Realising the Good University: Social Innovation, Care, Design Justice and Educational Infrastructure

Abstract

This paper is a contribution to the collective work of imagining better universities. It starts from Raewyn Connell’s account of the good university, and develops four main ideas. Connell’s insistence on thinking about universities as real workplaces, with real workforces doing real work that has real consequences, provides a disciplining foundation. On this basis, we must acknowledge that although changes are often set in motion outside a university, their realisation always depends on the work of university staff and students. Secondly, research on learning and teaching and the spaces in which they unfold can contribute to real change by providing stronger concepts and clearer language in which to imagine, discuss and plan. Thirdly, course and curriculum redesign, oriented to the great challenges that our students will be tackling in the next few decades, would benefit from an infusion of practices and values from the fields of social innovation and participatory design, and that design for social innovation needs a grounding in design justice. Finally, I outline some of the implications that we can infer for better learning spaces — understood from both a postdigital and a postcritical perspective. A connecting theme within this exploration is the realisation of care as thoughtful work.

University Estates and Postdigital Higher Education: Space, Place, and Being a University

“…Specifically, how pedagogy needs major revisiting to understand what learning is in virtual and physical environments. Similarly, Goodyear ( 2022 ) argues to for the realizing of a university we desire through questions of design justice, educational infrastructure, and social innovation. While these approaches highlight several key tensions, drivers, and debate the dimensions influencing the material and sociospatial environment of university estates, they would also benefit from further discussion of who might influence their respective aims and objectives and how values and principles could be imbued into the material and sociospatial environments of which the authors speak.…”

Materials and Places for Learning: Experiences of Doctoral Students in and around University Spaces

“…As Boys ( 2022 : 32) argues, such inequalities will only be addressed when we are able ‘to see how the encounters, space, time and technologies of higher education are already differentially distributed and how underlying discriminatory patterns are currently being ignored, challenged or reframed’. A critical stance is also foregrounded by Goodyear ( 2022 ), in a discussion of learning spaces grounded on design justice, educational infrastructure and social innovation. As Goodyear ( 2022 : 52) remarks, ‘creating new spaces for learning requires us to work (reflexively)’ to develop capacity that allows ‘people to aspire, to look up, to look at the future and map plausible routes towards states of affairs that they have reason to value’.…”

“…A critical stance is also foregrounded by Goodyear ( 2022 ), in a discussion of learning spaces grounded on design justice, educational infrastructure and social innovation. As Goodyear ( 2022 : 52) remarks, ‘creating new spaces for learning requires us to work (reflexively)’ to develop capacity that allows ‘people to aspire, to look up, to look at the future and map plausible routes towards states of affairs that they have reason to value’. Foundational to this discussion is to identify the high-level values and ways of working that will help us realize the university that we desire.…”

“…Overall, these recent postdigital studies invite us to consider learning spaces beyond their physical dimensions and/or teaching and learning practices; they invite us to carefully notice the complex configurations of human and non-human actors, and how this assemblage extends far beyond single physical elements or pedagogical practices, towards university strategy, government policy, digital technologies and so on (Lamb et al 2022 ). And as Spire ( 2022 ) suggests, they reveal that there are many tensions, such as those related to the influence of materials in the socio-spatial environment of universities, which call for a better understanding of whose aims and objectives are at stake and how certain values and principles might be expressed through the material and socio-spatial environments of universities (Boys 2022 ; Goodyear 2022 ; Spire 2022 ). In line with these ideas, in our research, we draw on a notion of learning spaces that foregrounds people, places, material and digital elements and the materiality of learning in and around university spaces — being these at classrooms, at libraries, in the canteen, in the corridors, via learning management systems, social media and in the many in-between spaces students and lecturers navigate, including when working from home.…”

“…Importantly, the physical space of a university has a symbolic significance for all — those on-campus and those at a distance. Exploring doctoral students’ unique social, cultural and institutional experiences may help us understand how to best design for a more inclusive doctoral environment, one that reflects the voices and needs of all students and allows us to work towards building a learning community, or the university we desire (Goodyear 2022 ). The next section details the background for the research study, including the research design, followed by the analysis and discussion of emerging findings of this research, with a focus on place attachment, materiality, belonging and identity.…”