‘Sit in the corner and don’t eat the crayons’: postgraduates with dyslexia and the dominant ‘lexic’ discourse

The lack of cultural diversity in higher education is recognised by policy objectives and a current focus on the development of widening participation for a range of students, including those with disabilities. Amongst this group are those with dyslexia who might previously have been disenfranchised from formal education and under‐represented within it. This paper explores the personal narratives and learner histories of six postgraduates and academics with dyslexia from their earliest memories of learning to their present experiences. It examines how literacy, as a dominant form of discourse, has defined concepts of academic ability resulting in the early exclusion of these learners from formal education. It is argued that this dominant discourse can be challenged by non‐authorised, informal learning resulting in stories of resistance.     

Public Discourses About International Students

A growing, English‐language literature analyzes the public discourse of international education and students. One large set of studies highlight the discursive marginalization of non‐western, international students in western, host societies. They draw on critical discourse analysis (CDA) and meta‐narratives of western, White, and elite dominance, which diminish the theoretical importance of discourse in non‐western and non‐elite settings. A second, smaller set of studies analyze the public discourse of international education in non‐western, specifically Asian, countries; they generally reference educational discourse in both Asian and western countries. Relatively few studies critically examine patterns of discursive domination in Asian discourse; but the ones that do so compare both Asian and Western countries. Even rarer are studies of social media discourse among international students. We find a few studies of social media discourse among Asian students who studied abroad, but none of foreign students studying in host, Asian countries. Attention to multiple discourses and theoretical narratives offers a fruitful, research agenda and underlines the complex, dynamic, global nature of contemporary public discourse on international education.     

Evaluating the effectiveness of a programme for improving the participation and academic success of an underrepresented minority group in New Zealand

Pacific peoples are a minority under-represented ethnic group in higher education in New Zealand. This article explores the effectiveness of a specific programme, which sought to improve outcomes of Pacific students in the tertiary environment. The aim of the evaluation was to determine the effectiveness of an intervention programme (2013–2015) to increase the participation and academic success of Pacific students in the first year in Health Sciences. The study found the academic results of Pacific students who participated in the intervention programme were significantly better compared to those who did not. The findings inform future research, suggesting that, when assessing the effectiveness of a programme, it is useful to explore the performance of the whole cohort separately to those who declared intention or interest to attend the programme. Strategies to support participation of each of these groups are likely to be different. Having a standardised approach when comparing groups will adjust for any confounding factors or prior differences. This will allow a more accurate assessment of the effectiveness of the programme being evaluated. This paper presents the importance of a robust approach to the delivery and evaluation of intervention programmes for improving outcomes for underrepresented students in the tertiary environment.     

Inquiry-based learning: A socially just approach to higher education

Higher education’s potential to transform social and economic status and improve society, underlies increasing demands to improve access. But simply increasing access is not sufficient—it is important to ask whether our prevailing pedagogical approaches facilitate an effective and socially just higher education system. In other words, are traditional pedagogical approaches used in universities today truly accessible to the broader student population entering university? The current paper argues that the majority of pedagogies remain rooted in traditional approaches that favor those who benefit from continuous education from primary through to tertiary education. Such approaches rely heavily on incremental credentialism and are neither truly accessible nor socially just. Most introductory courses in universities require prior knowledge and “expect” students to be enculturated into a particular type of learning: as such, students with different levels of preparation, who come from different backgrounds, may be excluded from full participation. In addition, the rising costs of tuition fees and textbooks, and access to technology create inequities that reinforce socially-based discrimination higher education. The paper reports on the impact of implementing a specifically designed course, using closed-loop, reiterative problem-based learning, to create learning paradigms that focus on a more socially just approach for students entering university: these courses do not demand specific prior knowledge, foster difficult ways of thinking, and focus on developing research skills through access to library resources. Finally, the paper reports on students’ expectations about higher education and underscores the importance of re-thinking at least the first-year experience for students.     

