Worldviews and Values in Higher Education

Human perceptions, attitudes, and relationships are shaped by worldviews and values. The rich mosaic of worldviews in today's fast-changing global village, where cultures interact and information flows freely, challenge educators and students. Worldviews influence problem modeling and solutions. Worldviews give us psychological confidence that the world is as we see it, safe, secure, and belonging. Each worldview is consistent with the assumptions, ideals, and analytical processes. Values define behavior, attitudes and decision-making. The global higher education system's long history and recent developments in globalization, technological innovations, and internationalization make it even more complex. Globally, higher education is evolving rapidly. Global political, economic, social, technological, and environmental factors promote rapid change. Higher education institutions have struggled to adapt to these developments due to limited resources and capacity. Growing demand has created new business models and institutions. Access, equity, inclusion, and quality are new issues that emerged. To be relevant in a rapidly changing environment, higher education institutions must adapt to the knowledge society and growing need for access. This anthology contains 14 thought-provoking studies on worldviews and values in teaching-learning, curricula, assessment, and outcomes.

The purpose of this chapter was to explore how the values of higher education institutions, and ultimately society, are conveyed through the curriculum of an institution. The arguments for focusing on a liberal education grounded in critical thinking are highlighted and then compared to the growing trend of occupational education being the central focus of a college education. The need to understand populist thinking in particular is aligned with the social responsibility that educational institutions carry in their charters. This means that the students and parents who pay tuition for their education want something to show for their investment, namely a level of compensation and employment that is perceived to be correlated with the expense of the degree. The competing views of education and training are then considered in a global context, noting the interconnectedness of the intellectual and business community around the globe. This chapter concludes by highlighting the importance of education and its impact on cultural understanding and engagement as a value, especially calling upon public policymakers to keep higher education leaders in check as they develop plans and expectations for their institutions.

Although educators would likely agree that values and ethics are important in all disciplines, they have particular importance for practice-oriented fields. These applied professionals need to solve complex social problems that require the application of ethical standards and value perspectives. While the importance of value-engaged practice is known to the applied field, there is little research and conversation about how values can be integrated into teaching. This chapter synthesizes values-education approaches in various practice-based disciplines such as public administration (PA), program evaluation, social work, and public health. This chapter draws from empirical and theoretical works as well as the authors' experiences developing, participating in, and conducting values-based research on professionals and professional education.

This chapter proposes selected cultural values and worldviews of cosmopolitan individual cultural identity as an ideal and model for international and transnational higher education, in teaching and learning, benefitting individuals and institutions. As a “metacultural position” and interactive engagement with the “Other,” cosmopolitan teaching and learning could impact national and global higher education. Such reflection of timeless educational values and ideals could benefit the development higher education systems in our ever more globalizing world.

Conceptually, cosmopolitan identity is defined via a complex literature matrix of key issues and concerns of world citizenship, substantiated and enriched by considerable critical thinking. Empirically, an investigation of highly multilingual students for revelations of their global identity strengthens and furthers this framework. Overall, interdisciplinary insights from literary, social, media and gender studies complement contributions to higher education's universality and values, so as to suit individual, institutional, and international needs.

Cosmopolitan features and values could harmonize global knowledge systems yet without cultural hegemonies, by building cross-cultural standards via best identity notions and practices. Recognizing equally valuable cultural contributions would also improve institutions' diversity, equity, and inclusion, raising educational quality, motivations, and expectations. Cosmopolitan identity could thus educationally enrich and institutionally empower for global complexity and uncertainty.

Educational stakeholders could shape institutions for cosmopolitan cultural values and increased diversity, with transnational norms and practices grounded in local realities, such as improved linguistic competences, or increased cultural understanding and engagement. Individual internationalization could therefore develop parallel to cultural and educational worldviews, expandable and improvable on an open-ended scale.

For researchers and sector agencies around the world, poor academic integrity is seen as a significant risk to universities (Bretag & Harper, 2017; QAA, 2020; TEQSA, 2019). Given the existential threat that acts of academic misconduct are deemed to pose to higher education, interest in ways of developing academic integrity is correspondingly high and often invokes the concept of values (Macfarlane et al., 2014; Morris, 2018). However, to ascribe to academic integrity, the status of a self-evident, perhaps universal, value of contemporary higher education is contentious on many levels. This chapter takes in turn three of the most common ways in which students and scholars infringe on the principles of academic integrity – plagiarism, collusion, and contract cheating – and explores what the prohibiting of each of these acts reveals about the values of contemporary higher education. It argues that, far from neutral or universal, the values of academic integrity appear both normative and culturally specific, promoting a particular conception of higher education which risks excluding large sections of the global population. To counter this, the notion of threshold values – borrowing from Meyer and Land's (2005) notion of the “threshold concept” – is proposed, identifying the development of shared values as crucial to ensuring that contemporary, globalized universities are inclusive and accessible spaces.

