Session Information
Session 2A, Higher Education: Transitions and Tensions (1)
Papers
Time:
2005-09-07
17:00-18:30
Room:
Agric. G24
Chair:
Francis Mudge
Contribution
This paper is influenced by the social trust concept. It is an elaboration of a new idea which has the following characteristics: first, quality assurance of learning. Second, government needs to ensure public funding, third, inclusion of each university in their regional and international content ( e.g. Bologna Process), fourth, new strategies of management based on transformational leadership, fifth, changing relationship between knowledge and professors and sixth, civic role of the university. In conclusion, a growing complicity and contradictions of functions and expectations that create the university crisis, and therefore, the difficulty of meeting an answer at different levels of this complexity are the nucleus of the social trust concept. The main issue is to offer a satisfactory answer to all the problems mentioned above. IntroductionAccording to the Social Sciences , there are two scenarios of the relationship among trust, distrust and power depending on circumstances, matters and expectations: "First, power may affect trust insofar as it influences parties' evaluation of the relative worth of the relationship. Second, to the extent that power affects the possibility of trust and trustworthiness, it also may affect the kinds of cooperation that take place on the basis of trust and trustworthiness" this evaluation of possible cooperation mediated by trust shows us a relational concept transferable to relationship between teaching and learning, as a asymmetrical power embodied by teacher and students respectively. But is it true? Is all this discourse true indeed? In my opinion, the key world to understand the concept of trust is evaluation of each situation, it is approximate credibility and it's trust worthy on both fields. In this matter, the social subject of trust means new offers which are building up the credibility of institutions and on the other hand, the fulfillment of the interests of state holders, students, and other representatives of the political and economical worlds. Provided that the relationship between credibility and interests can be reached on the same field, I would like to present the definition of these two concepts, which seem to be as the two sides of the same coin. Who has got the power in this relationship? Surprisingly, it isn't the University institution who posses it. This is the state holders and students thanks to their possibility to opt for several University Institutions, which are more or less accredited by State or the Quality Assurance Agencies. To support this view, I would like to add not only labour - market orientated arguments but also pointed out role of the citizenship in the contribution of the University Institutions to the social and political development. In the aspect of economic interest and credibility the social, cultural, economic and political influences (Local - Nation State - European Union) demanded a change in teaching (New Standards of Academic Excellence) summarized by Morris ( ) as "increasing demands of stakeholders for documenting and improving students learning outcomes", and synthesize in the broad concept of social [human] capital and human resources, for example: to increase full time and development of faculty members and excellence in students' learning. These tendencies had already been published in the decade of the 90's ( ) of last century. Now the educational politics wants to transfer those tendencies to concrete decisions: structural changes and new functions of the universities ( ) synthesized in the sentence "the competitive nature of higher education with other non traditional forms of tertiary education" ( ). Other reflections about changes are centred in new relations between each University and the Estate ( ) to overcome the distrust between both institutions, in order to improving the financing; In my opinion the main change is to create structures beyond traditional [non liberal] hierarchy "institutional position based" towards structures institutional project based and toward new structures that comes from William Isaacs (1996) and Edgar Schein (1993, 2001) in dialogue centred ( ) under the umbrella of knowledge society paradigm supported by scholars whose basic theoretical thinking is the neo-institutionalism ( )The second dimension of credibility is the new responsibilities of the Universities. In my opinion, the University should be responsible for the quality of all the processes, products and services that supplies, and therefore, should have "responsibility for labour, human rights, customer, ecological and related stakeholder practices and that universities are responding by developing responsibility management systems comparable in many respects to quality management systems already in place" , that I prefer to call as the human welfare in the universities, on one hand, and as the contribution to the social welfare on the other. In the first place it is fundamental that students, employees and staff body respect one's own initiative in the development framework of interactive forms, dialogue processes or online communication that support human and stakeholders rights and dignity, incorporated into the culture of the organization where all stakeholders involved in each university are aware of the social responsibility vision, values and strategies of teaching, learning and research. The second task is external responsibility, which main profiles, according to Davies, 2002 , are playing the key role in the corporation of the citizens in contribution to human resources development, technology access, sensitive and creative industrial restructuring and inclusive economic development as well as respecting human rights through several actions such as research policies, institutional program, building cooperation networks among social, cultural and economic institutions, and so on, where each university behaves responsibly at both the global and the local level. In this paper, not forgetting the external goal, I would like to analyze the internal dimension mentioned above and why this internal 'engagement' of all stakeholders has a positive value for each university? My answer is very simple: it is a necessity of the knowledge age which can be expressed in three basic dimensions: emotional, social and cognitive knowledge which is dominated by every person in every university due to the human capacities to observe, reflect, analyze, synthesize, and so on. This article that doesn't prevail in this discourse is the functionalism. ( ): the universities and the building of knowledge ( ), institutional change ( ), the application of the theory of the complexity to the creation of new structures ( ), structural knowledge ( ) and the definition of standard of institutional effectiveness ( ).This approach of institutional change have not solved, in my personal opinion, the dilemma between local innovation and standardization ( ). My intellectual option is to study the local innovations as the precursors of the role academic change ( ) that it means to adopt suitable behaviours to the citizenship ( ). Furthermore, it means that the students aren't customers, but citizens with rights and social and academic responsibilities.
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