This thesis explores the institutional development of social engagement (SE) programmes within higher education institutions (HEIs). Since the 1990s, universities in the United States and Canada have become increasingly active in directly addressing social issues such as poverty, social exclusion and political participation in their own local communities. The past decade has seen similar developments at universities in the United Kingdom. At the global level as well, there are increasing discussions about the role and responsibilities of HEIs in human and social development. To facilitate their engagement with wider social issues, HEIs frequently create SE programmes which coordinate activities between university-based actors and community-partners. A significant body of literature exists on SE programmes; however, these writings fall into two categories: firstly, promoting the concept of university engagement and, secondly, evaluating the impacts of such programmes on communities or students. What is far less theorised or researched are the intermediary processes which enable the social engagement aspirations of HEIs to come to fruition, generating these documented impacts. This study aims to produce new knowledge and insights on how university SE programmes are created and institutionalised over time. This research is a qualitative study of SE programmes at three HEIs, two in the UK and one in the US. The data for the study has been drawn from primary programme documents, participatory workshops and interviews with more than one-hundred staff, academics, students and community-partners involved with these programmes. The research suggests that, despite differences in size, mission and national context, there are common enabling factors which lead to the creation of these programmes and which facilitate their successful institutionalisation within their respective institutions. Moreover, the research also suggests that the presence of these programmes catalyses unexpected outcomes within the HEIs themselves, such as changes in the formal curriculum as well as changes in the overall learning culture of the institutions where these SE programmes were located. Considered together, these findings suggest that the presence of these programmes contributes to the development of a systemic ―institutional pedagogy‖ which encourages students, staff and academics to engage with important social and developmental issues in their local communities, and often more widely as well.

This research investigates formative assessment at a UK research-intensive university, considering the aims and effects of their deployment. The research spans three academic disciplines broadly within the sciences and considers the influence of their history and culture on the approaches taken. It reports on three case studies originally chosen because of their innovative use of technology in teaching and assessment methods. Each case included mid-term summative assessments that were intended to have a formative function for the students. A triangulation of research methods was used that included documentary analysis, interviews and focus groups. Cultural historic activity theory was used to interrogate the data that emerged from the research. Bourdieusian theory was also used to understand and explain some of the findings. The thesis explores commonly held ideas about what constitutes desirable learning outcomes. It concludes that teaching and assessment practices do not always deliver on their promises nor support their intended objectives. Even within innovative educational methods it finds deeply rooted practices which fail to support the graduate skill sets that the tutors are hoping to develop in their students. It suggests that formative assessments which only reward curriculum coverage encourage narrow and conformist thinking and such thinking is at odds with the behaviours we should be developing within our educational environments. However, this thesis also describes educational practices that do meet their primary aims: to develop students' learning autonomy whilst they cover the course curricula. These practices are constructed around formative assessments that build community within the student cohort, engage the students in authentic tasks requiring critical reflection and give students a chance to develop expertise within niche areas. The thesis suggests that these practices are applicable in all academic disciplines, independent of the subject, and provides approaches to teaching and assessment that encourage autonomous learning and develop high-level transferable skill sets. We all forget facts and procedures over time, and so it is our students' capacity to know that we must develop within education.

Higher education in the UK has experienced unprecedented levels of expansion over the last 50 years. This expansion has been underpinned by political and social discourses that expound its value to the social and economic prosperity of the country and more recently, towards the delivery of social justice and the social mobility of individuals. Higher education institutions are channelling increasing amounts of resource into supporting these discourses, largely around widening participation and fair access agendas. In juxtaposition, changes to funding models, including the cessation of maintenance grants and increasing charges for tuition fees, are placing significant financial burdens on graduating students, calling into question just how achievable these agendas can be. This research seeks to understand if there is a disparity between the social value and benefits that governmental and institutional discourses claim for going to university, and how individuals perceive the value of a contemporary degree. To do so it draws on the narratives of a panel of over 100 volunteer writers submitted as a qualitative survey on their opinions of and interactions with higher education. Drawn from all over the UK, these writers are participants in the Mass Observation Project, an in-depth, qualitative survey of everyday life in Britain established in 1981. The empirical research is embedded within biographical narrative methods, and seeks to create a landscape of perceptions of the social value of a university education and how these are embedded within people's life stories. Using the depth and retrospective opportunities provided in the qualitative narratives of Mass Observation allows this research to provide a more nuanced understanding of both the long-term impacts of higher education on individuals and how perceptions of its social and economic value have changed over the decades. It suggests that the ability to derive the greatest benefit from going to university is embedded within social backgrounds and therefore ensuring equality is far more complex than simply providing an opportunity to access higher education. This thesis also illustrates how the use of longitudinal and qualitative methods of research can provide alternative viewpoints that should be considered when creating policies that will ensure the greatest benefit to providing value and equality within higher education.

