Student Participation in Quality Assurance: Based on Critical Consideration of the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG)
Tsutomu YAMADA
World Education Research Association Focal Meeting 2019年08月 口頭発表(一般) 学習院大学
Quality assurance (QA) in higher education is a common issue internationally. Nevertheless, due to the fact that quality is not properly defined, various problems have arisen away from the intentions of the involved parties. Meanwhile, students who are supposed to be core stakeholders are generally subject to interviews in the QA process as well.
Accordingly, based on the critical consideration of ESG, which is positioning students as actors of QA and reviewing their roles, this study examined what students should participate in and how for achieving QA in higher education and why student participation is linked to the QA, if at all.
First, from the standpoint of anti-positivism, the quality can be defined as “a situation where purposes appropriate for higher education are set and the degree of attainment of those purposes can be interpreted as students’ learning improvement, based on the contextuality of the learning experience”.
Second, student participation in ESG is problematic in that the stakeholder approach and learner one are not related.
Third, internal QA is required to function as organizational learning that enables double-loop learning, not as internal control nor internal democratic procedure, and works with external QA. Therefore, proper student participation means that students provide effective feedback for organizational learning of institutions (departments).
It is important for institutions (departments) to consider students as learning parties essential for organizational learning and ask students to participate in QA. Student participation in QA cannot be achieved via commercialization of learning, nor democratization of learning.