The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics: - Higher Education ...

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The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics generally (Sloam 2008). The word ‘politics’ stands as a dirty word, inevitably tarnished by popular anger over ‘flipped’ mortgages, expense scandals and politicians who don’t seem to understand or care. But people are nevertheless interested in political issues: poverty, the War on Terror, themes of justice, the financial crisis, the environment ad infinitum. If the word ‘politics’ needs rescuing from bad repute, universities should not look the other way. Regrettably however: So much [university] funding simply follows measurable productivity, multiplying useless and needless publication of articles, the majority of which are rarely read by anybody, as if every teacher had to be, or pretended to be, an original scholar. And now there is little funding for extramural teaching, such departments diminished or collapsing all over the country; for funding now overwhelmingly favours vocational, certificated courses. Those in the community who value education for its own sake and non-vocational study are now left out in the cold or charged ‘the real cost’ which excludes much real need. Lifelong learning does not mean a multiplication of qualifications (Crick 2000: 144–5). This commercialisation of the sector began with the predominately vocational, economistic thrust of the Thatcher years but found willing apostles in government and university management up to and including the New Labour project. Issues such as employability, teaching quality and research assessment have dominated the agenda. How we as teachers of politics respond to these issues is surely important, but there is a sense that our discipline has been out-manoeuvred. As Bernard Crick neatly put it nearly a decade ago, politics has ‘locked itself up, or been locked up where it can do no harm, in the ivory tower’ (2000: 113). But things do not have to be this way: ‘citizenship education’ is an idea whose time has come. Citizenship education is by no means a new subject and has been debated by British educationalists for at least forty years. But since the 1990s we have witnessed an explosion of interest (see Callan 1997; Heater 1993, 2004; Crick 2000; Faulks 2000; Kivisto and Faist 2007). Such debate led to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) 226
Citizenship as a Roadmap for Change establishing an advisory group in citizenship education under the able chair of Professor Crick and the publication of the Crick Report, Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools, in 1988. The Crick Report was massively influential, and, since 2002, citizenship has been a compulsory component of the National Curriculum for all school pupils from primary to post-sixteen. Moreover, the role of universities in promoting citizenship education was formally recognised by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) in its strategic plan for the period 2006 to 2011: [Higher Education] plays a key role in developing active citizens, and sustaining a civilised, more tolerant and inclusive society. Graduates are, on average, more likely to vote in elections, hold more tolerant attitudes to other races, and are more likely to be involved in their communities through voluntary activities (HEFCE 2006: para. 42). This is by no means novel thinking, and such ‘traditional liberal’ aims found currency in 1854 with John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University, before being mimicked by the Robbins Report of the 1960s and reiterated by Dearing’s Higher Education for the 21st Century in the 1990s. If this citizenship project is left to the micro-managers, however, it seems possible that such sentiments will be interpreted to include simplistic policies of the type that model the university’s working week on that of schools in order to create ‘real’ university communities not ‘virtual’ ones (cf. Attwood 2009 on Liverpool Hope’s assault on home-working and the autonomy of academic life). Nevertheless, and although the Funding Council is silent on how this goal is to be realised (Smith et al. 2008), teaching citizenship should be seen as a part of a wider pedagogical framework in which a student’s education is a participatory transformative experience. Our vocation as teachers likewise surely demands not just that we cultivate critical intelligence but that we also reflect on issues that are important to us both morally and socially. One thing we certainly could do here is to make clear to ourselves our own stated and unstated presuppositions about what both university and notions of community 227
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The Scholarship of Engagement for P
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C-SAP Monographs Monograph No. 1: B
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Contents Foreword: E-Learning: Enga
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Foreword: E-Learning: Engagement an
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Foreword placements with an enhance
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Preface gave us all more confidence
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Preface educators (along with place
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Contributors John Annette is Dean o
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Contributors rehabilitation program
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Contributors bodies work together w
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Part I: Introduction
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Chapter 3 Rethinking Placement Lear
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Rethinking Placement Learning for P
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Chapter 6 Engaging Students through
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Appendix 6.1 The Scholarship of Eng
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Appendix 7.3 The Scholarship of Eng
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Part III: Assessment, Citizenship a
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Appendix 10.1 The Scholarship of En
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After the class The Scholarship of
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3. Career Profile Mark Sheet Clarit
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