The holistic curriculum of capability: whose holism?

ROBYN LINES, RMIT UNIVERSITY PETER MUIR, RMIT UNIVERSITY

in the now prominent capability based approach to curriculum is on a holistic design leading to capable performance that equips students to act effectively within rapidly changing socio-economic contexts. Consensus amongst the teaching team is required as they must collectively agree upon the discipline relevant capabilities to be developed and the learning experiences, assessment and feedback strategies that must be linked in an explicit, coherent and meaningful way (Bowden et al 2000, p.10) if the capability is to be achieved. Implicit in such descriptions is what constitutes a meaningful way; what values shape the coherence within the curriculum. Whilst there are multiple variations on the concept of capability, two themes dominate and occupy ends of a continuum of positions on capability. The rst emphasises student centredness and the humanist values of values of inclusive participation, access and individual development for work and full participation in civic life. The major alternate position emphasises meeting industry requirements for capable employees able to contribute effectively and immediately to wealth generation. The focus on generic capabilities is seen to provide a means of closing the employability gap (BHERT, 2003). Through the review of the capability proles generated for ve different programs at RMIT University and discussion with participants, this paper describes the concepts of capability that have prevailed in practice.
KEYWORDS: Capability,

ABSTRACT: Emphasis

curriculum renewal, holistic outcomes

INTRODUCTION A capability based approach to tertiary education has become dominant within the Australian higher education sector in recent years. The push for a focus on what graduates should be capable of when they leave universities has been driven by a combination of government, employer, academic and student interests. The convergence of thinking around the relevance of capability development within the higher education sector has coincided with a period of radical change in the governance of universities. The impact of these changes has seen the institutions interpret the concept of capability in widely divergent ways (BHERT, 2003). RMIT University has been part of this movement and has recognised that capable graduates should be the outcome of a university education. To this end it has made the renewal of all its curricula to a capability based approach a key teaching and learning strategy. The authors have been involved with a variety of program teams in the renewal of their curricula and through this experience have become aware of the different ways in which this task is approached and interpreted. The rst part of this paper briey outlines the features of a capability based approach that are central to our investigation and the approaches we have used in our analysis. The second part presents the analysis of ve different programs renewed to a capability base over the last two years.

CAPABILITY AS A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO CURRICULUM A key feature of this approach to curriculum is that capability is understood as holistic the essential integration of personal qualities, skills and specialist knowledge which enables students to be effective (Stephenson & Weil, 1992, p.3). For Stephenson & Weil (1992) the holistic curriculum integrates personal, social and work dimensions of capability development. Before a teaching team can design a curriculum that will support the development of this holistic capability they must arrive at some consensus as to what constitutes the desirable capability graduates should possess. According to a DETYA funded study, the achievement of the agreed capability then requires that the learning experiences, assessment and feedback strategies within the course of study be linked in an explicit, coherent and meaningful way (Bowden et al 2000, p.10) so that it may be achieved. The development of a capability based curriculum, therefore, focuses attention upon the different views within the design team of what being effective might mean and their different understandings of what might constitute a coherent and meaningful view of the world. The differing positions concerning these questions contain different views about who, in addition to the design team, is able to determine what concepts of effectiveness are legitimate. A second feature of the capability approach is that it sits within a traditional understanding of the purpose of education as the creation of modernitys self-motivated, selfdirecting, rational subject, capable of exercising individual agency (Usher & Edwards, 1994, p.2). Resistance to the approach has been maily concerned with the precise determination of the desirable qualities the self-motivated, autonomous students are expected to develop and with whom the responsibility for dening this rests. Whilst there are critiques of the capability approach from critical and postmodern perspectives that do, in fact, question the modernist purposes of education these are not addressed in this paper. VARIATIONS IN THE DEFINITION OF HOLISM Even within the mainstream debates about capability from a modernist perspective there is a wide variety of interpretations which privilege different concepts of effectiveness and the authority of different people to determine this. At one end are concepts of capability that emphasise student centredness and humanist values of inclusive participation, access and individual development for work and full participation in civic life. Stephenson and Weils denition of capability, for example