Academic integrity in tertiary education is a global concern. This chapter describes academic integrity in Australian universities and proposes an “it takes a village” framework to guide universities toward a re-evaluation of academic integrity education. It takes a village to raise a child – a child needs role models and positive influences from multiple people for healthy growth and development. With regard to academic integrity, the parallel is that the entire university community needs to be involved to foster development of students of integrity. The institution and its community need to provide structures, multiple positive and effective learning experiences, and clear guidelines to support both staff and students. In this chapter, we argue that academic integrity needs to be seen as a complex system, one in which everyone involved has responsibility to develop and maintain a culture of integrity and one which supports a student throughout their academic journey.

Spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in the open acknowledgment of the importance of teaching and learning praxis that is grounded in compassion, understanding, cocreation, community, and flexibility. This is especially so for ‘traditional’ university spaces, in essence questioning and resisting the many established dynamics that face-to-face teaching and learning took for granted within many neoliberal and neocolonial higher education contexts. In this chapter, I propose positioning a love ethic as a primary point of departure for all educational engagements, a foundational shift in ontology (way of being) of the university. By focusing on love as liberation and justice, and teaching as an act of love, I draw on critical, engaged, and feminist pedagogies, as well as my experience as a lecturer in a social justice– and global citizenship-oriented program at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, where I positioned a love ethic as central to my pedagogical approach. I argue that when we begin to view love as more than mere emotion, but as an ideological position that informs values and praxis within higher education (and our university “classrooms” in particular), we may move toward new and exciting ways of envisioning the decolonized university of the 21st century. A love ethic, as defined by bell hooks, offers possibilities for an approach to critical transformation that is not merely motivated by the change of institutional structures, but by the reform of values guiding teaching and learning and ways of being within higher education institutions.

Humans care about things. The truth of this claim is obvious, yet scholars who have evaluated student interventions and outcomes in higher education have largely neglected how student values might inform their experience with those interventions and outcomes. This chapter will rely on a philosophical conceptualization of a particular type of value known as “caring” to explore what students value as they weigh various collegiate decisions. Elaborating on findings from a qualitative study of 143 college students from eight American universities, I will summarize previous findings related to what students cared about, how those cares were structured, and what the cares and structures meant for students' pathways through college. The categorical and theoretical patterns I share demonstrate how students approached values in ways that have not typically been considered by scholars or institutional administrators. After summarizing my previous findings, I offer a conceptual argument for a “dialectical” approach that considers the mutually formative interaction between student and institutional values. The practical result of naming and understanding the dialectic realities of values in higher education is the opportunity for institutions to use their relatively greater agency to help individual students pursue what is worth pursuing without reducing the agency of those students. Thus, the dialectic places necessary boundary lines on both the institution and the student while also clarifying the opportunity to help students develop moral expertise and navigate their collegiate pathways successfully.

Within North American institutions of higher education, the sociopolitical construct of whiteness comprises an often implicit set of lessons that are reflected not only in policy and curricula but also in the teaching practices of faculty. Such lessons perpetuate white centricity and supremacy, at enormous costs to those who have been negatively racialized. Therefore, it is critical for white faculty to engage meaningfully with ongoing processes of self-reflection, self-education, and skill development so that they can contribute positively to the interrogation and disruption of whiteness in higher education. This chapter discusses seven processual considerations for white educators who seek to interrogate and disrupt the problem of whiteness in teaching and learning.

This chapter unpacks how the value of altruism is rooted in the pedagogical model used by Jesuit Worldwide Learning (JWL), a faith-based organization providing tertiary education opportunities through a blended learning approach to people living at the margins. This contribution aims at tracing how this value, summarized in the Jesuit motto “men and women for others,” is rooted in JWL modus operandi and informs its educational practices, in particular by discussing the following elements of its model: (1) the Experience – Reflection – Action cycle, (2) the Global Classroom, (3) the Local Community of Learners, and (4) the student-led operation mode. Finally, this chapter provides a reflection, based on the organization practice and experience, to contribute to the broader discussion on values and their global validity by unpacking the tension of a modus operandi based on values culturally and religiously rooted but that aims at being globally understood and shared.

No matter how dominant a worldview is, there are always other ways of interpreting the world. (Littlebear, 2000, p. 79)

No matter how dominant a worldview is, there are always other ways of interpreting the world. (Littlebear, 2000, p. 79)

These words resonated with me when I first started my career in higher education in Canada 15 years after being a school teacher for much of my young adult life in México. Back then, in Mexico, I took for granted the way in which I lived my values. While there were instances and contexts where those values were challenged, it was not until I moved to Canada that I started redefining and reshaping my worldview, negotiating what was negotiable within me, and fighting to maintain my position in what was not negotiable. I am still learning to navigate the world of postsecondary education where I have learned that, as Siksika Elder Leroy Littlebear (2000) observes, “No one has a pure worldview that is 100 percent Indigenous or Eurocentric; rather, everyone has an integrated mind, a fluxing and ambidextrous consciousness” (p. 85). How then, do I show all of who I am when my position toward Indigenous history, culture, language, and values is informed by my own upbringing and experience and consequently might be perceived as “biased”?