高职文秘专业语文教学中培养学生创新思维能力的途径

为适应社会对创新人才的需要,作为高职文秘专业基础课程之一的语文教学必须注重培养学生的创新思维能力。文章结合作者的教学体会,探索在语文教学中通过教学内容的选择、文本解读、教学手段等途径,培养学生的创新思维能力。     

Student perceptions of international education and study abroad: a pilot study at York University,Canada

International student mobility has been identified as a key strategy for the internationalization of higher education. Although an institutional priority, Canada has among the lowest levels of international student mobility, with only 2% of full-time university students participating in study-abroad programs. This pilot study, conducted at a large public university in Toronto, examined the value that students place on international education, their awareness of opportunities made available by the university, their attitudes toward, perceptions of, and preferences toward study abroad, and the institutional and individual factors that influence their intent to engage in study abroad. The study found associations between students’ intent to study abroad with their perceived social and institutional support and academic hassles at the host and home institution. It identified three distinct groups within the population, those intending to study abroad, those unsure about their plans, and a third group who does not seek to pursue study abroad. In terms of applied value, the findings will inform program administrators how to customize their support services and programs to both assist interested students and attract new students that otherwise would not be interested in such an experience.     

Internationalising colleges of education through the dialectic of the global and the local? A perspective and possible pathways from the American South

Most schooling disproportionately emphasises national affairs at the expense of more global and local phenomena. Students’ resulting nation bias can be resituated both internationally and more locally by integrating internationalisation policies with place-based education approaches, which help to illuminate these different levels and, particularly, the extensive and complex interconnections between them. This task is particularly critical for colleges of education, where higher education internationalisation policies have the greatest potential to expand the perspectives of public school students. This article uses three cases drawn from the authors’ teaching and local service initiatives to illustrate the educational potential for future teachers and school administrators of working to broaden students’ perspectives through a ‘dialectic of the global and the local’.     

Service learning and the practice of social justice and care

The values of a social justice pedagogy in teacher education are assumed to be firmly established in South African higher education. This article discusses how serviced learning (SL) can provide practical experience of caring and serve the promotion of the ideals of social justice in two initial teacher education programmes. However, an analysis of data in this case study shows that, although SL practice has served as a platform for social justice and for care as two basic educational values, participants were not yet able to verbalize and theorize these values. They were also not able to embed these values in their reflection about service as an inherent component of education. With data from different role players in a number of SL projects, we show that the students’ discourse of what it means to be a caring teacher in a just society has not yet been developed despite the successful practical experience. It was found that, although the students had been building a practice ‘platform’ for service, they had not yet been able to articulate the conceptual intersect of care and social justice clearly. With this epistemological notion in mind, two main themes from the data analysis are discussed: 1) How SL shifted student learning from ideas ‘about’ service to implemented service, and 2) how the practical experience promoted reciprocity in inter-institutional and inter-generational communities of practice.     

Learning the Hard Way

This article reports on a survey examining relationships between stress, role strain, perceived role demands, and perceived support in 443 women who carried family and job responsibilities while studying in 17 Canadian social work, nursing, or adult education programs. Findings indicate that women students with higher perceived role demands had more stress and role strain, while those participating in distance education had less. Women students with lower incomes indicated they had more stress, while those with stronger support from family and friends had less. The author suggests that, because some tangible supports might increase stress and role strain, educators should evaluate existing provisions carefully, while continuing to promote greater awareness of and responsiveness to these students’ unique needs.     

Social representations of inclusion and stratification: ethnographic research within two Israeli elementary schools

Based on ‘Social representations theory’, this ethnographic research examines the processes by which two Israeli elementary schools represented some children, but not others, as ‘weak’ students and in need of remedial teaching. This approach differs from most current research regarding children with disabilities, which mainly deals with the opposite process of how to include, as equal school partners, those who have already been represented as in need of some kind of special education. Our findings show that school life is founded on a representational dichotomy: while inclusion is the declared school ideology, daily discourse and school activity mainly serve stratification. This dichotomy is tolerated partly because the meaning of this activity is incorporated within school routine and ignored and partly because it is represented as a response to a supposedly self‐evident reality of the unequal intellectual potential of students.     

