Re-thinking graduate attributes: From skills and employability to education

1. Re-thinking graduate attributes: From skills and employability to education Anna Jones Centre for Research in Lifelong Learning and Caledonian Academy

2. What are graduate attributes? • University statement of aspirations and distinctiveness • Guide for curriculum design and teaching and assessment practice • Guide for students in articulating their capabilities and learning experience

3. Employability • Assumption that higher education should take (some) responsibility for employability ‘Education and training [should] enable people in an advanced society to compete with the best in the world. (Dearing Report, NCIHE 1997:para 1.11) • But questions about the role of higher education in developing economic capital (Morley 2001), whether education can develop employability (Atkins 1999) • Definitions– employment destinations, personal achievements/potential, lifelong learning

4. The contested nature of attributes • ‘theoretically threadbare’ • Definitions • Transferability • Employability • One size fits all • Multiple stakeholders • Application

5. Some dubious assumptions • Determinate • Definable • Measurable • Transferable

6. Situated nature of attributes • Notions of trans or super disciplinary skills is problematic • Disciplinary epistemology and departmental/institutional culture shape understandings of attributes • Meaningful teaching and learning of attributes is contextual and situated

7. Application • Academic resistance to meaningless, decontextualised ‘tick-box’ approach • Attributes as defined out of, taught and assessed within the disciplinary/interdisciplinary contexts

8. Are specifiable outcomes are desirable - or rather preparing students for the uncertainties of the ‘real’ world • How do we present complexity so that students can face the unforeseen? Newman (1920: 92-3) ‘A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation and wisdom... This then I would assign as the special fruit of the education furnished at a University’

9. Moving Forward Attributes in the formal and informal curriculum • Examine attributes in the disciplines/interdisciplines – how they are defined and taught, how this can be enhanced. Communities of practice (Wenger 1998) TLR’s (Trowler & Cooper 2002) • Examine co-curricula attribute development and how the university can facilitate this

10. Specifics of skills sit within disciplinary epistemology – the means it gives us, ideas it enables us to think critically about • Attributes are more ontological – the disposition or willingness to think, challenge, dig beneath the surface • Thus ‘graduateness’ can be both embedded in disciplinary systems and transcend them

11. From skills and employability to education • Move away from ‘spin’ or ‘quality’ • Use attributes as a way of sharpening the focus on education – what it means, what the university values, how it can facilitate this – both in the formal and co curriculum • Employment market in a state of constant flux • Education for a whole person – personal, professional, social

12. Move away from the ‘thin morality’ of competitive individualism to the ‘thick morality’ of citizenship and the common good (Apple 2001).