explicitly identies capability as relevant for personal, social and working lives and emphasises that in developing capability students are required to explore and explain its relevance to their own development and to the wider community (p.xv). In the attainment of capability students are required to accept a signicant role by taking greater responsibility for their own learning by negotiating their learning experiences, through active participation in peer managed collaborative work and structured reection. Proponents of such models of capability generally emphasise the recognition of non academic learning and the potential of the approach to enhance equity by better meeting the needs of non-traditional students. At the other end of the continuum of positions on capability are those that emphasise concepts of tness for employment as central to what constitutes effectiveness. These approaches are further differentiated by the conception of work that informs them. Fairly traditional views of the professional as expert, compete with conceptions of the new exible worker necessary for the emerging global enterprise economy and the team based, innovative workplace. These elaborations of capability usually make a passing reference to the social and civic purposes of education but concentrate on the acquisition of attitudes, skills and competencies perceived as functional to the needs of the socio-economic order (Usher & Edwards, 1994, p.48). In the determination of what constitutes capable practice in these models great weight is given to the views of professional bodies or employer and industry groups. A TOOL FOR ANALYSING VARIATION IN CONCEPTIONS OF CAPABILITY The adoption of a capability based approach to curriculum has been driven quite signicantly at the institutional level pushed by the Commonwealth governments requirement that each university provide a statement of the generic attributes graduates may expect to develop through study with them. The ways institutions have responded to the capability agenda have been profoundly shaped by the broader policy reforms introduced by the Commonwealth government since the 1980s. The Dawkins reforms (Commonwealth of Australia, 1987, 1988) were the rst and introduced many of the principles and practices adopted by private sector corporations. Terms such as strategic planning, best practice, quality management, etc became entrenched within university discourse. The reforms following the West Report (Commonwealth of Australia, 1998) introduced market logic to the sector with the insistence on competition and consumer choice as the route to effectiveness and efciency in the development and distribution of educational products.

In characterising the diversity and evolution of these discourses within universities, McNay (1995) identied four distinct organisational models that differ on the basis of the level of policy specication and control over implementation. He named these the collegium, the bureaucracy, the corporation and the enterprise (Refer to Figure 1). McNay argues that each model will be simultaneously present in any organisation but one of them will dominate. The collegium represents the form of university organisation that existed prior to the Government reforms introduced in the 1980s and is characterised by a loose policy framework and loose control over implementation. In this model the specication of the curriculum and processes for implementation and evaluation resides primarily with academic staff at the local level. The bureaucracy focuses on internal efciency and the regulation of behaviours through

mechanisms such as standard operating procedures. In this model there is considerable scope to conceptualise the curriculum in a variety of ways but greater central control is exercised over the operational aspects of curriculum development, implementation and evaluation. The corporation is the organisational form that emerged from the rst wave Dawkins reforms. The corporate model saw responsibility for the curriculum shift from the academic at the local level (bottom-up) to the manager at the central or corporate level (top-down). The model of the enterprise university retains the top down specication of the curriculum through institutional policy. This model reects the second wave of University reform where high levels of exibility and responsiveness at the local level are required to meet the needs demands of customer and markets.

