Quality as pedagogy of confinement: is there an alternative?
| Pages | 113-119 |
| Published date | 01 September 2004 |
| Date | 01 September 2004 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09684880410548735 |
| Author | Paul Gibbs,Melpo Iacovidou |
| Subject Matter | Education |
Quality as pedagogy of
confinement: is there an
alternative?
Paul Gibbs and
Melpo Iacovidou
The authors
Paul Gibbs is Dean of Research and Melpo Iacovidou is a
Senior Lecturer, both at Intercollege, Nicosia, Cyprus.
Keywords
Higher education, Quality, Government policy
Abstract
This paper argues for good higher education in which academics
and students take responsibility for their scholarly activities. This
ought to be the goal for higher education, not the fulfilment of
quality criteria that may fail to capture the essences of an
educated person. This proposal is offered, in part, as a response
to the UK government’s recent White Paper – on the future of
higher education.
Electronic access
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is
available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0968-4883.htm
Introduction
The Government believes that student choice will
be an increasingly important driver of teaching
quality, as students choose the good-quality
courses that will bring them respected and valuable
qualifications and give them the higher-level skills
that they will need during their working life (DfES,
2003, p. 4.1).
The UK government’s higher education policy as
proposed in their recent White Paper – the fu ture of
higher education – follows this direction for higher
education which may satisfy the rhetoric of
corporate profitor economic ideologies but does so
without balancing the impact of a cr iteria-
dependencyof measurable qualityindicators against
the wisdom inherent in the practical judgements
and professionalism of good[1] academia. This is
seen in Cheng’s definition of education quality as
“the character of the set of elements in the input,
process, and output of the education system that
provides services that completely satisfy both
internal and external strategic constituencies by
meeting their explicit and implicit expectations”
(Cheng and Tam, 1997, p. 23).
We argue that such a dependency may lead to
more efficiency and greater productivity but
creates a product of higher education tradeable in
term of credentials and wages which in turn affects
the credibility of higher education grounded in
critical thinking, tolerance and self-development.
Further, by adopting a notion of educational value
commensurate with the return on investment of
employability skills, (and homogenises diversity of
disciplines into employment skills) higher
education reveals itself as designed to provide
benefit entitlements for the achievement of explicit
criteria, however relevant or irrelevant these
criteria might be, to a fuller, transformative, notion
of higher education.
We will argue that we should trust the scholarly
community of our university teachers, and suggest
that through their authentic action as teachers they
produce good teaching and academic practice. To
support this we suggest that the ontology of
becoming a teacher is based, as Friere (1998, p. 43)
proposes, on critical reflection on practice and on
this basis that the external measurement of good
higher education, codified in this context as quality
education, is rendered unnecessary. Indeed, we go
further and suggest that external measurement of
something that does not exist – “good” is not the
same as quality, although it might be used
irresponsibly as a simulacrum of it – creates its
own pedagogy, a “pedagogy of confinement” of
student and academic potentialities. A pedagogy to
confine students to the technicalities of work
placement rather than the liberation of knowing to
be better people.
Quality Assurance in Education
Volume 12 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp.113-119
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0968-4883
DOI 10.1108/09684880410548735
113
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