Sub-brand to go here
Being a Graduate in the
Twenty-first Century
Ronald Barnett, Institute of Education, London
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
12 April, 2011
Centre for Higher
Education Studies
Context – and Emma’s tale
A present context: the unemployed graduate
‘Last year, I created a new society for the University, for my course. That
involved quite a lot of responsibility and taking control and I’ve never been in
that, sort of, leadership position before. … the society stuff definitely helped my
degree – if no other reason than just feeling more accessible to the lecturers
and the tutors.
‘I’m [also] an artist .. I tend to do [large] landscapes in acrylics.
Q Do you see that as something quite separate or do you think it spills over in any
way?
‘Yeah, I think it does in a way because I was thinking about how long it takes me
to do the paintings, I think that’s, kind of, patience and the motivation to do it
because there’s times when I think, I just want to give up.’
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Beginning questions
So from these two starting points:
 Just what is it to be a graduate in the C21?
 Just what might we hope for from our students?
 What might they want of themselves?
 How might we understand ‘career’ now (eg amid
(worldwide) recession)
 What is it to learn in a university? What are the
responsibilities of a university towards its students?
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Changing answers
Higher education - built successively around the themes of:
- knowledge/ understanding (‘initiation’)
- skills (‘employability’)
And now emerging?
- wellbeing (‘therapy’)
- citizenship (‘the global citizen’)
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The twenty-first century
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Challenge
Change
Uncertainty
Complexity/ supercomplexity
Division – differences – of values, of resources, of
perspectives
• Global dimension
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A student’s story
‘ … I had no … awareness of my own ability, so when you get an inspiring
teacher that has faith in you, or helps you understand a topic, then, you know,
it’s amazing
‘… you get excited … it makes you want to know, say, if it’s about a
particular topic, then you want to go and know more about it, you want to find
more … and that way you end up learning more.
‘… if a teacher inspires you in a subject, then you are going to pay a lot more
attention, feel that drive to get involved in a way.’
(4th yr student, post 92 university)
- A continuing pedagogical challenge
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Students as Global Citizens
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A care/ concern for the world
A sense of interconnectedness
Not living in one’s own world
Helping to bring about a better world (cf ‘wisdom’)
A project of ‘engagement’
Implies first-handedness; genuine (critical) thought & action
Impact on curricula
And on opportunities while a student
Forms of learning
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Sense that learning takes place in multiple sites
Even for the student
Is anything special about the student’s academic learning?
Lifewide learning – horizontal learning
Lifelong learning – learning through time
(We’ll come back to these matters in a moment.)
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Moving on
‘ Overall, the four years I spent at [university] have been
tiring and frustrating at times but mainly exciting, challenging
and immensely rewarding … I have graduated a different
person from who I was when I entered … better equipped for
all aspects of life’. (female engineering student)
‘It’s been a huge learning curve and building process as a
person. I am completely different from how I was in the first
place.’
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The ideas of ‘graduate attributes’ &
‘graduateness’
• (So) the world presents human being with considerable
challenges – technical, social, communicative, personal
• We look to graduates esp to be human beings who can live
purposively in the face of these challenges
• Even to be exemplary human beings
• Such a world requires, in the first place, neither knowledge
nor skills but dispositions and qualities of certain kinds
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Dispositions for a world of challenge
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A will to learn
A will to engage
A preparedness to listen
A preparedness to explore
A willingness to hold oneself open to experiences
A determination to keep going forward
Qualities for a world of challenge
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Carefulness
Courage
Resilience
Self-discipline
Integrity
Restraint
Respect for others
Openness
Dispositions and qualities compared
• The dispositions are necessary; the qualities have a degree
of optionality in them
• Hence, just a few dispositions; but many qualities
• The dispositions enable one to go forward
• The qualities colour that forward movement; give it
‘character’
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The (higher) educational significance of
the dispositions and qualities
• The dispositions and qualities are concomitants of a
genuine higher education
• Curricula and pedagogies could nurture them
• But often fall short
• Students are denied curricula space, and pedagogical
affirmation
• But the dispositions and qualities (above) are logically
implied in a ‘higher’ education.
14
Nurturing the dispositions and qualities –
the linguist’s tale
I’ve always had a huge passion for languages. But coming to [x
university], I found the French and the Italian departments very different,
and I did start to feel a bit bitter towards French. I wasn’t enjoying that
any more. I loved it at school more than Italian. I found the French
department very rigid … I did feel like I was back in school, but not in the
sixth form … I didn’t feel very free to express myself in the lessons. With
the Italian department, we all sit around a big table or chairs without tables
in front. There would be a lot more interaction … It was more friendly, just
a liberating atmosphere.’
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The idea of a career
• The idea of ‘career’ implied steady progression in a particular (and challenging)
field of work
• And that there were clear boundaries between work and non-work
• Both of those axioms have to be ditched
• Against the considerations here, a ‘career’ becomes the continuous public
working out of one’s possibilities in an uncertain world
• It is the sedimentation of the dispositions and the widening and strengthening of
the qualities
• In particular, the will to learn (disposition) and courage and openness (qualities)
are paramount
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Coping with complexity
‘(beginning the student journey) is [an entry into] a scary, exciting and
fascinating world … We need … self-belief to survive and prosper … I
remember thinking … this is amazing, exciting, exhilarating and downright
terrifying … Working with a complex world is … about … not giving up
when you feel overwhelmed …’
‘… What’s fascinating about Alison’s courses is the amount of panic,
you know, that surrounds the essays and I felt it personally … It was a
very, very scary thing to do because … there were no right answers.’
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Conclusions
 Becoming clearer about being a graduate in the C21 calls
for a sense of the world in which graduates find themselves
 & of the responsibilities graduates have in the world
 - to themselves and to others and even to the world itself
 In turn, the idea of ‘career’ diminishes
 But there arises larger questions as to the relationship
between graduates and the wider world
 In turn, arise profound issues over curriculum & pedagogy
 & in turn, arise qs as to the responsibilities of universities
 And so arises the question of the university in the C21
 It is that, no less, that lies before us in these considerations.
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