Leading Higher Education As and For Public Good: Rekindling Education as Praxis

199 Pages·2020·4.472 MB·English

by  Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke and Ciaran Sugrue

LEADING HIGHER EDUCATION AS AND
FOR PUBLIC GOOD
Leading Higher Education As and For Public Good asserts that the purpose of higher
education is twofold: for public good and as public good. Acknowledging that the
notion of public good increasingly cannot be taken for granted, the book argues
that leading, teaching and learning must be directly connected to its pursuit. It
avers and demonstrates how this may be accomplished, articulating specific
approaches and dispositions that require cultivation within university communities.
This volume argues that leading higher education occurs within competing and
sometimes conflicting webs of commitments, necessitating a capacity to negotiate
legitimate compromises. Its empirical chapters expand on this, providing examples
of academic developers who use deliberate communication as a method in culti­
vating leading and teaching praxis. What emerges is the potential of deliberative
leadership to be transformative in building sustainable leadership in higher educa­
tion, while simultaneously renewing commitments to education and contributing
to public good.
Leading Higher Education As and For Public Good is essential reading for policy­
makers, university leaders and administrators, academics, students and all those
interested in building a sustainable future for higher education that also contributes
to public good.
Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke is Professor of Higher Education and Academic Devel­
oper at the University of Oslo, Norway.
Ciaran Sugrue is Professor and Chair of Education at the School of Education,
University College Dublin, Ireland.

LEADING HIGHER
EDUCATION AS AND
FOR PUBLIC GOOD
Rekindling Education as Praxis
Edited by Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke and Ciaran
Sugrue
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke and Ciaran
Sugrue; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke and Ciaran Sugrue to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Solbrekke, Tone, editor. | Sugrue, Ciaran, editor.

Title: Leading higher education as and for public good : rekindling

education as praxis / edited by Tone Drydal Solbrekke and Ciaran Sugrue.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019054154 (print) | LCCN 2019054155 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780367205102 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367205126 (paperback) |

ISBN 9780429261947 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Education, Higher--Aims and objectives. |

Education, Higher--Administration. | Educational leadership. | Common good.

Classification: LCC LB2322.2 .L389 2020 (print) | LCC LB2322.2 (ebook) |

DDC 378.1--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054154

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054155

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 9780367205102 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780367205126 (pbk)
ISBN: 9780429261947 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
CONTENTS

Foreword vii
List of contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xvii
PART I 1
1 Leading higher education as, and for, public good: New
beginnings 3
Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke and Ciaran Sugrue
2 Leading higher education: Putting education centre stage 18
Ciaran Sugrue and Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke
3 Higher education as and for public good: Past, present and
possible futures 37
Tomas Englund and Andreas Bergh
4 Leading in a web of commitments: Negotiating legitimate
compromises 53
Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke, Ciaran Sugrue and Molly Sutphen
PART II 70
5 Leading higher education: deliberative communication as
praxis and method 71
Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke and Ciaran Sugrue
vi Contents
6 Intellectual virtues for leading higher education 80
Molly Sutphen, Tomas Englund and Kristin Ewins
7 Deliberative communication: Stimulating collective learning? 92
Andreas Bergh, Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke and Johan Wickström
8 Deliberative leadership: Moving beyond dialogue 107
Kristin Ewins, Ester Fremstad, Trine Fossland and Ragnhild Sandvoll
9 Deliberative communication as pedagogical leadership:
Promoting public good? 124
Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke and Ester Fremstad
10 Nurturing pedagogical praxis through deliberative
communication 142
Ragnhild Sandvoll, Andreas Bergh and Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke
PART III 157
11 Re-kindling education as praxis: The promise of deliberative
leadership 159
Ciaran Sugrue and Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke
Index 177
FOREWORD

