A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education

Dilly Fung

A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education

A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education

SPOTLIGHTS Series Editor: Timothy Mathews, Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, UCL

Spotlights is a short monograph series for authors wishing to make new or defining elements of their work accessible to a wide audience. The series will provide a responsive forum for researchers to share key developments in their discipline and reach across disciplinary boundaries. The series also aims to support a diverse range of approaches to undertaking research and writing it.

A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education

Dilly Fung

First published in 2017 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text ? Dilly Fung, 2017 Images ? Dilly Fung and copyright holders named in captions, 2017 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Dilly Fung, A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education. London, UCL Press, 2017. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at licenses/ ISBN: 978?1?911576?33?4 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978?1?911576?34?1 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978?1?911576?35?8 (PDF) ISBN: 978?1?911576?38?9 (epub) ISBN: 978?1?911576?37?2 (mobi) ISBN: 978?1?911576?36?5 (html) DOI:

Foreword: Energising an Institution

It is customary, in a Foreword, to begin by sketching a large context in which the book in question might be comprehended and then perhaps to pick out one or two of its key features and end by affirming the value of the book in front of the reader. On this occasion, I shall reverse this order. Let me start, therefore, by asserting that A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education is both a splendid book and, for all those who care about higher education and universities, a crucially important book.

That assertion actually contains a number of suggestions on my part. One is that this book offers important insights separately for higher education and for universities, that is to say both for students and their learning on the one hand and for universities as organisations on the other hand. Every page is packed with insights and practical suggestions for advancing students' learning and their wider experience: that is immediately evident. Furthermore, in the Connected Curriculum idea, there are the makings of a coherent vision and plan of action for institutional transformation.

At the centre of the Connected Curriculum idea lies the hope and, indeed, the demonstration that it is possible, within universities, to improve the relationship between teaching and research. In a sense, of course, this thought should never have needed to be uttered. For 200 years, since the modern idea of the university was born at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, it has been taken for granted in many quarters that a distinguishing feature of universities is that they be institutions that not only are spaces of both teaching and research but also that those two functions are intimately intertwined. However, for the past three decades or so, huge forces (national and global) have tended to pull research and teaching apart; and so the matter of their relationship has become a matter of wide concern.

It might be tempting to address this matter in a rather limited way, looking at the actual relationships between research and teaching ? which, characteristically, may be expected to vary even within the same

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university ?and focusing on a particular aspect, in trying to bring the two activities closer to each other. (The question has to be asked: just why should the Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Teaching and for Research ever talk to each other? After all, in many universities, their roles have become quite separate.) A huge virtue of A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education is, to the contrary, that it sees, in this issue of the relationship between teaching and research, the profound and much wider matter as to what it is actually to be a university. This book, therefore, contains ?albeit subtly ?a vision for the university in the twenty-first century.

Connectedness lies at the heart of this vision. There are no less than twelve dimensions of connectedness that can be glimpsed here, namely connections:

1) Between disciplines 2) Between the academy and the wider world 3) Between research and teaching 4) Between theory and practice 5) Between the student and teacher/lecturer/professor 6)Between the student in her/his interior being ?and in his/her

being in the wider world 7) Between the student and other students 8)Between the student and her/his disciplines ?that is, being

authentically and intimately connected epistemologically and ontologically 9) Between the various components of the curriculum 10)Between the student's own multiple understandings of and perspectives on the world 11)Between different areas ?or components ?of the complex organisation that constitutes the university 12)Between different aspects of the wider society, especially those associated with society's learning processes.

We could legitimately say that here is a vision of a well-tuned learning project, working at once on the personal, institutional and societal levels. Even if only some of these envisaged forms of interconnectedness bear fruit, we are surely in sight of a heightened institutional vibrancy, with new institutional energies being released as the various components of the extraordinary complex that constitutes a university exhibit new connections. With research and teaching, with disciplines, and with student and tutor and student and student, engaging with each

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Foreword: Energising an Institution

other in new ways, there will doubtless occur a satisfactory frisson, as the entities of a university make contact anew. There is a newly energised university on the cards here.

That is surely ambitious enough. But I detect in this book an even greater ambition. It is none other than to realise the potential of the university in the twenty-first century. Do we not detect here a university in which its component parts not just listen to each other and pay heed to each other but also bring the university into a new configuration with the wider world in all its manifestations? There is surely a sense here of the university coming out of itself to attend to all the many ecosystems in which it is implicated ?the economy certainly, but the ecosystems too of knowledge, social institutions, persons, learning, the natural environment and even culture. The Connected Curriculum opens, in short, to a new idea of the university, a university that is fully ecological, attending carefully to the many ecosystems in its midst.

This idea of the university ?lurking here in the Connected Curriculum ?is none other than a sense of the possibilities of and for the whole university. It is a bold idea of the university as such. Within it lies a sense of the university as having responsibilities towards its ecological hinterland, towards its students, knowledge (and the disciplines), learning, the economy and the wider society. In a century doubtless of much turmoil and challenge, the university is not in a position to save the world (whatever that might mean) but it is in a position to play a modest part in helping to strengthen the various ecosystems of the world. The idea of the Connected Curriculum holds out that hope.

This will not be an easy project to bring off. The kinds of change being opened here will be provocative in the best sense, stretching academics, students, and institutional leaders and universities themselves into challenging and even difficult places. But there are, in this book, numerous examples and vignettes that testify to the practical possibilities ahead. There are, too, and crucially important, the words of individuals involved that offer immediate testimony to the enthusiasm that this kind of project, when carefully orchestrated, can engender. And there are helpful questions that will aid examination both of self and of institutional practices. This is a living project and an energising project. I cannot think of a more important initiative for higher education and the future of the university.

Ronald Barnett, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education, Institute of Education, London

Foreword: Energising an Institution

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