Curriculum, content and controversy in higher education

Recent evidence suggest that academic staff face difficulties in applying new technologies as a means of assessing higher order assessment outcomes such as critical thinking, problem solving and creativity. Although higher education institutional mission statements and course unit outlines purport the value of these higher order skills there is still some question about how well academics are equipped to design curricula and, in particular, assessment strategies accordingly. Despite a rhetoric avowing the benefits of these higher order skills, it has been suggested that academics set assessment tasks up in such a way as to inadvertently lead students on the path towards lower order outcomes. This is a controversial claim, and one that this paper seeks to explore and critique in terms of challenging the conceptual basis of assessing higher order skills through new technologies. It is argued that the use of digital media in higher education is leading to a focus on student's ability to use and manipulate of these products as an index of their flexibility and adaptability to the demands of the knowledge economy. This focus mirrors market flexibility and encourages programmes and courses of study to be rhetorically packaged as such. Curricular content has becomes a means to procure more or less elaborate aggregates of attributes. Higher education is now charged with producing graduates who are entrepreneurial and creative in order to drive forward economic sustainability. It is argued that critical independent learning can take place through the democratisation afforded by cultural and knowledge digitization and that assessment needs to acknowledge the changing relations between audience and author, expert and amateur, creator and consumer.

The flexible citizen: education and citizenship

This paper considers the recent focus on citizenship within education by taking curricular reform within Scottish secondary schooling and its linkage with higher education as a case study. In Scotland the Curriculum for Excellence reform places citizenship as one of the four main capacities that pupils must work towards as part of their education. This is echoed to some extent within higher education through the Enhancement Theme reforms and the focus on graduate attributes. A unifying theme in these reforms is the need for students to work across different disciplines, to develop a cross-disciplinary perspective on the world by, for example, considering issues of sustainability in relation to scientific or technological developments. In this model of curriculum development teaching staff are considered as agents of change, enabling learners to develop their sense of citizenship in response to a fast-paced world of innovation and change. This kind of change is objectified as a need that must be responded to and met if tomorrow’s citizens are to be able to not only cope, but thrive in the world in which they inhabit. As such, the citizen is positioned as an ongoing project, as something to be worked at and worked on. However, this kind of notion of agency cloaks an neoliberal ideological construction of the citizen as a flexible resource for society, and usually in relation to economic output. The paper seeks to subject this construction of the citizen to critical scrutiny in relation to the idea that, in education, learners are developing their ability to be creative and enquiring in order to be adaptive to change.