Ronald Barnett

Knowing and becoming in the higher education curriculum

If a curriculum in higher education is understood to be an educational vehicle to promote a students development, and if a curriculum in higher education is also understood to be built in large part around a project of knowledge, then the issue arises as to the links between knowledge and student being and becoming. A distinction is made here between knowing as such and coming to know, with the focus on the latter. It is argued that the process of coming to know can be edifying: through the challenges of engaging over time with disciplines and their embedded standards, worthwhile dispositions and qualities may develop, the worthwhileness arising through the formation of ‘epistemic virtues’. Examples of such dispositions and qualities are identified, with differences between dispositions, on the one hand, and qualities, on the other hand, being observed. Educational implications of understanding the nurturing of student being in this way are sketched, with a set of 10 principles offered for curricula and pedagogy. It is suggested, finally, that the clarifying of the relationship between knowing and being is not only a value‐laden but also a pressing matter.

Conceptualising Curriculum Change

Recent developments in UK higher education are turning attention to the undergraduate curriculum. Drawing on Lyotards concept of performativity, this paper explores broad patterns of curriculum change in five subject areas. The curriculum is understood as an educational project forming identities founded in three domains: knowledge, action and self. Curriculum models are proposed that identify these components and their relationships with each other. The evidence suggests that the weightings and levels of integration of these components vary between the sciences and technology subjects, the arts and humanities, and professional courses. Attempts to develop curriculum strategies should take account of the patterns of curriculum components as they vary between the subject areas.

Relationships Between Teaching and Research in Higher Education in England

Although there is a popular conception that research enhances teaching, evidence of such synergistic relationships is inconclusive. Recent research, undertaken as part of the Higher Education Funding Council for Englands (HEFCE) fundamental review of research policy and funding, indicated that there are a range of relationships – both positive and negative – between teaching and research. While the ideal relationship might be perceived by many academics to be a positive one, there are a number of factors that shape the ways in which teaching and research can have a negative influence on each other, or even be driven apart. These factors include pressures to compartmentalize teaching and research through accountability and funding mechanisms, management strategies of academic staff time that treat teaching and research separately, and the competition for scarce resources. If teaching and research are to complement each other, new ways of managing the teaching and research relationship need to be considered.

Recapturing the Universal in the University

The idea of ‘the university’ has stood for universal themes—of knowing, of truthfulness, of learning, of human development, and of critical reason. Through its affirming and sustaining of such themes, the university came itself to stand for universality in at least two senses: the university was neither partial (in its truth criteria) nor local in its significance (at least, the university was an institution of the nation state and even had global significance). Now, this universalism has been shot down: on the one hand, universal themes have been impugned as passé in a postmodern age; in the ‘knowledge society’, knowledge with a capital ‘K’ is giving way to multiple and even local knowledges (plural). On the other hand, the very process of globalization has been accused of being a new process of colonization. Global universities, accordingly, may be seen as a vehicle for the imposition of Western modes of reason (often suspected in turn of being no more than Western economic reason at that). Diversity is the new watchword, a term that—we may note—has come to be part of the framing of the contemporary policy agenda for higher education. Accordingly, in such a situation of multiple meanings, both within and across institutions, the university becomes an institutional means for developing the capacities—at both the personal and the societal levels—to live with ‘strangeness’: perhaps here lies a new universal for the university? But, then, if that is the case, if strangeness is the new universal for the university, some large challenges await those who would claim to lead and manage universities.

The coming of the ecological university

What is it to be a university? In what does the being of the university reside in the 21st century? To draw on a Heideggerian expression, what is its ‘being possible’? To address such questions seriously, we are drawn to imagine the university as it might unfold and so sketch out feasible utopias for it. But such a project of the imagination requires in the first place a sense as to the past and present trajectory of the university. The dominant ideas—and forms—of the university have to be identified. A further step taken here is that of furnishing conceptual resources that may help us imagine the university into the future. Four imaginaries of the university are then sketched, with allegiance being given especially to the coming of the ecological university.

