learning activities, not assessment tasks

Learning activities are activities through which students can learn.

Not just learn to do the activity, but learn lots of other things associated with the activity 'through doing the activity'. Associated means surrounding, underpinning, etc - Halliday's up/down/around.

An assessment task is an activity from which you can 'read off' the learning of a student. Again, not just the achievement of the task itself.

Thus, genre theory that targets finalised activities, does not notice that it is learning the wider meaning potential that matters. The genre itself is only a pretext or medium or occasion for learning this larger domain.

In SFL terms, doing a genre is an instancing of a larger system.

Learners, not knowers

The goal of university education is not to be a knower, but to be a learner; that is, to be able to bracket your current knowledge and be open to learn anew.

Graduates for the real world

Acting and caring in and for the world is now emphatically holistic and interdisciplinary.

Worldly problems are inherently interdisciplinary, so our graduates need to be interdisciplinary too. Just as we talk about 'whole-of-government' or 'multiple bottomlines', so too our graduates need to be whole of faculty and multi-disciplinary.
Even if some 'old' universities continue to focus on producing new generations of narrow disciplinary theorists, new universities like VU should focus on producing worldly actors. Curriculum should focus on a real-world problem - water, energy, urban development, terrorism, pandemics, public health, Indigenous community development - and bring to bear on it as many disciplinary perspectives as possible. Students will learn to work and think across different vocabularies, paradigms, methodologies, values and conceptual frameworks.