Abstract In 2022, several prestigious Chinese universities – often referred to as ‘key-point’ institutions in Chinese national policy documents – announced their departure from the global university ranking systems (GURS), and these announcements generated heated public discussions on the Chinese cyberspace. This article analyses the discussions on university rankings in the Chinese public media forums. By unpacking the diverse meanings that Chinese commentators attach to GURS and their deep ambivalence towards the value and use of GURS in Chinese universities, this article shows how GURS extend the Party-State framework of education vis-à-vis national pride in the Chinese public forums. In addition, this article shows how policy travels beyond the domain it originally targets and functions as sites where people engage in political commentaries.
Abstract This article mines the perspectives of inclusive educators-in-training as both subjects and agents of policy negotiations for inclusion. It investigates how the tensions between the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and Austria's traditional legislation on segregated schooling impact teacher education on the ground. Drawing on ethnographic field research, I highlight teacher-students’ personal perspectives which reveal some of the barriers to overhauling an education system that human rights advocate Marianne Schulze calls a ‘fossilized policy construct’ (2022). I also show how peopling the UNCRPD brings forward new subjectivities of teacher-students. Two aspects about how teacher-students understood their own profession as inclusive educators stood out. First, they sought out professional collaboration to build on each other's experiences with disability in everyday life. Second, they interpreted inclusive education as an intersectional concept which provided a lens to view some of their own experiences with exclusion and (in)equity.
Abstract While debates about internationalisation of higher education in the United States have traditionally been shaped by domestic political and economic interests (Hovey 2004; Reilly and Senders 2009), this article focuses on the peripheries of these domestically driven conversations, the terrains where study abroad takes place. We bring in voices of students whose publicly engaged work while abroad addresses critical sociopolitical issues from a transnational perspective. We use the concept of performative democracy (Matynia 2009) to frame these democratic interventions of students. Through speaking and acting in the public realm, they transcend individually and domestically oriented learning paths and engage with civic matters through a deterritorialised global imagination (Appadurai 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1992). The students’ work, we suggest, challenges the continued pervasiveness of the homeland perspective in internationalisation policies and asks for their more expansive geopolitical framing.
Abstract This article is a discourse analysis of a corpus of refugee ‘success stories’, produced and circulated in the United States by resettlement policy actors. I document and analyse the visual and discourse strategies employed in these narratives to represent an idealised conception of refugee experience, which narrates the efficiency and moral goodness of the United States and its resettlement policy regime. I argue that this process entails a ‘null curriculum’ (Eisner 1985), which are the refugee experiences and contexts that are systematically elided from the stories that policy actors produce and circulate about refugees success – in particular, the role of US geopolitics in refugee displacement, the role of resettlement policy in directing refugees to precarious labour, and the role of higher education and career development in refugee flourishing.
Abstract Shared governance (SG), the joint responsibility of administration, faculty and trustees to govern, is one of the most distinctive features of US universities. However, in recent years, neoliberal reform efforts have undermined its practice. This article examines how the faculty senate of a university resisted neoliberal changes to reassert SG. Drawing on an autoethnographic account from the faculty senate floor over four years, supplemented by other data sources, the authors examine how senate resistance evolved in response to control mechanisms employed by the administration and the trustees. This article's primary contribution is presenting ‘tempered resistance’ as a viable ‘middle’ way – between acquiescence and radicalism – to confront the neoliberalisation of universities. This article underscores the importance of collective faculty voice in safeguarding the University's mission and uplifting campus morale.
Abstract We live in multisensorial environments where tacit knowledge, from sensory perception and emotion, is key to navigating and making meaning of the world. Yet higher education heavily favours cognitive knowledge as a medium of instruction and learning, based on pedagogical concepts of knowing educator and learning student, leading to a hierarchy of intelligences. Explicitly incorporating sensory knowledge into teaching and learning practice enables students to become experts in their field, and it is the combination of sensory and cognitive knowledge that enriches learning. We explore the links between sensory perception, emotion and cognition through an urban anthropology lecture and a workshop that enable students to connect popular music with urban theory. This demonstrates the potential to incorporate sensory teaching and learning into other disciplines.
