<p> Contemporary research in veterinary medical education indicates alarming rates of depression and anxiety among veterinary students. Yet, the focus of this scholarship is primarily on mental illness as effects of a social and relational process, rather than interrogating the affectual nature of the process. Medical education has a long history of interrogating various facets of socialization as largely embedded in the hidden curricula&mdash;the tacit culture of a social entity, and repository for values and norms of conduct. Unfortunately, scant scholarship explores the hidden curricula of veterinary medicine. Recently, an anonymous letter signed Young Veterinarian was published on a public website, and opened an electronic dialogue regarding the nature of affects imbedded in professional socialization. Many themes of the letter referred to issues imbedded in the literature. This study followed this online dialogue, and initiated one in a College of Veterinary Medicine. Centering this letter, object-focused interviews were conducted to explore how members of this community are affected by the anonymous letter. Analytical insights suggest three broad areas of affects related to the hidden curricula: Onto-epistemic tensions; affective neutrality; and freedom, debt, and hopelessness. Implications for research and professional practice/curricula are discussed and deliberated. </p><p>

<p> This doctoral research is an ethnographic study that describes the lived culture of Alice Lloyd College, a work college located in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, and its efficacy in engaging Appalachian students in sustainability education in a college setting. Campus culture was found to be consistent with that of the broader Appalachian region, with three blue collar values emerging as core cultural indicators within the campus community. The three core values are work ethic, service, and self-reliance. Student participants reported low levels of cultural dissonance in transitioning from their family lives to life in college, with most claiming that their immediate families were supportive of their decision to attend college. This is uncommon in the higher education landscape as many Appalachian students on more traditional campuses are first-generation, struggle to persist to graduation, and experience clashing between their home culture and that which they experience at school. The institution was found to be a model of sustainability education in the areas of social and economic justice. Social justice is promoted through the enactment of the institution&rsquo;s mission of cultivating leaders to serve and improve the Appalachian region. Economic justice is fostered through the College&rsquo;s work program which makes higher education possible without debt for low-income Appalachian students by providing tuition waivers to those who work a minimum of 10 hours per week carrying out critical campus operations. While environmental justice was not found to be a current outcome, the institution&rsquo;s practices have valuable implications for re-envisioning higher education as a tool for promoting&mdash;rather than impeding&mdash;holistic sustainability efforts by reinforcing and promulgating sustainable blue collar values through teaching subsistence skills and systems thinking in a work college setting. Data collection for this study was conducted via responsive qualitative interviews with multiple campus constituent groups, including students, faculty, and staff. Data analysis consisted of attributes coding, magnitude coding, and values coding, followed by code landscaping to identify patterns across each coding phase.</p>

<p> Post-secondary student retention and persistence is on the minds of professionals at various higher learning institutions due to the disparities in educational attainment. These disparities may lead to inhibited social mobility, and lack of cultural and social capital. This study examined what factors Southern Connecticut State University sophomore students perceived as aiding or impeding their degree path. It questioned how underrepresented students shaped their perception on their educational attainment and how this compares to the existing research and literature on the success practices of underrepresented students in higher education. The study was conducted using open-ended semi-structured interview questions administered to second year sophomore students at Southern Connecticut State University. Specifically, they were underrepresented students defined as being low-income, racial minority, and first-generation students. This study aimed to explore the narrative of underrepresented students by exploring why college access doesn&rsquo;t necessarily result in college completion. </p><p>

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.

This study seeks to explicate the processes through which feminist analyses and perspectives were during the early 1970s incorporated into undergraduate sociology degree programmes. The narrative it presents is based on data produced through semi-structured interviews with sixteen women sociologists whose political and professional biographies identify them more or less closely with these events, and on evidence obtained from a range of documentary and other secondary sources. I argue that feminism's curricular achievements may be understood as outcomes both of developments within the feminist public sphere and the institutionalised discipline of sociology and of struggles concerning the definition and structure of the 1970s sociological field. Only when attention is directed towards the social relations of academic production and the broader political, institutional and intellectual contexts in which these are located does the challenge of feminist sociology become fully apparent.

This is an ethnographic study of student teacher socialization located in a college of higher education. Drawing upon Lacey's research on teacher socialization, the study examines the processes of change and adaptation which a group of twenty-five mature women students underwent during their first year of a four year, B. Ed course. The research approach sits firmly within the qualitative paradigm and employs participant observation, interviews, life history methods and an interactionist perspective to further understanding about how mothers and wives learn to become students. A central feature of the study is the use of the concept of social strategy to explain change, particularly in relation to the way in which the women manage the demands of academic and family responsibilities. The construction of adaptive and coping strategies arise from a tightly interwoven relationship of life history, situational, institutional and structural features. Analyses of the progressive development of strategies revealed that becoming a student teacher was differentially experienced according to material resources, biographical and historical factors. The study offers a holistic analysis of student socialization in which the complexity of adaptation is revealed through the interrelationship of gender, identity, life course, strategies and the negotiation of change. An important part of this change is the emergence of a student teacher and academic identity, both of which are perceived as highly valued, new aspects of self, as well as being a significant part of student teacher socialization. In this hitherto under researched educational and sociological area of inquiry, the way in which biography and structure intersect with gender, reveals the uneasy blend of struggle, contestation, guilt and success which became a daily feature of the women's lives as they strove to reconcile the competing claims on their lives as mothers, wives and full-time students.

