Higher than what?

With its world heritage site Greenwich can potentially create a university that combines the best of the old with something new. That this does not happen automatically shows that the French sociologist of education, Pierre Bourdieu, was wrong in his contention that higher education is all form and no substance. But what is the substance of ‘higher’ learning? Higher than what? Further than where? as Sir Toby Weaver, author of our 1965 Woolwich Polytechnic speech, asked. Some would answer that higher education’s (HE) ‘higherness’ comes from specialisation but this is also the case in further education (FE). Others would assert academic freedom allows HE teachers to set their own courses linked to their research interests. However, although there is not (yet) a National Curriculum for HE, many programmes of study have long been agreed with professional bodies. And in an institution where the main activity of most staff is teaching or supporting teaching, research and scholarship exist, we admit, only in ‘pockets’. So this is not distinctive either. Therefore, when we are pushed to characterise ‘higherness’, we fall back on what we often look for in student assignments: A critical analysis of the information required. This is seen as ‘deep’ rather than ‘surface’ knowledge. Yet these tacit notions are often confused so that we know them when we see them but find them hard to justify explicitly. This contribution to Greenwich’s new pedagogic journal seeks to do this as simply as possible in the interests of stimulating debate and innovation

What Education Studies is and what it might be

Education Studies at the University of Greenwich is presented as an example of what Education Studies is – at least at one Higher Education Institution. As a field of practice to which a body of knowledge can be applied, Education Studies shares common features with other disciplinary fields of study. It is also unique in that its field – learning, is also what its students do – learn. What Education Studies isn’t is then discussed in relation to studies of schooling, the psychology of learning, sociology of education, traditional education degrees and teacher training. Lastly, what Education Studies could become is presented with reference to Ranson’s (1993) argument for the centrality of education as the common focus of all HE study. It is suggested that the subject could then contribute to expanding critical space in (higher) education through making research/ scholarship and creation an integral part of the Independent Study of all students at all levels of learning. This would be a necessary complement to the wider democratic transformation now demanded for human survival. It would also accord with what Marx called humanity’s “species being” as a “learning animal” (Morris). Such a social theory of learning can discriminate between information and competence at one level of learning and (corresponding terms) knowledge and skill at another more generalised level in relation to new divisions of knowledge and labour. Potentially these levels can be combined to create a new form of polytechnic learning, relating theory to practice, education to training and further to higher education

To the Dissertation and Beyond: Independent Study in the New Undergraduate Curriculum

Over the past 30 years social changes have taken place which makes the dialogue of teachers with students as the essential preserve of the higher educational community difficult. This is not only the case for the new universities that have made the most efforts to widen participation. With the decline of industry and the expansion of services, a reformation of social class has re-designated many jobs in what has become the working-middle of society as professional occupations requiring higher qualifications. Partly in response to this pressure for certification, many young people are leaving school and college later with supposedly higher standards but often trained rather than educated, or over schooled but undereducated (A. Ainley, and Allen 2010). Training to meet externally verified competences is also extending into higher education. Paradoxically, considering the hopes invested in it, new information and communications technology has not necessarily helped. While ICT allows access to a mass of information, it has also facilitated a culture of plagiarism and undermined existing expertise by multiplying the possibly verifiable criteria for new knowledge. On top of all this, academics have also often not helped themselves by designing courses which make a virtue of student choice from a range of options that may even deny the possibility of students constructing coherent conceptual totalities related to their fields of study

The management of business or the business of management?

Business is a large and diffuse activity that is growing larger with the expansion of the new market-state in which virtually all former-state services are contracted out to be run as businesses, if not yet directly for profit, then in heightened competition for customers

The Business Studies University

The Business Studies Universit

The COVID-19 Crisis and the Future of Tertiary Education: A Green Paper

Tertiary Education (TE) is facing a crisis which is partly the result of the Covid-19 pandemic but is also the cumulative effect of 30 years of marketization, privatisation and educational reforms that have turned education from a lifelong activity to an instrument of allocation to the labour market. The purpose of this paper is to think through the nature of this crisis for TE in the context of other global crises and to suggest how Tertiary institutions could start to contribute to a more progressive system of lifelong learning with a series of practical strategies