Cameroon university students are drawn to informal small group talks as a highly valued learning strategy, particularly in relation to assessment. This research investigates this practice in-depth as an ‘instance in action,' with academic, social and cultural implications in the life of the average university learner in Cameroon. Showing the methodological limitations of current discourses on student group talks in higher education teaching and learning, the study draws from bakhtinian ‘dialogism' to underpin analysis of students' talks and interactions. Data were collected through extended observation of several small groups in three different universities in Cameroon, across several disciplinary fields, levels of undergraduate learning, linguistic and social boundaries. Findings suggest that in the process of talking and interacting informally, that is, outside of the formal structure of the classroom, learners strategically position themselves in ways that allow their individual and collective voices to emerge. Sustained in the context of discourse, emerging voices create the dialogic space within which learners con-struct their understandings of disciplinary knowledge. For it is within the dialogic space that learners, through their voices, best relate to assessment demands, to expected learning outcomes and to the social and cultural contexts of learning in Cameroon. This work contributes to knowledge by underlining the importance of learning spaces in higher education, particularly in relation to learners' voices and expected active engagement with learning. As such, it highlights the potentials of informal collaborative learning to enhance the learning experience in Cameroon universities, particularly in relation to assessment and critical thinking. Hence, it provides grounds for claims that Cameroonian students, and generally learners in other similar contexts, are usually more independent thinkers. This offers reasonable basis for questioning existing presumptions around ‘academic inferiority' of ‘foreign' students in some institutions abroad; presumptions that have continued to widen existing gaps between western universities and competing institutions in developing contexts. In addition, it foregrounds subsequent inquiries on learners' identities in Cameroon universities. Methodological innovations in investigating unconventional learning practices, particularly with the use of information technology, are also highlighted.

This study investigates the attitudes of university lecturers and undergraduate students in regards to translation as a university subject and its role in enhancing students' English as foreign language at Benghazi University. The study examines the skills and linguistic aspects that lecturers and students believe are developed through pedagogical translation. A student survey was implemented on 400 students to measure their attitudes. In addition, a semi-structured interview was conducted on 6 university lectures. A mixed-methods approach was adopted using both quantitative and qualitative research methods to gain richer data and improve the validity and reliability of the study. The findings of the study revealed that students and their lectures believe that translation has enhanced their English language in general. In addition, they believe that it has specifically developed their reading and writing more than their speaking and listening skills. Lectures and students reveal that pedagogical translation has improved their grammar and language use of vocabulary and collocations. Moreover, they consider that implementing contrastive analysis in pedagogical translation classes has raised students' awareness of mother tongue interferences. Furthermore, students and their lecturers believe that several linguistic aspects were enhanced, such as cohesion, coherence, genres, registers, language dialects as well as form and meaning. Students and lecturers also believe that their cultural awareness was developed. In conclusion, students and lecturers believe that translation could be an effective tool in learning English as a foreign language. The study contributes to the literature of pedagogical translation and foreign language teaching and learning settings.

Simulation holds enormous potential for medical education, where patient safety concerns have made practice on patients less acceptable. However, there is no unequivocal evidence of simulation training translating to improved performance in vivo. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to add to the literature on simulation training by a) synthesising the current evidence on the effectiveness of simulation training in healthcare, b) investigating the effectiveness of different ‘doses’ of mannequin training in learning laryngeal mask airway placement and c) assessing the effectiveness of a simulation course on managing life threatening illness. This thesis has added to the literature in the field of medical education a review of reviews of the evidence regarding the effectiveness of simulation training in medicine and surgery, and two RCTs evaluating different simulation training courses. The review of reviews highlighted that simulation training can be effective, but there was little consistent evidence across tasks or types of simulator. The two RCTs reported nil results, reinforcing that simulation alone is insufficient to ensure effectiveness. These results highlight the importance of recognising when simulation training is appropriate, how simulation interacts with other elements of a training programme and how the simulation can be made maximally effective.

