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1.
Ka Ho Mok 《Higher Education》2010,60(4):419-440
With strong intention to enhance the global competitiveness of their university systems, both the Singapore and Malaysia governments have introduced reforms along the lines of ideas and practices embedded in neo-liberalism. In the last decade or so, we have witnessed reforms being introduced to the higher education sectors in these Asian states, particularly when corporatization and incorporation strategies are adopted to transform national/public universities. With particular reference to how academics evaluate the impact of the reforms on their academic life, this article reports and analyses findings generated from campus visits and field interviews conducted in Singapore and Malaysia from 2007 to 2009. Although the senior management of corporatized/incorporated universities in these Asian states has been given more discretion to decide how to operate their universities, most of the front line academics that we interviewed have not experienced major differences in university governance after the reforms took place. Instead of feeling ‘emancipated’ and ‘empowered’, many academics feel more pressures and control from the university administration and government ministries. Despite the fact that both the Singapore and Malaysia governments have tried to embrace the ideas and practices of ‘neo-liberalism’ to transform university governance, academics still see the state’s reluctance in withdrawing from steering/controlling higher education development. Such observations clearly reflect the ‘clash’ of two major governance philosophies, namely, ‘state centralism’ and ‘neo-liberalism’. In short, this article critically examines how far the proposed university governance reforms by adopting the corporatization/incorporation strategies have actually transformed university management and academic life style in Singapore and Malaysia.  相似文献   

2.
Positioning higher education for the knowledge based economy   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
This article questions the assumption that increasing competition among higher education institutions is the best method of achieving a strong higher education sector in developing countries. It notes that there has been increasing emphasis on the importance of higher education institutions for sustainable development, particularly because of their importance to the global knowledge economy. For the same reason, the appropriate management of the relationship between the state and higher education institutions is vital to a strong and dynamic future for these institutions. This paper proposes a menu of options for higher education governance, grouped around ‘state-centric’ and ‘neo-liberal’ models of development. The ‘state-centric’ model proposed is based on a variety of examples of high performing Asian economies, in particular, while the ‘neo-liberal’ model is based on emerging trends in higher education management in countries such as Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. The paper suggests that despite pressure across the globe to encourage a market among universities, this may not always be the most efficient use of resources, or the best way to integrate universities in a country’s drive for economic growth.  相似文献   

3.
The South African obsession with performance-based pedagogies, as I have shown, has negative implications for resolving equity problems in educational reforms; it threatens to negate a political debate about ‘goals’ in favour of a technician’s debate about ‘ends’; and it fragments knowledge into meaningless tasks that assign value to external behaviours rather than the multiplicity of ways in which learning and valuing can be experienced (if not always expressed). The real danger to building a strong democratic culture through education is that what should be vibrant debates about ‘what’s worth knowing’ could be effectively silenced in a performance assessment system that only values, through a complex assessment system, that which is worth doing. Such an understanding of education is, unfortunately, entrenched in a global network of economic and technological processes that make such pursuits appear both normal and inevitable.  相似文献   

4.
This paper is about changing concepts of equity in UK higher education. In particular, it charts the moves from concepts about gender equality as about women’s education as a key issue in twentieth century higher education to questions of men’s education in the twenty-first century. These changing concepts of equity are linked to wider social and economic transformations, the expansion of higher education and the growth in the knowledge economy, or what has been called ‘academic capitalism’. Feminist theorists and activists, often called second wave feminists, developed concepts of gender equality in education, including higher education in the twentieth century, and these have been incorporated into higher education and policies with the expansions of higher education, especially around notions of widening participation. Notions of widening participation in policy and practice arenas focus on equity as about social class, socio-economic disadvantage, ethnicity and race, rather than specifically on gender questions. Equity is now twinned with diversity and where gender is now invoked it is largely about young and working class men’s disadvantage in relation to higher education. In this paper, I will also provide research evidence from the UK’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) which has been the UK’s biggest ever initiative in education research about equity and diversity as currently conceived in UK higher education. I will show how gender has been incorporated with diversity questions and has lost its critical and feminist edge. I conclude with addressing questions about the future of higher education policies and practices to address questions of equity and diversity, attempting to counter the systemic inequalities in current forms of UK higher education. There are opportunities for developing new, critical and feminist pedagogies. More inclusive or ‘connectionist’ approaches, rather than ‘teaching to the test’, would engage socially diverse men and women students in a range of higher education subjects and settings.  相似文献   

