Uudle-izing higher education: Constructing a global accountability relation

The story of UUDLEs (otherwise known as University Undergraduate Degree Level Expectations) is one of how an organizing text is developed, implemented as policy, and becomes an actual condition of people’s everyday work within a faculty of education. I have begun the articulation of the textually-based work sequences that inform my understanding of UUDLEs. I have done this in order to produce an ethnographic account of the “...day-to-day text-based work and local discourse practices that produce and shape the dynamic ongoing activities of an institution” (Turner, 2006, p. 139). I could understand that something invisible was happening (and I was a part of it) and that this invisibility was generating a set of experiences for myself and, as I learned from conducting interviews, for my informants. As an institutional ethnographer my goal is to locate the actual so a portion of my data collection involved the tracing back and following of clues from the local site (a faculty of education) and the data that I collected therein and beyond (Campbell & Gregor, 2002). The beyond is where I wish to explore in this presentation. The sequences that I have mapped actually shape the global foundation upon which future teaching and further policy development occurs. What became visible was that the initiative that I understood to be specific to Ontario, Canada (the UUDLEs framework) in fact transcends across multiple locations and institutions. While the name UUDLEs might be specific to Canada, this movement of articulating and adhering to quality assurance frameworks is actually taking place and changing the everyday work of teachers on an international scale – all in the name of quality teaching, the student experience, and transfer of credit. Commensurability of education is the new actuality for higher education.