The global discourse of quality assurance in higher education has highjacked the discussion about quality enhancement.
The focus on the external, visible and performative aspects of quality depend on quality enhancement, but sets a high bar globally. Discourses of excellence shape national policies for internationalisation in several countries, especially those who wished to be ranked globally.
The concern about quality in higher has led many scholars to explore the field. Mari Elken and Bjorn Stensaker, for instance, offered a conceptual took to re-centre the discussion toward the practices of quality by proposing the concept of ‘quality work’, defined as the multiple practices that address the quality for educational provision (Elken & Stensaker, 2018, 2020).
We depart from their work to place quality as a form of global social policy.
Quality as global social policy relates to “how transnational modes of political organisation, action and forces are implicated in changes to the aims, characteristics and outcomes of social policies” (Yeates, 2014, p.7). It acknowledges the role of actors, yet questioning their rationale for acting. In addition, it takes into account that quality is embedded in an audit culture (Power, 1997), where accountability is at the centre of (higher) education governance.
Nonetheless, looking beyond the excellence discourse, we are that quality work aimed at quality enhancement (Williams, 2016) can be/come mechanisms for the promotion of equity at the institutional level.
This is because quality enhancement largely depends on day-to-day activities which do not get picked up by the formal assessments of quality assurance. Examples are: pre-sessional language courses, writing clinics, teacher training programmes for new staff, projects to support affirmative action students, to cite a few.
As such, the project is interested on the range of activities that directly and indirectly contribute to the ‘external’ world of quality in higher education to become visible.
Aliandra Barlete
How to cite this blog post:
Barlete, A (2024). Quality for equity. https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/quality-he/quality-for-equity/.