5.
Skill/competency approaches to workplace-based policy seek to assess and train for discrete individual competencies with the goal of increasing employability and productivity. These approaches have become increasingly prominent across a range of advanced capitalist countries. A substantial critique has emerged over this same period regarding issues of instrumentality and social control, as well as the failure of skill/compentancy approaches to articulate a meaningful understanding of human learning capacities. In this article, these critical perspectives are clarified further by a review of contributions to understanding the skill/competence question emerging from sociology of work literature. Building from these critiques, this article outlines recent experiences with and perspectives on skill/competency frameworks amongst different national labour movements. Included in this outline is a more detailed, comparative analysis of Norway and Canada; here we see the lofty ‘new’, ‘knowledge economy’ rhetoric — in two countries where one might expect to see it blossom in application — brought down to earth by the realities of industrial relations, employer intransigence and intra-labour movement differences. ‘Skill/competence’ proves to be a floating signifier that, amongst both employers and labour, stands as a proxy for ‘power/control’ struggles. Degenerating in this way, from a labour perspective, the new politics of skill/competency formation is seen to have spiraled toward irrelevance in Norway and Canada; awaiting, in both countries, a re-invigoration through attention to changes in the participatory structure of the labour process itself.  相似文献   

6.
The article examines Cate Tiernan’s ‘Wicca’ series. This series and the ‘Circle of Three’ books by Isobel Bird explore the experiences of teenage girls who embrace the pagan religion, Wicca. The texts reflect the growing interest in spirituality expressed by many young people and extend the literary representation of witchcraft. Tiernan produces stories of spiritual growth entwined with fantasy and romance. The series operates within a moral and religious framework that allows girls to feel positive about their bodies and their sexuality and acknowledges the complex moral decisions many young people face. Christine Jarvis is Dean of Education and Professional Development at the University of Huddersfield. She worked in community, adult and further education before moving into teacher education. Her doctoral thesis at the University of Leeds examined the educational uses of popular romantic fiction and she has published work on education and popular culture, romance, teen fiction and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  相似文献   

7.
Compared with the problems one encounters when trying to use ‘graduate employability’ as a measure of the quality of higher education, recognising how the definitions of ‘employability’ are dependent on the type of the data used in analysing the phenomenon in question is a totally different matter. This article demonstrates how the understanding of graduate employability varies when the viewpoint of the analysis changes from cross-sectional to longitudinal. Indicators obtained from the educational and working careers of graduates with master’s degree in nine European countries are used to illustrate differences between the two views on employability. The article shows that longitudinal indicators are useful in displaying the limitations of the higher education system when trying to improve the employability of graduates.  相似文献   

8.
This paper argues that the conceptions of ‘space’ (and increasingly ‘time’) in the discussion of ‘the university’ (in its most transcendent sense) have gone through four distinct phases in the UK. Using a Heideggerian conception of ‘space’ where usefulness is more important than proximity, the ‘ancient’ universities were ‘useful’ to the gentry and thus were ‘closer’ to them than to the excluded ‘local’ poor in the institutions’ vicinities. The ‘civic’ universities on the other hand stressed ‘localism’ as part of their mandate – to educate the people of their locality (but only those of the new industrial middle class). The ‘Robbins’ universities were a partial return to the ‘ancient’ notion of learning as a ‘lived’ activity, providing scenic landscapes on green-belt campuses where students could ‘retreat’ from the ‘real world’ for the duration of their studies. The ‘spatial’ quality of these places was thus part of a conception of higher education as ‘lifestyle choice’ where young people moved away from their locality to study. As such ‘proximity’ was an issue only insofar as the greater the distance from one’s point of origin the better for successful immersion in the growing student ‘culture’. The ‘new/post-1992’ universities partially retained their polytechnic mandate to educate local people, but embraced a colonialist impulse regarding local space usage. ‘ ‘The discussion can be further refined to argue that these four stages are merely two phases which have repeated themselves: from ancient ‘exclusivity’ to civic ‘localism’ and back to Robbins era ‘exclusivity’ and thence to post-1992 ‘localism’ once more’. The opening up of higher education via the Internet in the late 20th and early 21st centuries provides for the possibility of the growth of entirely non-spatial and asynchronous learning experiences, and as such we may well be on the verge of the fifth stage of university development.  相似文献   

