Tristan McCowanUniversity College London | UCL · Institute of Education
Tristan McCowan
PhD
About
96
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Introduction
Tristan McCowan's work focuses on higher education and international development, particularly in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, including issues of access, quality, innovation and impact. His latest book is Higher Education for and beyond the Sustainable Development Goals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and he is editor of Compare – a Journal of International and Comparative Education. He is currently leading a multi-country GCRF project on universities and climate change.
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (96)
Concerns over equity of access to higher education are widespread, but there is significant disagreement over what should constitute a fair system. This article assesses diverse conceptualisations of equity and explores the ways in which they embody themselves in the policies of three systems, those of England, Brazil and Kenya. While showing signi...
Unbundling is the process through which products previously sold together are separated into their constituent parts. In higher education, this dynamic has been driven primarily by financial motivations, and spearheaded by the for-profit sector, but also has pedagogical motivations through its emphasis on personalisation and employability. This art...
Higher education is increasingly acknowledged by national governments and international agencies as a key driver of development, and systems are expanding rapidly in response to rising demand. Moreover, universities have been attributed a central role in the post-2015 development agenda and the achievement of the sustainable development goals. Yet...
Opposition to university fees is often framed as a defence of higher education as a ‘right’ rather than a ‘privilege’. However, the basis and nature of this right is unclear. This article presents a conceptual exploration of the question, drawing on an initial analysis of international law. An argument is put forward for a right to higher education...
In recent years, new forms of higher education have emerged that challenge many of our assumptions about what a university is. In Brazil there has been a particular flowering of these alternative universities, on account of the wave of popular mobilisation following the end of the military dictatorship, aided by political support from the centre. T...
Internationalisation of higher education has diverging implications for climate change, on the one hand entailing greenhouse gas emissions through mobility, but also contributing to climate action through international collaboration. These apparent contradictions and resulting trade-offs present significant challenges to universities. This paper pu...
Indicators and metrics have gained increasing prominence in international higher education in recent years, and global rankings have become a powerful force in shaping ideas of what the university is and should be. Yet these measures do a poor job of capturing the broad role of the institution, and particularly in recognising its actions in promoti...
This technical note outlines the design and implementation of the survey ‘Climate Change – Practices, Experiences and Attitudes’, part of the Transforming Universities for a Changing Climate (Climate-U) research project. The survey was designed to assess students’ experiences, their engagement in climate change action and their attitudes towards en...
Quality of teaching and learning in higher education is increasingly recognised as a pressing issue on the African continent, and there have been various reform initiatives to transform classrooms and institutions. However, little is known about the factors that affect pedagogical change in institutions, and enable or constrain these innovations fr...
In the last three decades Brazil’s enrolments grew from approximately 1.5 million to more than 8 million students. Unlike the expansion in the 1990s, when few students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds gained access, the current expansion of Brazilian higher education is changing student profiles. The share of students from lower socioeconomic l...
Despite some superficial heterogeneity, higher education institutions around the world share core structures. According to critics such as Ivan Illich, the ossification of these institutional forms has ended up impoverishing the practices they were originally intended to support. This article assesses the grounds for these claims and associated con...
Despite an important process of expansion and growth, higher education institutions around the world still reproduce exclusion, discrimination and inequality with regard to underrepresented and underprivileged communities and peoples, their knowledges and their languages. In this text, we briefly frame contemporary alternatives to mainstream higher...
Universities and, more broadly, higher education institutions (HEIs), need to use the knowledge they produce and their education of new professionals, to help solve some of the world´s greatest problems, as addressed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out by the United Nations (UN). Humanity is facing unprecedented challenges, most str...
RESUMO Apesar de alguma heterogeneidade superficial, as instituições de ensino superior do mundo inteiro compartilham algumas estruturas centrais. De acordo com críticos como Ivan Illich, a ossificação destas formas institucionais terminou empobrecendo as práticas que originalmente pretendiam apoiar. Este artigo avalia as bases para essas afirmativ...
UK universities are world leaders in transnational education. In 2019-20 alone 156 UK providers reported 453,390 students based in 225 countries and territories worldwide. Underpinning this success is the reputation of UK higher education. In the eyes of overseas students and their families, accessing a UK education is a means to a successful caree...
