Challenges of the Graduate Attributes Movement
Kate Chanock
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Abstract: In response to pressures for accountability, most Australian universities are currently working to integrate the development of desirable “Graduate Attributes” (GAs) into their curricula. Although the adoption of GAs is typically initiated by senior management and implemented through the institutional structure of committees and academic units, it is wise for LAS advisers to inform ourselves about them for two reasons. As we are perceived to teach generic skills, we may be called upon to play a role in designating attributes and/or facilitating the integration of these into the subject curricula, and perhaps also to assist with the professional development of staff in the disciplines to adapt their teaching. Secondly, it is possible that we will be asked to teach generic units focusing on developing Graduate Attributes. In this paper, therefore, I discuss the problem of designating attributes that can be fostered, observed and assessed during a course of study, and then go on to focus on particular challenges for Arts degrees. There are practical difficulties in integrating GAs into a degree structure that typically has no stable cohort progressing through common subjects. There are also cultural problems such as tensions between the corporate values of the workplace and the academic emphasis on individual competition, and between the action orientation of business and the academic search for nuanced understandings. The paper suggests ways of making explicit what Arts degrees do well, and of fostering attributes that are often underdeveloped in a B.A.
Keywords: graduate attributes, humanities
Introduction
A movement is gathering momentum within Australian universities, as in Britain, to designate and develop “Graduate Attributes”(GAs) or generic skills in their students. This is driven both by community pressures for accountability, and by perceptions that it will make students more employable. There is a risk, however, that in rushing to comply with the expectation that they implement GAs, universities may adopt some which cannot be observed or assessed in the course of a degree.
This paper examines some of the problems in both designating and implementing GAs. I will focus particularly on the challenges to Arts Faculties: both practical problems with integrating the development of attributes into their loosely structured sequences of subjects, and cultural problems of reconciling the different purposes and methods of business and academic life. Within the limits of what is appropriate and feasible, I will suggest ways of making the skills that are developed more explicit, and of fostering some skills that are often underdeveloped in an Arts degree.
Background (what are Graduate Attributes and where do they come from?)
The Australian Technology Network (ATN), comprised of five universities around the country, defines graduate attributes as “the qualities, skills, and understandings a university community agrees its students should develop during their time with the institution” (Bowden et al. 2002). Murdoch University breaks these down into “the traditional academic skills (intellectual skills concerned with critical analysis and logical thinking), personal development skills (independence and self-reliance), and enterprise skills (leadership, interpersonal and presentation skills)” (Murdoch 2000; this and other websites referred to in this paper can be found in the list of references at the end). The last two categories address the concerns expressed by employers in response to a Nielson survey on “Employer Satisfaction with Graduates”. Perceived weaknesses were in the areas of “creativity and flair”; ability to deal with problems in the context of the workplace; teamwork; oral (and, to a lesser extent, written) communication; “interpersonal skills”; and “understanding of business practice” (DETYA 2000).
The process of adoption: what are universities doing?
Some of these concerns seem to have to do with office life rather than generic skills, and may be things that one must learn on the job (cf. Bennett et al. 1999, p. 82). Nevertheless, the government has accepted that it is the responsibility of universities to prepare students for the workplace; and universities have, in turn, accepted this responsibility. Most have by now developed lists of attributes and are working out how to demonstrate that these attributes are being fostered in their curricula, and being learnt by their students. Generally, there are four kinds of responses to this challenge, along the following lines.
Some universities are adopting the Graduate Skills Assessment (GSA), a psychometric test developed by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) to test Problem Solving, Critical Thinking, Written Communication, and Interpersonal Understandings. The idea is to compare students’ scores on entry and exit from their course (to measure “value added”). This solution has, at present, no particular implications for curriculum change, although if it is widely adopted it seems likely that universities will institute some kind of “teaching for the test”, in order to enhance their market edge vis-à-vis one another. (For sample questions and reports on trials of the test, see ACER’s website. For an extended critique of the GSA, see Clerehan et al. 2003.) A second strategy is to say that the Graduate Attributes are already encompassed in the teaching and learning activities in the degree. Alternatively, institutions may put on special subjects to teach or raise awareness of GAs. By far the most common response, however, seems to be to map GAs across all subjects taught, showing where and how they are taught, identifying gaps, and developing the curriculum to address these. The University of South Australia (UNISA) has been an early, zealous and thorough adopter of this approach, and its methods are detailed on its website. The ATN, to which UNISA belongs, has produced a very useful report on its members’ joint efforts, with a number of case studies. One example indicates the kind of thing that is happening:
[At UNISA], For each of [the] generic capabilities [life-long learning, critical and creative thinking and internationalisation], indicators for nursing were developed. For example, an indicator of internationalisation was the ability to appreciate the influence of language and culture on health care practices. To foster this awareness students were required to undertake activities to explore health beliefs and activities of someone from another culture as a learning activity. (Bowden et al. 2002).
Universities involved in this kind of process stress a number of things that are needed if it is to go well. It is important, first of all, that academics should “own” the process (Bennett et al. 1999, pp. 76-77, 90; Harding 2000; Laybourn et al. 2000; Scoufis 2000). One way to encourage this is to facilitate ways in which academics can learn methods from each other (at RMIT, at Murdoch, and at Wollongong, for example, staff are putting their methods up on the web for other staff members to access). It is important, too, to aim for a process that, while involving all academic staff, makes only reasonable demands upon their time and the elasticity of the subjects they teach. Software can be provided for mapping attributes onto curricula (see, e.g., http://www.tlc.murdoch.edu.au/gradatt/ or UNISA’s website cited above). At the last stage, “Academics [need] to be provided with pragmatic but sound ways by which they could easily integrate the development of the attributes into their curricula” without detracting from the coverage of content (Scoufis 2000).