This thesis is an attempt to explain some of the factors impacting on e-mail adoption and use in undergraduates. It is an extended case study, and therefore real world based, spanning eight years from 1993 to 2001, the population under scrutiny being five cohorts of undergraduates studying Psychology at a Scottish University. In a time of rapid technological advance, where computer experience is rising, access to computers is widespread, and IT training is compulsory for students in the institution under investigation, e-mail use has changed too. However, an unexpected drop in e-mail use during the 1996/97 session seemed to be atypical and led the original focus of the thesis away from individual differences such as computer experience, computer related attitudes, gender and personality, towards social and situational factors. Careful observation of the 1993/94 and 1994/95 cohorts’ e-mail behaviour, using surveys, e-mail logs, and examination of e-mail messages, provided insight into the unique nature of the e-mail environment for these groups. The final conclusions of the thesis are that what appeared to be small features of the e-mail system, and the nature of the computer laboratories where access was restricted to the class, provided the requirements for an e-mail community to form. Some significant results were found for individual differences, and these had some effect on the adoption of mail by the earliest users (those who really instigated the network) but a minimal effect on eventual e-mail use with the class. A group of enthusiastic e-mail users, with very little training in the system, began to mail either groups of classmates, or individuals, making use of the system’s list of class e-mail addresses, and the list of users logged on to the system. These were speculative messages to unknown recipients but they were to individuals the senders knew they had some common interest with as they were in the same social group (the class). The mail was mainly of a social nature, often almost synchronous, and obviously enjoyable to those who adopted the novel technology. The e-mail messages revealed evidence of ‘playfulness’ in the exchanges ranging from the use of nicknames in headers, signatures, and distribution of poetry, song lyrics, jokes and graphics. The class was large and forming e-mail relationships was one way of ‘meeting’ others. This behaviour was missing in the 1996/97 sample, when e-mail was not available in the computer laboratories. E-mail was available throughout the campus but the computer laboratory became a place for work only, and not for communication with classmates. In the 1999/00 and 2001/02 cohorts there is still no evidence of an electronic community forming in the class, despite even more computers being available for e-mail. Changeover to a university-wide e-mail system for students has removed the features that were so important to the formation of the network in the 1993/94 and 1994/95 cohorts.

This study is an investigation into the backgrounds of senior managers and leaders in the Further Education (FE) sector in England. In particular, the research aims to establish whether there is a link between the educational, professional or experiential background of a leader and the style of leadership that they perceive they display. There is a paucity of research that has been carried out on the subject of leadership in the further education arena. This thesis focuses on three approaches to leadership, transformational, distributed and managerial, which, it is argued, are the most relevant in the FE sector. The thesis also seeks to explore other factors that have an influence on the way in which FE principals lead. The research is carried out using a mixed method approach. An internet survey and semi-structured interviews are used as the data gathering tools. The study suggests that there are many influences on the way in which FE principals lead which include their background in addition to college culture and the context in which the college operates.

Spatial disparities in economic performance are amongst the most pervasive and persistent characteristics of modern economies. In the UK and across the EU, minimising regional inequalities is an objective of government policy. Yet analysis of how local differences in unemployment, earnings and industrial structure affect individual agents is not straightforward. Individual heterogeneity and sorting behaviour make separating the effects of agent attributes and regional characteristics difficult – a problem which is only compounded by the potential impact of unobserved individual heterogeneity. This thesis seeks to disentangle the effects of agent attributes – both observed and unobserved – from the effects of local labour markets in three individual level decisions made by graduates in the UK. The chapters examine (a) how agents choose which degree subject to study at university, (b) the determinants of postgraduate participation and (c) the likelihood of a graduate finding employment after completion. In this way, this thesis examines micro-level choices which affect the aggregate supply of skilled labour in the UK. The methodology I adopt permits conclusions to be drawn about how individual behaviour varies across observably different groups and offers insights into how local economic performance can shape the supply of skilled labour. I conclude that while agent attributes – including gender, ethnicity and prior academic attainment – are the most important determinants of an individual’s academic choices, economic circumstances have a significant, if smaller role to play. The results have several public policy implications, ranging from the impact of educational inequalities to the funding arrangements for postgraduate study in the UK.

This thesis examines the nature of the relationship between the educational environment of UK universities and the graduate labour market through the lens of correspondence theory. This theory was developed by Bowles and Gintis (1976), who asserted that there is a structurally reproductive relationship between the conditions of education and labour. One of the key aims of this research is to test the usefulness of this theory to contemporary UK higher education. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 students and key staff members in the Law faculties of three different status universities; Elite, Old and New. The interviews covered a number of key topics including class sizes, relationships between students and staff, career preparation and routines of working. Documents outlining the nature of the courses (e.g. prospectuses) were also collected and analysed. These data revealed that at Elite University, subject specific knowledge is the primary purpose of learning and the students encounter an intense working environment but are afforded high levels of autonomy. At New University, the educational experience for students is much more structured, with much less pressure on students to perform and a central focus upon employability. Old University occupies a position between these two universities, offering a form of education that encourages some autonomy within a structured teaching environment and values both employability teaching and subject specific knowledge. The significant differences between the teaching and conditions at these three universities reflect characteristics associated with different levels of graduate work thus indicating the continued analytical value of the correspondence theory.