British Educational Research Journal最新文献

In UK universities, there is a long-standing gap in degree award outcomes for undergraduate students with white British students more likely to graduate with a ‘good degree’ (first or upper second class) than British students from minority ethnic backgrounds. Given its complex, systemic nature, researchers have highlighted the importance of adopting holistic, intersectional and exploratory approaches that are solution-focused. However, few qualitative studies provide a voice to minoritised students with regards to describing their individual experiences and their own suggestions for change. Through interviews and an advisory group session, this qualitative study explores the lived experiences of 14 minority ethnic undergraduate female students attending a large, public research university in the UK. The findings generated key themes with intersectional dimensions including gender, nationality, immigrant status, socioeconomic status and educational background including biased attitudes and stereotypes, feelings of being underestimated and needing to work harder, the need for greater diversity, and feelings of disconnection and lack of integration with other minority ethnic students. Participants also shared their perceptions of the awarding gap and proposed strategies for addressing the gap, including raising awareness, increasing diversity among teaching staff, enhancing academic resources and fostering connection among peers. By capturing the racialised narratives of students, this research sheds light on the pervasive biases, stereotypes and systemic issues that contribute to the gap. Through these efforts, the study aims to foster a more inclusive and equitable educational environment, ultimately contributing to the elimination of the degree awarding gap at universities.

This study examines the role of predatory competition, student expectations and unclear institutional purposes in shaping the main management challenges present in Brazilian universities. The study explores the experiences, perceptions and recommendations of 42 rectors and academic directors working in Brazilian universities regarding the future of higher education in the country. In-depth interviews with these university leaders generated 482 pages of transcripts, analysed inductively and based on the content analysis technique. The data analysis indicates that managers, especially those who work in more recent private universities and do not belong to the large educational groups that dominate higher education in Brazil, will possibly face the greatest management challenges. The study results indicate the complex academic environment of Brazilian higher education institutions, dominated by harmful neoliberal principles, and characterised by low collaboration between higher education institutions, price wars, difficulty in differentiation, neglect of student expectations, conflicting interests, questioned legitimacy and institutional instability. The study offers recommendations for Brazilian universities to orient themselves towards the ‘neoliberal future’, especially by adopting a strategy to expand their educational services based on constant dialogue with the market, developing modern service management that focuses on people and improves the experience of its students, and defining a clear institutional purpose aligned with the demands of society and more deeply with the principles of sustainability and social responsibility.

The term ‘ideas-informed society’ describes democracies in which citizens believe in the value of staying well-informed and up-to-date with current affairs. They also put these beliefs into action: critically engaging with new ideas and perspectives, delving into scientific discoveries or emerging technologies and exploring aspects of history and culture. Likewise, they stay abreast of political, economic and health-related events, new products, new forms of media and so on. While ideas engagement can, in theory, lead to citizens becoming better informed, better able to engage in effective decision-making and better able to understand the world around them, these benefits do not reach everybody. Likewise, in the ideas ecosystem generally, we can often see ‘dark’ ideas winning through: resulting in less optimal outcomes for both citizens and nations. While interest in the notion of the ideas-informed society is burgeoning, we argue that, if future research is to be effectively positioned to support meaningful ideas engagement, what is now required is a theoretical frame to guide this research moving forward. We use this paper to argue for such a framework based on three principal elements: (1) whether individuals possess a prospective mindset, enabling them to value ideas engagement, as well as become more likely to commit to behaviours concomitant with ideas that have optimal and wide-reaching outcomes; (2) the features of individuals' social networks, and how these impact on citizens' access to ideas and the nature of their ideas engagement; and (3) individuals' levels of education and the extent to which the education people receive allows them to engage with ideas critically. As well as setting out the case for our proposed framework, we conclude by proposing future research to enable us to further specify and verify this framework as well as develop instruments to test it nationally and internationally.

In this paper, we entwine sympathetic concepts of liminality and workplace identity to capture processual, agential and emotional elements of transition for established professionals from other sectors taking up academic careers in a digitised UK business school. We undertake interpretative analysis of explicit and latent responses through three core themes exploring processes of transition, agencies of transition and emotions of transition through anonymised interviews conducted with 15 participants coming in from a variety of industrial and service roles. With a rationale of better understanding barriers and ambiguities experienced during times of transition, the paper considers perceptions of ambiguity and flux experienced by those undertaking second careers in the context of marketised higher education, arguing that coming in from a profession is complex and unsettling. The paper argues for greater institutional focus on improving perceptions of belonging, valorisation and recognition for those negotiating the ritual and contested space of transition, particularly in light of increasing collaboration between academia and practice and growing student numbers in this space. It concludes that in the light of continued policy decisions embracing rapid growth in apprenticeship and other practice-based degree programmes, university managers need active strategies to retain and develop those from industry and other professional backgrounds.

