The possibilities for university-based public-good professional education: a case-study from South Africa based on the ‘capability approach’

Abstract

The education of professionals oriented to poverty reduction and the public good is the focus of the article. Sen’s ‘capability approach’ is used to conceptualise university-based professional education as a process of developing public-good professional capabilities. The main output of a research project on professional education in South Africa is an innovative ‘Public-Good Professional Education Index’ generated by using three knowledge sources: theory; empirical data from five university-based professional education departments in three universities in South Africa; and deliberations with stakeholders. Here the case of a Department of Engineering is selected to exemplify how the Index assists an evaluation of the development of public-good professional capabilities in universities, which allows some optimism in the spaces between realism and idealism. Attention is drawn to the relevance of the approach and arguments to contemporary university-based professional education worldwide.

Keywords:

• public-good professional education
• professional capabilities
• poverty reduction
• comparative approach
• case study

Acknowledgements

We warmly thank Arona Dison in Cape Town and Rosie Vaughan in Nottingham for undertaking interviews and working on case studies. The complete set of case studies and more detail about the project as a whole can be found at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/EducationResearchProjects/DevelopmentDiscourses/ArticlesandResources.aspx.