3rd Global Conference
The Idea of Education
Monday 9th August - Wednesday 11th August 2004
Prague, Czech Republic
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Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 5: The
Future of Education I
Chair: Inna Geoghegan
The Cultural Mystique of the University and Education of 21st Century School
Administrators: Towards Learning Communities for New Frames of Multifocal
Leadership
Seth Agbo
Faculty of Education, Lakehead University, Ontario Canada
Traditionally, the university is an elite institution that places emphasis on theoretical knowledge and despises practical experience as a legitimate embodiment of knowledge and rationality. Like the university as a whole, traditional education for school administrators promotes a core of teaching ideals that focuses on theoretical academic preparation at the expense of knowledge of artistry and experience. This quandary is deepened by the continuous detachment of the relationship between public schools and universities and the rejection of practical experience in favour of the more cherished theoretical academic content knowledge. The limitations imposed by the idea of “university education” as handed down to the preparation of educational leaders by universities with the characteristic failure of the system to insure balance between theory on the one hand and the development of leader practitioners on the other demand a re-examination of the preparation of school leaders in universities. The present tendency in leadership education is characterized by the dominance of three concurrent and paradoxical trends, namely, (a) undervaluing the knowledge of artistry and the importance of experience, or (b) undervaluing technical knowledge and research or (c) emphasizing both the knowledge of artistic experience and technical knowledge without proper coordination. These trends reflect some of the contradictions of leadership education and raise questions such as: What are the purposes of leadership education? What values and skills should leaders learn at the university? These questions are best understood within the ideological and cultural frameworks of public schools for which universities prepare leaders. From this paper’s perspective, leader education must focus on the changing realities that together make up better schools and the corresponding learning needs in public schools. This paper looks more intimately at time honoured traditions serving as impediments to change in leadership preparation and introduces a collaborative model that leads to the preparation of multifocal leaders. The model is basically an illustration of how to use theory to inform practice in the preparation of pre-service leaders.
Realizing the Ideal: the Scholarship
of Engagement in Post-Modern Universities
Jayne R. Beilke
Department of Educational Studies, Ball State University, Muncie, IN,
USA
In Scholarship Reconsidered, Ernest L. Boyer
advanced the notion of a “scholarship of engagement” that
would “recognize
that teaching is crucial, that integrative studies are increasingly consequential,
and that, in addition to research, the work of the academy must relate
to the world beyond the campus” (75). By connecting institutions,
faculty, and students to the wider community, the ideas and ideals of
a liberal education can be instrumental in the formation of a more civil
society. Boyer’s new paradigm promised to expand the range of scholarship
undertaken by college and university faculty by identifying four general
areas of scholarship: discovery (traditional research), integration,
teaching, and service. The scholarship of engagement as envisioned by
Boyer, however, has been largely relegated to “service-learning,” a
pedagogical strategy whereby students perform community service in order
to fulfil a course requirement.
Colleges and universities in the 21
st century will be transformed by the admission of an increasingly diverse
student body, the presence of an unstable global political landscape,
exacerbated disparities of wealth and poverty, and environmental crisis.
At the same time, colleges and universities in the United States are
capitulating to student requests for non-traditional delivery systems
(distance and on-line education), thereby mandating a new definition
of “a community of learners.” In
fact, the very role of “student” is in the process of being
redefined from that of a learner to that of a consumer of
education. Within this context of transformation, faculty themselves
must assume the responsibility for maintaining community within the institution
and, at the same time, expanding that community to “the world beyond
the campus.”
Using Boyer’s paradigm as a starting point, this
paper examines the possibilities and contradictions of the realization
of a scholarship of engagement. It includes an historical overview of
the idea of higher education in the United States and discusses the challenges
of achieving community through education in a fractured society.
