RESPONSE: ADDRESSING HIGHER EDUCATION

RICHARD BATES

Deakin University

The changes currently being imposed on universities in Australia are not unrelated to changes within the wider society. Globalisation, marketisation, economic rationalism, privatisation, managerialism and competitive individualism are all component technologies of the New World Order. They are pervasive and seek to transform not only economic and industrial institutions but also the structures of government, culture and civil society, as well as the public agencies which establish and maintain those structures. Universities are one of the key agencies of these traditions as well as of their transformation. They are therefore, typically sites of struggle over both ideas and practices. Over the past decade, Faculties of Education have been sites of considerable collateral damage as this struggle emerges within the AVCC as well as within individual universities.

The incorporation of 'second tier' Colleges of Advanced Education within universities or their canonisation as universities in their own right renewed struggles for status within a disrupted pecking order, one already threatened by the emergence of entrepreneurial universities established during the 1970's. It also produced significant internal transfers of resources including those from teacher education to other more 'university-like' areas of activities. One of the results of these transfers has been to create a shortage of graduates from teacher education faculties which will create significant problems for Australian education systems over the next decade.

The Australian Council of Deans of Education (ACDE) has responded to the changes by becoming a great deal more organised and more politically active, and by sponsoring research into various aspects of the work of faculties of education. ACDE has also played a significant moderating influence in Government attempts to construct various measures of quality control such as statements of competencies tbr beginning teachers, as well as lobbying for more effective support for continuing teacher professional development.

Questions of organisation, quality, supply and demand, are therefore, being addressed a formal level and responded to by Deans on behalf of their faculties

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and the system more broadly. Education research has, however, despite the role of AARE in initiating the ARC Strategic Review of Research in Education (1992), and in presenting a strong submission, been less well organised in the face of a significant decline in its resource and organisational base.

The Feb ARC News predicts a further fall from 2.1% to 1.7% of expenditure on research grants even though education accounts for 5.3% GDP and brings in export earnings of $1.8 billion annually. (ARC Newa Feb 1996) Yet educational research only accounts for 1.6% of total (gross) expenditure on research and development.

Recently, however, AARE has established the Research Directors' Network in order to inform and organise a more systematic response to both external and internal issues. The need for such a network was demonstrated by the difficulty faced by some Faculties in responding to the invitation to send their Research Director to the initial meeting. Some Faculties had no such position, nor did they have a Research school or committee. It seems as though our vulnerability to external events might have been at least in part due to our lack of internal organisation as well as external voice. Hopefully the Network will assist in remedying these deficiencies. It might also serve to develop policy briefs and position and information papers that will assist members in developing strategies for educational research.

On a broader basis AARE, through its journals and web sites, can encourage research based dialogue across a number of areas of concern. This issue of Australian Educational Researcher contains several papers relevant to such a dialogue.

The first, by Ray Over, presents an analysis of responses of researchers to the processes of ARC grant allocation. There is clearly a great deal of room for dissatisfaction when only one in five applicants is successful. Nonetheless, even when this is taken into account there is still substantial disquiet about a number of aspects of the ARC's operations. The most significant of these may well be the absence of a discipline-specific panel for education. Here is a political agenda which the AARE can continue to pursue.

The second paper by Lafferty takes up a rather different issue but exemplifies what a critical overview of research into higher education teaching can contribute to our understanding of both the labour process in higher education and the transformation of disciplinary boundaries and understanding. The effects of transformations in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are documented and explained, providing an insightful account of the ways in which defensible educational strategy can be overwhelmed by the politics of resource allocation.

The paper by Pearson and Beasley addresses a specific case of the relationship between resources educational strategy, that is, the need to provide

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international fee-paying students with mechanisms through which to remedy the lack of appropriate skills which they bring to bear on their studies in Australian universities. There is an obvious relationship here between the revenue- producing enrolment of such students and the costs to universities of providing such skill development programs.

The paper by Loughnan addresses a long standing question with regard to teacher education-what effect does it have in the face of the realities of the classroom? Loughnan's study is particularly interesting, as it shows how an initial rejection of the importance of pre-service teacher education gradually becomes modified as insights from that education resurface and become incorporated into a professional strategy for dealing with what is, at first, the overwhelming complexity of classroom life.

Each of these papers illustrates how universities are sites of essential research into current strategies for change in the organisation, purposes, labour processes and resource allocation procedures of higher education. Such research is vitally important as we try to understand not only the experiences of students and teachers in schools, but also the struggles over our own organisational, political, cultural and economic context and our own labour process.