Blogs

Friends,

Our news today is coming from Brest, from the meeting of the PASCAL International Observatory where Rajesh and Budd have both been invited to offer keynote remarks.  This is the first time that we have appeared at the same event since the UNESCO Chair has been established.  We are very grateful to the University of Western Brittany and Dr. Jean-Marie Filloque for inviting us and to PASCAL for making us feel welcome amongst them.

Budd and Rajesh
Co-Chairs
UNESCO Chair in Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education

Dear Friends,

At the last meeting of GACER in Bonn in May of 2012, Prof Hans Schuetze, one of the best known Higher Education scholars working in the field of comparative studies agreed to lead a discussion about engagement and the rankings game. To this end he has launched a blog space to begin to develop some thoughts about community university engagement in the context of what are popularly known as the "league tables".  Many people working in engaged scholarship feel that the rankings tables are a distraction from more important ways of understanding universities and society.

Details of a new post within the School of Education at the University of Glasgow, the European base of PASCAL are found here. The person appointed will join an expanding staff grouping in the field of post-compulsory education.

The Main Duties and Responsibilities are as follows:

I was reminded of the Cape Town statement recently by Jin Yang of the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning in Hamburg. It was developed at the conference on Lifelong Learning, Higher Education and Active Citizenship held from the 10 - 12 October 2000 in Cape Town, co-hosted by University of Western Cape, the UNESCO Institute for Education and the Adult Education Research Group of the Danish National University of Education. I attach it here for us to reflect on how in the past decade universities have progressed in relation to the criteria laid out in the statement.

Readers may be interested in the National Collaborative for the Study of University Engagement (NCSUE) based at Michigan State University in the US. It seeks a greater understanding of how university engagement enhances faculty scholarship and community progress. How do scholars engage most effectively with their communities, and how, in turn, does such engagement enhance their scholarship?