Higher Education Policy and Practice (HEPP)

Established with support from the Centre for Higher Education Futures (CHEF), Higher Education Policy and Practice (HEPP) is a Special Interest Group under the Danish Network for Educational Development in Higher Education (DUN), bringing together researchers, academic developers, teachers, students and academic leaders interested in the relations between higher education policy and educational practice.

The network is interdisciplinary and cross-institutional and aims to connect Danish conversations on higher education with wider international debates and research networks.

HEPP’s activities develop in response to emerging questions in higher education. Current areas of interest include:

· Academic citizenship, democracy and participation

· Academic freedom and the changing societal role of universities

· Futuring, temporality and anticipatory forms of governance

· Sustainability, student agency and educational responses to societal challenges

· Changing relations between universities, policy and wider society

These themes build on HEPP’s earlier work on research integrity, academic freedom, de-internationalisation and academic citizenship.

Higher education policy increasingly enters the everyday practices of universities and other higher education institutions – through reforms, institutional strategies, changing expectations of education and research, and new demands concerning the societal role of universities. At the same time, experiences and practices within institutions raise important policy questions about academic freedom, participation, responsibility, knowledge, educational purposes and the futures universities are expected to help create.

HEPP provides a forum in which these perspectives can meet. Rather than treating policy and practice as separate domains, the network explores how they shape one another and how wider political and societal developments are translated into institutional, curricular and pedagogical practices.

HEPP organises seminars, workshops and conversations, often in collaboration with CHEF and other national and international networks. Activities combine research perspectives with experiences from teaching, educational development, leadership and policy and aim to create spaces where emerging issues can be discussed early, critically and creatively.

Recent and ongoing collaborations have addressed academic citizenship and democratic participation, futuring and temporality, sustainability and student agency, and changing forms of university responsiveness to societal challenges.

HEPP also contributes to the annual DUN conference and engages with wider international networks concerned with higher education policy, theory and practice.

Do you want to join HEPP?

Membership is open to anyone with an interest in higher education policy and practice. HEPP welcomes suggestions for themes, seminars and collaborative activities and can be contacted through the contact information shown on this site. For further information visit HEPP's DUN website by clicking this link