This study explores the dynamics of leadership of Asian, Black and Minority Ethnic (ABME) principals in England’s Further Education colleges. It identifies and describes the motivations and characteristics of their leadership which propel and sustain it. The research outcomes suggest that their leadership is learner and community focused. It is aimed at improving fairness, equality and social justice. The principals are driven by their deeply rooted principles, passions and values flowing from their direct experiences of disadvantage, disparities and racial discrimination. Their personal up-bringing, socialisation and heritage have not only inspired and encouraged them to come into education, but have also energised them in their journeys as leaders. The ABME principals’ trajectories, however, have been mediated by a persistent tendency within the establishment to marginalise and underestimate their capabilities, compounded by FE bureaucracies and organisational impediments. They have taken these obstacles as challenges and seized opportunities for further formalising their passions and principles into leadership strategies for transforming their colleges and influencing the FE environment. This thesis is based on empirical evidence, collected from interviews with the first generation ABME principals: the class of 1998/9 – 2008/9, offering an historic snapshot of their experiences, within the conceptual framework provided by the review of literature on educational leadership, FE management, race and ethnicity.

This research investigates Further Education (FE) governance and governors’ role(s) in college improvement and related issues. Empirical data is derived from semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis of governors’ meeting minutes. A total of 14 Standards committee (SC) governors and 6 principals from 6 FE colleges in the Midlands region of England agreed to be interviewed. Data from these individual interviews were supplemented by an analysis of SC governors’ meeting minutes from each of the 6 colleges in order to obtain rich data on the role of governors in college improvement. Findings suggest that ‘good’ governors with a good skill base can contribute to college improvement through their monitoring and challenging role; their role in appointing the principal and senior management; setting the strategic direction of the college and by acting as a ‘critical friend’ to the principal. It emerged from this study that governors are a group of individuals with different family, educational and professional backgrounds who are seeking a new identity and they need help in their ‘identity transformation’. This study, therefore, suggests the need for an induction and training programme for new governors, which includes ‘coaching and mentoring’ so that governors are continually supported in their ‘governorship’ journey.

The aim of the study was to investigate linguistic interaction in a vocational classroom based in a Further Education college in the UK. The course was designed for adults wishing to become qualified primary teaching assistants. The study was ethnographically grounded and, in keeping with a Linguistic Ethnography approach, it also incorporated close linguistic and narrative-in-interaction analysis. This enabled me to show how educational discourses shape local interactions and how, in particular types of classroom interaction, participants appropriate wider discourses creatively for their own goals. Through detailed analysis of whole class discursive interactions, I show how the tutor appropriated and mediated the curriculum content and discourses for and with her class. She did this by constantly shifting identities and relationships along clines of power, social solidarity and social distance, by drawing on funds of knowledge from her own lived experience and those of her class, and by creating spaces to talk about the different domains of social life: further education, primary school and local life worlds. In their turn, the learners drew on their previous experiences of education, their work experience and their own local life worlds, to make sense of the content with the tutor and their classmates.

This thesis explores students’ experiences in higher education in England in the early 21st century. It uses a longitudinal perspective, drawing upon data from semi structured interviews with undergraduates as they progressed from transition to graduation. The thesis argues that students enrol at university with learner identities shaped by different educational and social backgrounds. Once at university, students move through a process of acclimatisation during which they build upon particular capacities that enable them to succeed in higher education. These capacities help students to build robust undergraduate identities which allow them to exercise agency in their learning. However, as they do so, they carry with them varying degrees of risk and have to negotiate the disjuncture between expectation and reality in their undergraduate experiences. An understanding of the impact of risk and disjuncture has important implications in the rapidly changing world of higher education and these, alongside concepts of field, habitus, capital, and academic and social integration, help to explain undergraduate experiences in the rapidly changing political economy of higher education. Focusing on the particulars of individual experiences highlighted the significant investments individuals make in their studies and for whom the world of higher education can be an uncomfortable place.

