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

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.

Postdigital Science and Education https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00253-5

Peter Goodyear is a Professor of Education at The University of Sydney and was founding co-director of the University’s Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation. From 2004 to 2015 he was co-director of the Centre for Research on Computer Supported Learning and Cognition (CoCo). He held an Australian Laureate Fellowship from 2010-2015 and is a Senior Fellow of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Before emigrating to Australia in 2003 Peter was Professor of Educational Research at Lancaster University in the UK. He was the founding director of Lancaster’s Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology. He has also held academic positions in Belfast, London and Birmingham. His B.Sc. and D.Phil. degrees are from the University of Ulster. He is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (UK). 

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