Curriculum, social relevance and university policies

Abstract

Through a comparative review of the career's curricular projects in the Communications Degree of the Public University in Uruguay, and from the perspective of comprehensive curricular relevance and the multiple relationships between the University and the environment, this article frames the complex fabric of University public policies in the regional context along the recent decades. The approach to the documents of the curricula, their comprehensive relevance and the relationship they establish with the professional field and the world of work is made through the analysis of higher education policies, their transformations and trends in Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s, and the contextual elements of the Uruguayan case. Aspects of the curricular projects are also reviewed as educational policy-influenced products, from prospective scenarios bearing configuration axes, analysis criteria, and models functional to those scenarios, applicable to public universities in the region at the beginning of the 21st century. By finding both a curriculum reactive to the policies of the 90s in higher education in the region, and another project in line with the University reforms at the beginning of the century, which follow a “national university” model, elements showing that the transformations and trends in educational policies in the region in recent decades in the university & society relationship are identified; said transformations and trends seem to be anchored to specific products,  such as the curricular designs of a university degree.