543 research outputs found

    Microcredentials to support PBL

    Get PDF

    Contextualising Universities’ Third Mission:A Study of African Women’s Participation in Academic Engagement

    Get PDF
    The traditional mandate of universities has been to undertake research and teaching activities. However, in recent times, universities are pursuing a ‘third mission’ by collaborating with societal partners, including firms. Research suggests that such academic engagement (AE) activities are expedient for achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Other studies have, however, drawn attention to the gender differences in men and women’s pursuit and practice of AE. In particular, scholars have shown that the masculine cultures and structures of universities and firms are averse to women researchers’ lived experiences and, thus, limit their participation in AE activities compared to their male colleagues. The emerging gender dynamics in AE has raised important, yet unanswered questions, regarding the potential of universities and firms to support the achievement of SDG5 (gender equality and women’s empowerment), especially in developing countries that are characterised by weak institutions. Given the importance of AE to the success of the SDGs, this thesis aims to fill this knowledge gap by first, providing an understanding of how the corporate sustainability practices of businesses are pragmatically contributing to the achievement of the SDGs related to gender, climate change, democracy, and poverty, within the contexts of Mexico, Ghana, Vietnam, and South Africa. Second, and focusing narrowly on the theme of gender and the sub-Saharan African context, the thesis sheds light on how and why gender differences exist in the opportunities for men and women researchers to participate in AE activities. Next, the study draws on Bourdieusian social theory and in-depth interviews with 36 women researchers from Zambia, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, and Botswana, to explicate how women researchers within these contexts utilise their agency to overcome the structural and cultural constraints impeding their involvement in AE activities. Finally, the thesis deepens insights into how, and why, the efforts of African women researchers to overcome the systemic constraints impeding their participation in AE activities, come to reinforce the very structures that establish those barriers. A key finding from the study is that AE promotes competitiveness and performativity in academia, which in turn distorts the gender equality targets enshrined in SDG5. In particular, the findings demonstrate that AE is a gendered and neoliberal activity that urges women researchers to develop and implement career strategies that sustain male privileges and female disadvantages within universities. Emerging from the analysis is also the fact that, although businesses can make significant contributions to the SDGs, a failure to embed community participation in their corporate sustainability principles and agendas, can reverse much of the progress made on SDG5. This thesis makes several contributions. First, it extends and pushes forward existing scholarship and policy discussions on the SDGs by empirically investigating a significant, but understudied group of women, whose voices and experiences in academia have rarely been acknowledged. In addition, the study provides novel insights into the socio-cultural dimension of sustainable development by highlighting the utility of community participation approaches to corporate sustainability practices. Importantly, this study offers another way of viewing the gender gap in AE by drawing on Bourdieu’s (1977) social theory to show how the current single-level and de-contextualised explanations of this problem limit our understanding of the interesting ways in which micro-individual career opportunities are shaped by contextual influences at the macro-level and organisational processes and practices at the meso-level

