A context is needed to get a sense of the ways in which contemporary discourses of Widening Participation have emerged and have in turn shaped the discourses over who has the right to higher education, and who does not. This has become increasingly associated with the acceptance of the inevitably large amounts of debt after graduation. Read more…
Many understand intuitively the notion of education as a public good. Broader approaches to societal development are often harder to “sell” than narrowly focused reforms that try to achieve “one thing at a time”. This may help to explain why the powerful intellectual leadership of Manmohan Singh in bringing about the needed economic reforms in India in 1991 was so concentrated on “liberalization” only, without a corresponding focus on the much needed broadening of social opportunities. Read more…
Since the late 1970s the culture of academic life has been transformed by the institutionalisation of the policies of marketisation. Outwardly, universities increasingly model themselves on private and especially public sector corporations. Academic exercises and practices have been gradually displaced by management techniques as departments operate more as cost centres often run by administers recruited from the private and public sector. Read more…
The Edinburgh Settlement is a multi-purpose voluntary organisation with a rich history spanning more than 100 years. It is part of the international Settlement movement: a global network of social action centres which work closely with local communities, representing and responding to needs and aspirations, to promote social and environmental justice. Read more…
In terms of welfare, the human capabilities approach was developed as a means of measuring the opportunities open to an individual and through that, the welfare of a society. Two of the major authors in the capabilities approach are Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Popular metrics which gets conflated with the status of a nation’s welfare is that of Gross National Product (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Read more…
This is a podcast of Peter Shukie sharing his philosophy of what lies behind the Community Open Online Courses vision. Community Open Online Courses is a vision which takes the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) and flips the model making the community the creator of the content. This innovation in education and learning is important in that it values the inherent knowledge of individuals wherever they are situated.