Thematics
What this Symposium will do, among other things, is assist in seeing more clearly the implications of concepts such as internationalisation, marketisation, world class-universities, relevant research, governance, and excellence when these terms are em-bedded in discourses of persuasion. The Symposium will have a sharp ‘philosophical’ edge.
The Symposium will also contribute to the careful analysis of policies which are en-deavouring to reform, reconstruct and re-energise the university in specific contexts in Europe and in the USA and elsewhere. What are the policy principles and policy ac-tions which are creating the reform of universities and their governance, their quality control systems, their knowledge production, their changing professoriate and their changing student cohorts, and their definitions of teaching-and-learning in specific places in contemporary times? And what are the subsequent policy consequences and puzzles which arise from those reforms? For these policy analyses, the Symposi-um will have a sharp narrative core.
And the Symposium will also look simultaneously backwards and forwards. The Sym-posium will capture and illustrate some of the major historical and sociological changes in the relations of State and market, of university traditions and current innovations, which frame the central question of the Symposium: what, here and now, and in which places, would count as ‘creative governance’ and why? In this sense, the Symposium by noting some of the patterns of the past, looks alertly towards the future – and the avoidance of simplistic ‘solutions’ for the improvement of that future and of the univer-sity and its governance.
The International Congress of University Teaching and Innovation (CIDUI) is an initia-tive of the Universities of Catalonia (Spain) in which participate usually between 800 and 1,000 university professors from various parts of the world. It is celebrated every two years. So far six Congresses have been organized. The last one was held in July 2010, in Barcelona, with the participation of 839 delegates. During the CIDUI initiatives for educational improvement are presented that, in many cases, anticipate the future and the changes that await the University in the field of educational innovation. The Congresses, through their symposiums, workshops, speeches and debates, facilitate the attendants an updated review of significant international trends in education and innovation in Higher Education.
In the years between two consecutive Congresses an International Symposium on cur-rent issues of unquestionable academic relevance is announced. These are meetings of experts and senior managers of universities. Five symposia have been held thus far. The themes of the past symposia have been focussed on issues such as “World of Work and University”, “The design of teaching by skills” or “Teaching, research and learning”.
The six Congresses and five Symposia held till now have enabled us to closely follow current trends and common goals shared by many universities and to cooperate from a teaching practice rooted in the classroom, reflected and discussed with other col-leagues and revised in the light of experiences in other countries and enriched by re-flection and theoretical discussion with renowned experts and researchers.
Goals and Aims
• Examine changes in models and paradigms of the university in the last few decades
• Examine which university policies are driven today’s reforms and the challenges and shortcomings of these processes
• Illustrate the most relevant social and historical changes in the relations between the university, the state and the market
• Review the concept of ‘creative governance’ and its role in the university’s response to major issues and challenges in euro-peans societies in counterpoint with the usa and leading coun-tries of asia.
If the problems were as simple as perceiving that the University is changing, then an intellectual understanding of “changing colleges” would be very easy to design.
Organized by:
