The diploma thesis is based on interviews with participants of the Mentoring program for early career scientists. The paper presents an analysis of the ways in which interview participants relate to what they believe is science. The aim of the analysis is to find out whether their understanding of science is gender-related and what features carry the academic identity of people actively participating in the mentoring program. The theoretical frameworks are the epistemology of science, the theory of mentoring, the scientific environment in the Czech Republic and the work of Pat O'Connor, Clare O'Hagan and Julie Brannen which deal with the research of academic identities in the current neoliberal academic environment.

Latino students in the United States face significant challenges including very high student dropout rates and difficulties finding support for student academic success. This research focuses on Latino students who are successful despite these many challenges and explores how these successful students describe their experiences in school. Three successful Latino high school students describe their pathways toward academic achievement in this ethnography, which takes a narrative approach. The student stories illustrate the influence of families, peers, schools, and the interplay between ethnic and academic identity as relevant to how students achieve success. Although these students articulate very different experiences, supports and challenges, all of the students are successful in school, which encourages a reexamination of the ways schools and communities can support minority student success.

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This qualitative study explored the relationship between ten African American girls’ experiences with discipline practices and their academic identity in middle school. In the U.S., Black girls continue to suffer from inequitable treatment in school discipline resulting in disparate academic outcomes and have higher suspension rates than all other students including boys. This study attempted to answer the central question: what is the relationship between students’ experiences with school discipline practices and their academic identity? Ten African American girls associated with a middle school in New York fit the following criteria: (1) students in grades 6-8; a female student (2) self-identified as being African American (3) have received an out of school suspension in the previous school year. A one-on-one interview was conducted with the girls individually. The five major themes were related to: (a) good vs. bad student, (b) strict rules, (c) negative and positive teacher-student relationships, (d) different treatment by black and white teachers, and (e) role of peers. The conclusions derived from the study were: (1) African American girls educational experiences are influenced by teachers’ and administrators’ lack of cultural knowledge and understanding; thus, teachers and administrators can reflect how their biases manifest themselves in disciplinary actions, educational outcomes and student participation (2) teachers and administrators can work together to develop different ways to support African Americans to feel welcome and safe in school. (3) Teachers and administrators need to review and revise the current school discipline policies that are too harsh. Addressing these issues will help support African American girls to be successful in middle school. / Educational Leadership

The university sector at the beginning of the 21st Century is shifting in response to national and global changes in the role and purpose of Higher Education. Some universities, including the University of Hertfordshire, have chosen to focus attention on engagement with business and commerce. This practice based research examines the experience of academics in relation to the new challenges posed by this strategic development. There are three threads of investigation; interviews, examination of key concepts and the practitioner dimension. Drawing on a qualitative and constructivist approach, individual interviews with a range of business facing academics explore their experience of engaging with new activities. My perspective, as a manager of business facing academics, provides an important thread and situates the work firmly in the practice context. The implicit expectations arising from strategic positioning as a business facing university are examined. A conceptual framework is established with a focus on the nature of business facing activity, including its relationship with traditional forms of teaching and research, learning through work in the Higher Education setting and the idea of an enabling local context. The research found that amongst those undertaking business facing activity, academic identity is a fluid and multi-faceted construct reconfigured through experience and learning in the workplace; by its nature not easily defined, labelled or bounded. The challenge for universities is to nurture and sustain individuals in the creation and use of academic identities, in order to meet the undoubted challenges to come. This requires a forward looking, inclusive and innovative stance, resisting the temptation to judge current academic identities by the established notions of the past. Management of academics involved in business facing activity requires a more flexible, trusting and individual approach than is traditionally seen in universities.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990's Kazakhstan experienced a socio-economic transition from a socialist economy to a free market economy and was challenged with building a newly independent state. In pursuit of fulfilling strategic nationwide tasks, the government undertook multidimensional measures in all spheres. However, in order to implement such profound changes and keep up with globalization, the newly independent state found itself in a position where there was a burning need for a serious update in knowledge and skills in all fields. In light of the National State Conception of Education Development of 2005 (NSCED), higher education in Kazakhstan is viewed as the most fundamental liaison between academia, research and innovation in industry and business of the country. Integration of these three components represents the concept of a national innovation system that will allow Kazakhstan to establish successfully its own competitive advantage in the global arena. Therefore, the higher education faculty of Kazakhstan becomes the driving force in fulfilling such grand tasks as relating research to practice, as well as increasing the knowledge, skills, and capacities of young specialists and researchers for a future sustainable society. In other words, there is a need to determine the current status of higher education faculty development which may then serve as a basis for a comprehensive approach and enable the compliance process with the Bologna international standards of education to be expedited. For the purpose of this study, a qualitative research methodology was used whereby the researcher was the primary research tool who interviewed 20 faculty members and university administrators from two large universities of national status in Kazakhstan. The data collection tools employed were semi-structured interviews, observations, and document analysis and field notes. Since the nature of this phenomenological study is exploratory and descriptive, it was considered holistically and based on interpretation and analysis of all study participants combined. Moreover, the phenomenon under study is complex due to a dynamic interaction and interdependence of multiple HRD levels; and consequently, it was viewed through the contexts of international relationships, the country's broad societal transformations, and its organizational and individual levels. The research findings indicate that there is no systematic and consistent approach to faculty development in the area of higher education in Kazakhstan. The majority of current faculty development and any professional development activities tend to have a spontaneous character without implementation of a thorough faculty needs task analysis or performance evaluation. The faculty as social subjects with different socio-cultural identities is currently in the process of constructing a new academic identity based on updated social values, beliefs, mentality and work styles. In the case of successfully updating professional expertise and higher education policy implementation, the faculty will constitute a group of highly educated experts and professionals who are capable of providing the younger generation with a high quality education according to international standards and conducting intensive research that will connect the theory and practice through real applications in various industries.