9.
10.
In this paper I reflect on perspectives presented by John Settlage as he examines the truth of the proposition that ‘many teacher educators harbour deficit perspectives about their pre-service teachers, presuming that their lack of exposure to economically, ethnically and linguistically diverse settings renders them deficient as future educators.’ In the study presented in his paper, he ‘uncovered shifting identities that indicate that mainstream future teachers do not fit the ‘‘damaged goods’’ label that ardent multiculturalists might be tempted to impose.’ One of his conclusions was that ‘the practices of essentializing education majors because of their perceived deficiencies born of privilege are inaccurate and unproductive.’ My reflections focus on tertiary teacher-researchers in mathematics, information technology, environmental sciences and engineering, their students and racism, and broaden Settlage’s context to teaching and research relationships in this setting.  相似文献   

11.
Creativity is viewed in different ways in different disciplines: in education it is called ‘innovation’, in business it is ‘entrepreneurship’, in mathematics it is often equated with ‘problem solving’, and in music it is ‘performance’ or ‘composition’. A creative product in different domains is measured against the norms of that domain, with its own rules, approaches and conceptions of creativity.  相似文献   

12.
Assessment has become an important topic of debate and even reform in many Western countries. It is equally important in other regions of the world, although less subject to reform. Yet discussions of assessment across cultural boundaries are not frequent and in a globalizing world this can be problematic. The purposes of this article, therefore, are to review concepts such as ‘formative’ and ‘summative’ assessment and how they have developed over time. A focus of this review will be to identify the implications of different kinds of assessment for student learning, especially in relation to the cultural contexts in which they take place. The article will argue that different forms of assessment can be directed towards different learning purposes, especially where cultural pressures dictate certain kinds of assessment practices. Valorizing one form of assessment over another may well be counterproductive in particular cultural contexts.  相似文献   

13.
14.
The aim of this study was to develop an instrument for evaluating how an education program has been implemented. Such evaluation can provide insight into the effectiveness of a program. Examined here was the Olympic Education Program used in Greek schools since 2000. In it, students learn the history of the Olympic games and the importance of exercise for health along with the principles and values of sports and volunteerism. The evaluation instrument underlying this study addressed the following six factors: ‘facilities’, ‘administration’, ‘educational material’, ‘student–teacher relationships’, ‘educational procedures’, and ‘training’. Results indicate that the instrument, while adequate for assessing effectiveness, should be combined with advanced statistical methods.  相似文献   

15.
Many epoch-making biological discoveries (e.g. Darwinian Theory) were based upon observations. Nevertheless, observation is often regarded as ‘just looking’ rather than a basic scientific skill. As observation is one of the main research methods in biological sciences, it must be considered as an independent research method and systematic practice of this method is necessary. Because observation skills form the basis of further scientific methods (e.g. experiments or comparisons) and children from the age of 4 years are able to independently generate questions and hypotheses, it seems possible to foster observation competency at a preschool level. To be able to provide development-adequate individual fostering of this competency, it is first necessary to assess each child’s competency. Therefore, drawing on the recent literature, we developed in this study a competency model that was empirically evaluated within learners (N = 110) from different age groups, from kindergarten to university. In addition, we collected data on language skills, domain-specific interest and previous knowledge to analyse coherence between these skills and observation competency. The study showed as expected that previous knowledge had a high impact on observation competency, whereas the influence of domain-specific interest was nonexistent. Language skills were shown to have a weak influence. By utilising the empirically validated model consisting of three dimensions (‘Describing’, ‘Scientific reasoning’ and ‘Interpreting’) and three skill levels, it was possible to assess each child’s competency level and to develop and evaluate guided play activities to individually foster a child’s observation competency.  相似文献   

