Higher education institutions : subject profile

"This briefing provides an overview of Higher Education Institutions in Scotland. It provides key statistics and information on recent policy developments" -- front cover

RAS Project Evaluative Report

Report findings from university study RAS (Retain, Achieve, Succeed), a staff research programme that examines issues around a 30% achievement gap between home black and home white students. Its focus has been on the curriculum and understanding matters of diversity and accessibility within institutional delivery at UAL

Funder-Intermediary Relationships: Promise & Pitfalls

A growing body of work is being undertaken by foundations with the help of intermediary organizations. For a funder, working with an intermediary has the potential to greatly enhance the funder's impact with their constituents, bringing needed expertise, skills, connections, infrastructure, and objectivity. For an intermediary, working with a funder can expand impact and reach, provide a financial base, and increase visibility and credibility. Win - win, right? Well, these relationships can also be difficult to manage for both the funder and the intermediary, and in the worst case, contribute to ineffectiveness of the joint work. Fieldstone Alliance hoped to learn more about critical success factors that lead to positive, mutually beneficial relationships between funders and intermediaries. An online survey was used to gather experiences from both funders and intermediaries. These success factors could then be used by both funders and intermediaries as a guide when developing contracts or grants, and as a tool to manage the ongoing work of the partnership. The following report includes highlights from the survey

Welcome to BU Libraries bookmark

Bookmark welcoming students to BU Libraries

When Memories Make a Difference: Multimodal Literacy Narratives for Preservice ELA Methods Students

This article examines multimodal literacy narrative projects designed by students in a methods of teaching course for secondary preservice English Language Arts teachers. For the multimodal project, preservice teachers infused written, audio, and visual text using a variety of creative mediums. Through combined theoretical frames, the researcher explores semiotics and preservice teachers’ use of multiliteracies as they shift their conceptions of what it means to compose. Finally, this article explores how the act of reflection through the literacy narrative influences preservice teachers’ notions of teaching composition through a variety of mediums

Disarming charisma? Mayoralty, gender and power in Medellín, Colombia

The ‘Urban Century’ has seen a rise in power of cities, and the emergence of city mayors as significant political actors both nationally and globally. The power of city mayors, which unifies pragmatic, techno-managerial leadership with the authority and legitimacy of public office, invites a reappraisal of the gendered construction of power in the ‘Urban Century’, and the particular notions of hegemonic masculinity that city mayors recreate. This article explores the example of Medellín, Colombia, whose mayor Sergio Fajardo is widely regarded to have stewarded the city's rapid reduction in violence. Fajardo's leadership can be characterised as typical of the phenomenon of smart, cosmopolitan, charismatic mayors who are seen to respond professionally to local needs by making smart investment decisions and attracting international capital. The emergence of a techno-managerial mayor in the city of Medellín, which during the 1990s was the epicentre of Colombia's multi-faceted conflict with the highest homicide rate in the world, represents a fundamental change to the identity and gender of power in a context of violent conflict where legitimate authority in terms of a monopoly on the use of force, was fiercely disputed. I use this example to explore how mayoral power is gendered and how it relates to violence, which is central to liberal theories of leadership and the focus of the feminist critique of them. The possibility that such a character attain power indicates underlying changes in the gendered structure of political space, including the institution of a Sub-Secretariat for Women and formalisation of participation in political process

In the Shadow of a Willow Tree: A Community Garden Experiment in Decolonising, Multispecies Research

In 2014 I commenced a postdoctoral project that involved collaboratively planting and maintaining a community garden on a block of land that was once part of the East Armidale Aboriginal Reserve in the so-called New England Tableland region of New South Wales, Australia. At the edge of this block of land is an introduced, invasive willow tree. In this article I write with and alongside the willow tree to interrogate the potential and limitations of anticolonial projects undertaken from colonial subject positions predicated on relations of social and environmental privilege. Anticolonial scholarly activism demands a critique of individual and institutional complicity with ongoing colonial power structures. The following analysis offers a personal narrative of what it has been like to be involved in an anticolonial multispecies research project while working within the confines of the neoliberal university. Exploring the intersection of academic, social and environmental ecologies, I position the community garden as an alternative pedagogical and public environmental humanities research site that interrupts the reproduction of settler colonial power relations by cultivating tactics of collective resistance in alliance with the nonhuman world