Policy denition loose

collegium

bureaucracy

Control of Implementation

loose

tight

enterprise

corporation

tight

Figure 1: Models of universities as organisations (McNay, 1995)

In a similar vein, Hough (2001, p.3) has argued there are four paradigms or logics-of-action simultaneously present within the university. He has elaborated these logics-of-action as ideal types but notes that in practice they are mixed in ways which may well be internally contradictory (See Figure 2). Managerial Beneciary Nature of service Staff role Consumer Product Manager of learning experiences Better management Professional Student (client) Service Market Customer Commodity Cmmunity Student (citizen) Participation Enabler, facilitator, scholar Facilitation Building belonging and collective identity Socialisation

Teacher/ researcher/ Broker of educational scholar opportunities Professional bodies Customer choice Supply and demand

Accountability & policy direction

Clearer planning and Codes of practice specication Staff development and educational support Support for scholarship

We have used this delineation of the differing paradigms as a tool to explore different approaches to developing capability based curricula in ve programs at RMIT. Through review of capability proles developed and interviews with program leaders and some staff, we have sought to identify how the beneciary is dened, how the nature of service or practice has been understood, how the staff role is dened and to whom accountability is rst directed. Our purpose is to discover what and how conceptions of capability are being developed in practice. THE RMIT APPROACH The approach adopted at RMIT draws upon a report undertaken by the Australian Technology Network (ATN) for DETYA (Bowden et al, 2000) which itself utilises work by Bowden and Marton (1998). The approach requires that students take considerable responsibility for the development of their capabilities, however, this is rmly placed within a managed curriculum model where the determination of the capability to be developed and the orchestration of learning experiences rests with the university community. (Bowden et al, p. iii). Three arguments are put forward for this approach. First, part of the role of a university is to provide citizens who can operate as agents of social good in the community (Ibid, p.4). Second, because students frequently work in

areas that are removed from their original educational focus and because knowledge is rapidly developing, students need to develop their capabilities to deal with situations that they have not encountered before (Ibid, p.5). Finally, there is a need to respond to employer concerns about the adequacy of graduate abilities beyond mastery of discipline knowledge. Whilst the approach acknowledges the role of universities in the development of citizenship this is passed over rapidly as the reports primary concern is with a subset of the attributes institutions have adopted, specically those concerned with the transition to the workplace (Ibid, p.4). The world of work envisaged within the ATN report is modelled upon a fairly traditional view of professional practice. This is evident in the following description of knowledge capability provided in the report which adopts a linear and individualised problem solving approach as a key to professional practice. The development of knowledge capability goes beyond the accumulation and understanding of technical content and enables a graduate to: Work out what are the key aspects to be dealt with in each new situation encountered Relate those aspects to knowledge already acquired and/or to knowledge the graduate knows how to access

Determine what the underlying task or problem in that situation actually is Design a process or solution to deal with the situation, and them Have the ability to follow through and complete the task or solve the problem, either alone or with a team. (Ibid, p.19)

The result of this focus is the positioning of the RMIT approach in the professional paradigm where the concept of professional practice is of an expert who brings his or her expertise to bear upon consequential problems. The accountability will therefore be oriented towards professional bodies who exercise considerable inuence in determining the accepted frameworks for such professional practice. The approach developed at RMIT requires that a specic capability prole be developed for any program and that the ways in which it is developed and assessed in individual courses be mapped, documented and visible for staff, students and the university community. The form of the prole developed through this practice is illustrated schematically below. VARIATIONS IN PRACTICE CONCEPTIONS OF CAPABILITY IN FIVE PROGRAMS The programs that were reviewed in this study were: the Master of Applied Science (Clinical Chiropractic), the Bachelor of Engineering (Civil and Infrastructure), the Bachelor of Applied Science (Disability Studies), the Master of Applied Science (Chinese Herbal Medicine) and a suite of four Bachelor of Applied Science degrees in the area of Property, Valuation, Project and Construction Management. As might be expected, there is no simple one to one relationship between a particular paradigm as described by Hough and the approach taken in any one curriculum development. Rather, the programs investigated reveal a much more complex and interleaved relationship between the four paradigms that is enacted in very different ways and with different balances within each. Using Houghs differentiating aspects, our interviews revealed that each of the programs has a dominant connection to the professional paradigm in that each accepts a high level of accountability to professional bodies and directions for curriculum and teaching practice are signicantly inuenced by their concerns. The accountability to the profession appears to be much stronger than any accountability to the universitys managerial agenda or indeed to the market or community paradigms Each development has been situated in a University context of managerially inspired demands for detailed

