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On March 8th, Prof. Sotiria Grek gave a seminar on the topic of 'The making of the European Education Area 2025; the many faces and functions of quality assurance in Higher Education in Europe'
Here is a short description of the talk:
The making of the European Education Area 2025 represents the latest effort by the European Commission to coordinate the governance of the European education space.
Although the history of the making of European education is long, since the 1970s we observe a systematic effort to create convergence of European education policy objectives, as well as foster increased mobility within Europe. However, any attempt to govern the European education space walks on the tight rope of creating possibilities for mobility via standardisation, whilst respecting national histories, cultures and pedagogical traditions in education. This is difficult, as education is still seen as one of the last policy bastions of the nation-state. The paper builds on on-going ERC-funded work that explores the construction of the European Education Area 2025, focusing on the following issues:
- the simultaneous push and pull of standardising education versus opening it out to include culture and create broader discourses of commonness and unity
- the continuous creation of different focal ‘areas’ (for example, EHEA, ERA, now the EEA) with different ways of organising, aims and ways of doing things;
- the central place of quality assurance as a way of working;
- the central role of the collaboration with the OECD as key partners;
- and last but not least, the use of higher education quality assurance as the blue print for creating the European education area.