16.
The term ‘concept’ is used in different ways within educational literature and has at least two different, although related, referents in relation to science knowledge, namely, public knowledge and private understandings. A taxonomic structure for ‘science concepts’ (public knowledge) has been developed to provide a rationale for the choice of phenomena to be used in the investigation of students’ ‘concepts’ and also to act as a frame of reference for generating insights about the data to be collected. Furthermore, it may be a useful heuristic to predict other science concepts likely to be highly problematic in school teaching situations and thus worthy of detailed research. The taxonomy, called a ‘Scale of Empirical Distance’ (SED), enables science concepts to be mapped according to their degree of closeness to concrete realities. The scale shows a recognition of the empirical basis of science concepts and the role of human senses in the perception of the material world even though “absolute objectivity of observation is not a possible ideal of science” as Harre (1972) has noted. The scale uses two binary variables, namely, ‘visual’ and ‘tactile’, to generate four categories of science concepts ranging on a continuum from concrete to abstract. Some concepts related to ‘matter’ will be classified and discussed. Specializations: science teacher education, primary science curriculum and methods, students’ personal meanings of phenomena.  相似文献   

17.
This paper examines the change in young children’s understanding of ‘equal’, ‘more’, ‘less’, and ‘between’, words commonly used in equivalent and non-equivalent situations, over a 3-year period. Seventy-six children participated in the longitudinal study. Each year they were asked to share their understanding of these four words. Past research has indicated that many children have limited understanding of ‘equal’ as quantitative sameness. The results of this research suggested that many children also have limited understanding of ‘more’ and ‘less’ and that these understandings did not significantly change over the 3-year period.  相似文献   

18.
In this paper I address the challenge of developing theory in relation to the practices of mathematics teaching and its development. I do this by exploring a notion of ‘teaching as learning in practice’ through overt use of ‘inquiry’ in mathematics learning, mathematics teaching and the development of practices of teaching in communities involving teachers and educators. The roles and goals of mathematics teachers and educators in such communities are both distinct and deeply intertwined. I see an aim of inquiry in teaching to be the ‘critical alignment’ (Wenger, 1998) of teaching within the communities in which teaching takes place. Inquiry ‘as a tool’ and inquiry ‘as a way of being’ are important concepts in reflexive developmental processes in which inquiry practice leads to better understandings and development of theory.  相似文献   

19.
This article presents recent reform processes in Japanese higher education, concerning the tensions emerging within the system regarding ‘excellence’ and ‘diversity’. The article particularly focuses on how Japanese universities have reacted to the recent ‘competition’ and ‘differentiation’ policy promoted by the government, drawing on recent survey results conducted with academic managers at Japanese universities. It is interesting to examine the case of Japan, a historically diversified and differentiated national system, which has been changing rapidly with recent national ‘top-down’ policy reforms, followed by more recent and new bottom-up institutional initiatives. The study shows that universities are trying to achieve excellence, fulfilling different functions at the same time, aspiring to be excellent in teaching, research and social contribution without having institutional capacity to meet these expectations. Appropriate internal governance and external mediation mechanisms need to be created at the institutional level to manage diversification of the higher education system as a whole.  相似文献   

20.
The increasing importance that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been gaining for Physical Education (PE) and sports pedagogy has generated the need to prepare ICT-proficient prospective PE teachers within PE and sport science university departments. This study was aimed at: (a) the design and implementation of two project-based elective courses on ICT in education (entitled ‘Informatics in Education’ and ‘Computers in Physical Education Teaching’) for the undergraduate students of a PE and sport science department, and (b) the investigation of students’ responses to the courses and instructor’s experiences from organizing and imparting the courses. The courses were focused on educational multimedia and web development for PE. Twenty-three students that had attended ‘Informatics in Education’ and 13 students that had attended ‘Computers in Physical Education Teaching’ participated in the study. Research data were collected through student questionnaires and instructor’s notes. It was found that students were helped to acquire basic multimedia and web development skills for educational purposes, and that their responses to the courses were positive overall. The courses fulfilled students’ expectations and were successful in equipping students with self-confidence in their ability to make use of ICT in PE courses and to construct multimedia and web-based learning materials. Furthermore, students were provided with opportunities to express their creativity and improve their future instructional practices. However, the study also brought to light the various difficulties and challenges of training prospective PE teachers in the didactical utilization of ICT at undergraduate level.  相似文献   

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