documentation and complete visibility of a rational and sequential curriculum that has been designed at the outset. These demands are reected in the outcomes which are comprehensively designed and documented specications for programs of study. These demands were generally found to be onerous and a burden. They were described as difcult, wasteful and with the potential to restrict creativity. In one instance the Universitys documentation requirements were used as a lever to generate staff engagement with the concept of capability. Rather than an endorsement of the managerial requirements, this constituted an opportunistic use of its demand to achieve local purposes. This ts with the McNays bureaucratic requirement of standardised presentation of approval documentation that to varying degrees does not t with the programs desire to meet external demands of the profession. Whilst located within the professional paradigm, it is important to note that it is not a simple case of academics responding to directives or meeting criteria or standards set by professional or accrediting bodies. Rather this is a complex relationship involving dialogue, leadership from both academic and professional groups, moments of convergence and of divergence. These relationships and the impacts they have on the development of a capability based curriculum seem to be inuenced signicantly by the various histories and stages of professionalisation of the specic professions. It is these factors, themselves the result of previous dialogue and development over time, that seem to most profoundly inuence the capability prole developed. Within this context, the development of a capability based curriculum represents a further contribution to a continuing dialogue about the nature of professional practice. This dialogue is both amongst the staff teaching the program and between them and the professional bodies. The capability prole is more a contribution to continued discussion than the documentation of an already achieved consensus. The following brief summary of the approaches taken in the ve programs reviewed is set out using the four aspects used by Hough to delineate the different features of the four paradigms. THE BENEFICIARY / STAFF ROLE In all of the cases examined, the beneciary of the educational process is conceived primarily as a student rather than as a customer or consumer. Where students were discussed in the interviews in relation to capability or the curriculum it was using terms associated with professional education. Such matters as readiness for study, of diversity within cohorts, of streams of specialisation or the building and assessing of professional skills were raised.

There was, in all cases a taken for granted role for staff in determining the nature of the program of study and the limits of student choice within it, that is, a program of study created and controlled by the already professional for those who aspire to be so. Similarly there was an orientation to providing diverse ways to meet diverse student needs and a desire to accommodate student interest but within the prescribed and managed course of study. In no cases was there a primary focus on extending or enabling wide student choice in the creation of a program of study outside of staff determined program rules. When students were spoken about outside of their engagement in learning, however, the inuence of the market discourse could be seen. One of the advantages of the capability approach described was the possibility of clear and effective marketing of the educational outcomes to be achieved in a particular program to prospective students thus introducing the notion of students as discriminating potential customers of educational products. NATURE OF THE SERVICE / ACCOUNTABILITY AND POLICY DIRECTION For all programs, education was understood as service rather than as a product or a commodity and in this broad sense it once again relates to Houghs professional paradigm. The primary role of the service was for those already expert in a form of professional practice to equip students for capable professional practice. How this was understood for each program differed profoundly and in some cases this brought alternative paradigms into play. The Disability program, for example, has been involved over an extended period of time in a broad based community, professional and academic debate concerning the nature of its service. This has been conducted in terms of the discourses of rights, of the marginalised and of the the other that have also affected areas like gender studies and been revealed in feminist work. This discourse about practice has come out of practice and provides a particular environment for thinking about capability that privileges the community paradigm identied by Hough. The professional concerns of this program are with the relationships that mediate the development of individual capacity and of social capacity. Its professional accountability is at one and the same time a community accountability to building belonging, collective identity and socialisation. This way of theorising their practice focuses learning on the relationships between the two dominant, alternatives (disability as a social construct and disability as something wrong with the individual) that provided the poles of this debate. The capability prole for this program includes the ability to engage in dialogue with a diverse range of clients, to maintain tolerance and respect for individuals

