Higher Education最新文献

There are strong concerns about students perceiving their undergraduate education in instrumental, rather than transformational, ways. However, it is not clear whether seeing education instrumentally undermines students' capacity to see their education as transformational. Based on data from a 7-year longitudinal study of chemical engineering students from three countries, this article shows that all students focused on instrumental outcomes from education in their first year of study. However, by their final year, students tended to give instrumental accounts of what they had gained from their overall university experience and transformational accounts of what they had gained from studying their subject. This suggests that, depending on the context evoked, most students can describe instrumental or transformational relationships to their education. However, developing transformational accounts on their education appeared to be dependent on studying knowledge-rich degrees that supported them to engage with the world from the perspective of a particular body of knowledge. This raises serious questions about educational policies that imply that instrumental outcomes are the most important outcomes from students' educational experiences as such policies obscure the importance of transformational knowledge-focused relationships that change the way that students engage with the world.

Using interviews with global research stakeholders, this research explores how stakeholders within research-system-level research governance organisations conceptualised, responded to, and reasoned the realities of disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they positioned procedural changes to their governance mechanisms. Given that system shocks present critical challenges to established practices and embedded institutional norms, we use neo-institutional theory as a heuristic device to examine the relationship between the exogenous shock of COVID-19, trajectories of institutional norms and cultures, and the role institutional stakeholders play in managing responses. Across all the research systems studied (with particular focus on the UK, Australia, Norway, New Zealand, Hong Kong SAR, and Italy), participants were concerned about how the shock provided by COVID-19 had both revealed and entrenched deep inequalities inherent in their research systems and globally. There were tensions in how participants centralised the concept of the 'normal' as part of a process of recovery permeating all system-level responses, often with a sense of wistful affection for pre-pandemic structures, modes of operation, and embedded norms. Aspirations for short-, medium,- and long-term plans for research change echoed a dependency on returning to 'normal' and an inevitable pull of the norms of the pre-pandemic status quo. Despite the desire to 'build back better', the pull of institutional norms and the gravitational force of the status quo appeared too strong for meaningful change in recovering research systems.

Despite extensive research into English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in higher education, few if any studies have explored the role of higher education autonomy in driving EMI. This paper tests the novel hypothesis that university autonomy-spearheaded across European higher education through neoliberally predicated 'steering at a distance' reforms-predicts EMI. The data are multilevel with higher education institutions (HEIs) nested inside education systems. The University Autonomy Scorecards (Pruvot & Estermann, 2017) operationalise university autonomy at the education-system level (n = 26) and measure four dimensions of autonomy: academic, financial, staffing, and organisational. We include 'overall autonomy' as the average. The European Tertiary Education Register provides HEI-level data (n = 1815), which we combine with a count of English-taught degree programmes (ETPs) to measure EMI, provided by Study Portals, the largest online portal of degree programmes. We conduct multilevel regression to analyse the relationships between autonomy and EMI. The results showed that overall autonomy predicts EMI in public universities (p = 0.002). Increasing overall autonomy by one point above the mean increases the likelihood of offering EMI by 9.5%. Academic, staffing, and organisational autonomy predict EMI in public universities, whereas financial autonomy does not. The first to quantify a relationship between university autonomy and EMI, this study offers new insights into how EMI comes about. By revealing a previously obscured interconnectedness between language shift and higher education governance, the study demonstrates the value added of an interdisciplinary approach and proposes a new line of inquiry for future research.

This paper employs critical discourse analysis to investigate the construction of 'high-level talents' within China's Double First-Class Project, an educational initiative implemented in 2015 to establish first-class universities and disciplines and cultivate high-level talents. The study examines the juxtaposition of human capital discourse and the political concern of 'socialism builders and inheritors' as articulated in key policy texts, including President Xi Jinping's speeches and various government documents. It investigates how the global discourse of human capital has been recontextualised within Chinese higher education policy, highlighting the tensions and negotiations between economic objectives and ideological imperatives. The findings reveal a hybrid discourse-'high-level talents with Chinese characteristics'-that reflects the Chinese Communist Party's strategy in crafting its narrative to negotiate compliance with global policy discourses while strengthening its governing power in an increasingly globalised, economic, and individualising world. This study contributes to the understanding of how global educational ideologies are localised, offering insights into the implications for students' educational choices and identities within the framework of China's socio-political landscape.

A major shift in the research sector has been the increased expectation from policymakers and funders that academic research should yield some socioeconomic benefits or 'impacts' rather than merely new knowledge. In this paper, we explore the role that impact has in academics' motivations and values and how impact is being integrated into academics' core functions of research and education. We do this through in-depth interviews (n = 60) with scientists who work on the development or application of artificial intelligence (AI), broadly defined. This AI's focus situates our participants within a strategically important, high-priority area of research for all three national contexts included in our study-Australia, the UK and the USA. Our findings reveal that the impact mission has become central to understanding the motivations and values of academics, but unevenly. We identify divergence between those who work on AI from a foundational computer science perspective and those who develop and apply AI within other scientific domains. The two groups have different understandings of key notions such as 'impact' and 'applied research', as well as different ways of integrating the impact agenda into their research and education activities. The study highlights the importance of flexible approaches to research policy and governance that are based on a deeper understanding of what motivates researchers, and that take into account academics' educational role. Greater holistic understanding of how academic identities and practices are accommodating the impact agenda is essential to maximise synergy across activities and avoid unintended consequences.

