U21 Collaborative Group – Research Universities and their Regions

Lifelong learning driving universities’ ambitions for advanced teaching and research? Dare we? Can we? Let’s!

Workshop - University of Glasgow 14/15 May 2012

Within many universities lifelong learning and adult education teeters on the brink of a vicious cycle of low status, poor resourcing, and reducing relevance. Within Europe and the wider world departments devoted to adult education are under threat while universities shift focus from the marginalised to attracting talented researchers and raising their international profile.

This workshop offers an opportunity to explore and claim for adult education and lifelong learning a prominent role in research intensive universities. We will identify ways that reaching out into regional and international communities through adult education contributes to our institutions’ core activities and we will explore how, having established the strategic relevance of our work, activity can best be delivered.

To benefit from this workshop attendees must be willing to ‘let go’, to set aside their preconceptions about what lifelong learning or adult education must be.  Participants should be willing to flex, to respond to emerging trends and to seek alignment between lifelong learning and the goals and missions of their institutions.

A series of sessions will be held, each will begin with a short contexualising presentation, then a focus group discussion will be held and the workshop will culminate with an attempt by a facilitator to summarise and pull together emerging ideas. Each session will address an issue that is of strategic relevance to research intensive universities and may include exploring the ways that adult education and lifelong learning can contribute to:

• Building institutional relationships and profile
• Universities serving as the critic and conscience of society
• Creating a global reputation
• Building entrepreneurship and innovation
• Disseminating research and advanced thinking
• Enriching the student body
• Revenue generation (or at least being cost neutral and value rich!)

The workshop will conclude with a plenary session where each session facilitator presents back to the wider group. The workshop leaders will write a ‘Green Paper’ for U21’s consideration.

Following the workshop a second day of informal collaboration will be available during which participants will take the ideas generated within the workshop and develop individual strategies and plans to take home to their own institutions.

Susan Geerthuis, University of Auckland

Michael Osborne, University of Glasgow

14 October 2011