Learning about climate change is widely recognised as an
important outcome for higher education students. However,
there is uncertainty as to the best way to incorporate issues of
climate into the curriculum, whether as a stand-alone module,
through infusion across courses, through interdisciplinary
provision, or informal activities. Furthermore, t...
Learning about climate change is widely recognised as an important outcome for higher education students. However, there is uncertainty as to the best way to incorporate issues of climate into the curriculum, whether as a stand-alone module, through infusion across courses, through interdisciplinary provision, or informal activities. Furthermore, t...
With globalization and the knowledge society, the expansion of higher education has become an ‘object of desire’ among governments to bolster both economic growth and social development. In recent decades, just as in other countries, Brazil has expanded the system and become the fourth largest in the world in enrollment numbers, significantly incre...
Humanity is currently facing a critical challenge in
its relationship with the natural world. Overuse of
the earth’s resources, emissions of greenhouse gases
and other forms of pollution and loss of biodiversity
are presenting significant threats to survival and
quality of life, and will worsen quickly if action is
not taken. Universities represent...
While critical thinking is widely regarded as a key outcome of higher education, research has shown that in practice it is only developed when certain conditions are in place, relating to the pedagogical approach, the nature of the curriculum and the level of challenge, amongst other factors. This article reports on findings from a four-year mixed...
While there are rapidly increasing enrolments worldwide, higher education systems are still characterized by continuing inequalities in access. Brazil is a case in point in this regard, with highly restricted admissions for those from low-income families, African descendants, and those with low parental level of education, despite the system tripli...
Universities have a crucial role to play in addressing climate change, but the complex and multifaceted nature of the issue presents challenges for the traditional functioning of the institution. While there is a growing body of work on campus sustainability and climate issues in the curriculum, there is a need to understand more holistically the f...
In the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals, higher education has been given a key role in addressing societal challenges, reducing poverty, ensuring sustainable livelihoods and protecting the natural environment. Yet there has been a singular lack of imagination as regards the institutional forms that might help support this vision. This...
A oposição ao pagamento de mensalidades na Educação Superior é, de forma recorrente, formulada como a defesa da Educação Superior como um ‘direito’ ao invés de um ‘privilégio’. No entanto, a base e a natureza desse direito são nebulosas. Este artigo apresenta uma exploração conceitual sobre a questão, a partir de uma aproximação com o Direito Inter...
This is the updated and corrected version of the report uploaded last week
The impact of higher education institutions on society has become the focus of significant policy attention in recent years, most prominently as part of research evaluation. This paper presents a theoretical exploration of the notion, identifying the key dimensions as source, form, trajectory, intensity, timescale and destination. While acknowledgi...
SDG4 proposes equal access to quality tertiary education as one of its goals, but in practice most countries are far from achieving it. This chapter analyses the conditions of entry to higher education in three contexts—England, Brazil and Kenya—which despite being diverse in terms of income levels and coverage of the higher education system, are a...
The final chapter summarises the main arguments made in the book, in light of the cataclysmic prospects facing humanity in the twenty-first century. Heterogeneity in higher education is desirable, yet this diversity can cohere around a common set of principles including a commitment to human understanding through open-ended enquiry, fair access, a...
While higher education has always had an international dimension, it is problematic to assume universally valid epistemologies, curricula and missions. This penultimate chapter explores radical critiques of the university in terms of its institutional structures and epistemic underpinnings, drawing on the ideas of Ivan Illich and post-development t...
Understanding the role of education in development is highly complex, on account of the slippery nature of both concepts, and the multifaceted relationship between them. This chapter provides a conceptual exploration of these relationships, laying the groundwork for the rest of the book. First, it assesses the role of education as a driver of devel...
This chapter presents a more critical perspective on the notion of impact. While it is incontrovertible that universities must do what they can to bring positive benefits to society and address global challenges, too much of an emphasis on short-term, tangible and non-academic impact can be dangerous. The processes of scholarship and learning are o...
This chapter presents the theoretical framework of the book in relation to the institution of the university. It starts by outlining four principal models of the university—the mediaeval, the Humboldtian, the developmental and the entrepreneurial—drawing on historical accounts. These are not neatly successive stages, but represent broad approaches...
