant, close to society, media‐savvy and think‐tank‐like, whilst at the same time remaining impeccably academic. Whilst one goal of the paper is the relatively modest one of giving local texture to some of the general tendencies identified in wider debates about ‘academic capitalism’, ‘the postmodern university’, and the like, we also develop some initial considerations that are intended as a contribution to the assessment of those theoretical themes.     

Complexities of Vietnamese femininities: a resource for rethinking women's university leadership practices

This paper develops a dialogical encounter between northern-inspired theorisations of gender and Vietnam's historical and cultural differentiation identified through the presence of matriarchy in ancient societies and its popularity in folklore and contemporary politics. The article draws on interviews with 12 senior women from 8 universities in Northern and Southern Vietnam. Three main themes are explored: (1) the Vietnamese woman as ‘general of the interior’; (2) the ‘woman behind the throne’; and (3) ‘behind a woman is another woman’. These themes illustrate the distinctiveness of a historically produced Vietnamese gender order as reflected in current university women's experience. By providing insights into the complex dynamics of Vietnamese women's ‘informal power’, as evident in both spheres of home and university, the paper presents a discussion of forms of Vietnamese femininity that contributes to re-theorising Connell's concepts of ‘hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity’.     

Sticky and slippery destinations for academic mobility: the case of Singapore

This article seeks to contribute to the existing scholarship on academic mobility in two ways. First, it brings together insights on academic mobility (aspirations, desperations) and higher education internationalisation to show how we may analytically organise these insights to shed light on the shifting global higher education landscape from an experiential perspective. Second, it provides fresh data on the ‘lived experiences’ of mobile faculty members based in an attractive academic destination outside of the traditional knowledge cores—Singapore. As a city state without any natural resources, Singapore has successfully transformed its economy into one that is knowledge-intensive based on combined efforts from grooming locals to recruiting foreign talents to shore up skilled manpower needs. These efforts are reflected in the university sector where Singapore’s comprehensive universities have consistently ranked high across many global university rankings. Using survey and interview data, I show how the mobility and immobility experiences of faculty based in Singapore have contributed to its making as a ‘sticky’ and ‘slippery’ academic destination. My contributions point to the need to integrate individual-level factors underpinning academic mobility decisions with systemic developments to better understand the changing global higher education landscape today.

     

The curious promise of educationalising technological unemployment: What can places of learning really do about the future of work?

Abstract

University education is full of promise. Indeed universities have the capacity to create and shape, through staff and students, all kinds of enthralling ‘worlds’ and ‘new possibilities of life’. Yet students are encouraged increasingly to view universities as simply a means to an end, where neoliberal education delivers flexible skills to directly serve a certain type of capitalism. Additionally, the universal challenge of technological unemployment, alongside numerous other social issues, has become educationalised and portrayed in HE policy, as an issue to be solved by universities. The idea that more education can resolve the problem of technological unemployment is a political construction which has largely failed to deliver its promise. In this article, we look at educationalisation in hand with technologisation and we draw on a Critical Discourse Analysis of HE policies, to demonstrate the problems arising from taken for granted visions of neoliberal social development related to education, technology, and employment. To disrupt the tired visions of ‘techno-fixes’ and ‘edu-fixes’ we identify in these texts, we call for a radical re-imagining of HE policy. Instead of attributing responsibility for social change to abstract notions of education, market and technology, a new shared vision is needed where more agency is explicitly attributed to the researchers, teachers, and students who are the genuine human future of work.     

Invisible practices; innovative outcomes: intrapreneurship within the academy

Across the world, higher education is facing new challenges as governments cut subsidies, new technologies enable ‘massively open’ online courses, students are accessed from global locations, and the centuries-old mission of universities is commercialised. In spite of these profound changes, most institutions of higher education have remained unaltered in terms of how they are structured and governed. Similarly, the consequent commodification of knowledge has not been challenged in general even though the lack of the deep knowledge that underpins competent professional practice is periodically lamented. This paper outlines an experiment in an alternative form of academic programme management; one which is perhaps more appropriate in current times. It describes an initiative at an Australian university where an action-research approach is being used to engage the full spectrum of stakeholders in the governance and execution of the strategic intent of a particular ‘flagship’ postgraduate programme. In this way, it demonstrates how knowing (knowledge manifesting in practice) is achieved through a form of praxis that continuously refines, through interactive ‘creatively abrasive’ forums, the enactment of mission-pertinent practices. However, as an initiative that threatens the political status quo within the university, much of the action, until recently, has had to be conducted ‘invisibly’.     

