Nafn nemanda: Le Yu
Námsleið: Alþjóðlegt nám í menntunarfræði, MA
Leiðbeinendur: Susan Elizabeth Gollifer og Ólafur Páll Jónsson

Ágrip: „This research targets two consecutive versions of the strategic plan of the University of Iceland and explores how the university discursive constructs the purpose of education, the roles of university and social responsibility by navigating the tensions between humanistic and technocratic paradigms in the strategic plans and capturing the embodied changes and continuity and changes rendered through the texts. The focus of this research is not what the university practices and implements, but how institutional discourses are organized to represent the university’s value statement, legitimacy narratives and social meanings.
Adapting a qualitative research design, this research is philosophically based on social-constructionism with an interpretivist epistemological Stance and adapts Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as research method. The analytical process is based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA and the analytical framework extracted from literature review.
The findings of this research indicate that both strategic plans keep humanistic narratives of knowledge, culture, public engagement, responsibility and democratic society. However, as the texts develop, these narratives are translated into technocratic languages of quality control, performance indicators, social impact, and accountability. Humanistic discourses do not disappear, but has become symbolic and function as legitimizing the foundation of university; Technocratic discourses take the lead to organize the logic of implementation and concrete measures of the university’s strategies. Social responsibility is framed differently. The previous version emphasizes more on public duty, cultural inheriting and knowledge production while the latter put more emphasis on its visible impact and reconceptualizes it as partnerships, social impact and demonstratable contribution in global agenda.
This research suggests that the purpose of education and university’s roles and social responsibility are of flexible property—they don’t just stand still, but are continuously re-conceptualized, institutionalized and reconciled in the strategic plan. The findings of this research could further understandings towards university social responsibility and transformation in terms of university governance induced by contemporary ideological shift in higher education governance environment and in terms of Icelandic context. This research could also empirically support research in relevant fields such as the purpose of education, university strategic plan and the methodological implication of critical discourse analysis used in the field of higher education.