Who/What is the University in a Time of Restructure?

Who/What is the University in a Time of Restructure?

Come join us at Western Sydney University Parramatta South Campus, Rm EA.2.21 for a lively discussion on the future of universities in times of change. This workshop will delve into the challenges and opportunities facing higher education institutions today. Don't miss out on this insightful event!

This workshop led by the Critical Pedagogies Research Group addresses the current state of the contemporary university. In this workshop we draw on our experiences of the Western Sydney University restructure and the discourses/narratives around Resetting for Growth to ask broader questions about how we think, work and do critical pedagogies in our current Higher Education context. The CPRG’s work on Institutions and Structures recognises that critical pedagogy offers a frame for understanding, interrogating, disrupting, and transforming a suite of educational activities and practices that characterise and structure the routines of our institutional lives. These practices take place in contexts marked by policy landscapes that are ideological, media discourses that are neither neutral nor innocent, and power arrangements that often mimic and reproduce the contradictions of neo-liberalism and how we imagine the university and its role, including our role within it.

This workshop is envisaged as the first of a series of events designed to engage WSU colleagues in opening up the conceptual values that the institution is premised upon through our pedagogical practices. To this end we ask; how we can use the current times as a reflective/collective/activism moment to interrogate what our role in the university is? These events will generate opportunities for co-authorship on pieces that reflect on the purpose of critique and critical praxis within the current university context.

Participants are asked to read and respond to,

• Grant, B. M. (2021). Becoming-teacher as (in) activist: Feeling and Refusing the Force of University Policy. Policy Futures in Education, 19(5), 539-553

• Connell, R. (2019). The Good University: What universities Actually Do and Why it’s Time for Radical Change. Bloomsbury Publishing (Introduction only)

• Ensor, J. Not a Bug, but a Feature: The Myth of the ‘Single Point of Failure’ in University Restructures (2 pages)

Bring a ½ to 1 page response that will be shared with each other before the event. Participants will be asked to speak to their response (briefly) in any form they choose (poetry, visual, movement, spoken, etc) to generate dialogue.

Some suggested thinking points include:

• How do we understand the institutional conditions that we labour in and how can they be disrupted in ways that are more just?

• What discourses and narratives do we labour in and how might we encounter or intervene in these?

• What is our sense of being “counted” or accountability, or our sense of value, within the discourses that frame our professional praxis?

This activity will be followed by an embodied and creative activity that allows us to reflect upon the question of who we are as the university today, of what collective engagement, organisation, and indeed collaborative output might mean, considering different positionalities and sensibilities and how these can be summoned in the type of work that we undertake. If we ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) of our existing environments, what possibilities do we see coming from this for our pedagogical and research engagements? There will be a final reflective activity that considers further collaboration possibilities.

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