This auto-ethnographic chapter addresses this question by presenting a case study where I reflect on Littlebear's (2000) observations on the fluidity of worldviews and the development of an “ambidextrous consciousness,” and how those principles have allowed me the space to be my authentic self despite the different ontological and axiological orientations I have encountered my work in higher education.

This chapter discusses the process of initiating and developing an open and ongoing conversation about values within a doctoral community in an education research center located within a British university. To do this, the authors first articulate the local and institutional context of this specific doctoral community and the intersections of values declared by the host institution and the specific research center.

This chapter then moves on to describing the process of building an open conversation with postgraduate researchers (PGRs) and staff supporting them. This open conversation questions and explores the institutionally stated values, starting from collaboratively negotiated guiding questions and prompts. The discussion of responses to those prompts, obtained through an anonymous online platform, grounds then a discussion of how values can become relevant and rooted in everyday experience for PGRs. The authors, as a collective, use the concept of “boundaries,” emerged in the conversations themselves but also relevant in academic literature, as a linking concept for the discussion of the responses.

The discussion then concludes by articulating the broader impact of the engagement in these conversations about values within and beyond the boundaries of the host institution and argues for the importance of such ongoing conversations as fundamental elements of fostering value-based communities and cultures in higher education contexts.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in Australia shape the country's economic, social, and political landscape and equip students with the skills they need to succeed in ever-changing work environments. Embedded within Australian HEIs are sets of values that reflect and reinforce collective Australian values, which describe the shared beliefs of the leadership, academic staff, students, and the local community. These shared values then direct all members of the university community. Using a top-tier university in Melbourne, Australia, as a case study, this chapter explores how the values of accessibility, inclusion, and collaboration are embedded into the curriculum, teaching, and assessment practices. Relationship-building and positive student interaction within learning contexts are also crucial to learning contexts in higher education (HE) and are essentially driven by values in HE. Furthermore, values identified in this chapter align with broader Australian values relating to fairness, equity, cooperation, and support. Utilizing the experience and reflection of four contributing academics in HE, this chapter offers ideas and strategies on how these values can be fundamentally rooted within learning and teaching programs, thereby increasing student engagement, interaction, and success. This chapter acknowledges that the needs of contemporary education have changed, as the HE sector now accommodates students from all walks of life. Additionally, a fundamental premise of the discourse is that learner diversity can be accommodated more effectively if it is spurred by values that respect and appreciate learner diversity.

The impact of globalization is undeniable; yet, it is so pervasive that we as researchers are still seeking answers to its impact and how to bring it to use most effectively. This chapter studies the role of global values in higher education of Pakistan and the amalgamation of global values in the practices of higher education institutions (HEIs) of Pakistan. For this purpose, 18 educational leaders and institutional heads of public and private HEIs of Pakistan were interviewed. Through thematic analysis, it was found that the educational leaders of Pakistani HEIs believe that global values such as integrity, creativity, fairness, unity, freedom, connection, sustainability, empowerment, reverence for life, human rights, civil rights, mutual trust, and honesty are responsible for harmony and peace in the world, and that universities are the best centers for promoting these values. However, they had concerns regarding Colonization by Western Values and conservation of national, regional, cultural, and religious values within a nation state.

Before the British colonial regime, Muslims in South Asia recognized a transnational notion of education that stretched on all sides, including the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Central and South-East Asia, with a great social awakening and consciousness about the importance of inclusive education. Academia included theological and secular subjects and focused on producing thoughtful, sophisticated, and confident individuals ready to defend their beliefs with sound knowledge and reasoning. However, the British Raj in the 19th and 20th centuries had a lasting and indelible impression on the Muslims and the Islamic education system. British colonial regime challenged the theological discourse and education and compelled a Western style of education. These transformations in the education system raised several dilemmas and impasses for the Muslims of South Asia. Pakistan has remained a silent recipient of this tension underpinned in its educational systems even before its inception. This chapter traces the roots of education systems operating in Pakistan starting from the ninth century with the victory of Mohammad Bin Qasim through the 19th-century colonial rule of Great Britain until today, when the country offers a blend of diverse education systems. The study explores values embedded in different education systems operating in Pakistan. It is essential to understand the values inherent in these systems to see the harmony or conflict prevailing as a consequence which might have repercussions for the different societal segments and communities. Renewed focus toward value realization will facilitate refining educational frameworks and a promise for the acceptance of global and international advancements.