Human rights at the heart of the social work curriculum

ABSTRACT

Social work policy and practice all over the world continue to face the impact of the neoliberal agenda. Similarly, social work education has been subject to the economic and political changes, with an increasing emphasis on a discourse of ‘evidence-based practice’. However, it is the core of social work programs in higher education to initiate students in the fundamental values of social work, as they are recognized in the global definition of social work. In order to prepare future social workers for their assignment, human rights should be given an explicit place in the social work curricula at Universities and Universities of Applied Sciences.

For human rights to gain more attention in social work programs in higher education, a Manifesto was written by lecturers’ social work in the Netherlands and Flanders, with a 5-point program to include human rights in the social work curricula. In this article, we elaborate on the five objectives that are presented in the Manifesto. Throughout the paper, we introduce small ‘case examples’ of how human rights can be integrated in education. These experiences show the importance of developing a particular social work perspective on human rights that is found in the idea of ‘human rights from below.’     

US College Students' Reports of Receiving Health Information on College Campuses

Abstract

Institutions of higher education are in a unique position to promote healthy behaviors by providing health education to students, but little information exists about the proportion of students reached by such efforts. The authors used data from a nationally representative sample of college students to describe the extent to which students reported receiving health information from their colleges and universities, to examine the characteristics of students who received such information, and to determine specific sources of health information. Approximately three quarters of college students reported they received information on at least one health topic, and 6% received information on all of the topics examined. Those who reported receiving health information from their colleges or universities were likely to be “traditional” college students. To achieve relevant national health objectives, health educators must increase the proportion of students they reach and the number of health topics they cover.     

Education in the crucible of a postcolonial revolution: community reaction to the challenges of Zimbabwe’s crisis

It is paradoxical that when Zimbabwe was experiencing the worst economic situation in its recorded history and the highest inflation rate ever experienced worldwide by any nation at peace, its educational achievements were unprecedented. The economy had untold negative effects on the education system causing mass exodus of teachers, dilapidation of infrastructure, shortage of library books and even lack of food. However, against this backdrop, the country scored major successes in education. In 2010, Zimbabwe became the highest ranked in terms of literacy on the continent. University enrolment was ninefold by 2006, and technical and vocational education has achieved similar developments. How and by what means? Research on education has so far mainly focused on the institutions of higher learning with little or no concern at all about community activities and efforts to sustain education at various levels. In fact until recently university education in Zimbabwe has had little community participation. This had to change during the last decade when the state could not afford to fund its own army, let alone education. Donor, bilateral and multilateral funding were withdrawn as the sanctions screw tightened. This research explores the community (students and parents) efforts in sustaining education from secondary to tertiary institutions. How did parents and students react to the deteriorating conditions of education and with what effect? The study findings indicate parents responded by supporting teachers with money and food, engaging in economic activities such as cross-border trading, and were involved in teaching the students. The students also responded by engaging in peer education and sharing resources such as books. This study could widen our understanding of community participation in education particularly at university level.     

Social support,the presence of barriers and ideas for the future from students with disabilities in the higher education system in Croatia

This paper examines how students with disabilities in Croatia perceive support, experience barriers and propose ways forward for equality of opportunities in the higher education system. In qualitative interviews, students were satisfied with the informal support they received from family and friends but dissatisfied with the formal support they received from universities and the government. Obstacles to inclusion included: inadequate transport and finance to attend university and minimal adaptation of buildings, toilets, lifts, classrooms and dormitories. Students proposed: investment in adapting buildings, personal assistants, educational grants and transport; coordination within the formal systems from national government to universities and non-governmental organisations; and measures to increase disability awareness for academics, professionals and other students within higher education. The situation for students with disabilities in Croatia is a reminder for those working in countries where policy and practice is relatively advanced that many disability battles are still to be won in newer nations.     

