Higher Education Pedagogies

This book sets out to generate new ways of reflecting ethically about the purposes and values of contemporary higher education in relation to agency, learning, public values and democratic life, and the pedagogies which support these. It offers an alternative to human capital theory and the emphasis on the economic returns of education in higher education, arguing for intrinsic as much as instrumental goods. It frames these issues using key ideas from the human capability approach, developed by economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, as a rich resource for thinking about higher education and shows how this moves us to a criterion of justice as a value in higher education. It places human flourishing, human dignity and students as human beings at its centre. It takes up the value Sen attributes to education in the capability approach, and puts the approach demonstrates its relevance for higher education. The book asks: * What does higher education learning and teaching enable students to be and to do? * What are valued capabilities in higher education, and how do we identify them? * How might the capability approach contribute to thinking and practices of student learning and accomplished and ethical university teaching? Higher Education Pedagogies offers illustrative narratives of capability pedagogies, drawing on student and lecturer voices to demonstrate how this multi-dimensional approach might be applied in higher education. The book therefore searches theoretically and practically for an ethical language for higher education pedagogy which connects broader trends in higher education with student learning opportunities and outcomes, and which suggests hopeful possibilities for making futures. It will both challenge and interest students and scholars of higher education, and university lecturers, managers and policy-makers concerned with teaching and learning as ethical, hopeful practices in the UK and internationally. It will further engage an interdisciplinary audience of lecturers, teachers and researchers in development studies and international education.Part 1: Context of higher education; Part 2: The capability approach and higher education ş Core ideas from the capability approach ş What are we distributing? Part 3: - Learning and capabilities - Widening participation and capabilities şş Selecting capabilities Part 4: Change in higher education ş Pedagogy, capabilities and a criterion of justice