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Because a highly skilled population is necessary for economic success, universities have a critical and growing social and economic role. Transferable skills associated with employability, such as critical thinking, lifelong learning, cultural awareness, teamwork, communication and leadership, are included in a suite of attributes which, as Barrie (2006) has described, many universities aspire to develop within their graduates. Aside from employability, there are also imperatives for universities to develop skills so that graduates may confront what has been described Barnett (2000:257) as "supercomplexity", "a world where nothing can be taken for granted, where no frame of understanding or of action can be entertained with any security" (see Su, in this volume). This is the case across individual disciplines and also in an interdisciplinary context. For example, health professionals will need to face a plethora of new challenges such as those described by Christobal et al. (2009) - for instance, the emergence of new diseases, a growing pandemic of non-communicable disorders, largely due to inappropriate lifestyles and social and educational changes as well as global information technology in a consumerist environment. |
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