Work Paper 4_informes 26/10/11 10:11 Página 9
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The relationship between teachers and students constitutes the core of university activity. Beyond degrees, methods and formulas by which this reciprocity takes shape, what brings our university institutions alive is the fact that specific individuals communicate in a framework of coexistence, generating a network of interpersonal relationships. In the different chapters of the 4th Working Document by Studia XXI, Victor Pérez-Díaz, Francisco Michavila and María Antonia García-Benau “Teachers and students at the centre of universities”, propose a series of reflections based on the need to study the network of relationships that are formed within the community of teachers and students, learning from new experiences and taking advantage of the successes obtained over the long term at university institutions. Once again, these reflections represent a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge refers to the idea of setting the coordinates to guide the way for reforms pending, based on critical, realistic and constructive perspective: a process of internal reflection where universities must decide what principles can orient a transfer of knowledge, which is always verified from person to person. It is a good idea to study this dimension of university functions because we have historical perspective and because new winds of change are blowing within European Higher Education Institutions. And it is also a good idea to share and to learn from new experiences and from the innovative proposals made by many universities, as consequence of studying new ways of interpreting this living relationship between students and their teachers. In the first chapter, Victor Pérez-Díaz summarizes what idea of university could act as a guide for reforms and suggests the internal and external incentives that could enable them. Then, focusing on the case of Spain, he describes a series of institutional mechanisms and cultural features that would have to be corrected, conclude with some proposals on the path to follow. In practice, speaking of a different university education, as professor Francisco Michavila explains in the document’s second chapter, involves making an effort to translate the institutional mission itself, its values and its signs of identity. The educational model aspires to reflect the intentionality and the ethos of the university education project itself. That sum of strategies and actions, ordered and integrated into a global plan, must give rise to universities educational model. Its design aims to structure, in a flexible way, the life of the university community, to strengthen its habits both individually and collectively and lay down the institutional rule that govern university activities in their academic, educational-teaching, research, cultuEXECUTIVE SUMMARY 9