and groups from diverse background and holding diverse values and to build networks of collaborative partnerships with clients, colleagues, other professionals and the community. The Chinese Medicine program locates capability very differently. This is a profession in the very early stages of establishing its credentials within Australia. Whilst the curriculum needed to incorporate professional criteria set by an accrediting body the development of a capability based approach was taken as a way of accelerating dialogue concerning the nature of Chinese herbal medicine practice in Australia with a view to developing a more sophisticated consensus. The professional bodies were seen as failing to provide leadership concerning the long term future of Chinese medicine. The resulting curriculum both responds to and pushes the profession to think differently about its role and purpose. Its capability prole emphasises the abilities needed for the integration of Chinese medicine and Chinese medical practitioners into the Western health care system and culture by integrating Western medical diagnosis and terminology with traditional Chinese medicine. In this a focus on evidence based practice and research is strong. Whilst the program is clearly located within the professional paradigm, its concerns are with the redevelopment of current conceptions of practice which stress the western concept of professional practice as grounded in a body of science. In this the capability based program becomes a laboratory for the discovery, through practice of what such a new conception might be. Engineering too was engaged in a process of redening the nature of professional practice in a dialogue with their professional bodies, which have adopted capabilities as their operating framework. The movement is away from a conception of engineering as advanced mathematical modelling requiring the application of scientic knowledge to instrumental problems towards one of engineering as consulting, a conception that requires attention to human interactions and values in decision making. A key to this approach was the redenition of problem solving which in engineering contexts is often interpreted in a narrow, instrumental way to one of decision making which gives greater emphasis to the role of values. As part of the dialogue around capability, the professional bodies have made a move towards acknowledging issues of cultural difference and the need for cultural awareness. What this might mean is as yet unclear as the profession has not, in fact, developed a discourse of engineering practice by articulating for itself the diverse ways of understanding engineering or what it might mean to work with people with diverse values. By identifying this area, the capability approach is setting an agenda for future scholarly work and the continued rethinking of what it means to be an engineer.

The suite of Applied Science programs that embrace Property, Valuation, Project Management and Construction Management also originate within the professional paradigm but reect the impacts of the market paradigm and weave within them aspects of a community approach. The fact that these are a suite of programs is a response to the market driven logic of standardised and exchangeable component courses that are combined to meet multiple purposes in program designs with common core courses and specialised streams that may be added and deleted as the market requires. These are professions where the nature of the economy and the workings of the market are core to the practice. The programs have been developed within this framework to reect the changing nature of the market for graduates where blurring between previously more distinct domains is increasing and high levels of graduate mobility are evident after the early years of practice. The capability focus seeks to build these abilities for adaptation to deal with changing circumstances by integrating strategic and operational thinking and action while simultaneously addressing specic professional skills. The program emphasises the community responsibilities of graduates as part of professional teams that produce spaces that shape the communitys possibilities of interaction. These brief examples show the complex relationships between different discourses that impact upon the ways capability is conceptualised. The market and community discourses will enter the equation in relation to the nature and development of the profession and as the results of initiatives from within the university to drive exibility, student choice or managed and aligned curriculum. These initiatives will, themselves, be interpreted and attended to in signicantly different ways in each professional context. Variations within the concept of the profession reect a diversity of impacts and the capability prole represents the documentation of a moment within a continuing dialogue. THE QUESTION OF CONSENSUS WHOSE HOLISM? It was noted previously that the capability based approach makes an assumption of consensus within the staff team concerning the nature of practice and of appropriate education for it. These examples show that different understandings about the nature of professional practice are specic to each profession, historically situated and affected by pressures from various constituencies that reect different discursive positions. Each program needs to nd a way of addressing this diversity within a curriculum model that requires consensus. Rather than choosing and insisting upon a particular view of professional practice, the programs within this review appear to have sought a way of