Historically and contemporarily the Black male experience has stimulated and provoked meaningful discussions in the realms of sport and academia. Black males are uniquely situated in American society, as they inhabit a liminal existence that oscillates between love and hate. Ladson-Billings (2011) expounds that Black boys are loved in the narrow niches of sport but are often abhorred in academic settings. The majority of research on the athletic and academic identities of Black student-athletes is conducted at the collegiate level in the revenue sports of basketball and football, and the research asserts that the collegiate sport atmosphere renders the two identities as mutually exclusive (Edwards, 1984; Harrison et al., 2011; Singer, 2008). There are studies occurring at the middle school level; however, these studies combine all male athletes into one group and do not distinguish the research participants according to their specific sport participation or racial background (Alfone, 2013; Fuller, Percy, & Bruening, 2013; Gorton, 2010). The few studies that distinguish between race and sport participation are somewhat dated (Mahiri, 1991, 1998; Nasir, 2000, 2008). This study addresses a gap in the literature by focusing solely on elite Black male middle school student-athletes to discover what leads to the seemingly incompatible athletic and academic identities that surface during college. I employed an instrumental case study grounded in Critical Race Theory which investigated and examined the experiences and perspectives of seven elite Black middle school club basketball players. Themes were generated by coding the interview data of all relevant stakeholders such as coaches, players, and parents as well as a thorough analysis of field notes, artifacts, and focus group data. Five themes emerged from the data, Academic Recognition, Athletic Recognition, Career, Racial Expectations, & Time Devoted to Sport and Intellectual Endeavors. This study is significant because it contextualizes the racial, athletic and academic climate of Black male athletes at a crucial time in their identity development. It contributes to the current literature by providing insight and furnishing essential information for parents, coaches and educators in order to bolster and enhance the academic identity and attainment of young Black male basketball players.

This study set out to explore the ways in which non-STEM academics, working within UK universities that had positioned themselves publicly as ‘entrepreneurial’ institutions, interpret and negotiate the related concepts of the entrepreneurial academic and university. The entrepreneurial university concept has become a ubiquitous theme in higher education and policy literatures in recent decades, having been described variously as an ‘idea for its time’ (Shattock, 2010) and the ‘end-point of the evolution of the idea of the university’ (Barnett, 2010, p.i). This research set out to interrogate some of the key ways in which this institutional form, and the corresponding concept of the entrepreneurial academic, have been discursively constructed by advocates in the UK and beyond. Further to this, the study aimed to collect narratives of experience from non-STEM academics employed by self-described ‘entrepreneurial’ universities, both to enquire into how they interpreted the ‘entrepreneurial paradigm’, and to invite them to report on how they felt that their university’s assumption of an enterprise mission had, or had not, influenced its organisational ‘culture’ and their subjectively experienced academic work-lives. The researcher’s interest in the relationship between enterprise discourse and the organisational ‘culture’ of universities stemmed from the apparent consensus within the scholarly and policy literature about the need for universities to develop an integrated ‘entrepreneurial culture’ (Clark, 1998, p.7)(Gibb, 2006b, p.2)(Rae, Gee and Moon, 2009) by pursuing a policy of ‘organisational culture change’, with culture here denoting ‘the realm of ideas, beliefs, and asserted values’ (Kwiek, 2008, p.115) which inhere within institutions. To this end, a series of semi-structured, interpretive interviews were carried out with participants from a range of non-STEM disciplines, working in a variety of university types in the UK. The researcher then employed a discourse-analytic method to delineate some of the ‘discursive repertoires’ that participants used to account for their professional practices, and report on their experiences in - and understandings of - the entrepreneurial university. What emerged from this analysis was a complex picture of ‘enterprise discourse’ within the contemporary university setting, as well as a general tendency amongst participants to adopt a position of ontological scepticism where the issue of ‘university culture’ was concerned. Further to this, it was determined that the ‘inclusive’ interpretation of entrepreneurialism typically employed by advocates for the paradigm had not generally been taken up by participants, for whom it was, for the most part, a phenomenon associated variously with ‘managerialism’, ‘market values’, ‘the business agenda’, ‘income generation’, ‘money making’, and the figure of the ‘individual, lone, romantic, heroic capitalist’. Additionally, where subjects were conversant in broader, more ‘social’ conceptions of academic entrepreneurialism, they typically reported that it was rarely articulated in the internal communications of their respective universities.

The thesis follows the research stream focused on changes to the academic environment in the recent decades and their impact on academic professional paths and identities. Specifically, it is concerned with the phenomenon of attrition from academic profession which is pursued through a perspective of professional identity. We understand academic identities as an integral part of current changes to the academic environment and their study thus may help us better understand the changes as well as their influence on the development of academic ambitions. The aim of the thesis is to ascertain what kind of people and with what kind of professional identities enter and leave academia and for what reasons, and on this basis to identify barriers to the development of academic identities and paths. Special attention is paid to research field and gender aspects of the development of professional identities in order to explore the possible influence of specific structural factors (mainly field specific organization of academic production and gender specific biographies) and gain information needed for appropriate policy measures aimed at supporting professional development of early-career researchers. The analysis is based on narrative interviews with people who left academic professional path. The outcome of...