This study investigates the experiences of first-in-family participants in a dual-sector university in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. In the context of the continuing debate around inequality in participation rates in higher education in Scotland and on-going concern with the attainment gap between working and middle-classes, I ask whether a dual-sector university could be perceived as being more relevant to the lives of non-traditional learners and provide an experience less alienating than a traditional university. I ask whether this dual sector environment can provide access to a valued higher education experience without causing the same sense of disjuncture and discomfort reported by many studies of working-class students’ experience in the middle-class world of higher education (Reay at al. 2009b, Keane 2011, He Li 2013, Lee and Kramer 2013, He Li 2015). The study was designed within an interpretivist paradigm, acknowledging the role of participant and researcher in co-creating knowledge and understanding. Using semi-structured interviews, towards the end of their first year, the experience of nine under-graduate students was explored. The methodological design and data analysis were informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field. These concepts were employed as a framework within which the positioning of the students in relation to higher education and their interaction with the University could be considered. The data evidenced an alignment between the habitus of the students and that of the University that eased their transition to higher education and sustained a motivational focus on the students’ future career choice. Furthermore, the University prompted some students to extend their learning beyond the institution into vocational settings providing opportunities to begin to develop a professional identity from an early stage. While the University provided local access to higher education to many who would otherwise have no opportunity to participate, the modest ambitions of the students and evidence of the continued pull of their primary habitus, suggested that the University offered opportunities for development and attainment that stopped short of transformation.

Extensive research has been done on learning-oriented assessment practices in higher education. Keywords such as formative assessment, peer-assessment and feedback dominate the scholarly discourses of assessment. This research, however, argues that not enough attention has been paid to the relationship between assessment policy, power in assessment and the effects of assessment policy and practice on academic and student subjectivities. This is particularly the case in neoliberalised universities where institutional policies are constantly reshaped and developed for the sake of quality assurance and accountability. Guided by Michel Foucault’s work on discipline and governmentality, this doctoral research explores the ways in which assessment policies have been constructed in two European universities with different historical, political and social backgrounds: the University of Glasgow and Tallinn University. Furthermore, the study explores assessment as an institutional technology that can act on academics and students and shape their experience of their work and studies. In addition to policy analysis, the study involves interviews and focus groups with academics, graduate teaching assistants, students and assessment policy makers in both universities, as well as expert conversations with leading authors in the field. The analytic framework for the study is derived from Fairclough’s approach to discourse analysis. By exploring various discourses, the study traces the ways that assessment policies shape academics and students, and how they are negotiated and resisted by the participants. The research findings demonstrate that assessment policy and practice draw on wider higher education policy discourses such as the discourses of neoliberalism. The study argues that student assessment is highly complex in neoliberalised universities: it not only operates as a disciplinary technology through which the assessor dominates over the assessed, but can become a neoliberal technology of government that relies on a high number of (ambiguous) regulations and self-governance of academics and students. The issues of governmentality are particularly characteristic to a highly neoliberalised policy context in the University of Glasgow that shapes complex academic and student subjectivities. Both students and academics feel constrained and controlled in assessment processes, and they tend to accept rather than actively resist the institutional assessment policy and practice developments. However, some evidence of covert resistance was found. This can be conceptualised as a Foucauldian understanding of a subject who is not passively created through power relations but who has opportunities to create him/herself to some extent. As the study captured an early stage of neoliberalisation in Tallinn University, assessment can also be seen as operating, in this context, as a more traditional technology of discipline: little regulated, designed by academics and experienced by students as a subjective process. The findings demonstrate that a more traditional operation of assessment in Tallinn offers significant opportunities for individual pro-activeness and resistance, such as academics managing their practices and students manoeuvring within these practice contexts. These findings lead to the conclusion that assessment in higher education is not only an educational process but an institutional technology related to the issues of discipline and governmentality. Furthermore, they demonstrate that subjectification of academics and students through assessment policy and practice is complex and context-specific in which neoliberal policies tend to have a more constraining effect than that of the traditional understanding of assessment as the domain of the teacher.