Lead kindly light: in praise of one step at a time
‘Lead kindly light’ is an English hymn, the words of which were composed as a
poem by John Henry Newman. Well known in the more reflective higher edu­
cation circles for certain of his essays collected together as The Idea of the University
(which remains still – more than one and a half centuries after its composition –
one of the most influential books on the matter), Newman was also a poet, mystic
and theologian, and the first verse of that poem of his runs as follows:
Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
Do we not have resonances here with this book, Leading Higher Education As and
For Public Good: Rekindling education as praxis? That, at least, in exploring those
connections, is the path I wish to tread in the space generously afforded to me by
the volume’s editors, Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke and Ciaran Sugrue.
What is, or might be, or even should be, academic development in the twenty-
first century? It is susceptible to all manner of interpretations, both narrow and
wide. Its more narrow interpretations would confine it to assisting newish academics in
their teaching role, and seeing that assistance as a matter of identifying a portfolio
of skills that might be said to be characteristic of good teaching in higher educa­
tion, not least that of utilising potentials offered by the internet. Hovering in the
viii Foreword
background, if not in the foreground, would be that portentous signifier ‘excel­
lent’. After all, all teaching these days has surely to be nothing less than excellent.
Wider notions of academic development would encompass matters of curriculum, of
what it is to be a student (doubtless with the aspiration of ensuring ‘student satis­
faction’), and of assessment. Still wider notions of academic development would
invite participants to reflect on the meaning that ‘higher education’ has for them,
and even what it is to be a ‘university’ and to imagine possibilities of realising those
aspirations in their teaching practices. Perhaps, too, reflective consideration might
be given to the student as a ‘global citizen’ or social justice or to what it is to be an
international student far from home. This would be a conception of educational
development that constitutes a never-ending journey of critical reflection, of value
to university teachers throughout their careers.
Those former narrower interpretations are not just technical but technicist in their
character, reducing teaching instrumentally to a matter of skills oriented to ends,
and limited ends at that. Those latter wider interpretations, on the other hand, are
genuinely educational in their character, in one of the early meanings of education.
They help to lead out participants to understandings and actions that are personally
meaningful and have inherent value. They help, too, in promoting continuing
reflection and debate as to what it is to be a university in the twenty-first century
and to generate internal dynamism in teaching in higher education, with teachers
coming to be critically reflective practitioners; even, it might be said, coming to be
philosophically reflective practitioners.
Such, I think, is the very broad range of understandings that characterise edu­
cational development in higher education today and the way in which it is being
taken forward. Each university, and even – in devolved administrations – each
faculty in a university, will have its own understanding, whether tacit or explicitly
advanced; but I think that most understandings of academic development will be
plottable along this narrow–wide array of interpretations that I have just sketched.
Both of these poles have been pulled outwards: on the one hand, skill-oriented
interpretations have been emphasised, not least as teaching has become more subject
to audits and performance management; and, on the other hand, educationally
oriented interpretations have also become more sophisticated, not least as the
reflective literature on higher education has grown apace and as educational devel­
opers have collectively advanced their own understandings of their challenges and
possibilities, as well as the challenges and possibilities faced by their own university.
This general pattern of educational development in universities has largely persisted
over the past thirty-plus years, with its narrower and wider interpretations, albeit
extended at both ends, at once being more technicist and more educational/philoso­
phical. Is that it, then, with a continuing stretching at both ends of the polarity in front
of us? Either more technical/instrumental forms of ‘educational development’, more
subject to performance management and learning analytics and, even soon, roboticised
or more educational, reflective and considerate of students-as-persons with their own
unfolding lives? But might another option be available, even orthogonal to this
polarity? The ambition of the present volume is just that, to seek a quite different and
Foreword ix
bold approach, and to do it through the notion of the public good as both the context
for and the substance of educational development.
Why might it be said that the idea of the public good is orthogonal to the
instrumental–educational polarity that I have just sketched out? Because the idea of
the public good lies in a quite different realm from either the instrumental or the
educational polarities. It might be tempting to think that the public sphere is
simply an extension of the educational orientation; a point further out on that end
of the instrumental–educational polarity. But this would be to mistake the ambi­
tion advanced here – the connection with the idea of public – and, thereby, what
this book stands for.
To speak of the public realm here is to locate higher education in the wider
world and to summon up a glimpse of a particular space in it. It is a discursive
space, of give and take, of reason and reasoning, of care and sensibility, of unity
and difference, of equal participation across members of society and of collective
fruitfulness. Such a space is orthogonal to the polarity we have observed. On the
one hand, it looks outwards as does the instrumental conception of educational
development but it eschews instrumentalism. On the contrary, it sees value in the
public realm as a good in itself; indeed, in the public good. On the other hand, it
sympathises with the educational arm but in effect also contains a critique of that
position as being too inward. A concern with the public realm injects energy into
educational development precisely because it senses possibilities for it in helping to
further a public sphere that goes well beyond the university.
This book, therefore, is a brave book for it opens a quite new front for educational
development that cannot be ensnared within the conventional educational–instru­
mental territory. It amounts to nothing less than a completely new re-territorialisation
of the matter.
See what considerations and implications it brings in its wake. There is, first of
all, a bevvy of possibilities precisely in relation to the idea of public. We may
wonder, amidst the complexities of a riven age, whether it makes much sense to
speak of ‘the public’. Famously, Jürgen Habermas spoke of ‘the public sphere’
(which he wished to see ‘transformed’) but should we not now speak of public
spheres (plural)? Are there not a host of public spheres, and multiple communities,
towards which the university, and thereby programmes of study, might be orien­
ted? And is not the title of this book exquisitely chosen, therefore, in its speaking
of higher education neither for ‘a’public good nor for ‘the’public good but simply
for ‘public good’? This is a formulation that simultaneously orients higher educa­
tion outward – in that conjunction ‘for’ – and, in a delicious act of constructive
ambiguity, leaves it open as to whether there is a single or multiple public goods.
Just in relation to the idea of public, therefore, the book opens spaces and, in this
way again, runs outside and beyond the closures of the instrumental–educational
framing of educational development.
The title of this book adds another potent twist. It constitutes an argument in
favour of higher education not only for public good but as public good. That is to
say that educational development should be construed itself as a contributory part