Beyond Employability: Educating Cosmopolitan Citizens

1. Beyond Employability: Educating Cosmopolitan Citizens Professor Martin Haigh, SSSL Dr Valerie Clifford, OCSLD

2. Internationalisation of the curriculum at Brookes encompasses: • Global perspectives • Intercultural awareness • Responsible citizenship

3. What are the needs of our graduates in terms of their future lives, living and working in a globalised, multicultural world, and what does this mean for their discipline?

4. Undergraduate Attributes • Critical understanding • Informed by current developments in the subject • An awareness of the provisional nature of knowledge, how knowledge is created, advanced and renewed, and the excitement of changing knowledge • The ability to identify and analyse problems and issues and to formulate, evaluate and apply evidence based solutions and arguments • An ability to apply a systematic and critical assessment of complex problems and issues • An ability to deploy techniques of analysis and enquiry • Familiarity with advanced techniques and skills • Originality and creativity in formulating, evaluating and applying evidence-based solutions and arguments • An understanding of the need for a high level of ethical, social, cultural, environmental and wider professional conduct.

5. Masters Attributes • Conceptual understanding that enables critical evaluation of current research and advanced scholarship • Originality in the application of knowledge • The ability to deal with complex issues and make sound judgments in the absence of complete data. QAA(Scotland), 2007

6. Graduate Attributes for a Digital Age • Able to handle multiple, diverse information sources and media • Proficiently mediating their interactions with social and professional groups using a . . . range of technologies • Able confidently to use digital technologies to reflect on, record and mange their lifelong learning • Self regulating citizens in a globally connected society. Benfield and Francis, 2008

7. Crick Report, 1998 “To make secure and to increase the knowledge, skills and values relevant to the nature and practices of participative democracy; also to enhance the awareness of rights and duties, and the sense of responsibilities needed for the development of … active citizens…[with] involvement in the local and wider community”

8. Britishness should emphasise the way in which those values connect to universal human rights, and recognise that critical and divergent perspectives, as well as the potential to have alternative and different layers of identity, are a central part of what contemporary Britishness is about” House of Commons Education and Skills Cttee, 2007

9. Planetary/Cosmopolitan Citizenship Attributes The capacity for self-criticism and critical thought about one’s own traditions, and the abilities both to see oneself as a member of a heterogeneous nation and world and to imagine sympathetically the lives of people different from oneself. Nussbaum, 2007

10. Our Vision We want our graduates to be the best people they can be: • good for themselves • good for other people, not least ourselves • good for the planet. We would like them to be able to: • solve the problems of the future • care for those who cannot care for themselves • defend the social values that we believe in • protect the environment for those who will follow • help set our world on a sustainable course.

11. Graduate Attributes • Responsible Citizens • Capable Citizens • Compassionate Citizens • Self-aware Citizens • Ecoliterate Citizens • Cosmopolitan Citizens • Employed Citizens

12. Graduate Skills & Employability • Retrieve and manage information and knowledge • Get Results • Think Creatively and Innovate • Demonstrate Expertise in their Special Discipline(s) • Communicate • Work in a Team • Act as an effective leader or manager • Develop autonomously • Committed to quality and social justice • Adapt to Change • Learn from Experience

13. Academics’ Beliefs about Graduate Attributes • Precursor conception • Complement conception • Translation conception ‘If a student can’t exercise abilities like ethical judgement and creativity, and balance these against scientific method in their research then they are not professional scientists!’ • Enabling conception Barrie, 2006

14. Value-ladened We are aware that we are talking from a value-ladened position that believes in self questioning, critiquing ideas, working to sustain our planet, equity, justice and a general sense of social responsibility. These are not universally held values but we do not believe that it is possible to educate in a value-free way, and our higher education institution, Oxford Brookes University, has made it explicit that it stands for these values.

15. So, you may wish to contest the values held by Oxford Brookes or you may choose to explore creative ways of developing cosmopolitan and professional citizens.