This thesis explores the implementation of academic servant leadership in a faith-based university in Indonesia. The exploration includes the academic leaders’ understanding on the concept and practise of servant leadership. Their perceptions are analysed in order to construct the theory of academic servant leadership in the HE sector. The case study method was chosen as the methodology since it is able to explain the academic servant leadership phenomena from the leaders’ perspective in their context. Data was collected from thirty higher education leaders who participated in a semi-structured interview. The analysis shows that servant leadership is driven by three motives: service, influence and improvement. The motives for servant leadership influence their characteristics which consist of spiritual, intrapersonal and relational characteristics. These concentric characteristics are then manifested into five servant leadership actions namely ‘pergumulan’, individual meetings, institutional meetings, dealing with conflicts and fostering collaborations. The researcher argues that academic servant leaders need to have a pure motive and strong character in order to enact their servant leadership. The manifestation of their characters into actions cannot be separated from three contextual matters at the case campus, namely hierarchical academic leadership, organisational changes and external challenges and opportunities.

This thesis is focused upon and examines the experiences of students with dyslexia in higher education. At the time of the research project started not much was known about the experiences of higher education students with dyslexia. An insight into their lives and experiences with a further overview of their past is evaluated. The participants of this study were undergraduate and postgraduate students studying for a degree in Higher Education and were assessed as dyslexic. The sample consisted of students that were studying in three universities in the city that the research took place. In order for the data to be collected interviews were used, as it would be very difficult to describe experiences and feelings with numbers. The words of the participants were used to support the categories and findings of the study. The students of these particular universities were overall satisfied with the provision and support they were receiving from their institutions although further investigation needs to be done on the attitudes and perceptions of the lecturers with regards to dyslexia.

This corpus-based, exploratory study attempts to fill a gap in the realm of knowledge on writer’s self-representation in academic writing. It aims to examine the writer’s discoursal self manifested by the utilisation of first person pronouns, focusing on the functional roles they occupy in multi-genre texts (paragraphs and essays) generated by non-native, undergraduate students at different levels of the College of Nursing in the cities of Al-Ahsa (CON-A) and Jeddah (CON-J) in Saudi Arabia. The students’ texts were compiled in two sub-corpora: CON-A (27160 words) and CON-J (15413 words). The data have been analysed quantitatively and qualitatively employing a data-driven framework of writer discoursal self, which includes the categories of the roles inhabited by the writer ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the text. The results mainly show the strong presence of writer as a person, who performs roles outside the text, and the rare use of writer as an academic, who occupies roles inside the text. A number of other observations have been made, which will help form a better understanding of students’ writing and their perception of identity in writing. Factors that appear to have influenced the students’ discoursal choices and acts have been proposed. Taking the findings into account, the thesis concludes with proposing some practical suggestions for raising awareness in L2 writing pedagogy, and identifying some future research.

This study postulates that there are currently four main dyslexia paradigms. These paradigms are: a) the Positivist-Intrinsic-Dyslexia-Paradigm, which reflects positivist studies on dyslexia that hold the etiological view that dyslexia exists intrinsically to the individual (of constitutional origin), b) the Interpretivist-Intrinsic-Dyslexia-Paradigm, which holds the etiological view that dyslexia exists intrinsically to the individual c) the Positivist-Extrinsic-Dyslexia-Paradigm, which reflects studies on dyslexia that hold the etiological view that dyslexia exists extrinsically to the individual (not of constitutional origin), and, d) the Interpretivist-Extrinsic-Dyslexia-Paradigm, which reflects studies on dyslexia that also hold the etiological view that dyslexia exists extrinsically to the individual. This study moves beyond the four main dyslexia paradigms by combining the I-E-D-Paradigm with elements of Burrell and Morgan's (1979) sociological Radical Humanist Paradigm, thus creating a Radical I-E-D-Paradigm from which to conduct the present study. From the position of a Radical I-E-D-Paradigm this study develops an alternative perspective on dyslexia, i.e., a non-constitutional perspective on dyslexia (N-C-PoD), and, emancipatory intervention aimed at assisting 'dyslexic' students to explore their perceptions of dyslexia. This study explores the influence that the N-C-PoD and emancipatory intervention has on the descriptions of dyslexia, in relation to self-concept, of two 'dyslexic' students studying in tertiary education.