1. Being a Graduate in the Twenty-first Century
Sub-brand to go here
Being a Graduate in the Twenty-first Century
Ronald Barnett, Institute of Education, London
International Career Studies Symposium, University of Reading, September, 2009
Centre for Higher
Education Studies

2. Context – and Emma’s tale
A present context: the unemployed graduate
‘Last year, I created a new society for the University, for my course. That involved quite a lot of responsibility and taking control and I’ve never been in that, sort of, leadership position before. … the society stuff definitely helped my degree – if no other reason than just feeling more accessible to the lecturers and the tutors.
‘I’m [also] an artist .. I tend to do [large] landscapes in acylics.
Q Do you see that as something quite separate or do you think it spills over in any way?
‘Yeah, I think it does in a way because I was thinking about how long it takes me to do the paintings, I think that’s, kind of, patience and the motivation to do it because there’s times when I think, I just want to give up.’

3. Beginning questions So from these two starting points:
Just what is it to be a graduate in the C21?
Just what might we hope for from our students?
What might they want of themselves?
How might we understand ‘career’ now (eg amid (worldwide) recession)
What is it to learn in a university? What are the responsibilities of a university towards its students?

4. Changing answers Built successively around the themes of:
knowledge/ understanding (‘initiation’)
skills (‘employability’)
And now emerging?
wellbeing (‘therapy’)
citizenship (‘the global citizen’)

5. The twenty-first century
Challenge
Change
Uncertainty
Complexity/ supercomplexity
Division – differences – of values, of resources, of perspectives
Global dimension

6. Students as Global Citizens
A care/ concern for the world
A sense of interconnectedness
Not living in one’s own world
Helping to bring about a better world (cf ‘wisdom’)
A project of ‘engagement’
Implies first-handedness; genuine (critical) thought & action
Impact on curricula
And on opportunities while a student

7. Forms of learning Sense that learning takes place in multiple sites
Even for the student
Is anything special about the student’s academic learning?
Lifewide learning – horizontal learning
Lifelong learning – learning through time
(We’ll come back to these matters in a moment.)

8. The ideas of ‘graduate attributes’ & ‘graduateness’
(So) the world presents human being with considerable challenges – technical, social, communicative, personal
We look to graduates esp to be human beings who can live purposively in the face of these challenges
Even to be exemplary human beings
Such a world requires, in the first place, neither knowledge nor skills but dispositions and qualities of certain kinds

9. Dispositions for a world of challenge
A will to learn
A will to engage
A preparedness to listen
A preparedness to explore
A willingness to hold oneself open to experiences
A determination to keep going forward

10. Qualities for a world of challenge
Carefulness
Courage
Resilience
Self-discipline
Integrity
Restraint
Respect for others
Openness

11. Dispositions and qualities compared
The dispositions are necessary; the qualities have a degree of optionality in them
Hence, just a few dispositions; but many qualities
The dispositions enable one to go forward
The qualities colour that forward movement; give it ‘character’

12. The (higher) educational significance of the dispositions and qualities
The dispositions and qualities are concomitants of a genuine higher education
Curricula and pedagogies could nurture them
But often fall short
Students are denied curricula space, and pedagogical affirmation
But the dispositions and qualities (above) are logically implied in a ‘higher’ education.

13. The idea of a career
The idea of ‘career’ implied steady progression in a particular (and challenging) field of work
And that there were clear boundaries between work and non-work
Both of those axioms have to be ditched
Against the considerations here, a ‘career’ becomes the continuous public working out of one’s possibilities in an uncertain world
It is the sedimentation of the dispositions and the widening and strengthening of the qualities
In particular, the will to learn (disposition) and courage and openness (qualities) are paramount
‘Careers Units’ should perhaps be renamed ‘For-Life Units’

14. Lifewide learning
Being a graduate (it follows) calls for both lifelong and for lifewide learning
If lifelong lng is lng through one’s lifespan, lifewide learning is learning across one’s life experiences
Implications for universities: the opening up of learning experiences outside the formal curriculum – both on and off campus.
It just may be that graduates gain as much – in the formation of the dispositions and qualities – from non-formal settings as from the formal curriculum.
So the idea of the ‘life-informed curriculum’ beckons
(We are unclear as to the relationships between the student’s manifold sites of learning; to what degree learning in one domain can assist learning in another domain. The answer may lie in Ds and Qs.)

15. Conclusions Becoming clearer about being a graduate in the C21 calls
for a sense of the world in which graduates find themselves
& of the responsibilities graduates have in the world
- to themselves and to others and even to the world itself
In turn, the idea of ‘career’ diminishes
But there arises larger questions as to the relationship
between graduates and the wider world
In turn, arise profound issues over curriculum & pedagogy
& in turn, arise qs as to the responsibilities of universities
And so arises the question of the university in the C21
It is that, no less, that lies before us in these considerations.
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