What is education in higher education in a time of reform?

The current Danish university reform focuses on how to shorten Master’s programmes, and how to tailor these more closely to professional stakeholders’ contexts. During the political, public, and academic discussions, key questions have arisen concerning the purposes of the university-society interconnections, and the goals and value of higher education.
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Submission deadline: February 3, 2025
Over the last decade, a long series of performance indicators asking for employability, retention, faster completion and student well-being have become core priorities (Wright et.al., 2020). Consequently, the analysis and discussion of what could, and should, change educationally within higher education has been neglected.
While research in higher education often takes a critical perspective on external pressures on the educational aspects of the university, this session sets out by reversing the question, inquiring into what education actually means in the context of higher education today. In doing so, we seek to explore the possibilities for shifting the narrative from critiquing the instrumental focus on the labor market to a more holistic focus on higher higher education in itself.
By asking, what is the value of HE and what values are embedded in education, we take a critical constructive approach based in the Germanic ‘Bildung’-tradition (Klafki, 2005) combined with anglophone ‘Bildung’-oriented educational theories (Barnett, 2018; Biesta, 2006). By assuming a critical-constructive analytical stance, we interrogate possible trajectories for shaping the reform conclusions in a sustainable way.
In the session, we aim to (1) summarise the Masters Reform situation, (2) present our own critical- constructive conceptual stance, and (3) collectively and collaboratively with the audience, in working groups, to facilitate a discussion about possible ways forward for the educational dimension of higher education in the future.