Towards a more equal, inclusive higher education Patrick Blessinger, Jaimie Hoffman and Mandla Makhanya St John’s University (NYC), University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, University of South Africa Widening participation initiatives aim to improve access to higher education opportunities for all people. Driven by increased demand for education from all segments of society as well as legal reforms and human rights declarations, these initiatives focus on improving access for students from historically marginalised backgrounds (for example, ethnic minorities, students with disabilities and students from low-income backgrounds) to address inequities and inequalities in higher education. Thus, the heart of widening participation policies revolves around making access to education more fair and equal. To that end, equity and inclusion initiatives aim to address and redress longstanding practices of exclusion and privilege (typically along race, ethnicity, sex, gender and socio-economic class lines) which have tended to stratify society. Each society or institution of higher education is unique...
Higher education for a hyper-connected world
- Blog
- TAGS : Equality | Globalization | Patrick Blessinger | University World News | V3A1
Higher education for a hyper-connected world Patrick Blessinger St. John's University (NYC) and HETL Association In many respects the world has become a global knowledge society of interconnected and interdependent human activity that shares increasingly common ways to communicate and interact politically, economically and socially. Yet, at the same time, the world continues to be highly diverse in these areas as well as linguistically and culturally. The world has become more homogeneous at the global level, but still remains highly heterogeneous at the local level. An emerging hyper-connected world The emerging global knowledge society, facilitated mainly by international trade and travel and ubiquitous global communications such as internet and wireless based technologies, is a space of hyper-connected human activity in which people increasingly interact with each other on a regular basis, irrespective of physical space and time boundaries. It is a hyper-connected network where everything is quickly becoming connected to...
