汕头老市区美食攻略:`GRADUATENESS' AND A CORE CURRICULUM FOR GEOGRAPHY? 是什么意思？

ABSTRACT :Geography is an academic discipline, not a profession, and one of its traditional strengths in British higher education is its use as a vehicle for the development of critical intellectual skills. These require neither a core curriculum nor standard assessment procedures and 'quality thresholds'. This feature should be defended against the short-term materialist and politically correct arguments of programmes seeking to define 'graduateness' and core curricula.
KEYWORDS :Graduateness, core curriculum. The pressures for a core curriculum for geography in British higher education were discussed in Mike Bradford's editorial to an earlier issue of this journal, in which he concluded that "A national curriculum or common core for higher education would present a brand-new vehicle for further, short-sighted political interference. Let us not assemble the vehicle for them" (Bradford, 1995, p. 9). In the following year a report from a project on 'graduateness' being funded by the English Higher Education Quality Council's Quality Enhancement Group, which seeks to "identify what attributes are expected of graduates across all degree programmes (or clusters of them) and how these attributes might be defined and their possession assessed", was published in the Internet journal Deliberations (Wright, 1996). Alan Jenkins (1996) used this to re-visit the issue of a core curriculum for a geography degree, through a series of questions addressed to 'subscribers' to GeogNet (GeogNet@nene.ac.uk) on the Internet (see Livingstone, this issue).
Jenkins posed two core questions: 'What is a geography graduate?', and 'Is there a core/baseline in geography degree standards?'. He then set a series of subsidiary questions: