This thesis examined the experiences of women academics in relation to their family contribution, educational experiences and, factors that motivated them towards academia, while highlighting strategies that they have employed to reach their present professional and academic ranks. In addition, any challenges experienced by the women academics were explored. The study is a contribution to knowledge and the extant literature on women academics’ career experiences which has been under-researched, especially in Kenya. It claims to have made a contribution to a wider understanding of women academics’ experiences, exposing a significant impact of culture, family, work tensions, gender role expectations, male-dominated university cultures, and a lack of role models and mentors, which contribute to the slow progress of women academics’ careers in Kenyan universities. Using a qualitative research approach, the researcher used a face- to- face in- depth interviewing technique with sixteen women academics from three universities in Kenya while drawing from a feminist perspective. My aim was to create a dialogue on the lived experiences while at the same time using theory to inform and reflect on those experiences. With the use of thematic analysis, the data generated five themes; family socialisation, educational attributes, motivational factors, challenges and strategies. The findings of this research demonstrated that very few women have progressed into senior academic and professional ranks and that, the pace is slow. They continue to be hampered by socio-cultural attitudes towards women and their roles in Kenyan society. This is not the full story as some of the women interviewed reported that they had to put off marriage for career and likewise, others put on hold or postponed career for family responsibilities. To maintain their positions or climb the professional ladder, they therefore, had to employ a range of strategies such as; working hard, focusing on research and publication for promotion purposes. The wider implications of these findings are discussed.

This thesis explores the concept of socialisation through the experiences of nurse educators within a United Kingdom context in one higher education institution in the Northwest of England. Built upon the assumption that nurse educators‘ practices and dispositions are shaped and affected by the sociocultural field in which they occur, attention is paid to identifying these influences reflected through an understanding of their curriculum practices. A micro-ethnographic philosophy is adopted where semi-structured interviews are the key data source from a volunteer group of twenty nurse educators‘ informant accounts, inter-woven with observations and my reflections as a nurse educator, and therefore written in the first person. As I also claim a pertinent professional cultural heritage all data are collected and analysed from an insider-researcher position. Pierre Bourdieu‘s relational concepts of field, capital and habitus are applied as a template through which the accounts of nurse educators are filtered and interpreted. In this thesis I will argue that nurse educators experience difficult transitions in and between the fields in which they practise and that their dominant, but hidden, values contribute to their perceived marginalisation within the academic community and field of higher education. Nurse educators appear to adopt practices that reflect their practitioner habitus which contradicts the popular perspectives of academic roles and identity, referred to as an academic habitus. This negatively affects the development of academic identity and contributes to difficulties experienced in accruing academic capital. Specifically, curriculum practices are affected by the hegemonic values of nurse educators where practice-bred values conflict with academic world values.

This thesis reports the findings of an essentially phenomenographic research study into nurse teachers’ Conceptions of Student-Centred Teaching and Student-Centred Approaches to Teaching. The focus on the experience of student-centred aspects of teaching is a departure from previous research from this perspective in Higher Education that has focused upon teachers’ experience of teaching. The approach and focus of this study is also a departure from research into student-centred teaching in nurse education. Previous research in Higher Education has identified and reported qualitative variation in conceptions of teaching and qualitative variation in approaches to teaching and these have been categorised as either teacher-centred or student-centred. However, the interpretation and separation of conceptions of teaching and approaches to teaching has been largely as a result of the researchers’ interpretation of what it means to be teacher-centred or student-centred in teaching. This study aimed at identifying the qualitative variation that exists in conceptions of student-centred teaching and student-centred approaches to teaching from the perspectives of those nurse teachers who claimed to adopt student-centred methods in their teaching practice. The findings of this study indicate that there are significant qualitative differences in nurse teachers’ conceptions of student-centred teaching and their approaches to student-centred teaching than has hitherto been identified. In both cases a limited number of qualitatively different categories of description were identified (5 in each case) ranging from approaches to teaching that result in the reproduction of expert knowledge and skills to students developing their professional attitudes and values (affective components), and acquisition of disciplinary concepts and skills to student self-empowerment conceptions of student-centred teaching. This study also reports that the relations between conceptions of student-centred teaching and student-centred approaches to teaching are significantly different from previous research in this area, and suggests that some teachers holding student development conceptions of student- centred teaching adopt a similar sophisticated approach to student-centred teaching despite the existence of qualitative variation in their conceptions of student-centred teaching. This research extends our awareness of the experience of student-centred teaching. Finally, the implications of these findings for teacher development are discussed.

This action research project focussed on the key components of the construct mathematical resilience and how mathematical resilience can be developed in learners who are working towards their GCSE in mathematics. Split-screen lesson objectives, one related to a mathematical skill and the other related to a learning skill, were used to focus the learner’s attention onto each skill. These learning skills were chosen to encourage a particular group of learners to gain the confidence, persistence and perseverance to allow them to work inside the Growth Zone. The overall aim of this action research project was to improve the attainment of learners in their GCSE mathematics examination.

This thesis is an investigation of the reasons why and ways in which teachers in English Further Education practise critical pedagogy within a neoliberal policy context. It presents new findings in terms of how and why teachers engage in critical pedagogy; it also presents an original contribution to the field by offering a hermeneutical tool, drawn from Slavko Splichal’s work in communications studies, for understanding the operation of neoliberal hegemony in education and elsewhere. This analytic tool illuminates potential practical and theoretical approaches which may be helpful in the development of counter-hegemonic resistance to neoliberalism. The thesis argues that neoliberalism has become hegemonic through a reversal of Enlightenment values and priorities and that it is therefore possible to combat the neoliberal advance by a return to the Enlightenment emphasis upon the use of critical reason in public life, but with an added recognition of the impact of power relations shaping both public and private spheres. The approach is interpretivist and critical and has both theoretical and practical aims and outcomes. It is based on ten semi-structured interviews with teachers in a range of professional contexts in English Further Education. In terms of practice, the thesis resulted in the establishment of a collaborative group of critical educators in the north of England, as well as the founding of a new sixth form college as a site where critical approaches are welcome and encouraged.

This thesis investigates the effect of social background on pupils’ choices of educational and career pathways. A group of 18 pupils, chosen from a single Comprehensive School in the North West of England, was followed from the ages of 13 to 16 as they encountered the options available to them when they chose their GCSE subjects. Data were collected principally through focus group interviews with the pupils. The interviews were timed to coincide with key stages in the options process before and after the choices were made. Additional interviews were carried out with individual parents and members of staff at the school. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and cultural capital were used in the analysis of the data, which revealed evidence to support Bourdieu’s notion that forms of capital are reproduced through investment by the family. Pupils with disadvantaged backgrounds were less likely to opt for Higher Education especially if it involved study at a significant distance from home. A survey of the development of the English education system since the 1944 Education Act is used to support the conclusion that schools are also a significant agent for cultural reproduction. The school at the centre of the survey used data supplied and processed by the Fischer Family Trust to assist with the target setting process, and evidence suggested that this process was employed by the school as a mechanism to support progress towards targets set for it by the National Government. The support given to individual pupils to achieve targets set for them therefore became disconnected from the educational need of the individual.

Both the oral reading errors and the metalinguistic knowledge of 52 eleven year old Secondary school remedial readers were investigated during 9 reading task/structured interview sessions. The children read three texts which were of similar linguistic difficulty but which differed in terms of their 'accessibility': SELF-texts (based on the readers' oral language); PEER-texts (the 'self-generated' texts of their peers) and a CLASS-text passage from a typical class-reader. The results of the analyses performed on the children's REFUSAL, OMISSION, INSERTION, and SUBSTITUTION errors showed that reading accuracy and the pattern of errors on each type of text was very similar and that all the children were capable of utilising the graphic, semantic and syntactic cues provided by the texts. However, the 'quality' of the SUBSTITUTION errors differed according to text-type and to reading ability. On the SELF and PEER-texts the errors of the 'Poorer' readers in the sample were, by and large, as 'good' as those of the 'Better' and 'Fair' readers whilst the CLASS-text performances showed the errors of the Poorer readers to be qualitatively inferior to those of the other children. These results were interpreted to suggest that, whilst the reading strengths and weaknesses of the children did not differ per Se, the strengths of the Poorer readers were the least 'portable' across texts of differing accessibility. The children's reported metalinguistic knowledge of their own problem-solving strategies showed evidence of a 'mismatch' between what they said they did when they encountered an 'unknown' word and what the analysis of their reading errors suggested they actually did. Readers seemed particularly unaware of their ability to make use of the linguistic context in solving 'difficult' words although their ability to do this was clearly indicated by the analysis of their errors.

Evidence from examination boards and successive governments’ research into gender show that examination success in RE and the numbers opting to take the subject at GCSE and ‘A’ level remain heavily skewed towards female learners. Drawing from poststructuralism and masculinities theory, the aim of my research is to critically investigate key stage four boys’ relationship to religious education and explore the factors which produced association or disassociation with RE. My findings indicate that the boys who had a positive relationship to RE valued the epistemological openness of pluralistic RE as it helped them make sense of social and cultural difference. The boys who associated with RE were able to use it as a discursive resource for their on-going project of the masculine self, linking it to their imagined futures and career trajectories. Interviews with the boys who disassociated from RE showed that where the boys had a negative view of religion they tended to conflate religion with RE. In some cases the pluralistic nature of RE was rejected and for others it was simply seen as irrelevant to their masculine identity work and was a resource they chose not to use. Throughout this study the boys’ wider gendered practices are illuminated through their relationship to RE as the discursive site for the on-going construction of gendered subjectivity. The boys’ narratives also show their relationship to other dominant masculinising processes at work in their lives such as their relationship to sport, physicality, violence, subject choice and authority. The findings presented offer new insights into adolescent identity work through the use of a poststructuralist analytic, to examine the construction of the adolescent masculine subject. The findings also suggest new directions for critical RE at a time of political change and curriculum review.

Authentic early experience describes new medical students undertaking ‘human contact in a social or clinical context that enhances learning of health, illness or disease, and the role of the health professional’ (Littlewood et al. 2005). This thesis provides three original research contributions: a critical analysis of the application of socio-cultural and educational theories to authentic early experience; empirical data addressing two inter-related research questions; ‘How and why do students construct useful knowledge and meaning-making from authentic early experience?’ and ‘How and why do students make authentic early experiences work for them?’; and an interpretation of social processes and resultant consequences embedded in authentic early experience. Multiple theoretical perspectives were used to create a framework incorporating mixed qualitative methods. Scott’s concept of Mētis (1998) guided interpretation of not only how students created meaning but also when and how they chose to use it, and value it, relative to formally recognised knowledge. The study identified six specific findings which provide understanding of the complex consequences arising from authentic early experience. (1) Faculty and placement provider expectations of students were simultaneously too high and too low. (2) Dynamic social interactions are fundamental to meaning-making and knowledge construction (which are inextricably intertwined with identity evolution). (3) Social processes influencing authentic early experience can be described through dyads of variables which form intersecting workplace and educational spectra. (4) A holistic social view identifies unpredictable and unintended consequences of authentic early experience. (5) Students do not align the locus of ‘real learning’ with the locus of ‘real practice’. (6) Students create their own Mētis which crucially includes understanding about how to handle knowledge and meaning and how to make experiences work for them. The implications and potential applications of these findings are discussed.

This thesis investigates the experiences of internationalisation among academics from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, focusing on the role of internationalisation in the construction of academic identity, practice and approaches to university reform. The research is situated in the context of profound policy and ideological change in higher education systems in this region during the transition period, and in a wider discussion of global trends in higher education. The study adopts a qualitative and biographical approach, drawing on data from life story narratives elicited in interviews with twenty individual academics. Thus, the thesis presents an alternative look at internationalisation conceived not as an institutional policy but as individual experience responsible for the formation or reformulation of academic identity, values, dispositions and academic practices. The concept of individualisation is used as the main theoretical tool through which experiences of internationalisation can be studied and understood as elements of individual life story. The findings of this research concern the different ways in which a novel and hybrid or multiple set of academic identities and practices have been constructed on the basis of significant internationalisation experiences among academics located in particular (and partially shared) historical and policy contexts. Among the interviewed academics, internationalisation is found to be a very productive tool in the shaping of academic identity, practice and attitude towards university reform, which is reflected through a specific individualised life story.