This research investigates the writing of EFL university students at the English department of a major university in Syria. Using Systemic Functional Linguistics as an analytical framework, the study applies Thematic analysis to students’ exam essays across two disciplines: language and literature, with the aim of exploring the differences in the language choices that students make in meeting the relevant disciplinary requirements. Another aspect of the study is to analyse student writing across different academic level with a view to identifying the nature of students’ developing writing maturity. Based on the assumption of an existing strong connection between the text and the broader context, the research investigates the possible influence of other contextual factors including the essay questions, model essays from the textbooks, and teacher’s views and perceptions. The findings from Thematic analysis point to the importance of interpersonal meaning in understanding this across-disciplinary variation in terms of building the argument and answering the essay question. The research shows potential pedagogical benefits in raising students’ awareness to the important function of different linguistic choices, particularly those with Thematic positions, in achieving the purpose of the text.

Short-term international study tours are increasingly available as an elective academic credit course at Canadian universities and seminaries. My research examined the pedagogy of such study tours to ascertain whether a study tour that encourages critical reflection assists students to synthesise learning to the extent that their pre-existing conceptual framework is modified or transformed. Since all the tours had a spiritual or religious theme, I also investigated the extent to which these study tours encouraged transcendent experiences and spiritual learning. I investigated four study tours, two of which went to Spain and included a pilgrimage along El Camino de Santiago, another to Israel/Palestine exploring both historical sites and contemporary issues, and the fourth to Cyprus, Malta, and Rome, exploring the history and legacy of Paul, the Christian apostle. In addition, I participated in a local Ontario, Canada, pilgrimage and a service learning trip to an orphanage in Mexico as comparatives to the study tours. Adopting an interpretivist methodology, data was gathered from students and professors through questionnaires and interviews, and from my observations as a participant researcher. The data were interpreted to map how learning is occurring using Kolb’s experiential learning cycle and Illeris’ three−dimensional learning model, and to identify what contributes to learning. The research discovered that the student’s localised conceptual framework associated with the home context can be modified or transformed by the experience on-the-ground at the tour destination, resulting in transformative learning or moving students toward transformative learning. To encourage student learning, pre-tour preparatory studies should address the potential gap in student’s background knowledge and their existing meaning schemes, and should prepare the students for experiential learning. Reflective time and space should be provided during the tour to allow students to process their experiences, including emotional responses. And, post-tour assignments should encourage critical reflection that integrates and consolidates learning. To encourage spiritual learning requires accommodating students’ diverse interpretations of spirituality, and allowing students similar space and time, particularly at sacred places, to process spiritual experiences.

The 2015 revisions to the Ontario teacher education program were intended to give greater attention to diversity in the Ontario classroom and provide new teachers with more knowledge of the Ontario context. Using an interpretivist methodology, a careful examination of the curriculum changes undertaken by the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Ontario College of Teachers indicates that these objectives have not been met. Despite being an integral part of the identity and experience of a large number of Ontario teachers and students, religion is not one of the diversities given attention to in the revisions. This omission has revealed a gap in the Ontario teacher education curriculum in which the religious diversity component of the Ontario context is largely ignored. The gap in teacher education has also created a misunderstanding of the nature and intent of the secular classroom where, instead of being a place where all religions are given equal attention and one that fostering healthy religious conversations, it has become an environment of fear and silence, where teacher and students are unsure of how to engage it religious conversations. My research concludes that the OCT curriculum does not provide sufficient curriculum content that addresses teacher knowledge, skills and attitudes in the area of religion, nor does it provide information about religious belief systems and world views or clarify religious language and terminology. Despite the fact that teachers and parents welcome the academic, non-confessional study of religion in the classroom, the OCT and the OME have not indicated through the revisions that this is the direction in which they intend to proceed. Enacting changes to increase the amount of time required for teacher education has not prepared teachers to address the multi-religious context of the Ontario classroom or to meet the needs of religious students.

