A critical study of pressures and demands for relevance and excellence in three selected universities in Ghana.

• In Event: Dissertation workshop session
  In Special Session: Policy Analysis

Proposal

Overview and Research Questions
Ghanaian higher education is experiencing a unique moment. Ghana has increased to lower middle income status coupled with being one of the fastest growing economies in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Second, public universities in Ghana have been granted institutional autonomy with minimal interference from governmental control. This has given university actors the urge to position the university not only at the national/local level but also at the global level. Hence, the universities in Ghana are under constant pressure to accommodate multiple pressures emanating from both global (pressures beyond; excellence/world class university), and national/local (pressures from within; relevance). The resultant effect of the autonomy granted and pressures is that most universities in Ghana to adapt their strategic policies emphasizing the same policy of excellence and relevance. In spite of the seemingly widespread use of the notion of relevance and excellence, it should not be interpreted as a mere organizational isomorphism just on the face value as a resultant effect of hegemonic pressures of internationalization and globalization. Nevertheless, I strongly argue that there is the need to fully deconstruct and delve deep into how it has been adopted, used and localized to fit a particular context. In effect the discourses of excellence (e.g. world class university) and relevance are now pervasive and taken for granted throughout the system. I thus propose to explore critical moment in Ghanaian HE, asking,
• How do(es) management, academics, and students in three selected universities in Ghana understand and experience relevance and excellence discourses, including the types of pressures these discourses create?
o How can these actors move towards a conceptualization of relevance and excellence that can enable social transformation and justice?
o How are these pressures connected to “change processes” at the universities?
o How do these actors’ strategic choices help them negotiate/mediate these dynamics?


Thesis statement
By centering the experiences of management, academics, and students at a time of important policy change in Ghanaian higher education (which has not historically incorporated their voices), specifically around relevance and excellence discourses, spaces can be created to more inclusively conceptualize these discourses. Coupled with change processes and strategic choices employed with the aim of more inclusive social transformation and justice.

Theoretical Framework
This study is anchored within postfoundational, critical feminist sociology of education (Burke, 2012). This perspective enables reflexivity coupled with rejecting the positivists notion of objective truth/knowledge and reality. Hence, it subscribes to the notion of knowledge being constructed socially, this is because actors, individuals or groups are intrinsically interwoven with their social, historical local factors and influences the knowledge they produce. This will enable actors to interpret or operationalize the contested and dialectical notion of excellence and relevance within their own context. It will allow academics, management and students to have spaces to critically reflect and become aware of the forces within the institutional environment and Ghanaian society. Hence, allowing for strategic alternative choices or responses in order to mediate through these environmental pressures. It will also allow me as a critical researcher to “uncover the truths of academics and students who have been silenced, excluded and pathologised through the colonizing, regulating, normalizing and paternalistic gaze of policies that are being dumped on them without being an active part in the Ghanaian context”(Burke, 2012, p. 66). Hence, the choice of the critical perspective will help me to unearth and illuminate the effects of hegemonic influences on academics and students. Hence these effects requires a much careful insight which otherwise will be taken for granted.

Planned Method of Inquiry
This is a qualitative study that employs semi-structured interviews, observation, and document analysis. I argue that the selected methods of inquiry converge with the idea that knowledge is situated, hence there are multiple truths, which will allow for critical reflexivity and create consciousness which in effect will lead to an awareness of the hegemonic pressures of power relations at play, with the aim of leading to change in the universities.

Statement of dissertation stage
I am currently at the dissertation proposal stage and hopefully will finish with my first round of data collection and analysis by the time of the conference.

Significance
As there is a dearth of research on the current Ghanaian higher education landscape, and specifically on this topic, centering research on social transformation and justice at this pivotal moment in HE policy change has the potential to make an important impact in widening participation (Burke, 2012) in both the universities and the overall society. It has the potential to contribute to the interrelated fields of comparative education, sociology of higher education, and regional studies.

Author

• Emmanuel Intsiful, Beijing Normal University