Badania nad szkolnictwem wyższym, polityka i praktyka - wzorce dobrego i złego porozumiewania się

Higher education in both industrialized and developing countries is facing heightened expectations for increased access, improved performance and greater relevance to workplace needs. In such a context systems of higher education could benefit greatly from the insights and suggestions of scholars and practitioners who had acquired special expertise. However the relationship between the research and political words of higher education is considered to be problematic. This paper offers a perspective on the relationship of policy, practice and research in higher education by focusing especially on communication patterns among them. It suggests some reasons that relatively poor communication persists between research and policy and offers some suggestions for improving Communications, such as: choosing the best “modes of delivery”, paying attention to the audience and accepting random aspects of policy formation by researchers.Zarówno w krajach rozwiniętych, jak i rozwijających się przed szkolnictwem wyższym stawiane są coraz większe oczekiwania dotyczące zwiększenia dostępności, poprawy osiągnięć i zbliżenia do potrzeb zgłaszanych przez rynek pracy. W tych warunkach szkolnictwo wyższe mogłoby wiele skorzystać z analiz nastawionych na wewnętrzne problemy funkcjonowania oraz z sugestii uczonych i praktyków, którzy posiedli pogłębioną wiedzę na temat szkolnictwa. Jednak stosunki między badaczami a politykami w sferze szkolnictwa wyższego uważa się za dalekie od doskonałości. W niniejszym artykule proponuje się podejście do relacji między polityką, praktyką i badaniami nad szkolnictwem wyższym koncentrujące się na wzorcach komunikacji między nimi. Sugeruje się przyczyny, które spowodowały utrzymywanie się niewłaściwych relacji między badaniami i polityką oraz proponuje sposoby ich naprawy, takie jak wybór najlepszego wzorca „świadczenia usług” przez badaczy, zwrócenie większej uwagi na klientów czy akceptacja przez badaczy wpływu przypadkowych elementów na proces tworzenia polityki

In Quest of Educational Quality in the UAE

Quality assurance started as a corporate-related process in the 1960s but later became a highly sought-after objective in educational and academic contexts. The growing interest in quality assurance has been the result of government and business expectations, as well as competition in the higher education marketplace. One such growing market for quality assurance is the United Arab Emirates, where public formal education has only existed since the 1970s. This chapter focuses on the quest for what can be considered as the Holy Grail within the context of each of the previous chapters in this edited book, namely, quality education. The chapter offers a synopsis of the fast-paced developments and ongoing activities in quality assurance in education in the United Arab Emirates. Federal and emirate-based initiatives will be presented and discussed while reflecting on lessons learned and offering recommendations whenever possible

Expanding the parameters of academia

This paper draws on qualitative data gathered from two studies funded by the UK Leadership Foundation for Higher Education to examine the expansion of academic identities in higher education. It builds on Whitchurch’s earlier work, which focused primarily on professional staff, to suggest that the emergence of broadly based projects such as widening participation, learning support and community partnership is also impacting on academic identities. Thus, academic as well as professional staff are increasingly likely to work in multi-professional teams across a variety of constituencies, as well as with external partners, and the binary distinction between ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ roles and activities is no longer clear-cut. Moreover, there is evidence from the studies of an intentionality about deviations from mainstream academic career routes among respondents who could have gone either way. Consideration is therefore given to factors that influence individuals to work in more project-oriented areas, as well as to variables that affect ways in which these roles and identities develop. Finally, three models of academically oriented project activity are identified, and the implications of an expansion of academic identities are reviewed

Agents for Change and Changed Agents: The Micro-politics of Change and Feminism in the Academy

This article explores gender politics and processes in the academy and investigates change from the perspectives of feminist academics. In particular, it explores the experiences of women academics attempting to effect change to the gendered status quo of their own institutions. Focusing on micro-politics, the feminist movement is empirically explored in localized spaces of resistance and in the small but significant individual efforts at making changes in academic institutions. The analysis is based on interviews with female academics working in business and management schools and focuses on the challenges for change and how change attempts affect their personal and professional identities. The article explores the range of change strategies that participants use as they try to progress in their academic career while staying true to their feminist values and priorities through both resisting and incorporating dominant discourses of academic work. The analysis highlights such tensions and focuses on a contextualized, bottom-up perspective on change that, unlike more totalizing theorization, takes into account mundane and lived experiences at the level of the individual