Changing cultures of knowledge and learning in higher education

تم النشر بتاريخ 03-11-2021

INTRODUCTION Ways of developing knowledge and learning of relevance for professional work, and the role of higher education in this, are in transformation in today’s society. One aspect of this is that professional higher education programmes are subjected to change processes referred to as academic drift (Pratt and Burgess, 1974, Neave, 1979, Smeby, 2006) or academisation (Elzinga, 1990; Kyvik, 2009). This implies, for example, that professional communities have established throughout the last 20 to 30 years new or stronger links to science, as reflected in the emergence of research especially devoted to serve the professions, such as in nursing science and applied engineering, and in an overall orientation towards making professional work more knowledge-based. Another consequence concerns the introduction and rapid growth of profession-oriented master programs as well as professional doctorates in many countries. Second, the knowledge worlds in which educational programs are embedded are getting more extensive and complex. The knowledge domains of professionals, as well as the production of services and collective identities, stretch beyond the nation state and into an extended globalised space (Brint, 2001). More abstract and symbolic modes of representation give rise to “global forms” of knowledge, that is, forms that have a “capacity for decontextualization and recontextualization, abstractability and movement, across diverse social and cultural situations and spheres of life” (Collier and Ong, 2005, p. 11). Such forms of knowledge circulate quickly in information networks, and on its way it provides arenas for engagement as well as resources for the formation of new types of communities. As argued by Krishnan (2006), global circuits of knowledge fuel other forms of globalization, e.g. economical, political and cultural forms, by influencing the intellectual spheres of life. A third and related aspect is that the relationship between higher education and professional learning is in transition. The role of higher education is no longer restricted to the initial phase of preparing practitioners sufficiently for the world of work. Rather, practitioners enroll in higher education in different phases of their life to update or advance their competencies, and many higher education organizations engage more actively in efforts to develop professional practice by way of research and other knowledge- producing efforts .

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