theorising practice that brings the different conceptions of professional practice into a relationship and to centre the curriculum design upon this relationship. For Disability this is the relationship between conceptions that focus on individual capacity and those that emphasise building social capacities. For the suite of built environment programs it is the relationship between space producers and space users that situates capability. For the Chinese medicine practitioners it is the relationship between Western denitions of professional practice based on the application of science and traditional Chinese systems of knowledge development and validation. For Engineering it is the relationship between traditional conceptions of professional practice as the application of science and technique to instrumental problems to a broader conception concerned with problem identication, messy problems and the understanding that values inform all decision making. In the Chiropractic program the consensus is still to be nalised despite the existence of a capability prole that ostensibly represents it. There are divergent positions within the practice spanning those that only recognise clinical experience to those that privilege evidence based inquiry grounded in scientic research. These are reected in some ways within the staff group. Using the capability curriculum project, the opportunity has been taken to take a stand on where the program locates itself in relation to the different views of practice. The capability prole is being used as a tool or springboard to generate and focus the necessary internal debates to see what consensus might be found. There are indications that the resolution in this case might follow the patterns of the others by privileging defensible individual practice within a denition of evidence based practice as the combination of best research, clinical experience and patient preferences in decision making. Such ways of structuring consensus can accommodate a wide range of staff views. The extent to which the relationships between different conceptions of practice become an explicit focus of the curriculum will determine, however, the extent to which graduates develop the ability to position themselves within these differing conceptions of practice. Making the nature of professional practice, the impossibility of synthesis of differing positions and the necessity of continued dialogue an explicit focus of the curriculum requires more of academics. They must not only teach professional knowledge and develop skills but make their own positioning within the adopted schema of practice clear as they do so.

REFERENCES BHERT, Business/Higher Education Round Table. (2003) Developing generic skills: examples of best practice, B-HERT News, 16, 2-30. Bowden, J., Hart, G., King, B., Trigwell, K., & Watts, O. (2000). Generic capabilities of ATN University Graduates, Australian Technology Network Teaching and Learning Committee, Final report to DETYA. Bowden, J., & Marton, F. (1998). The University of Learning: Beyond Quality and Competence in Higher Education. London: Kogan Page. Commonwealth of Australia (1987). Higher Education: A policy discussion paper (the Green Paper). Canberra: AGPS. Commonwealth of Australia (1988). Higher Education: A policy statement (the White Paper). Canberra: AGPS. Commonwealth of Australia (1998). Learning for Life. Canberra: AGPS. Hough, G. (2001). Scenarios for Teaching and Learning Strategy Committee. Paper presented to RMIT Teaching and Learning Strategy Committee. McNay, I. (1995). From collegial academy to corporate enterprise: the changing cultures of universities. In T. Schuller (Ed.) The Changing University? (pp.105-115). Buckingham: SRHE & Open University Press. Stephenson, J., & Weil, S. (1992). Quality in Learning: A capability Approach to Higher Education. London: Kogan Page. Usher, R., & Edwards, R. (1994). Postmodernism and Education. London: Routledge.

COPYRIGHT 2004 ROBYN LINES AND PETER MUIR: THE AUTHORS ASSIGN TO HERDSA AND EDUCATIONAL NON-PROFIT INSTITUTIONS A NON-EXCLUSIVE LICENCE TO USE THIS DOCUMENT FOR PERSONAL USE AND IN COURSES OF INSTRUCTION PROVIDED THAT THE ARTICLE IS USED IN FULL AND THIS COPYRIGHT STATEMENT IS REPRODUCED. THE AUTHORS ALSO GRANT A NON-EXCLUSIVE LICENCE TO HERDSA TO PUBLISH THIS DOCUMENT IN FULL ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB (PRIME SITES AND MIRRORS) ON CD-ROM AND IN PRINTED FORM WITHIN THE HERDSA 2004 CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS. ANY OTHER USAGE IS PROHIBITED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS PERMISSION OF THE AUTHORS.