During the last few years, the concept of generic skills and competences has become widespread across universities. An introduction to generic competences is, as such, important because it enables redefinition of educational goals and may positively rearrange forms of interaction in classes. It also indicates that education should inspire students to develop and use critical and creative forms of thinking, feeling and doing. On the one hand, the need to promote generic skills can be seen as driven by neoliberal desire. On the other, however, generic competences can enable students to think, feel and act differently, but also respect and welcome various forms of life and ways of living. Responding to the growing need to reflect upon generic competences, this book contributes to the various ways of conceptualising generic skills and the methods in which they might be acquired. The volume engenders adventurous encounters between different theories, which predominantly come from the feminist conceptual framework, that result in appealing meanings of affect and concepts. It also experimentally explores and discusses ways in which theories of affect and concepts may complicate understanding of generic competences and inspire generic skills-oriented education. Consequently, this collection revitalizes the concept of generic skills, but also advocates daring pedagogical practices that invigorate the meaning of and approach to teaching and learning in present landscapes of higher education.

This text addresses both the issues and practicalities of key skills in higher education. It discusses the issues relating to the introduction of key skills, drawing on both the arguments and theory of why key skills should (or should not) be introduced. Case study material is included.

In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list. Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents—all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.

First Published in 1987. The assumption about the purpose of education, to which the authors of this book subscribe, is that it is to produce autonomous lifelong learners. This book is about a very important goal of education and how it can be translated into practice. It concerns ways in which teachers in higher education can enable students to become more autonomous in their learning; that is, assist students to learn more effectively without the constant presence or intervention of a teacher.