A "whole university approach" has been recommended for addressing concerns about the wellbeing of UK university lecturers and students. Previously, staff wellbeing has been explored from staff perspectives. Student wellbeing has been explored from the perspectives of both students and staff. However, little research has been conducted on student perspectives on staff wellbeing and its possible impact on students. Addressing this gap, this study explored student perceptions of their lecturers' wellbeing and ways that it can impact on student wellbeing. Three themes were identified from the thematic analysis of 9 focus groups with 41 undergraduate students. First, students notice their lecturer wellbeing, particularly if they have the opportunity to interact with their lecturers. Second, students perceive that their lecturers' wellbeing can be affected by university policies and practices, student behaviours, and external factors. Third, lecturer wellbeing and student wellbeing are often reciprocal, emphasising the importance of lecturer-student interactions. These findings have implications for a whole university approach, namely development of university practices that support sufficient time for constructive lecturer-student interactions, such as timetabling, allocation of administrative tasks, class size and staffing levels.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10734-024-01365-0.

Theoretical and empirical contributions to research on evaluation have advanced our understanding of how values influence evaluation practice. Yet rather than understand how values shape evaluation and its use, research on the evaluation of widening participation (WP) programmes delivered by English higher education (HE) providers has focused on methodological deficits. Rather, this study explores the complexity of how national policy, organisational imperatives and the individual values of staff responsible for WP within HE providers influence how evaluation is practised and used to inform decision-making. The results of semi-structured interviews with 17 staff members spanning the organisational hierarchy of three diverse English HE providers highlight conflicts between staff values, job roles and responsibilities and espoused organisational values, and how they can influence symbolic and legitimising evaluation practices. Alternatively, at the individual level staff values support the process and instrumental use of evaluation to inform programme improvements. The findings identify implications for how HE providers can shape their evaluation systems, and how staff choose to enact evaluation within their programme areas.

The 2014 Israeli war on the Gaza Strip was described, as the 'longest' and 'most violent', compared to previous wars since 2008. This paper reports on this war experiences for educationalists (academic staff and students) at two of Gaza's universities. It draws on 36 in-depth semi-structured interviews with educationalists in the Gaza Strip, which I conducted via Skype and mobile/phones from the UK, for my PhD research at the University of Cambridge. Theoretically, the inductive study uses insights from Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Bourdieu's work on symbolic violence, retrospectively. Findings from this research show the impact of the war on Gaza's educationalists has varied between vulnerability and resilience. The memories of loss, fear, and dehumanization continued to affect educationalists, even after the war came to halt. Some of Gaza's universities buildings, and facilities were also damaged. Consequently, Gaza's universities found themselves in a dilemma on how to manage immediate needs, with developmental prospects. This paper documents the history of Gaza's universities, enhancing our sociological understanding of the experiences of higher education in the Gaza Strip, and the challenges for its development. The research widens the geographical scope of research on conflict, and education, by including the experiences of educationalists in the occupied and besieged context of Gaza, which is significantly under-researched. Insights from this research could be useful to inform the process of reconstruction of higher education in the Gaza Strip, after Israel's ongoing war on the Gaza Strip, since 7th October 2023 comes to end.

Publishing research in English-medium international journals has become highly valued in various academic contexts. The Russian academic context is part of this trend, which puts new pressures on Russian academics. Although a range of measures has been undertaken as publication support, Russian academics’ ability to produce high-quality papers for English-medium international journals remains low. In this paper, we present a study conducted to gain a better understanding of the possible reasons for this phenomenon. It draws on documentary sources produced by 139 academics working at 26 Russian universities. The findings of the study indicate that a large number of Russian academics remain under-represented; the existing publication support is still not focusing appropriately on publishing in English-medium international journals, and is insufficiently diverse to satisfy Russian academics’ individual needs. We conclude by suggesting that wider audiences of Russian academics should be engaged in publication efforts; higher education policymakers and institutional leaders should reconsider the role that higher education institutions play in preparing academics for publishing in English-medium international journals; publication support should focus appropriately on publishing in these journals. This paper will make a useful contribution to the literature by providing fresh insights into the issues experienced by Russian academics along their publication path and determining the areas that need to be addressed. In particular, this may be useful for academics from post-Soviet countries since many of them share common research traditions. However, potential beneficiaries are not limited to them.

The principle of collegiality is one of the philosophical backbones of academic tradition. However, in the USA, institutional policies that aim to enforce collegiality have met strong opposition. This paper examines the framings of collegiality in American higher education and underlying institutional logics through qualitative content analysis of the Chronicle of Higher Education articles published between 2013 and 2022. The analysis identified six collegiality frames: Communal Ties, Collective Responsibilities, Likability/Interpersonal Skills, Cultural Fit, Willingness to Serve, and Coerced Conformity. Most typically, collegiality is portrayed as a characteristic of the faculty community marked by collaborative interactions. The framing of collegiality as communal ties is often accompanied by a “narrative of loss” (Kligyte & Barrie, 2014). Career advice articles targeting academic job seekers and faculty review candidates frame collegiality as a desirable individual quality and an implicit yet crucial criterion in peer evaluation. In contrast, articles discussing institutional policies and employment disputes offer a more critical framing, presenting a view of collegiality as an euphemism for coerced conformity and an instrument for managerial control. This paper contends that the divergent collegiality framings reflect the interplay of competing institutional logics and logic casting within the higher education landscape.