    Honors Colleges in the 21st Century

    Get PDF
    Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction | Richard Badenhausen Part I: Honors College Contexts: Past and Present CHAPTER ONE Oxbridge and Core Curricula: Continuing Conversations with the Past in Honors Colleges | Christopher A. Snyder CHAPTER TWO Characteristics of the 21st-Century Honors College | Andrew J. Cognard-Black and Patricia J. Smith Part II: Transitioning to an Honors College CHAPTER THREE Should We Start an Honors College? An Administrative Playbook for Working Through the Decision | Richard Badenhausen CHAPTER FOUR Beyond the Letterhead: A Tactical Toolbox for Transitioning from Program to College | Sara Hottinger, Megan McIlreavy, Clay Motley, and Louis Keiner Part III: Administrative Leadership CHAPTER FIVE “It Is What You Make It’’: Opportunities Arising from the Unique Roles of Honors College Deans | Jeff Chamberlain, Thomas M. Spencer, and Jefford Vahlbusch CHAPTER SIX The Role of the Honors College Dean in the Future of Honors Education | Peter Parolin, Timothy J. Nichols, Donal C. Skinner, and Rebecca C. Bott-Knutson CHAPTER SEVEN From the Top Down: Implications of Honors College Deans’ Race and Gender | Malin Pereira, Jacqueline Smith-Mason, Karoline Summerville, and Scott Linneman Part IV: Honors College Operations CHAPTER EIGHT Something Borrowed, Something New: Honors College Faculty and the Staffing of Honors Courses | Erin E. Edgington and Linda Frost CHAPTER NINE Telling Your Story: Stewardship and the Honors College | Andrew Martino Part V: Honors Colleges as Leaders in the Work of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access CHAPTER TEN Cultivating Institutional Change: Infusing Principles of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into Everyday Honors College Practices | Tara M. Tuttle, Julie Stewart, and Kayla Powell CHAPTER ELEVEN Positioning Honors Colleges to Lead Diversity and Inclusion Efforts at Predominantly White Institutions | Susan Dinan, Jason T. Hilton, and Jennifer Willford CHAPTER TWELVE Honors Colleges as Levers of Educational Equity | Teagan Decker, Joshua Kalin Busman, and Michele Fazio CHAPTER THIRTEEN Promoting the Inclusion of LGBTQ+ Students: The Role of the Honors College in Faith-Based Colleges and Universities | Paul E. Prill Part VI: Supporting Students CHAPTER FOURTEEN Who Belongs in Honors? Culturally Responsive Advising and Transformative Diversity | Elizabeth Raisanen CHAPTER FIFTEEN Fostering Student Leadership in Honors Colleges | Jill Nelson Granger Part VII: Honors College Curricular Innovation CHAPTER SIXTEEN Honors Liberal Arts for the 21st Century | John Carrell, Aliza S. Wong, Chad Cain, Carrie J. Preston, and Muhammad H. Zaman CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Honors Colleges, Transdisciplinary Education, and Global Challenges | 423 Paul Knox and Paul Heilker Part VIII: Community Engagement CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Teaching and Learning in the Fourth Space: Preparing Scholars to Engage in Solving Community Problems | Heidi Appel, Rebecca C. Bott-Knutson, Joy Hart, Paul Knox, Andrea Radasanu, Leigh E. Fine, Timothy J. Nichols, Daniel Roberts, Keith Garbutt, William Ziegler, Jonathan Kotinek, Kathy Cooke, Ralph Keen, Mark Andersen, and Jyotsna Kapur CHAPTER NINETEEN Serving Our Communities: Leveraging the Honors College Model at Two-Year Institutions | Eric Hoffman, Victoria M. Bryan, and Dan Flores About the Authors About the NCHC Monograph Serie

    Social research for our times: Thomas Coram Research Unit past, present and future

    Get PDF
    For 50 years, researchers at UCL’s Thomas Coram Research Unit have been undertaking ground-breaking policy-relevant social research. Their main focus has been social issues affecting children, young people and families, and the services provided for them. Social Research for our Times brings together different generations of researchers from the Unit to share some of the most important results of their studies. Two sections focus on the main findings and conclusions from research into children and children services, and on family life, minoritised groups and gender. A third is then devoted to the innovative methods that have been developed and used to undertake research in these complex areas. Running through the book is a key strategic question: what should be the relationship between research and policy? Or put another way, what does ‘policy relevant research’ mean? This perennial question has gained new importance in the post-Covid, post-Brexit world that we have entered, making this text a timely intervention for sharing decades of experience. Taking a unique opportunity to reflect on research context as well as research findings, this book will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students and those involved in policy making both in and beyond dedicated research units, and can be read as a whole or sampled for individual standalone chapters

    Education for sustainable development in higher education institutions: an approach for effective interdisciplinarity