The aim of this study is to explore doctoral students' (DS) perceptions of social practices that contribute to their well-being. Utilising social practice theory, specifically the framework of social practices as an interplay of ‘materials’, ‘meanings’ and ‘competences’, we examine which social practices enhance DS well-being and the contexts in which these practices occur. We employ an auto-photography methodology. Twelve UK-based DS took photographs of places that relate to their well-being and participated in interviews to explain their photos. On completing a three-stage data analytic procedure, our findings show that DS well-being is shaped by social practices shared between students and supervisors, where informal settings and the significance of place play a crucial role. We demonstrate that such settings, both on and off campus, act as facilitators for the performance of well-being-enhancing practices. Instead of solely attributing DS well-being to micro-level individual choices or macro-level institutional factors, as is often conceptualised, we propose that scholars must focus on the dynamic interplay of social practices that shape DS well-being. By demonstrating how social practices connect micro-level experiences with macro-level structures, we provide a deeper understanding of what shapes well-being and highlight the essential role of place. Understanding these practices can inform targeted interventions and policies, ultimately enhancing well-being among doctoral students.

This paper proposes a research model that explores and tests a mediated moderation model of teacher educator's professional identity (TEPI). The model assesses the link between (a) triggering factor (leadership support, professional socialisation, training & development) and TEPI; (b) psychological arousals (role clarity and transformative learning) and TEPI; and (c) institutional support as a moderator of the effect of aforesaid psychological arousals on TEPI. We used cross-sectional data to gauge these relationships via data obtained from teachers’ educators from higher education institutes in Pakistan. Most of the hypothesised associations are supported, and the model we proposed is viable. Leadership support, professional socialisation, and training and development of teacher educators ignite the development process of teacher educators, whereas role clarity and transformative learning positively moderate the aforementioned relationship. However, this study could not find a constructive role of institutional support in the role clarity–TEPI and transformative learning–TEPI nexuses.

Citizenship Education (CE) has been found to be an effective tool in preparing young people to participate actively in a democracy. However, recent years have seen a decline in both the quality and provision of CE, coupled with a notable absence of public input on the subject. This paper provides an initial exploration of the British public's views on citizenship education through an exploratory survey conducted with a nationally representative sample of 1003 individuals. The survey examined public perceptions of the current quality of CE, general support for the subject, and specific educational aims. Our findings indicate that while CE is generally regarded as important, its quality is perceived as lacking. Respondents highlighted critical thinking skills, as well as financial and digital literacy as the most crucial components of CE, whereas communitarian aspects of citizenship were deemed less significant. Additionally, the study found that ideology, demographic factors, and political attitudes significantly influence public views on CE. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy and research implications, emphasising the need to incorporate public perceptions in the design of citizenship education and suggesting ways that CE can be developed to support democratic engagement.

This study addresses the complex challenges of childhood obesity, food poverty and environmental degradation by developing a planetary health framework for school food in education. Drawing on Dewey's experiential learning philosophy, it adopts an integrative approach where school meals and food education converge. Rooted in the planetary health model, the research explores the interdependence of human and environmental health within the context of school food. Employing a convergent mixed-methods approach, we conduct interviews, a web-based survey and observations in English primary schools to explore multiple stakeholders' perspectives on sustainable school food. Findings underscore three defining characteristics of sustainable school food: reversion to scratch cooking, prioritising local and agroecological food procurement and promoting plant-based meals. Findings stress the convergence of health and environmental sustainability within school food, highlighting the need for a planetary health approach to school food where meals and education are integrated into school food experiences. Experiential food education, such as cooking and farm visits, supports sustainable school meals provision and their use as a pedagogical tool, embedding sustainable food practices into pupils' everyday school experiences. The study underscores the role of ethical leadership in allocating scarce resources and empowering often marginalised stakeholders such as catering staff and local producers to mobilise school food partnerships. Such partnerships generate mutual benefits, such as supporting local agroecological food production and challenging the dominance of processed foods in school menus from large corporations.

There is a longstanding imperative from both government and industry for a workforce with the skills needed to drive forward the scientific and technological advances that are considered so crucial to the economic prosperity of the nation. However, the skills of this workforce have purportedly been both in short supply and inadequate for many decades, leading to the well-established narrative of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) skill shortages. One solution to this challenge has been to encourage, through myriad policies and initiatives, more young people, particularly young women, to study more science for longer. This paper contributes to the literature on the supply of STEM workers by documenting the long-term trends in the participation and attainment of girls and women in STEM education: from school science through to graduate entry into the highly skilled STEM labour market. Using population datasets that extend across seven decades and include millions of students, it shows that gendered patterns of participation in science subjects have varied little in recent decades, suggesting that efforts to increase the number of women studying science in school have not resulted in a substantial increase in well-qualified female graduates entering highly skilled STEM jobs. Furthermore, studying STEM appears to be generally advantageous for men, in terms of field-related employment outcomes, but is not always associated with such higher status occupations among women.

This paper explores learning about environments with a focus on starting with trees. The paper examines children and young people's perceptions of and engagement with trees, as part of a large grant that sought to examine the dis/benefits of trees for children's lives and learning. In this paper, we attempt to move beyond notions of ‘education for sustainability’ in that we start with knowledges generated with trees. We are concerned that current educational discourses tend to incorporate extractivist perspectives. They also focus on humans rather than the inseparability of the natural world from the human experience as a starting point for research. The paper is based on a large-scale, transdisciplinary, UK-based project, rooted in in-depth, co-produced research with a total of 545 children and young people, across multiple primary and secondary schools in England and Scotland. The paper begins and exemplifies a new conversation about what starting with trees might enable for studies of education and childhood. We propose the concepts of dwelling, skilling and belonging as a novel framework for ‘starting with trees’.