Academics’ understandings of generic graduate attributes : a conceptual basis for lifelong learning

Lifelong learning is a commonly espoused quality of university graduates (Candy, Crebert & O’Leary 1994). However even a cursory consideration of the literature reveals a bewildering array of definitions and assumed meanings attached to the term. Such confusion is of course not limited to this particular graduate quality. There have been repeated calls (see for example Clanchy & Ballard 1995; Holmes 2000) for basic definitional work and a clarification of the theoretical and conceptual basis for such graduate attributes, skills or capabilities, (just to mention a few of the terms used to describe these sorts of learning outcomes). However, while policy statements listing graduate qualities have proliferated and the vocabulary used has come to have the appearance of a shared common usage, the extent to which the underlying meaning of terms like lifelong learning is shared, remains questionable. This chapter discusses how a phenomenographically derived description of academics’ conceptions of graduate attributes has been applied to the task of revising one university’s statement of generic graduate attributes, with a particular focus on the graduate attribute of lifelong learning. In doing so the chapter considers the different understandings academics hold of lifelong learning as a graduate attribute and how these are reflected in different approaches to university curricula. Rather than seeking to impose a single ‘correct’ definition, the chapter describes an approach that recognises the reality of such disparate understandings and incorporates these in a university’s statement of graduate attributes. Using this perspective, it was possible for the University’s existing conglomerate list of different types of generic graduate attribtues to be re-organised, rather than redeveloped from scratch, and the role of the different types of initiatives already in place to be recognised. The chapter explores how the revised policy achieves this by explicitly accommodating two significantly different conceptualisations of lifelong learning. The approach brings to the surface the buried, but significant, underlying assumptions academics hold regarding the place of a graduate attribute like lifelong learning in more traditional, ‘knowledge based’ curricula. Of the various conceptions of graduate attributes described in this chapter, the most complex conception of lifelong learning is as ‘a learner’s attitude and stance towards herself’. This is an example of a conception of generic graduate attributes that has the potential to go beyond the limiting notions inherent in many previous formulations of ‘generic skills’ (Barnett 1997).