    Get PDF
    Purpose: This paper aims to develop an improved and harmonized approach to interdisciplinarity in education for sustainable development (ESD)within higher education institutions (HEIs), focusing on maximizing the mobilization of students from all academic disciplines. An attempt is made to reconcile varying strategies for the implementation of interdisciplinary ESD content in HEIs, studying the relative merit and benefit of those strategies and crafting a new approach to combining them, where possible. Design/methodology/approach: This work relies on a robust review and analysis of existing literature proposals on the implementation of ESD in HEIs to elaborate an integrated approach to interdisciplinarity. Specifically, a scoping literature review is applied, analyzing the existing approaches to ESD in HEIs as well as the challenges observed in their implementation. Using this theoretical framework, this paper evaluates the compatibility and efficiency of the approaches currently implemented. Based on this analysis, an integrative approach is outlined, building upon and combining existing proposals. Findings: Building on existing literature, this study identifies two main trends for interdisciplinarity in ESD in HEIs: integration into existing disciplinary curricula and new, stand-alone ESD curricula. This paper suggests adopting the two approaches simultaneously, to reach students from all academic disciplines, especially those with minimal exposure to ESD through their own discipline. Furthermore, this paper stresses that these dual curricula strategies should be combined with further interdisciplinary research initiatives as well as extensive leveraging of technology and e-learning. Originality/value: This study bridges the gap between diverging visions for ESD in HEIs, harmonizing strategies from the literature to outline a new, multilateral strategy. Furthermore, it extensively studies the need for increased engagement into ESD of students from underrepresented disciplines, including the humanities. This engagement has been little addressed in the literature, rendering the proposed approach original insofar as it outlines the ways to improve current approaches to ESD in HEIs

    Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

    Get PDF
    The intersection of scholarly communication librarianship and open education offers a unique opportunity to expand knowledge of scholarly communication topics in both education and practice. Open resources can address the gap in teaching timely and critical scholarly communication topics—copyright in teaching and research environments, academic publishing, emerging modes of scholarship, impact measurement—while increasing access to resources and equitable participation in education and scholarly communication. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts: *What is Scholarly Communication? *Scholarly Communication and Open Culture *Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is a thorough guide meant to increase instruction on scholarly communication and open education issues and practices so library workers can continue to meet the changing needs of students and faculty. It is also a political statement about the future to which we aspire and a challenge to the industrial, commercial, capitalistic tendencies encroaching on higher education. Students, readers, educators, and adaptors of this resource can find and embrace these themes throughout the text and embody them in their work

    Literacy for digital futures : Mind, body, text

    Get PDF
    The unprecedented rate of global, technological, and societal change calls for a radical, new understanding of literacy. This book offers a nuanced framework for making sense of literacy by addressing knowledge as contextualised, embodied, multimodal, and digitally mediated. In today’s world of technological breakthroughs, social shifts, and rapid changes to the educational landscape, literacy can no longer be understood through established curriculum and static text structures. To prepare teachers, scholars, and researchers for the digital future, the book is organised around three themes – Mind and Materiality; Body and Senses; and Texts and Digital Semiotics – to shape readers’ understanding of literacy. Opening up new interdisciplinary themes, Mills, Unsworth, and Scholes confront emerging issues for next-generation digital literacy practices. The volume helps new and established researchers rethink dynamic changes in the materiality of texts and their implications for the mind and body, and features recommendations for educational and professional practice

    Leading ethical leaders : higher education institutions, business schools and the sustainable development goals

    Get PDF
    This volume provides unique and profound insights from within educational institutions in diverse regions of the world on how ‘learning outside’ and ‘learning inside’ can be holistically integrated, so that the sustainable development agenda does not remain static and programmatic, but a creative and permeable framework. The shared hope across the thirteen chapters, which constitute complete original essays on the theme, is to develop meaningful, interdisciplinary curricula and research projects which serve the human community as a whole. The aim of the editors is directed towards a similar United Nations’ valuable ideal: to advance knowledge in respect of the earth and the future generations who will inherit it
    • …
    corecore