The current research investigates the professional and administrative expansion taking place in universities over the last twenty years, characterised by the emergence of new roles and functions in areas such as: planning, marketing, student services, student placement, quality control, and external relations. Understanding the forces underlying this change is essential in building a reliable picture of the current state and likely direction of the university as an institution. I engage with the two arguments conceptualizing administrative and professional growth in universities: functionalist (emphasising the role of structural pressures e.g. student numbers) and neo-institutionalist (drawing attention to the cultural forces that shape universities as formal organisations). The first chapter provides a cross-national assessment of the relative significance of functionalist and cultural (neo-institutionalist) explanations in accounting for variation in the levels of administrative and professional staff in 761 universities from 11 European countries. The second chapter provides a national level empirical illustration of how cultural forces such as the diffusion of formal organisation make UK universities’ more prone to expand their professional infrastructure in catering to demographic inclusion. The third chapter extends the national level inquiry with an investigation into whether UK universities’ engagement with professional staff enhances university performance, in line with functionalist expectations. The findings show that the impact of structural needs on the expansion of professional and administrative staff is overestimated, as well as the role that professional staff plays in universities’ performance. The growth in administrative and professional staff is by large a by-product of universities formalising themselves as organisations. In this sense, universities’ engagement with new layers of professional expertise is a purveyor of legitimacy for institutions articulating themselves as highly integrated, strategic, and goal-driven entities.

Increasing numbers of Vietnamese students write in English as a foreign language for university and employment purposes. This research study explored the writing of ten higher education students in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. In the first of its kind in Vietnam, the study establishes the types of writing or genres, in English, that participants had undertaken over their life course. Although participants reported a significant standardisation of genres at lower levels of education, they had been expected to produce a wider range of genres at either undergraduate or MA level, or for employment purposes. This included the need to write for research, science and business purposes. Participants were generally ill-prepared to take on these writing challenges. The findings indicate that a form of genre needs-analysis and genre pedagogy at undergraduate level could be implemented to support English language teachers and students to scaffold writing activities and to help prepare graduates for the type of writing expected of them within MA-level courses and employment. The participants valued assignments and writing that helped them to develop their thinking; they appreciated learning to write in a way that would be useful for employment and academic study and were motivated by gaining high scores and receiving positive feedback from teachers. Having the opportunity to write about familiar topics in a more creative way was also highly regarded. Participants felt they had experienced challenges when they first engaged in critical thinking, when they had to brainstorm for ideas and when they wrote introductions. During writing activities, participants positioned themselves and their arguments as Vietnamese citizens with a sense of pride and loyalty to their national identity. Participants were audience aware and used only material that would be deemed socially and politically correct within Vietnam. Many features of the sociocultural context played a role in the genres participants had written, the writing processes they engaged in and their perceptions of writing activities. The prevalence of English as a lingua franca and international research-writing conventions were evident. Traditional teaching approaches and grammar-based assessment and testing practices within Vietnam also featured significantly in participant’s experiences of writing in English. These structural forces, as well as other historical, cultural and political realities presented themselves more evidently than personal or idiographic in the writing experiences and writing processes of the participants.

The thesis explores the experiences of a group of university students with African diasporic connections, an under-researched group in UK HE. Building on the traditions of ideological and ethnographic approaches to academic literacies research, the thesis highlights power relations involved in a range of life experiences, social practices and institutional power relations. The study offers a complex reading of the student experience focusing on the negotiation of literacy practices. It presents non-traditional undergraduates as complex individuals with a range of abilities and resources to draw on for knowledge making which are constantly being reshaped by their diasporic identities, power relations within the academy and wider context beyond the university setting. Research findings evoke a reciprocal exchange between disciplinary understandings, knowledge making and poststructural conceptions of identity. More specifically, while the students I worked with were assessed in unfavourable ways, they displayed a range of resources for knowledge making stemming from a complex interchange between cultural and social identification, an applied social science curriculum and the negotiation of high stakes written assignments. The thesis offers an enhanced understanding of undergraduates as knowledge makers, the resources they bring to the academy and how, at times, they are positioned by others as they negotiate what is required of them. In doing so, an alternative image of the multilingual, non-traditional undergraduate and the potential resources they have is provided. The thesis is also concerned with the broader and less distinct phenomena of globalisation, migration and social exclusion and their impact on current understandings of the student experience within contemporary UK HE. As a result, the main contribution to knowledge can be said to centre on understandings of the scope of academic literacies research, what it means to be a nontraditional learner in HE and critical perspectives on the nature of higher education in the contemporary world.