Higher education and civic engagement

This paper focuses on the relationship between social engagement, particularly civic engagement, and education. It is well known that more highly educated people are more likely to engage in voluntary work in formalized settings. It has been difficult to disentangle the effect of higher education from that of family origin and occupational socialization. This paper examines the effects of tertiary education on the social and civic engagement of young people, using the British Household Panel Study. The social and civic activity of young people is observed in their late teens, before entering the labour market or tertiary education, and compared with that of the same young people in their early 20s, after completing tertiary education courses or gaining labour market experience. It was found that the social and civic engagement of young people who would enter higher education was higher in their late teens than that of their peers who did not enter. However, higher education had a small additional effect on civic engagement, for both young and mature students. The children of professionals were the social grouping most likely to be involved in civic activities. The relationship of higher education, professional occupations and family socialization is discussed.     

North Central Sociological Association 2018 Teaching Address: John F. Schnabel Lecture Teaching as Mentoring; Mentoring as Teaching

Graduate student mentoring is widely considered a critical element of postbaccalaureate education, yet the mentoring of undergraduates is a frequently neglected topic in academic discourse. The benefits of mentoring are all too often reaped by only a small group of students who demonstrate academic promise. Yet the impact of mentoring on undergraduate student persistence is resoundingly positive, especially for students in the academic middle and the students most at risk of abandoning the pursuit of higher education. Much of the academic discussion of mentoring undergraduate students focuses on the possibilities presented via independent research projects, academic advising, and more formal mentoring programs. Although substantial debate exists regarding what mentoring is, and how or whether it is achievable en masse, I propose that teaching itself can exist as a form of mentoring, and vice versa, especially within the small liberal arts university environment.     

Crafting the Elastic Self? Gender and Identities in Senior Appointments in Irish Education

This article considers the impact of new managerial reform on the recruitment and retention of women into senior management posts across the Irish education sector. In Ireland as elsewhere, the rhetoric of gender equality permeates new managerial reforms. Yet our data suggest that an emphasis on performativity and an intense commitment to paid work consolidates masculinist management cultures disguised through the ideology of choice. This works to the detriment of women, especially those with caring responsibilities. Drawing on studies of 23 top‐level educational appointments in primary, secondary and higher education, we show how the relentless crafting of an elastic self is required for both those who remain in management positions in education and those who seek them.     

Refusing to be co-opted: revolutionary multicultural education amidst global neoliberalisation

Abstract

In this article, I explore how neoliberalism dictates the terms of debate about education reform and equity in the U.S. and abroad. In particular, I explain how two paradigmatic reforms – the edTPA evaluation for preservice teachers in the United States and the global initiative Teach For All – have co-opted the discourse of multicultural education in an attempt to advance their own priorities and not those at the heart of the field, thus jeopardising the possibility of real justice. Finally, I envision a way forward, through a theory of revolutionary multicultural education, as we seek to reimagine the terms of debate about the goals of educating all students.     

My life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we investigate memes about student issues. We consider the memes as expressions of a new networked student public that contain discourses that may fall outside the mainstream discourse on higher education. The paper is based on content analysis of 179 posts in the public Facebook Group ‘Student Problem Memes’, combined with a nine-month media watch and a discussion workshop with 15 students. Through self-deprecating humour, students create an inverse attention economy of competitive one-downmanship, where the goal is to display humorous failure instead of perfect appearance. Our analysis shows that students use humour to express, share, and commiserate over daily struggles, but also that the problems related to work/study balance and mental health, are experienced as a persistent feature of student living. We also analyse limitations of meme-based publics, emphasizing processes of inclusion and exclusion through specific vernaculars of visual and discursive humour where issues related to gender, race, orientation, class, and ability are sidelined in favour of relatable humour.     

生活世界：思想政治教育的新视角

在社会发生深刻变革的大环境下,传统的知识论和技术论的思想政治教育方式已日渐衰微,哲学中的“生活世界”话语也就渗入了思想政治教育领域,这就要求思想政治教育必须以新的方式来思考和关注学生的生活和教育问题。教育离不开入的生活世界,只有关注学生的生活世界,思想政治教育才能实现它的价值。