Conclusion: Human Development and the Common Good—Implications for Higher Education, Community Engagement and Service-Learning

Author(s):  
Ntimi Nikusuma Mtawa
2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene Gabriel Machimana ◽  
Maximus Monaheng Sefotho ◽  
Liesel Ebersöhn

The purpose of this study is to inform global citizenship practice as a higher education agenda by comparing the retrospective experiences of a range of community engagement partners and including often silent voices of non-researcher partners. Higher education–community engagement aims to contribute to social justice as it constructs and transfers new knowledge from the perspectives of a wide range of community engagement partners. This qualitative secondary analysis study was framed theoretically by the transformative–emancipatory paradigm. Existing case data, generated on retrospective experiences of community engagement partners in a long-term community engagement partnership, were conveniently sampled to analyse and compare a range of community engagement experiences ( parents of student clients ( n = 12: females 10, males 2), teachers from the partner rural school ( n = 18: females 12, males 6), student-educational psychology clients ( n = 31: females 14, males 17), Academic Service-Learning ( ASL) students ( n = 20: females 17, males 3) and researchers ( n = 12: females 11, males 1). Following thematic in-case and cross-case analysis, it emerged that all higher education–community engagement partners experienced that socio-economic challenges (defined as rural school adversities, include financial, geographic and social challenges) are addressed when an higher education–community engagement partnership exists, but that particular operational challenges (communication barriers, time constraints, workload and unclear scope, inconsistent feedback, as well as conflicting expectations) hamper higher education–community engagement partnership. A significant insight from this study is that a range of community engagement partners experience similar challenges when a university and rural school partner. All community engagement partners experienced that higher education–community engagement is challenged by the structural disparity between the rural context and operational miscommunication.


2021 ◽  
pp. 155-181
Author(s):  
Deborah L. Rhode

This chapter explores the challenges for families and schools in channeling ambitions in more productive directions. Today’s adolescents confront a world of growing pressures, which are also increasing mental health challenges. Parents’ vicarious ambitions can compound the problems if they push children to focus too much on extrinsic markers of success at the expense of intrinsic motivations to learn and ethical values. Both schools and families should help students to develop persistence, resilience, a strong moral compass, and commitment to the common good. Opportunities for service learning, internships and mentorships can encourage constructive ambitions. So too, parents and colleges must better control the preoccupation with prestige that has hijacked admission processes and encouraged gaming the system. Educators should also modify admission criteria such as legacy, donor, and athletic preferences that advantage already advantaged applicants.


2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-296
Author(s):  
Elaine Unterhalter

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Ingold

<?page nr="45"?>Abstract Around the world, universities have been converted into agents of globalization, competing for business in the markets of the knowledge economy. To an ever-increasing extent, they are managed like corporations. The result has been a massive betrayal of the underlying principles of higher education. In both teaching and research, universities have reneged on their founding commitment to the pursuit of truth, and to the service of the common good. With their combination of overpaid managers, staff in precarious employment and indebted students, they are manifestly unsustainable. Rather than waiting for them to collapse, however, we need to start now to build the universities of the future, and to restore their civic purpose as necessary components of the constitution of a democratic society. This article first sets out the four principles—of freedom, trust, education and community—on which any university must be built, if it is to meet the challenges of our time. It will then go on to consider the meaning of the common good, and how universities of the future can be of service to it.


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