Blueprints of distress?: Why quality assurance frameworks and disciplinary education cannot sustain a 21st-century education

Learning and teaching in the university sector is at an impasse. Almost every university one surveys seeks to produce graduates who are adaptive, creative, curious, and entrepreneurial. But the learning and teaching quality assurance frameworks upon which universities rely to prepare such graduates are comprised of rigidly prescriptive norms, wideranging managerial oversight, and time-consuming bureaucratic processes. The learning outcome and the rubric stand out as the two most prevalent technologies deployed in such systems. Much the same could be said about a comparison between the openness of transdisciplinarity and the relatively closed system of disciplinary learning and teaching. In an effort to move beyond such dilemmas, the learning and teaching model of the knowledge ecology can restore to the classroom the individuality and spontaneity that has gone missing while it can also prepare students for the demands and challenges of the precarious world they will enter upon graduation.