Abstract The January 2015 massacre at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and subsequent days of terror represented for many the challenges of building a more diverse and inclusive European Union. One response from the European Parliament's Culture and Education (CULT) Committee delved into questions of intercultural dialogue and tolerance. What lessons does the work of CULT during that period offer for coaxing or cajoling member states on educating against xenophobia and racism? This article explores the intertextual policy field in which CULT conducted its work, the report that this committee generated, and the response from the European Commission. I argue that the impact of CULT's report lies significantly in how it advanced the deep and broad intertextual work of the European Union.
Abstract The transition from school to university can be overwhelming for some students. Mentoring schemes provide guidance and support during this transitional period of change in their lives, helping students adjust to the academic, social, and personal challenges that begin to face them. This qualitative research aims to explore the experience of first-year students and student mentors of the student mentoring scheme in a UK university. Online, semi-structured interviews were conducted. Thematic analysis identified a number of themes, which are discussed in relation to existing literature. Despite the small sample size, the findings identify strengths of the scheme and areas for improvement to be considered.
Abstract We theorise and illustrate the deinstitutionalisation process that universities are currently undergoing. This deinstitutionalisation process is triggered by a loss of moral values that have formed the basis of a certain self-description and self-identity of the university as an institution for more than a century. It manifests itself in certain funerary practices that are adopted to veil, take advantage of, or cope with this loss. We look in particular at three funerary practices. First, we highlight the increasing investments in branding and marketing activities and their impact on the image of universities. Furthermore, we explore shifts in governance and the authoritarian turn in university leadership. Third, we will take a closer look at expressions of dissatisfaction and dissent among its members. In the remainder, we will reflect on the future(s) of universities at this critical juncture.
As ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have swept into the world of higher education, more attention than usual is being paid to the way in which students behave in relation to information. One claim is that some students are not using AI-generated material with acceptable levels of care and ethical attention. This article does not test this accusation. Rather, it explores the notion on which this argument rests, namely that experienced students know how to respond appropriately to any piece of information, AI-based or not. In this article we assess this assumption through a study of the information behaviours of a cohort of students who ought to be amongst the most sophisticated in terms of their relationship with information: taught postgraduate students (from two universities) studying Politics and International Relations.
In a relentless pursuit of 'excellence', academic communities are facing challenges of loneliness, burnout, loss of motivation and lack of legitimacy. How should we rethink career development in research? Traditionally, 'talent' (picked locally or acquired externally) is hired into positions with an expectation to perform along similar and standardised norms; we argue for more diverse and individual approaches to academic careers as part of academic citizenship. We outline a career programme for scientists and academic leaders developed by professors at the University of Copenhagen. We describe the programme's structure, content and outcomes, and evaluate the participant's gains from the first two rounds, each lasting ten months. We posit that senior scholars and top researchers can be drivers of creativity and academic leadership training across universities-a task that ideally should be part of their tenure.
This article explores the cultural aspects of transnational education by examining a case of pedagogical development cooperation between a Finnish and a Brazilian higher education institution. Informed by scholarship on transnational education, organisational cultures and poststructuralist discourse perspectives, this study analyses teaching and learning cultures at the Brazilian organisation during its education cooperation with a Finnish university. The research dataset includes texts written by thirty-eight Brazilian university teachers during a transnational education programme organised between 2017 and 2018. Our poststructuralist discourse analysis identified four discourses: (1) integral education, (2) changing roles of students and teachers, (3) contextual forces, and (4) educating for citizenship. The study shows that the transnational programme prompted a discursive transformation of teaching and learning cultures in Brazil through processes of diversification and hybridisation.
The shift to remote learning during the pandemic posed significant challenges for lecturers and higher education institutions in maintaining student engagement. In this research, two interconnected aspects are explored: first, what were the pre-existing conditions that either facilitated or hindered the integration of technology in European higher education during the pandemic. Second, how did these conditions shape Portuguese students' perceptions of the flipped classroom model prior to, during, and following the pandemic. The article uses a multi-method research design. The findings underscore the critical influence of pre-existing conditions on the capacity of higher education institutions to implement digital transformation effectively. Within this broader framework, the analysis of the effectiveness of the flipped classroom model reveals that students often value the flexibility, self-directed learning opportunities, and increased interaction afforded by this approach.
This article discusses the sustainability of higher education internationalisation and changing practice during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. While many previous studies frame the understanding of sustainable internationalisation within the discourse of environmental and financial sustainability, we view the sustainability of internationalisation in terms of 'educational sustainability' - a developmental process that is characterised by new paradigms, policies, purposes and practice of internationalisation, and its adequacy for the post-COVID-19 era. Our study draws upon the thematic analysis of a wide range of academic literature, national and institutional policy documents and sixty interviews in six universities in England and Hungary. Conceptually, we argue that sustainable internationalisation beyond the pandemic is about prioritising making education itself authentic and sustainable, realising human potential and building social capacity. In practical terms, such authentic education must be rooted in place and tradition, open and participatory, and must not be industrialised and commercialised.
