EDUC46030: The Case for Higher Education: From Precarity to Empowerment

• This module will introduce students to the changing context of global higher education landscape, including its competing purposes, value contexts, governance frameworks and the identities of key actors. It will enable students to appreciate critically the key issues within higher education and reflect on what matters in taking higher education forward.

• This module will work across four interrelated thematic areas. Whilst texts and materials for the module will change and be updated regularly to ensure that the module continues to focus on up-to-date research and thinking, we will also draw on some seminal texts that focus on the purpose and nature of higher education (examples provided under each thematic area)
• Tracing the sociohistorical context of higher education: from elitism to marketisation of higher education.
• Governing higher education and educational processes.
• Exploring identities: academics, students and their experiences.
• Imagining alternatives futures of higher education and tackling inequalities.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Knowledge and understanding of changing context, places and purposes of higher education.
• Knowledge and understanding of contemporary governance frameworks and associated policy regimes in higher education.
• Knowledge and understanding of identities of key actors in higher education.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Critically evaluate literature in the field of higher education.
• Deconstruct the contemporary higher education policy regimes.
• Analyse the complexity and intersectionality of issues affecting global higher education.
• Reflect critically on what matters in taking higher education forward.

Key Skills:

• Engage with higher education literature reflectively and critically.
• Evaluate and engage with different primary and secondary source material.
• To develop study skills, information retrieval, and the capacity to plan and manage learning, and to reflect on own learning.
• To use written and spoken communication skills to develop academic arguments.

• Sessions combining interactive lectures and seminars will be employed. In addition, portfolio-based learning on the virtual learning platform will further support student engagement with key issues in the subject area.
• Lecture element of the sessions will introduce students to broad knowledge of key higher education concepts and frameworks and help structure students' independent study towards the learning objectives
• Seminar element of the sessions will facilitate a more in-depth student engagement with themes and issues raised in the lectures. It will also support students' work on portfolio assignment.
• On-line materials and the virtual learning platform will facilitate self-study activity and portfolio assignment

Students will receive ongoing formative support in terms of verbal feedback on ideas and contributions in taught sessions. Students will be offered an individual short tutorial to gain formative feedback on initial portfolio planning and critical commentary. Furthermore, one seminar session will be dedicated to presenting work in progress on portfolios. In addition, ipsative assessment approaches will be used to provide online feedback on the portfolio and encourage self-reflection.

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