The issue of critical thinking (CT) amongst Chinese students has emerged as an important topic among educators. While there is some literature on CT and Chinese students’ performance, no study has tackled how this increasing focus on CT is impacting on higher education in China and what CT means to policy makers, teachers and students. This thesis sets out to fill this gap using insights from the theory of knowledge transfer. This theoretical framework was chosen in order to examine the ways in which Western CT theory and practice is gradually being imported to and integrated into Chinese culture, largely focusing on the understanding of CT. Using a case study approach, the thesis reports on empirical findings that have emerged from analysing Chinese Ministry of Education press releases and mission statements, observing university CT classes and studying chats about CT on a student internet discussion forum. Findings show that: 1. some core aspects of modern Western approaches to CT, such as how to deal with uncertainty, are missing in Chinese teaching; 2. disposition and emotion are sidelined in favour of a strong focus on logic and reason, and their inseparable relationship to reasoning ability found by Western scholars was neglected. 3. CT is regarded as crucial by Chinese educators and students but currently the teaching fails to make CT accessible and interesting to students and might therefore not foster CT itself. These findings have important implications for how policy makers and educators might continue to implement and teach CT in China.

The aim of this research is to investigate student development in the context of a transnational higher education partnership to deliver a foundation program between a Russell group university in the UK and a recently established university in Kazakhstan. It is argued that there is a crisis in the higher education sector internationally whereby the value of a degree is decreasing while the cost of obtaining a degree is increasing and that communication by universities of the purpose and value of a degree is a contributing factor to this crisis. It is further argued that the context of this research is of interest given the strategic importance of Kazakhstan on the New Silk Road and the continuing expansion of the internationalisation of higher education. This research uses mixed methods and is divided into three discrete but complementary studies: Study 1: An investigation into the development of graduate attributes, capabilities and their predictors. This study is quantitative and longitudinal in nature and uses a survey instrument administered at two points, the beginning and end of the academic year. Study 2: An investigation into the perceptions of student development from the perspective of teaching and administrative staff working on the foundation program. This study is qualitative in nature and uses in depth interviews. Study 3: An investigation into student experiences and perceptions of their own development of graduate attributes, capabilities and their predictors. This study is qualitative in nature and uses group interviews with student participants of study 1, to both confirm and explore the findings from the previous two studies. The results indicate that participants in the overall study, both students and staff, do not have a fixed conception of the institution of the university. However, there was consensus between participants in the three studies over certain qualities that individuals develop whilst at university, which include critical thinking, openness and maturity. Changes in capability and graduate attributes, as measured by the survey instrument in this study, were correlated. An unexpected finding was that the only significant changes in capability were decreases in those capabilities connected with stress and affiliation. Exploration of this finding in the third study revealed that the nature of the foundation year itself, in that it is a pass or fail hurdle for entry to the university, may be responsible for the decreases in capabilities. Participants in study 1 also registered a significant increase in the personality trait of conscientiousness. This trait aligns with graduate attributes associated with organisational skills and autonomy. Analysis of the data set revealed that intrinsic motivation (such as a desire to study as an end in itself) and stress are important predictors of the development of graduate attributes. However, students entering the university are largely motivated by extrinsic factors (predominantly connected to future employment) and over the course of the foundation year, levels of intrinsic motivation decrease and stress increase. There are two principal conclusions arising from this study. Firstly, students do develop in the manner perceived by students and staff. This is in line with the intrinsic notion of the benefits of the university as described in general by graduate attributes. Secondly, how students develop can be predicted by the analysis of variables including intrinsic motivation and stress. It may be the case that the extrinsic motivation of students observed in this research is a product, at least in part, of the direction universities are taking and the crisis in HE described earlier. The measurement of student development should be an important step not only in the mitigation of this crisis through allowing for the promotion of the intrinsic value of HE, but also in predicting where students may encounter obstacles to their development.