In this article, we explore the European post-pandemic higher education. Drawing from our research and experiences in Finnish and Irish higher education systems, we discuss how the post-pandemic higher education might, ideally, look. We base our work on the concepts of care and power-as-empowerment and influence . First, we envision an ideal post-pandemic university, inspired by previous literature. We then problematise the role of individual academics in shaping the university, acknowledging the limitations of individual efforts. Empirically, we draw on existing research on COVID-19 and care, our own work, and experiences of working in several European universities before, during, and after the pandemic. Our article balances between hope and despair about higher education's future, emphasising the importance of collectively working towards creating a more sustainable, respectful and caring university.
Universities, as public organisations, exemplify three competing institutional logics regarding governance. First, the state wields considerable control over universities through a Weberian bureaucratic logic. Second, university managers have been granted increased autonomy under a neoliberal, managerial logic. Third, a traditional academic logic involves a high degree of self-regulation and peer control. The country-specific ways in which this balance has been achieved come under pressure in times of crisis, such as the pandemic. In this article, we explore how the challenge of managing an unprecedented crisis has affected higher education systems and institutions and how the balance between the three logics has developed before, during and after the crisis. To this end, we adopt a comparative approach and analyse four different European higher education systems: Denmark, France, Portugal and Germany. The analysis reveals that paths of governance that weaken the academic logic were reinforced during the pandemic as university leadership reacted to the crisis by enacting top-down decision-making processes.
The shift to remote learning during the pandemic posed significant challenges for lecturers and higher education institutions in maintaining student engagement. In this research, two interconnected aspects are explored: first, what were the pre-existing conditions that either facilitated or hindered the integration of technology in European higher education during the pandemic. Second, how did these conditions shape Portuguese students’ perceptions of the flipped classroom model prior to, during, and following the pandemic. The article uses a multi-method research design. The findings underscore the critical influence of pre-existing conditions on the capacity of higher education institutions to implement digital transformation effectively. Within this broader framework, the analysis of the effectiveness of the flipped classroom model reveals that students often value the flexibility, self-directed learning opportunities, and increased interaction afforded by this approach.
This article discusses the sustainability of higher education internationalisation and changing practice during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. While many previous studies frame the understanding of sustainable internationalisation within the discourse of environmental and financial sustainability, we view the sustainability of internationalisation in terms of ‘educational sustainability’ – a developmental process that is characterised by new paradigms, policies, purposes and practice of internationalisation, and its adequacy for the post–COVID-19 era. Our study draws upon the thematic analysis of a wide range of academic literature, national and institutional policy documents and sixty interviews in six universities in England and Hungary. Conceptually, we argue that sustainable internationalisation beyond the pandemic is about prioritising making education itself authentic and sustainable, realising human potential and building social capacity. In practical terms, such authentic education must be rooted in place and tradition, open and participatory, and must not be industrialised and commercialised.
This article reports a small-scale case study implemented in a higher education institution that fosters students' active construction of knowledge. The research was conducted at an international university in Uzbekistan, with the primary objective of exploring and analysing the students' attitudes towards active learning classrooms. The learning scenario was created and used with three distinct groups of students. Data regarding the students' experiences during the active learning exercises were gathered through a questionnaire and focus group discussions. The results of data collection were supportive of active learning, indicating that scenario activities enhance the educational process by making it more interesting and engaging. The study recommends promoting active learning approaches while considering the continuously evolving educational trends of the current student generation.
Theorisation of higher education internationalisation is biased both as a Western activity and as Euro-/Anglocentric and Anglophone research. In this article, we first argue that it is necessary to 'think otherwise' about internationalisation. We then present theorisations of how this could be achieved. As our analysis, we conduct a Mad Libs exercise of two internationalisation documents in which we replace the word 'international' and its derivatives with words stemming from the ideological trajectory of the post-Second World War history of internationalisation: 'peace-seeking', 'neoliberal' and 'equitable'. The Mad Libs exercise is a playful subversion that helps us break away from the rigidity and structuredness that keep us reproducing biased theorisations.
