The emergence of social responsibility in the US and Latin American Higher Education Systems

• In Event: Highlighted Session: The social responsibility of higher education: What do we owe, and to whom?

Proposal

In the recent years, universities and communities have been approaching each other showing increasing exchange of many resources to partner on behalf of common needs (Bortolin, 2011; Hahn, Hatcher, Norris & Halford, 2015). According to the Campus Compact and similar organizations, these activities show remarkable growth involving people from academia and community institutions. At the same time, numerous peer-reviewed publications have proliferated exhibiting a host of ways in which engagement can be expanded, grounded on its virtues, through different models and activities, to advance the communities and learning in the American higher education system (Kuh, 2009; Yorio & Ye, 2012; Zepke, 2015). Although many of the current forms of higher education’s involvement in social responsibility, such as community engagement, civic life, service-learning, among other, were greatly promoted from a Neoliberal platform of policies, universities of all sizes and styles seem to support, to some degree, engagement with society as an “add-on” mission component to the main traditional teaching, research and service functions (Harward, 2016). This trend has generated mega discourses that are reconfiguring many regional ideas of university engagement. That is the case of Latin American universities. A growing number of institutions and scholars are endorsing an emerging notion of social responsibility over the last 20 years. Administrators are hoping that engagement can provide alternatives to social and crucial issues in the region (Vallaeys & Alvarez, 2019).
There is a lack of research that compares the similarities and differences on emerging discourses that promote social responsibility in higher education. So, this study explores major peer-reviewed journals and scholarly reports to unfold the emerging discourses regarding social responsibility in Latin American in comparison with the USA. Using a Discourse Analysis (DA) method, a review of relevant publications dealing with social responsibility concepts and practices was performed and the collected articles analyzed to describe the regional characteristic of social responsibility discourses. Discourse analysis can provide some of the epistemological foundations to grasp the configuration and development of social responsibility in higher education, as Phillips and Hardy (2002) remarked,
…we find discourse analysis to be a compelling theoretical frame for observing social reality…to be a useful method in a number of empirical studies…an epistemology that explains how we know the social world, as well as a set of methods for studying it. (pp. 2-3)
A core epistemological assumption of DA is that social reality is created through language that expresses itself through a multitude of type of texts (Krippendorff, 2004; Wittgenstein, 1967). These texts configure, in tandem with many contextual interactions, the discourses that yield social organizations (Gee, 1999). The final product of the dynamic between texts and context is a discourse that creates specific identities, as Gee (1999) put it, “…spoken and written language as it is used to enact social and cultural perspectives and identities” (p. 4). The same author clarified, “…language-in-action is always and everywhere an active building process” (p. 11), that produces social reality, in this case universities that are engaged to transforming society.
This trend has proved that it is capable of critically influence the way universities see themselves and carry their basic academic functions in both compared regions. In addition, university engagement appeared as a byproduct of a complex and deep questioning of the practices under which institutions operated. The revision of purposes with private and public support for redirecting academia towards more useful and relevant contributions to society, along with redesigning of learning and research in the context of epistemological paradigm shifts, may explain much of this movement that is reconfiguring higher education. The overall set of discourses upon which social responsibility is based, for USA and Latin America, revolved around the idea that engaging with and toward communities is the best alternative to improve learning, research, and service, producing a graduate with much better understanding of professional fields within social context. In so doing, higher education reinforces its socially constructed nature to bring solutions to encompassing social problems. This alternative design for academia had a strong grasp among multiple actors, including politicians, scholars, community leaders, and university administrators, which made it an almost unstoppable trend in a few years.

Author

• Gus Gregorutti, Andrews University