Generic graduate attributes: citizens for an uncertain future

Over the past two decades the terms generic skills, graduate qualities, generic attributes and core capabilities have become a familiar part of the teaching and learning landscape of higher education. Indeed it seems that there is rarely a higher education teaching and learning conference these days that doesn't have a theme on generic attributes (as we shall refer to them in this introduction). At these conferences and in the literature, conversations in the higher education community around generic attributes typically centre on accounts of practice. Publications on the topic have often focussed on the evaluation of particular curriculum initiatives, reports on institutions' initiatives in the area of generic skills and reports of the relative importance of different sets of attributes or skills. There has been less written about the theoretical and conceptual basis for such attributes, despite many reports of practice pointing to this missing conceptual base. While there may increasingly be a shared vocabulary discernible in these publications and conversations, the extent to which this represents a shared meaning is questionable. The variety of terms commonly used to refer to generic attributes is an obvious feature of these discussions. Indeed it is a mark of the lack of critical attention that the concept has received that terms such as generic skills, graduate qualities, generic attributes and core capabilities are used relatively interchangeably, with an apparent assumption of a shared meaning. Equally striking is the range of de®nitions advanced for particular skills and attributes in the literature, a range that is matched only by the variety of reported approaches taken to the teaching and learning of these varied attributes. Sitting behind such accounts of the initiatives, initiated by academics to foster such worthwhile outcomes as team work and communication skills, are policy statements claiming such qualities on behalf of graduates. These statements of generic attributes seek to describe the core outcomes of a higher education. In doing so they specify an aspect of the institution's contribution to society and carry with them implicit and sometimes explicit assumptions as to the purpose and nature of a `higher' education. Such assumptions are inextricably entwined with suppositions as to the nature of knowledge and what it means to be educated in contemporary society.