The ability of universities to fulfil the developmental role is not only dependent on their internal workings, but also on the external policy environment. This chapter addresses three major global trends affecting higher education: status competition, manifesting itself principally through international university rankings; commodification, appear...
This chapter explores the various pathways through which higher education can have a positive impact on the SDGs. The goals are diverse in nature, and their achievement requires in some cases innovation and breakthroughs in knowledge, in some the development of professional skills, and in others the raising of public awareness or changing of attitu...
This chapter outlines the model of university that provides the best fit with the role proposed in the SDGs. The developmental university emerged in Africa in the post-independence period, but has its roots in the nineteenth-century land grant institutions in the USA, with other antecedents in Latin America. It has four primary characteristics: ser...
Quality of higher education is a highly contested concept and can be interpreted in traditional, market-based or transformational ways. This chapter addresses these diverse conceptualisations and their connections with the achievement of the SDGs. Lower income countries face particular challenges in relation to quality, on account of resource const...
This research report summarises analysis made in the project Higher education, inequality and the public good: A study in four African countries. The study funded 2017-2019 by the ESRC/Newton/NRF funding partnership has focussed on Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa and has brought together researchers from those four countries, together with c...
This book analyses the role of the university in working towards the Sustainable Development Goals. In contrast to the previous Millennium Development Goals, higher education is seen to have a crucial role in this new agenda. Yet how can the university fulfil these weighty expectations, and are the dominant trends in higher education supporting or...
The impact of higher education institutions on society has become the focus of significant policy attention in recent years, most prominently as part of research evaluation. This paper presents a theoretical exploration of the notion, identifying the key dimensions as source, form, trajectory, intensity, timescale and destination. While acknowledgi...
The complexity of the contemporary world has had significant impact on the daily life of educational institutions. The boundaries between the inside and the outside of schools have become increasingly permeable to socio-cultural processes, and the trajectories of the individuals who work and study there have become ever more diverse. The discourse...
Higher education has been the object of policy attention in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years. It has been seen as key to unlocking the potential of the youth bulge, responding to the demands of a growing middle class and to transforming commodities-based economies into knowledge societies (World Bank 2009; Cloete, Maassen & Bailey 2015; Chuks, 20...
The complexity of the contemporary world has had significant impact on the daily life of educational institutions. The boundaries between the inside and the outside of schools have become increasingly permeable to socio-cultural processes, and the trajectories of the individuals who work and study there have become ever more diverse. The discourse...
Unbundling is the process through which products previously sold together are separated into their constituent parts. In higher education, this dynamic has been driven primarily by financial motivations, and spearheaded by the for-profit sector, but also has pedagogical motivations through its emphasis on personalization and employability. This art...
Despite the consensus amongst all stakeholders of the critical need for action in the higher education sector in Kenya, national and institutional drives for quality have had limited impact. This study aims to assess the barriers to enhancing quality in Kenyan higher education, drawing on interviews, observations and documentary analysis as part of...
In recent years, higher education institutions have been encouraged to engage more strongly with their local communities, and address their historically weak links with their surrounding populations. In the latter part of the twentieth century, a number of community universities were established in the South of Brazil, characterised by democratic l...
The idea of the "developmental university" was popularised on the African continent in the post-independence period, but has recently returned to view on account of the positioning of the university in the newly agreed United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The developmental model is characterised by service to society, application of knowle...
Indigenous groups in Latin America face a double exclusion from higher education, with low levels of access to institutions and little acknowledgement of their distinctive cultural and epistemological traditions within the curriculum. This article assesses current policies in Mexico and Brazil towards indigenous populations in higher education, con...
While concerns about graduate unemployment and the work-readiness of graduates in Sub-Saharan Africa abound, there is a severe lack of institutional data and academic research on graduate destinations on which to base policy changes. This article presents findings from an exploratory study of three major higher education institutions in Kenya. An o...
In recent years, significant attention has been paid by stakeholders in higher education, government and the private sector to maximising the opportunities and minimise the hazards of the education-to-work transition. However, the enthusiasm for interventions to boost employability of higher education graduates is not always supported by an adequat...
