the curriculum challenge in business schools, post gfc: what, and who really matters katrina waite...
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The curriculum challenge in business schools, post GFC:What, and who really mattersKatrina WaiteUniversity of Technology SydneyAustralia
Historical Context
Sep 15 2008
Research Context
Scheduled curriculum review – main undergrad business degree
AACSB (International Business School Accreditation) Reaccreditation review
My role as academic developer undertaking PhD
Was Marx right?
Was the GFC “the collapse of capitalism”
Alan Greenspan ex-Chairman of the US Federal Reserve admits “I was partially wrong” about free-market economics
Did Business Education create the GFC?
With the background of the GFC – change would be easy....
How do you research the practice of curriculum change?
What is higher education curriculum?
In Higher Education, “curriculum” is “rich in tacit epistemological underpinnings that neither the user or the reader/listener may be aware of Fraser & Bosanquet (2006)
Long processes – many meetings –many people
Potential for huge volumes of data
At start of project few examples in higher education literature
Constraints of PhD study
Individual research in a collaborative project
Research questions and approach
What are the social, political, economic, educational discourses present in the practice of curriculum change?
What discourses – which might be expected – are minimal or absent?
Why is curriculum change so difficult?
What can be learnt that can inform future curriculum change projects?
Discourse analysis of texts produced in the process
Interviews with key members of curriculum development team
Participant observer approach
Remarkable….
A successful curriculum renewal project in an already successful business school
Why remarkable?
“If it ain’t broke – don’t fix it”
Discourses of risk, financial risk
“this is such a big program and brings in so much money there was always the pressure of making sure it doesn’t mess up” – A project leader
Discourses of stasis
“I mean, when you have a very successful product and business is going well, … and everyone knows that products have life cycles and there should be a refresh and renewal, it's very difficult to get people to engage with thinking completely differently about curriculum renewal.” –Senior Manager
Stasis as a “practical reaction”
“It (The social space)is a relatively stable site of the coexistence of points of view, in the dual sense of positions in the distribution of capital (economic, information, social, etc.) and of the corresponding powers, but also of practical reactions to and representations of that space, produced from these points through habitus that are structured, and double informed, but the structure of the space and by the structures of the schemes of perception that are applied to it. (Bourdieu, 2000 p183).
Luxury of embedding within the research site
Highlights limitations and partial nature of research on curriculum change (Bamber et al, 2009)
Example:
Although significant responses to GFC in documents and practice
Researcher: Anything about the global financial crisis or anything? Do you think that had any impact or not?
Participant: Not that I'm aware of
The drivers of the “new” Alignment of senior management strategic practices with curriculum
development practices – participant role enabled tracking of discursive practices across the institution
Example: Senior Manager ‘’sometimes academics in a successful course don’t notice the trends”
Senior management strategic plan – money for large curriculum renewal grants
“Decisions are part of a broader consultation which always takes longer but the effect is that people buy into the result. Nothing is more important in a university where you can’t actually proceed by instruction. It’s not like any other organisation in society. If you proceed by way of instruction, you will come a cropper…”Senior manager
Funded a number of curriculum retreats where new curriculum was conceptualised collaboratively
Layers of discursive practices
Application for grants recognises academic autonomy – no-one forced to apply
Award of a grant confers academic capital and potential for recognition
However, the practice of curriculum renewal not recognised well – need for change
Awards guidelines amended
“a field of practices arises in the interwoven texture that connect practices to each other, and that the texture is held together by a certain number of practices which provide anchorage for others.” Gherardi (2006)
Money matters in higher education curriculum
Money funded strategic change from faculty and institutional sources
Money funded awards which allowed for recognition
Students constructed as consumers of the business education product; employers as consumers of students
Enrolments maintain the academic field, the social world of the business faculty
Other drivers
External accreditation – AACSB
Commitment and political astuteness of a number of key players
Did the GFC matter?
To some critical GFC discourses worked to provide a basis for conversation and creative approaches to change, without a need to agree that the “evils of business education” caused the GFC
What is higher education curriculum about in this case
Curriculum in this case is as much about the organization as it is about the validity and authority of knowledge and the student experience
“this is about what will be best for the students and for the business school as a whole.” Senior Manager
So what…..
What’s missing
What is needed?
The student with two, or two billion brains, the bionic student, the borderless student
A new conceptualisation of today’s students with access to all the published knowledge in the world through ubiquitous portable devices
What is higher education curriculum?
In 1978, Apple (1978) noted that the focus on curriculum has been on the “measures of the acquisition of information, propensities, skills, and dispositions and the effect of such acquisition on later life”.
He suggests that in questions of curriculum the focus should be on ”the prior set of questions to those usually asked about school success and failure… Whose knowledge is it? Why is it being taught to this particular group, in this particular way?”
What is higher education curriculum
“So understood, curriculum becomes in- tensely historical, political, racial, gendered, phenomenological, postmodern, autobiographical, aesthetic, theological, and international. …When we say that curriculum is an extraordinarily complicated conversation, we are underscoring human agency and the volitional character of human action” (Pinar, 1999).
In higher education, the curriculum practice adds the localised complexities of academic autonomy, strategic management, and an engagement with the financial implications of curriculum at a personal level.
The process of researching higher education curriculum practice matters
Curriculum change happens - but “by stealth” Barnett & Coate (2006)
The practice of curriculum change is contested – can be agonising, disappointing, exciting, creative
Agree on a team approach at the outset and obtain ethics approval
Rich with texts and collaborative research opportunities
Acknowledgements
All the members of the curriculum renewal team, others who were participants in the study, and my PhD supervisor, Professor Lesley Farrell