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The University as a Public Educator: Learning and Teaching for Engagement
Book chapter

The University as a Public Educator: Learning and Teaching for Engagement

David Davies and James Nyland
Curriculum Challenges for Universities: Agenda For Change, pp.39-58
Springer, 1st
03/2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8582-8_3

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Abstract

The focus of this paper is on universities, primarily those in Australia, though it should be relevant for many others around the world especially those which have been part of the Anglo-American sphere of development. The topic of the paper is ‘engagement’, which is short-hand for how they relate to their communities and stakeholders. Our starting point is that universities are public educators with a ‘duty’ and mission to support and engage with their local and regional communities as well as often claiming national and international importance. This has been a contested territory for at least a generation in the context of a globalising world (Barnett in The end of knowledge in higher education, London: Cassell, (1997); Seidman in Contested knowledge: Social theory in the postmodern era, Cassell, 1998; Zuboff in The age of surveillance capitalism, Profile Books Ltd, 2019). Our initial concerns may appear to be critical of what universities already do in respect of their involvement in the wider and deeper learning needs of the communities in which they are set. Yet it would be remiss to ignore the progressive and reforming types of learning and its formal recognition within some university programmes of study. Service learning is of major significance in conventional universities as is work-integrated and work-based learning.

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