Semiotics,edusemiotics and the culture of education

Semiotics is the study of signs addressing their action, usage, communication and signification (meaning). Edusemiotics—educational semiotics—is a recently developed direction in educational theory that takes semiotics as its foundational philosophy and explores the philosophical specifics of semiotics in educational contexts. As a novel theoretical field of inquiry, it is complemented by research known under the banner ‘semiotics in education’, which is largely an applied enterprise. In this respect edusemiotics is a new conceptual framework for both theoretical and empirical studies. Edusemiotics has also been given the status of being a new branch of theoretical semiotics and it was launched as such at the 12th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in September 2014 at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. The article presents ‘semiosis’ as the action of signs across culture AND nature and posits ‘learning’ in terms of developing semiotic consciousness and semiotic competence. Semiosis is a process and as such it defies the Cartesian philosophy of substance-dualism that still informs the culture of education. The paper focuses specifically on university education permeated by disciplinary boundaries and the fragmentation of knowledge grounded in objective science inherited from modernity. Where is semiotics as the science of signs (or relations) in the context of academic culture? The authors conclude by affirming the transdisciplinary character of semiotics and edusemiotics and specify the distinctive focal points of transdisciplinary knowledge afforded by edusemiotics.     

De-coding or de-colonising the technocratic university? Rural students’ digital transitions to South African higher education

ABSTRACT

Despite wide-ranging policies and practices intended to address historical inequalities in South African higher education, and calls for decolonisation to include more local relevance, little attention has been paid to the experiences of rural students, especially their digital participation once at university. Previous research has highlighted limitations in technological access in rural areas and the importance of mobile phones for transitions. Whilst universities offer wide-ranging digital support, there remains a tendency towards universalist mechanisms. Drawing on a longitudinal study across three universities, and employing Holland’s theory of figured worlds, we highlight rural students’ experiences of digital transitions across different cultural worlds, prior to university and once they arrive, including the bewildering technocratic systems and practices and resulting conflicts and positionings encountered. We show how students improvise to decode the digital university and figure out new practices. Decolonisation of universities involves rethinking the ‘technocratic consciousness’ (both colonialist and neoliberal) and its apparatus including digital systems and structures. For rural students to become successful digital practitioners in higher education, universities should acknowledge prior digital experience and forms of knowledge and focus on expanding individual and collective agency in supporting transitions, as mechanisms for shaping a decolonised digital education.     

History and the relationship between scientific and pedagogical knowledge: anatomy lectures then and now

In recent years, school science has been the target of increasing critique for two reasons. On the one hand, it is said to enforce ‘epic’ images of science that celebrate the heroes and heroic deeds that established the scientific canon and its methods and thereby falsifies the history and nature of science. On the other hand, the sciences are presented as objective, making factual statements independent of location and time—a claim that runs counter to the current mainstream canon of scientific knowledge as socially and individually constructed. In this article, we suggest that contexts leading to new scientific knowledge make science objective and subjective simultaneously. Our approach, which focuses on the performative dimensions of (school) science, works to overcome the distinctions between knowledge and knowing and the associated distinction between theory and practice. We show the significance of the performative dimension through a comparison of anatomy lectures and texts from the 17^th century and in present-day biology classrooms. We underscore the need to retain and investigate the historical connections between the founding of (scientific) knowledge and its present-day form taught in schools.     

Unveiling the ‘logic’ of modern university in China: Historical,social and value perspectives

Abstract

This study concentrates on exploring the ‘logic’ of modern universities in China-a working concept that promotes a more in-depth discourse on the implicit illustrations of the ‘logic’ of universities in contemporary China. Drawing on the logic model, we explore the conceptualization of the ‘logic’ of university and examine how the concept of ‘logic’ of modern universities to be perceived, challenged and negotiated through the historical, social and value perspectives. The historical logics, social logics and value logics contribute on unveiling the ‘logic’ of modern university in contemporary China. We suggested that the ‘logic’ of university has important conceptual and practical implications for higher education, especially the importance of explicitness. The ‘logic’ of modern university in China is subject to offer a platform where expectations of university students are elaborated. In addition, the study also seeks to offer an insight into the conceptualization of the ‘logic’ of modern university in contemporary China.     

统一性和多样化并存的日本大学招生考试制度

日本现行的大学招生考试制度是由全国统一学力考试"大学入学考试中心考试"和各高校自行组织的单独考试两个阶段组成。这种考试制度作为紧密联系中等教育和高等教育的一个重要环节,解决了考生共性与个性、聚合思维与发散思维以及中学教学的基础性和高校选拔的专业性等矛盾,最大限度地克服了"一考定终身"的弊端。     

Travelling theory: Western knowledge and its Indian object

From the1830s the colonial government in India became the agency for the promotion of ‘Western education’, that is, education that sought to disseminate modern, Western, rational knowledge through modern institutions and pedagogic processes. This paper examines a historical episode in which certain key categories of modern Western thought were pressed into service to explain a consequence of the dissemination of Western knowledge in colonial India. The episode in question was that of the alleged ‘moral crisis’ of the educated Indian, who, many argued, had been plunged into confusion and moral disarray following his exposure to Western knowledge in the schools and universities established by his British ruler. In the discourse of moral crisis, the knowledge being disseminated through Western education was simultaneously put to use in explaining an unanticipated effect of this education. How adequate was Western knowledge to explaining its own effects? More generally – for this paper is drawn from a larger study of how modern Western knowledge ‘travelled’ when transplanted to colonial India – what is the status of the knowledge we produce when we ‘apply’ the categories of modern Western thought in order to understand or explain India?