No description available.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is governed by an absolute monarchy, with a relatively short history of Higher Education (HE). However, the need for high quality and strong educational leadership within its academic institutions is just as pressing as elsewhere. Despite a growing number of studies on the performance of Heads of Department (HoDs), there is relatively little research investigating their role in Quality Assurance (QA), and virtually none within the KSA context. The present research is grounded in ‘leadership’ and ‘HE quality’ literature. A case study approach was adopted to investigate HoD perceptions of their roles in QA at a leading Saudi university. Data were collected through 59 online questionnaires administered to the HoD participants as well as through interviews with 36 selected HoDs, a former university rector and various staff members with QA responsibilities. The data collection is probably unique in so far as the female researcher conducted face-to-face interviews with 26 male academics, despite the strict gender segregation normally observed in KSA. The study found that most HoDs acknowledged their QA role and that their beliefs and actions in this regard were influenced by their disciplinary affiliation and length in post. Identified challenges in quality achievement included limited resources, a lack of financial and administrative autonomy, heavy workload and bureaucracy and resistance from senior colleagues. Participants also identified several ways that the work of the National Commission for Academic Accreditation and Assessment, a key body in the quality achievement context within KSA, might be improved. HoDs claim they are heavily involved in QA but other staff are critical of their contribution. The new system for appointing HoDs is seen as enhancing departmental quality because the Selection Committee increases faculty involvement and reduces patronage. The two-year term of office is deemed too short for QA purposes. Although professional development opportunities are available, HoDs say they do not have time for them. Based on these findings, a theoretical model linking different QA approaches (compliance, consistency and culture) to different outcomes (achieving accreditation, maintaining standards, and change and improvement) has been developed. The study also makes practical recommendations about Saudi HoD recruitment, professional development and institutional support of value to policymakers in KSA higher education.

The following thesis creates a conceptual framework out of new materialisms and posthumanisms, to discuss and develop transdisciplinary teaching and learning for higher education settings. It specifically investigates how the disciplines of management studies and theatre and performance studies can come together to produce and enhance new, critical dimensions in the field of management learning. The thesis crafts the conceptual framework from the works of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and their notion of deterritorialisation, and Karen Barad’s (2007) notions of diffraction, material-discursivity, agential realism, and entanglement. Moreover, the thesis both critiques and uses practice-as-research to develop its main experimental, pedagogical projects. Practice-as-research is a method gaining steam in theatre and performance studies that combines (and indeed entangles) the kind of research undertaken by the practice of making performance / art with the kind of research more traditional to the academy, in service of producing one overall critical investigation. Thus, different forms of research and knowledge production are implicit in the creation of practice-as-research. Furthermore, artworks created and produced as part of the investigation are given equal weight with more traditional academic thesis writing. Although, due to its length, this thesis is not itself a practice-as-research submission, it does make use of practice-as-research methods in its experimental designs. Furthermore, whilst the main drive of the thesis is towards practice-as-research, other related styles, including practice-based research are considered to provide a more fulsome discussion of the area as a whole. The thesis concludes that deterritorialisation and diffraction can provide the basis for creating new kinds of conceptual framework (described as ‘maps’) through which management learning can be enhanced by the use of transdisciplinary practices. Such practices are here understood and experimented with in teaching and learning settings via arts-performance, in order create more affective, embodied and material-discursive approaches to complex and critical issues in management studies contexts.

In 2010, Article 124 of the new Ecuadorian Higher Education Law stipulated that university students need to master a foreign language as a requirement for graduation. Subsequent regulations specified that this requirement had to be a B1 level, based on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). To identify the responses, challenges and tensions that universities experienced in complying with the requirements of Article 124, an explanatory sequential mixed methods study was conducted. This comprised a survey that was administered to language centre Directors, EFL teachers and EFL students in 14 universities located in 10 different cities in the country, in-depth interviews conducted with teachers, and focus group interviews with students from 3 universities. Results of this research showed that responses of participating universities focused mainly on their physical and information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure development, and less on pedagogy and management due to dependence on the use of overseas textbooks and the adoption of the Common European Framework language indicators as the proposed EFL outcomes for ELT programmes. Challenges faced by university stakeholders included lack of budget for infrastructure and ICT improvement, effective ICT integration, identification of a target EFL language level, and a lack of status of English in the participating universities. Out of these responses and challenges, tensions emerged related to teaching qualifications and access to appropriate institutional resources for teachers. Using Mahboob and Tilakaratna’s (2012) Principles-Based Approach for English Language Teaching Policies and Practices as a lens through which to analyse EFL language policy, the study found that the principles of collaboration, alignment and transparency were not sufficiently realised and there was a lack of evidence and empowerment among Ecuadorian universities. Thus, the study proposes a more contextualised and consensual approach to formulating EFL language policy, in which English can be integrated into institutional processes that promote globalisation and the internationalisation of universities.

