There is an alternative: A report on an action research project to develop a framework for co-operative higher education

Mike Neary and I have had an article published in Learning and Teaching. The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences.

The article is the first of two publications arising from our ISRF-funded project (2015-16):  Beyond public and private: A model for co-operative higher education. A longer article is currently under review. An earlier combined version of both articles was presented at conferences last year.

This report provides an interim account of a participatory action research project undertaken during 2015–16. The research brought together scholars, students and expert members of the co-operative movement to design a theoretically informed and practically grounded framework for co-operative higher education that activists, educators and the co-operative movement could take forward into implementation. Our dual roles in the research were as founding members of the Social Science Centre, Lincoln, an autonomous co-operative for higher education constituted in 2011 (Social Science Centre 2013), and as professional researchers working at the University of Lincoln. The immediate context for the research was, and remains, the ‘assault’ on universities in the U.K. (Bailey and Freedman 2011), the ‘gamble’ being taken with the future of higher education (McGettigan 2013), and the ‘pedagogy of debt’ (Williams 2006) that has been imposed through the removal of public funding of teaching and the concurrent tripling of tuition fees (Sutton Trust 2016).

Download a pre-print PDF.

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