Complications
Although this process is well underway in so many institutions, there are aspects of it which must be questionable. One, to which I alluded above, is the inclusion in the GAs of capacities that probably cannot be taught in universities, and belong more properly to on-the-job training, or even to informal induction into the culture of the workplace. Similarly, there are a number of GAs in the lists adopted by most universities that are simply not observable during the course of any university degree. This problem is not necessarily inherent in the notion of graduate attributes, for the ones in the West Review (reported in Bowden et al. 2002) are relevant to, and for the most part observable in, the course of university study:
· the capacity for critical, conceptual and reflective thinking in all aspects of intellectual and practical activity;
· technical competence and an understanding of the broad conceptual and theoretical elements of his or her fields of specialisation;
· intellectual openness and curiosity, and an appreciation of the interconnectedness, and areas of uncertainty, in current human knowledge;
· effective communication skills in all domains (reading, writing, speaking and listening);
· research, discovery, and information retrieval skills and a general capacity to use information;
· multifaceted problem solving skills and the capacity for team work; and high ethical standards in personal and professional life, underpinned by a capacity for self-directed activity.
Most of these do relate to university curricula. However, the attributes under the last point do raise questions of how a university would plan to monitor a graduate’s “personal and professional life”; and this sort of problem is still more evident in the formulations adopted by different universities, where we find a mixture of values and attitudes that would be very difficult to assess. The following list (extracted from the websites of a range of universities) is only a selection from many similar ones, but gives some indication of the problem:
· “life-long learning”, “social responsibility” (U. of New England);
· “be flexible in approach and adaptable to change”, “be committed to ethical practice in their chosen field”, “be able to work effectively within culturally diverse settings”, and “value social justice, tolerance and responsible action” (Victoria University);
· “the ability to plan and achieve goals in both the personal and the professional sphere” (U. of Sydney);
· “demonstrates international perspectives as a professional and as a citizen” (UNISA);
· “work toward improvement in society”, “act in environmentally sustainable ways” and “have the ability to initiate new ideas, implement decisions and cope with uncertainty” (U. of Canberra);
· “an ability to function in a multi-cultural or global environment” and “a desire to continually seek improved solutions and to initiate, and participate in, organization and social change” (U. of Wollongong).
Although most of these refer to graduates’ values and behaviours after they graduate, an institution that adopts these sorts of attributes is saddling itself with the task of ensuring that they are developed in every student in every degree and assessed before graduation. This is both a logical and a practical impossibility, and it is surprising that so many universities seem to be undertaking it. Far more pragmatic is a policy like that of the Arts Faculty at the University of Melbourne, whose website lists a set of skills that are both relevant to their degree and feasible to foster within it: “research; critical thinking and analysis; thinking in theoretical terms; thinking creatively; understanding of social, ethical and cultural context; communicating knowledge intelligibly and economically; written communication; public speaking; attention to detail; time management and planning”. It is then possible for the Faculty to list the ways in which these skills are fostered through the methods of teaching and learning already in place.
Another way of tackling the problem is not to claim that one’s graduates “will”, or “should”, or “are expected to” behave in particular ways after graduation, regardless of their field, but to say that they will have an awareness of skills and qualities that may be required of them in the future, and to say that their skills will be those appropriate to the disciplines they have studied. The University of Southern Queensland has taken this approach in its list of “Attributes of a USQ Graduate”, which include, for example,
Competence and emerging expertise in their chosen discipline(s);…An awareness of the need for, and an understanding of, high professional standards and ethical behaviour;… and an understanding of the social, environmental and cultural context of their discipline(s). (Bowden 2002)
Some challenges for Arts Degrees
While the problems canvassed above apply to GAs generally, there are further problems in adopting a standard list across a range of disciplines. How, for example, is Maths to foster values such as Murdoch’s attribute of “justice”? It seems more appropriate for different Faculties, and possibly different courses, to “own” some kinds of attributes and limit their claims to foster others. In the area with which I am familiar, Humanities and Social Sciences, some of the common attributes are a close match with what is taught, but others raise problems both practical and philosophical – or perhaps, more properly, cultural.
Practical problems
The literature on developing GAs, and the case studies documented there, come mainly from technical and professional courses, which may find it easiest to implement the integration of attributes, as these derive largely from employers’ requirements, and make sense in terms of professional training (cf. Bennett et al. 1999, p. 81). For generalist courses like the B.A. – which have traditionally claimed to foster generic skills – implementation may, paradoxically, be more difficult. With no core subjects and no stable cohort proceeding through a set sequence of subjects, the B.A. structure does not lend itself to planning that shares out the development of attributes across the whole degree. It is tempting, for this reason, to put all the students through a hurdle subject in which the attributes are implemented; but many teachers think that there is little educational value in teaching skills outside of specific contexts – as an “add-on” subject (Laybourn et al. 2000). The literature on expertise and transfer of training, moreover, suggests that ‘skills’ must be learned in a context of knowledge, and do not necessarily transfer well from one context to another (Perkins & Salomon 1994; Bennett et al. 1999, p. 76; Holmes 2000). If this is so, B.A. courses face a challenge to highlight the ways that skills are integrated into the curriculum, and learned in a way that facilitates transfer.
Cultural problems
The cultural or philosophical problems are, if anything, more difficult to resolve. In general, observers have noted a tension between the intellectual orientation of universities and the practical goals of business: between, as Bennett et al. (1999, p.73) put it, “contemplative” and “instrumental” orientations to knowledge (cf. Bradshaw 1992, p. 44. In addition, Bradshaw very usefully discusses the extent to which “skills” may overlap with personality, and the contrasts between personalities that do well in business and those that do well in study). The disjunctions are many, and the ones identified here are by no means exhaustive.