1st Global Conference
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Monday 12th February - Wednesday 14th February
2007
Sydney, Australia
Conference Programme, Abstract and Papers
Session 3: The Dynamics of Change in Higher
Education
Chair: Tai Peseta
Shifting Discourses in Higher Education: The Performance Based Research
Fund in New Zealand
Grant
Duncan
School of Social and Cultural Studies,
Massey University Albany,
Auckland, New Zealand
Lyotard’s concept of ‘performativity’ has proven to be particularly useful (if not prophetic) in understanding the major shifts in the institutional discourses of universities in recent times. The New Zealand government’s Tertiary Education Strategy (TES) and Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) are interesting examples of this. The present paper shall outline some of the main elements of these new political devices, especially their use of a ‘commodity’ theory of knowledge. Attention will be focused particularly on the PBRF. It will be shown that the PBRF: Is being used to make claims about research productivity that do not meet the normative standards of research methodology; in effect breaches the Education Act’s requirements of government to respect academic freedom; is being misused by university managers for disciplinary purposes; and promotes the perverse perception that the purpose of research is to make money (commodifying research and researchers), rather than institutional income being deployed to produce research for its own value. Finally, in an ironic form of reflexivity, the present paper, and any subsequent ‘research output’, may or may not be entered into a PBRF assessment for the purpose of augmenting a university’s income.
Epistemological Uncertainties in the
Discourses of Higher Education
Heintz
Kreutz
Education Plan Implementation Corps,
Office of the Senior Deputy Vice Chancellor,
Faculty of Arts,
Monash University, Australia
In my presentation I wish to explore the shifts
in the perception of ‘knowledge’ through the prism of Higher
Education. Epistemological precepts have become increasingly ambiguous
in recent times in an education context whose discourse is now shaped
by connotations and labels such as massification, commodification,
internationalisation and professionalisation of Higher Education, knowledge
societies, economy and management, diversity and flexibility of education,
quality of research.
The metaphor of a global and faster than ever
changing world, although debatable, has become pervasive. Its existence
invites us to raise the question of how the very discourse of Higher
Education reflects and exposes growing epistemological uncertainties.
A university’s academic plan represents an institutional ‘interpretation’ of
knowledge and knowledge delivery. I propose to use the Monash University
Education Plan 2007-2010 as a case study in order to illustrate the
inevitable adjustments Higher Education providers have to make in order
to respond to external drivers such as the Government Learning and
Teaching Performance Fund, which are shaping the future path of education
and contingent approaches to knowledge production and distribution.
In doing so I wish to concentrate on three of the education plan’s
key objectives: Internationalisation, Research-led teaching and Employability.
As institutional responsibilities and market expectations become more
complex, knowledge boundaries become more blurred. In large Higher
Education institutions this is particularly evident in the disappearing
delineations between the traditionally academic/intellectual
disciplines on the one hand, and the more professional faculties on
the other.
Accepting the premise that our own, internalised reality
is only comprehensible in the context of an external, more absolute
reality, and asserting the link between knowledge and Weltanschauung,
I will explore the relationship between the modern institutional desiderata
of Internationalisation, Employability and Research-led Teaching and
their potential embeddedness in knowledge production.
How to Figure it Out? The Demise of Matriculation
Mira
Crouch
School of Social Sciences and International Studies,
The University of New South Wales, Australia
In Australia (and much of the US), university entrance is based on a single figure which is derived, via various calculations, from the students' performance in an end-of-schooling examination. Currently in NSW this purely numerical qualification is the UAI (University Admission Index) which, at the collective level, constitutes a scale. - By contrast, matriculation (still current elsewhere, eg in most British universities) does emphasise the quality, as well as the quantity, so to speak, of the aspiring university students' education. - This paper argues that the UAI - or its equivalent - obscures the knowledge on which it is based and, through its emphasis on relative value, renders learning instrumental rather than essential. In other words, the UAI becomes currency. Consequently it is the order of magnitude that attracts attention, and this order corrupts and warps both students' and institutions' valuing of the nature and role of knowledge in our lives.