Perspectives of quality assurance and academic development practitioners in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa
This report aims to contribute to
the task of ensuring quality higher
education provision in Sub-Saharan Africa
through an in-depth assessment of
student perceptions of the university
experience and of their prospects as graduates.
Employability is becoming increasingly central to the mission and functioning of universities, spurred on by national and supranational agencies, and the demands of marketisation. This article provides a response to the normative dimensions of the question, progressing through four stages: first, there is a brief consideration of the meaning and ma...
A educação em direitos humanos está contida em uma variedade de instrumentos de direito internacional, e tem se tornado predominante na educação formal e não formal a nível mundial. No entanto, há uma incerteza considerável - de natureza conceitual e prática - sobre a forma como a educação em direitos humanos relaciona-se com o próprio direito à ed...
p>After many years of relative neglect, development agencies and national governments across the developing world are now considering renewing their financial commitment to tertiary education. As a result, questions about the ways that tertiary education can impact society have returned to the discourse. This article summarizes the findings of a re...
There have been debates around the social impact of tertiary education in developing countries for decades. In the late 1980s, a series of studies commissioned by the World Bank seemed to indicate that, in developing contexts, investment in tertiary education would yield a much lower social return than that in lower levels of education. In contexts...
This evidence brief summarises the findings from a rigorous review conducted by Oketch, McCowan and Schendel (2014), entitled \"The impact of tertiary education on development\". The review aims to assess the evidence linking tertiary education (TE) to a wide range of economic and human development outcomes in low- and lower-middle-income countries...
If conceptions of citizenship are complex and contested, then no less so are the curricular forms corresponding to them. While governments and other agencies may sometimes naively assume that schools and universities can straightforwardly promote whatever goals are passed down to them, the reality is far less predictable. Considerable challenges ar...
Education is widely recognized as a fundamental human right, yet the nature of the right remains unclear. Is it an entitlement to go to school, to acquire particular forms of knowledge or develop particular skills or attributes? And why exactly is education so important that we might defend all people's right to it? This book provides a much-needed...
While respect for human rights has long been endorsed as a goal of education, only recently has significant attention been paid to the need to incorporate rights within educational processes. Current support for human rights within education, however, has a variety of motivations. This paper provides a theoretical exploration of these diverse justi...
While there has been widespread international attention paid to the promotion of citizenship in schools, the civic dimension of higher education study has been less prominent. This article assesses three cases of provision for the teaching of citizenship in English universities, encompassing both discrete modules and embedded approaches. The cases...
While commitment to a universal entitlement to education is highly desirable, some significant limitations have been identified in the right to education as currently expressed and implemented. This article assesses the contribution that the capabilities approach can make in this regard. While some proponents have suggested that capabilities should...
Apesar de haver uma consideravel literatura acerca da educacao no contexto da legislacao internacional de direitos, pouco se discute sobre os sentidos fundamentais da educacao, a sua natureza e escopo. Este artigo apresenta uma exploracao teorica dessa questao e leva a uma reavaliacao normativa. Primeiramente, o artigo avalia como o direito a educa...
The universal right to education has been enshrined in a range of international rights instruments. Yet despite the considerable secondary literature on the subject, there has been little discussion of the notion of education underpinning the right. This article presents a theoretical exploration of the question, leading to a normative reassessment...
Recent moves towards greater pupil participation in school decision-making have in part been based on instrumental rationales, such as increases in test scores and improvements in behaviour. This article assesses a different approach — that of the ‘prefigurative’ — through which the school embodies the democratic society it aims to create.Two examp...
Since the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, there has been an increasing recognition globally that children need to have more say in their education. Children as Decision Makers in Education looks at how children can actively participate in decision-making. It builds upon previous research into student voice and decision-making, citizenship...
While it is clear that all educational undertakings consist of ends and means, the relationship between the two is far from straightforward. This article proposes a framework for understanding the relationship in the context of citizenship education. Qualitative research was undertaken of three educational initiatives in Brazil: the schools of the...