Critical thinking is closely aligned with the higher in higher education – as a core element of ‘graduateness' and a cornerstone of the mission of higher education institutions. Yet while critical thinking is very much ‘part of the furniture' in the teaching and learning landscape of higher education, I argue that behind this seemingly good, everyday intellectual value lies further complexity and this research re-thinks how critical thinking is a highly contextualised and embodied set of practices. My fieldwork involved qualitative research with first-year undergraduate students at a research-intensive UK university. I conducted 3 months of loosely structured observation of students in their weekly lectures and seminars for a compulsory module. I focused on two cohorts of students – named as a professional – or applied social science subject and a more traditional academic social science discipline. I also interviewed 15 of these students at the beginning of their first year at university and conducted focus groups with 4 of these students at the end of their first year. These research encounters explored how undergraduate students understand what critical thinking means, what it requires, what it makes possible and its role in their studies, lives and futures. These data were then analysed using a critical, feminist sociological theoretical framework, informed by post-structural and new materialist theorisations. It drew specifically on the theoretical insights offered by Karen Barad and Sara Ahmed and how the connections and clashes in their work offer generative potential for re-thinking critical thinking. I argue that a specifically feminist analysis of critical thinking allows both a deeper exploration of how critical thinking legitimates itself through different bodies, as well how it gets constituted through higher education's structures of power and inequality. The thesis makes four analytical claims. Firstly, rather than critical thinking representing a cognitive act by reasoned, detached bodies, this thesis explores how it emerges both through the web of social, material and discursive knowledge practices that constitute critical knowledge and with different bodies that enact it. Instead of understanding pedagogical practices in higher education as fixed and stable, I highlight how the experience of critical thinking shifts in accordance with the social, embodied and relational contexts in which one is entangled at any particular moment. Secondly, I explore how critical thinking is an intensely affective experience. Students appeared to feel their way through complex affects of both desiring the transformative power of criticality whilst also wishing to resist it and apply it selectively as a consequence of its negativity. Such concerns over embodying the right kind of critical persona, demonstrate how becoming a critical thinker is not a simplistic act of thought and action but deeply affective processes of becoming critical. Thirdly, critical thinking is not undertaken by generic ‘critical beings' but critical bodies located in the particularities of their social characteristics and differences and the multiple intersecting impacts of these upon their own experiences. Critical thinkers are not neutral subjects but gendered, classed and raced beings and becoming a critical thinker is inseparable from the ways bodies are unequally positioned in the academy. Finally, this thesis explores how neoliberal higher education produces an increasingly narrow economic vocabulary for talking about education's value and values and a limited grammar for understanding the contextual and contingent nature of critical thinking.

The research presented in this thesis explores how expatriate researchers who completed a PhD abroad evaluate and articulate their experience of academic mobility with regard to their early postdoctoral career and personal development. Having adopted a mixed-methods approach, this study draws on an original dataset including 20 semi-structured interviews and 281 replies to an online survey. By conducting thematic analysis of the interview data in NVivo and descriptive analysis of the survey data in SPSS, the research presented in this thesis provides replies to the following three questions. First, what do expatriate researchers expect from their doctoral experience of academic mobility? Second, does academic mobility during a doctorate result in career-related outcomes, according to the perceptions of expatriate researchers? Finally, what is the individual value of a doctorate abroad for expatriate researchers? This study argues that expatriate researchers in social sciences embark on a doctoral study abroad without necessarily expecting any immediate career-related returns but are influenced by contextual factors, such as the opportunity structure and insecure employment conditions in the labour market for PhD graduates. In addition, the present research has not found any strong evidence showing that academic mobility directly brings immediate career-related returns. In summary, this research provides evidence of widespread agreement among expatriate researchers that the value of a doctoral degree from abroad is in gaining a meaningful personal experience resulting in personal development and skills acquisition, rather than directly resulting in career advancement. This finding contributes to the knowledge of the value of a doctoral study abroad on the individual level, suggested as an under-researched area by the scholarly literature in the field (Raddon and Sung, 2006; Nerad and Cerny, 2000; Casey, 2009).