Teaching to Clients: Quality Assurance in Higher Education and the Construction of the Invisible Student at Philipps-Universität Marburg and Universidad Centroamericana in Managua

The widespread applicability of quality assurance processes has induced a re-labeling of clients as students (see, for example: OECD, 1998), as well as an imposition of compatible evaluation and training processes for teachers. Quality assurance, a now globalised practice in higher education institutions, is an instance of the “audit culture” (Power, 1997, 2010; Strathern, 2000a), and has come to signify good government in universities. Its “rituals of verification” (Power, 1997) are now hegemonic and widespread practices. Quality assurance is also an intrinsic element of academic capitalism (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), and deployed through the same mechanisms. The phenomenon of quality assurance has created a technology (Foucault, 1988) in the practices of evaluation and accreditation, which largely ignores evident differences of context and culture that emerge in situ, and focuses on creating “virtual” (Miller, 1998) similarities through a “tyranny of transparency” (Strathern, 2000c) that instead of revealing, conceals important issues from the teaching/learning experience, fetishizing the classroom session. Through quality assurance, universities present themselves to the public – and to each other – through a common language and common goals. The language of quality assurance, which I define as the ‘talk of quality’, describes quality as a summation of continuously changing and externally defined criteria that an institution must fulfil in order to be positively perceived by the public. This ‘talk of quality’ seeps into everyday decisions and transactions, generates alliances or competition, and continuously reinforces an imagined hierarchy of universities. Given the pervasiveness of this discourse, its visibility and repetitiveness, but above all, its use in day to day “rituals of verification” in which teachers and students are directly involved, to analyse higher education transformations it is not enough to look at policies, funding schemes, numbers of staff and students, facilities, research production or ranking achievements. For this reason, I analyse quality assurance practices and its discourse, as they are applied in specific contexts. The results and discussion The analysis revealed that the ‘talk of quality’ present in two universities displays almost identical concepts and notions and supports the development of specialised managerial capacity. Evaluation and accreditation processes are conducted in both universities and promote the enforcement of other “rituals of verification”, specifically teacher evaluation, which constitutes a technology (Foucault, 1988) for the subjectification of teachers, the effects of which have been described by several researchers. A fixed notion of good teaching has been defined in both universities through specific indicators. The results from each application of the process generate ‘truths’ about teachers supported by neutral sounding pedagogical concepts. Alongside the constant evaluation of teaching, both universities have also launched teacher training programmes and incentive – and punishment – systems tied to evaluation results. The transformation of students into clients emerges as a necessity for this technology to function. In order to present teacher evaluation as a simple and effective guiding tool to better teaching, an honest feedback from students, the questionnaire relies on assumptions about students’ responses as clients genuinely concerned with filling it in the intended way. The empirical analysis revealed that instead, students at both universities have their own criteria for judging teaching, which instead of relying on standardised and specific indicators, like those of the questionnaire, relies on shared ideas about how teachers make them feel, how they relate to them, how they perceive the course in question, and how they define knowledge in general or university life. Students also approach the answering of the questionnaire – which they largely perceive as a power tool applied by the management – from their own strategies of “college management” and “professor management” (Nathan, 2005), which allows them to shape the university’s choices to their own schemes. As evidenced by the empirical analysis, the ‘student-centred’ approach of quality assurance, which relies on the idea of the student as a demanding client and the teacher as a service provider, produces a management-centred higher education in which important elements are concealed by the same process that means to reveal them

The “Health Benefit Basket” in France

The French “Health Benefit Basket” is defined principally by positive lists of reimbursed goods and services; however, global budget-financed hospital-delivered services are more implicitly defined. The range of reimbursable curative care services is defined by two coexisting positive lists/fee schedules: the Classification Commune des Actes Médicaux (CCAM) and the Nomenclature Générale des Actes Professionnels (NGAP). The National Union of Health Insurance Funds has been updating these positive lists since August 2004, with the main criterion for inclusion being the proposed procedure’s effectiveness. This is assessed by the newly created High Health authority (replacing the former ANAES). In addition, complementary health insurers are consulted in the inclusion process due to their important role in French healthcare financing

