Higher Education Policy and Practice (HEPP)

Background purpose

Higher education policy and practice are increasingly merging in the everyday life of teachers and students at Danish universities and institutions for higher education. Higher education programmes and specific courses are, increasingly, steered closer towards the job market and wider societal arenas outside academic institutions. Discussions of the threatened academic freedom and the right to critically debate the institutional and academic leadership of Danish universities emerge in newspapers, union magazines, reports on work environment (APVs), and in research papers, special issues, and edited volumes. Debates around research ethics and research integrity take shape and become part of competence development modules.

It is rare in a Danish academic context that policy and practice speak together and are combined in a joint undertaking. Often, policy makers and practitioners work and discuss their work in separate forums, and few efforts exist that try and bridge the gap between the two paradigms. HEPP aims to mend the divide by including researchers and developers working in the intersections of higher education policy and practice. Further, HEPP aims to include members who work across academic and institutional levels: academic leaders, researchers, developers, teachers, and students (across all levels). This way, HEPP aims for a greater level of awareness, understanding, complementarity, and cohesion in the future debates, initiatives, and actions taken in order to mutually benefit the policy and practice levels of higher education in Denmark. Further, HEPP will create an interdisciplinary forum, where the research into higher education policy and practice often draws from separate and conflicting research methodologies and knowledge paradigms. HEPP will bring together researchers and developers from the Social Sciences, Sciences, and Humanities, who work from quantitative, quality, and theoretical academic traditions – with the aim of creating better understanding, recognition, and acknowledgment across the levels within universities, but also between institutions and the wider societal domains.

Method

• HEPP will have regular meetings (1-2 per semester). The hosting role and responsibility will shift between members’ institutions. Members are invited to propose topics for workshops and participants may present and discuss their current work, find synergies and identify opportunities for further collaboration.

• HEPP will contribute with symposia, workshops, and individual papers at the annual DUN conference and present the work of the SIG. HEPP will submit to DUT both research papers and practice-based papers and reports.

Themes

HEPP is currently working on four main themes:

1. Research Integrity

2. Academic Freedom

3. De-internationalisation of Danish Higher Education

4. Academic Citizenship