Power, Enlightenment and Quality Evaluation

Within European countries and across them, forms of quality assurance have multiple purposes and are being driven forward by different interest groups. The academic community, the state and the market are the dominant forces at work, with forms of quality assurance being oriented separately towards judgments on quality (a summative function) and quality improvement (a formative function). A major fault line distinguishing the different purposes at work is that between enlightenment and surveillance. Any one form of quality evaluation can be assessed against this dimension: is it essentially a means for the faculty to understand itself better and so be enabled to transform its own activities by and for itself? In such a situation, we are in the presence of a form of enlightenment. Or is it a means by which the state can know better and thereby control more effectively what goes on in the institutions increasingly drawn together into a higher education system? In this latter situation, we are in the presence of a means of state surveillance. Partly as a proxy for state steerage but also a force in its own right, the market represents a separate fault line. However, in Europe at least, consumer satisfaction remains for now a weaker, if strengthening, form of leverage in quality evaluation and in the discussion that follows, it will take a residual place behind the state-academe axis. Each form of quality evaluation offers a particular reflection of the forces at work: the collegium, the state and the market. Nonetheless, within this melange of differential power and purposes and the resulting multitude of forms of quality evaluation, a dominant trend can be detected. The greater weight of developments reflects a drive on the part of the state to secure higher levels of control and surveillance over higher education. Firstly, a technicist approach to quality evaluation is adopted, most notably through the growing use of performance indicators. Secondly, this technicism is coupled with an attempt to deploy evaluation as a means of steering the higher education system more in the direction of the labour market. This is a double instrumentalism which reduces the possibility of evaluation having hermeneutic or dialogic value within the academy and which could enable the academic members of the higher education system to become more genuinely a professional community. This, at any rate, is the thesis to be argued for here.

Knowledge, Higher Education and Society: a postmodern problem

Abstract In modern society, knowledge, higher education and society act upon each other as separate forces. Two contemporary analytical frameworks help to illuminate this triangle of forces, but the stories they tell seem opposed to each other. Critical theory points up the skewed character of rationality in modern society: on this view, the changing definitions of knowledge in higher education can be said to be a shift in the direction of instrumental reason, with other (hermeneutic and critical) forms of reason being down‐played. Postmodernism, on the other hand, argues not for any such one‐dimensionality but underscores a heterogeneity of thought forms. Higher education can be viewed in this way, too: the university is a social institution which celebrates differentiation of forms of thought. Can the circle be squared? Can these differences between critical theory and postmodernism—as interpretations of higher education—be reconciled? This paper argues that they can be.

‘In’ or ‘For’ the Learning Society?

The Dearing Report on higher education in the UK places itself in the context of ‘he learning society’ It notes a world of change and unpredictability and looks to higher education to assist in the development of the ‘nation’s people’ so as ‘to sustain a competitive economy’. To this end, the Report places significance upon ‘learning’and the need for learners to be ‘enthused’ However, the Report also places a heavy emphasis on the need to develop a range of ‘skills’ thereby falling back onto assumptions of stability – of situations and human responses – which an unpredictable world denies. The Report offers a view of higher education ‘in’ a learning society, responding to given and understood parameters of change. It could, instead, have offered a vision of higher education developing human dispositions capable of creatively helping to generate an uncertain but reflexive world. That would have been a higher education ‘or’a learning society.

Academic Fragilities in a Marketised Age: The Case of Chile

Abstract Academics are confronted with multiple and conflicting narratives as to what it is to be an academic. Their identities, however, are not entirely of their own making. Through a qualitative study, and deploying a social realist perspective, this paper analyses academic identities in Chile and attempts to locate the patterns of identity in the context of a marketised higher education system. The data were collected in both a state and a private university. The results suggest that distinct kinds of fragilities may be emerging among Chilean academics (ontological and contractual fragilities). These two fragilities can be traced to the attendant structures of the university system at an institutional level (reputational fragility in the public sector and a branding fragility in the private sector). The paper concludes by observing that, although the power of the structures is considerable, there are still spaces for agentic responses.

Thinking about Higher Education

The very idea of ‘thinking about higher education’ implies two things. Firstly, that it is worthwhile to think seriously and hard about higher education and secondly that higher education opens itself to complexities and options.