Estimer la datation, la durée et les discontinuités de l'occupation des sites archéologiques à l'aide de la modélisation des faciès céramiques

http://www.univ-tours.fr/lat/pdf/F2_13.pdfpremière étape d'une démarche statistique dont l'objectif est des préciser la datation des contextes archéologiques. Pour plus de précision : voir aussi les articles plus récents des mêmes auteurs publiés en 2006 et 2008.Le but de cet article est de présenter une démarche méthodologique fondée sur la stratigraphie et le mobilier archéologique - tout particulièrement la céramique - qui a pour objet de formaliser, étape par étape, la construction d'une Chronologie Absolue, ici à l'échelle de la ville. Il s'agit d'étudier les contextes archéologiques de plusieurs fouilles afin d'établir une échelle de temps qui tiennent aussi bien compte des temporalités attestées que des hiatus chronologiques dans un espace choisi. Cette tentative, très fructueuse en interrogations nouvelles, nous a fait prendre conscience de certaines lacunes terminologiques existantes en archéologie dans le domaine des échelles de temps. Une terminologie adaptée conduisant à une meilleure mise en lumière de la notion de temps en archéologie a alors été élaborée : Chronologie Relative Intégrante, Temporalité, Hiatus Chronologique, Site, Lieu, Espace céramiques...dont les définitions se trouvent dans un glossaire en annexe. L'originalité de cette étude est également l'utilisation de la modélisation statistique permettant d'obtenir des réponses archéologiques dans le cas de données qualitatives et quantitatives nombreuses. Cette approche, qui complète la démarche archéologique générale utilisée à Chinon et à Rigny, a été mise en œuvre à Tours et correspond à la dernière partie de cet article

The segment information practices of the biggest European companies

25 pagesThe sample includes 50 companies from the FT Europe 500, the 35 biggest firms and 15 firms ranked between 36th and 100th which were randomly chosen. Insurance companies and banks were excluded. Several sources were used: consolidated financial statements certified by auditors, management reports, slides used during presentations of results and press releases when available. The report analyses the choices made by management concerning indicators disclosed according to IFRS 8 and segment identification. It also compares the redundancy of disclosure across different media: press releases, slides used during presentations of results and management reports. Our objective is to explore the relevance and comparability of segment information.Effectuée à partir d'un échantillon de 50 entreprises européennes, cette étude analyse les pratiques des entreprises en matière d'information sectorielle en utilisant de multiples sources : comptes consolidés, rapports annuels, communiqués de presse. Les résultats montrent que les pratiques sont très diversifiés et mettent en évidence les limites de la pertinence et de la comparabilité de l'information sectorielle telle que publiée en IFRS 8

Service Oriented Architecture: impacts and challenges of an architecture paradigm change

International audienceAutomotive embedded software has relied on signal-based architecture for a long time. This architecture has proven through the last decades its reliability and ability to address complex systems such as a car embedding several tens of processors.Automotive industry foresees a large introduction of Service Oriented Architecture in the car whereas the technology was initially used by information systems and web applications. A complete change of architecture is clearly a challenge considering the number of heterogeneous actors, the heavy legacy of business and the safety constraints.This paper aims at providing feedbacks on the introduction of SOA in automotive industry through the prism of Software architecture and development team

Le rôle de l'assurance dans la gestion des risques psychosociaux en entreprise

National audienceLes risques psychosociaux sont de plus en plus d'actualité dans nos sociétés industrialisées et leurs conséquences ont des effets non négligeables sur la performance des entreprises. La loi et les institutions prennent déjà en compte ce fait de société. Cependant, dans ce contexte, une question se pose : dans quelle mesure l'assurance peut-elle devenir une solution intelligente et acceptable face à ces risques ? L'absence d'une définition juridique précise les rend difficilement assurables. Néanmoins, les assurances ont un rôle à jouer, non pas en financement, mais en accompagnement, comme le font des grands cabinets de courtage dans le cadre de leur devoir de conseil

Clisson, Gétigné, Gorges – Contournement de Clisson

Les sondages mécaniques réalisés sur l’emprise du contournement de Clisson ont livré quatre sites et indices de sites archéologiques. Au Barrillet, sur la commune de Gétigné, le diagnostic a permis de confirmer la présence d’un enclos fossoyé accompagné de diverses structures (trous de poteaux, fosses, puits). L’échantillonnage de mobilier semble montrer une occupation s’étalant depuis La Tène finale jusqu’au iiie s. apr. J.-C. Le secteur de la Robinière, en limite des communes de Gorges et d..

Blain – Chapelle de La Groulais

Dans le cadre de l’aménagement du château de La Groulais par la conservation régionale des Monuments historiques et la municipalité de Blain, propriétaire de la partie sud et de la tour du Connétable, quelques vérifications archéologiques s’imposaient. Le premier sondage a permis d’établir l’existence d’une maçonnerie primitive de la tour des Prisons, liée à des éléments du rez-de-chaussée et du premier étage encore en place actuellement (portes de la tour, conduits de latrines), ainsi que la..