1 WORKING PAPER 3: Development Discourses: Higher Education and Poverty Reduction in South Africa, October 2008 Strengthening professionalism for the public good: implications for professional education Monica McLean, Melanie Walker, Arona Dison, and Rosie Peppin- Vaughan Abstract The project ‘Developing Discourses: Higher Education and Poverty Reduction in South Africa’ explores how university-located professional education might contribute to South Africa’s transformation priorities, in particular poverty reduction, which we conceptualize as the expansion of human capabilities. This working paper builds on the idea that the project is developing (drawing on the work of Amartya Sen [1999] and Martha Nussbaum [2000]) that ‘pro- poor professionalism’ can be identified as a set of professional functional capabilities, encouraged by a range of curriculum and pedagogic indicators, which would educate professionals to function in the interests of the poor. We propose that the discourse of professionalism might be employed as a resource to elaborate and illuminate the task that faces the educators of professionals in a transforming South Africa. Across the world there is evidence that ideal-typical professionalism, defined as working for the public good, is in crisis: self-interest and technical rationality are prevailing, and there are histories of collusion with corrupt states (including apartheid South Africa). Nevertheless, we argue that the integrity of professional life is necessary to the health of civic culture everywhere; and, that there are some grounds for believing that a concept of professionalism that is linked to social functions and the common good can be revived to be of service in any democratic society in the contemporary world, and in South Africa in particular. One of the circumstances that makes possible progressive versions of professionalism is the potential offered by education and training. Professional education university departments 1 are charged with a public mission to educate professionals for performance, for ethical judgment and for a disposition towards society and clients; such departments institutionalize distinctive cultures through their pedagogical and research practices. We make some proposals about pedagogic practices that might indicate human development professional capabilities, or to put it another way, indicate strengthening professionalism for the public good. 1. Introduction ‘[…]what makes one free and renders life worth living is finally neither satisfying one’s desires nor accomplishing one’s purposes, valuable as these are, but instead learning to act with the good of the whole in view, building life act by act, happy if each deed, as far as circumstances allow, contributes to general welfare. Anyone who has been stirred and inspired by a committed teacher, an attentive health care provider, a dedicated pastor or rabbi; anyone who has experienced a well- functioning business firm or public agency, school or cultural institution 1 Here the moniker ‘department’ is stands in for ‘faculty’ and ‘school’.