Educational undertakings are subject to disjunctures at three separate stages: in the creation of curricular programmes, in the implementation of these curricula in practice and in their effects on students. These disjunctures are the result of complex ‘leaps’ between ends and means, and between ideal and real. This article proposes a response in t...
When Leslie Bethell (2000) states that, “Brazil is a democracy of voters, not yet a democracy of citizens”, he is highlighting two significant aspects of the country. Firstly, the fact that all people can vote in Brazil, and nearly all do (it is obligatory for those aged 18–70), is indicative of a range of advances in the twentieth-century that ens...
Rethinking Citizenship Education presents a fundamental reassessment of the field. Drawing on empirical research, the book argues that attempting to transmit preconceived notions of citizenship through schools is both unviable and undesirable. The notion of 'curricular transposition' is introduced, a framework for understanding the changes undergon...
The considerable debate in recent years on the aims of citizenship education has not been accompanied by an equally substantial discussion on the educational processes involved.This article puts forward a theoretical framework, referred to as `curricular transposition', for understanding the complex task of realizing normative ideals of citizenship...
Access to higher education in Brazil is to a large extent restricted to the higher socio-economic groups. Public universities have limited places and entry is determined by highly competitive exams, thereby excluding those who have not had a high quality secondary education or attended an expensive preparatory course. There has been considerable gr...
A case study was undertaken of Pelotas, a large town in southern Brazil, where a recent government of the Workers’ Party (PT) implemented a range of social policy reforms. The study draws on interviews with key members of the Municipal Secretariat of Education and policy documents, analyzing them in relation to theoretical literature on citizenship...
Abstract:
The forms that political education should take, and indeed its very presence in
schools, are strongly contested questions. This paper explores these ideas in the light of
the work of two theorists, Bernard Crick and Paulo Freire. There is first an analysis of
their conceptions of politics and the political, their justifications for polit...
A key question that providers of citizenship education must face is the extent to which they should be promoting either critical attitudes or allegiance to the State. While some argue that cohesion and unity are necessary for the polity to function, others observe that a conforming and unquestioning population will not choose the best governments a...
An important question in citizenship education concerns the extent to which learners are encouraged to conform to authority and existing political structures, or alternatively to question and challenge them. This article puts forward an argument for a critical questioning approach, in which the ability and disposition to subject political issues an...
O ensino superior privado no Brasil tem sofrido um crescimento significativo nos últimos anos. O Banco Mundial apoiou esta expansão com base na capacidade dos fornecedores privados de assegurar um rápido aumento das matrículas, visando melhorar a qualidade por meio da competição entre as instituições e trazer benefícios à sociedade a um custo públi...
There has been a dramatic growth in private higher education in Brazil in recent years. The World Bank has promoted this expansion on the basis of the private providers' ability to ensure a rapid increase in enrolment, to improve quality through competition between institutions, and to secure benefits for society at little public cost. However, the...
There has been a dramatic growth in private higher education in Brazil in recent years. The World Bank has promoted this expansion on the basis of the private providers' ability to ensure a rapid increase in enrolment, to improve quality through competition between institutions and to bring benefits for society at little public cost. However, the c...
Universities and the making of citizens: Martha Nussbaum's defence of the liberal curriculum WORKSHOP With the emergence of mass higher education systems, universities have become increasingly relevant as sites for the development of citizenship. However, the kind of role that universities might play is uncertain, given their (in many cases) substa...
An important question in citizenship education concerns the extent to which learners are encouraged to conform to authority and existing political structures, or alternatively to question and challenge them. This article puts forward an argument for a critical questioning approach, in which the ability and disposition to subject political issues an...
Projects
Projects (7)
The project aims to map the roles and influence of new and emergent supranational actors in higher education, the ways they interact, the forms of impact on different regions and countries, and the nature of the policies, discourses, and norms developed and disseminated.
GCRF project to explore the impact of locally generated initiatives on climate change mitigation and adaptation in universities in Brazil, Fiji, Kenya and Mozambique
The study aims to understand how innovative pedagogy in higher education can improve the critical thinking skills of undergraduate students.
This knowledge will be crucial in allowing higher education systems to improve their practice and drive a thriving economy and an inclusive society.
The project is being implemented in three countries: Kenya, Botswana and Ghana.