Design management has not previously been taught in China and the courses are largely ‘imported’ from the west. The transfer of knowledge to a culturally different context must consider a range of aspects which impact upon design management education. This research study aims to conduct an intensive investigation into the transferability of postgraduate design management education (Pg DME) system and programmes from the UK to China. The key objectives are to identify key issues of design management knowledge and its education in a Chinese context; and understand the impact of findings on the interaction in Chinese social, industrial and educational environments. The following areas were reviewed to inform the key theoretical context of Pg DME development in China: 1) the essential issues of knowledge transfer; 2) the theory of design and design management; and 3) the strategic content of design management education and its implications. Through the literature review, the themes of the research were finally indentified: differences in culture, economic drivers and education systems make the transfer complex, thus requiring interpretation as well as translation in Chinese Pg DME 1) policy making; 2) curriculum development; and 3) teaching & learning strategies. This research project is based upon an innate belief in the subjective nature of reality from within the interpretive paradigm. Therefore the research is exploratory with an inductive approach. The 3-phased multi-method comparative research study includes a design management 1) education related policy study; 2) curriculum development study; and 3) is comprised of 18 semi-structured qualitative interviews; providing three distinct but comparable data sets, allowing investigation of the research objective from strategic, tactical and operational perspectives. Models have also been developed in this study, where each level has been designated an essential framework for the healthy development of Pg DME in China. The main findings of the research study highlight Pg DME as an enabling discipline where the needs to be satisfied are internal to the design manager and external to the market and social environment. This necessitates consideration of the appropriate level of understanding of culture background; business & market awareness; and professional practice under the influence of globalisation and knowledge transfer for the society; industries; HEIs; academics and students. It also provides a deeper understanding of cultural aspects of design management provision, enabling the understanding of knowledge transfer, curricula, and teaching & learning across cultural borders.

Since the 19th century School Governors have gone through an extended period of change. The most recent legislative changes related to the New Relationship with Schools Agenda (NRwS) will challenge Governing Bodies and highlights the need for effectiveness and accountability. Today state secondary schools are legally required to have a corporate Governing Body which is responsible for appointing the Head Teacher, for strategic planning and for standards. Governors are representative of the community they serve and are expected to be `critical friend' to the Head Teacher. This research is aimed at developing a method of helping Governors become more effective by: examining empirically their performance and effectiveness; investigating the nature of volunteering; exploring the distinctions between School Governor practices and those of Non-Executive Directors in the business sectors; identifying not only the bathers to effectiveness but individual and organizational factors which enable a Governing Body to become more effective and then developing Model Guidelines which will help them to carry out its role more effectively. To achieve these aims an ethnographic methodology is used and the data gathering methods included: a pilot questionnaire survey; a pilot self evaluation exercise with a school experiencing problems; a questionnaire survey; a pilot elite interview; elite interviews with five experts and fieldwork in two state secondary schools. Most of the literature tends to focus on factual information whereas this study, whilst an academic piece of research, it is also intended to be a working tool for Governors. The findings are largely consistent with the literature; thirty two issues of concern have been identified. These in turn have been translated into five key issues, Governance and Structure, Guiding Principles, People and Processes and Conduct all within a culture of Review and Self Evaluation. The fifth key issue highlights criteria considered essential to the development of the Model Guidelines. The five key issues identified by the research constitute the parameters for the explicit, generic, applicable and hitherto unavailable Model Guidelines for School Governors.

An appreciation of the extent of one's own knowledge is known as metaknowledge and it has been argued that students' ability to distinguish between what they know, and what they do not, is an important influence on academic success. However, previous research suggests a general tendency for individuals to display overconfidence in their knowledge, by overestimating how much they know. This study assessed the ability of learners studying business in higher education to appreciate the extent of their own knowledge and investigated the association between this capability and academic achievement. It therefore contributes towards answering broader questions regarding how well individuals are able to assess their own capabilities and what the implications of this are. Quantitative methodology was employed and multiple-choice tests used to investigate how accurately students were able to assess the extent of their knowledge of issues addressed in their study programmes. Analysis of over 12,500 judgements provided by 508 respondents revealed a general tendency for overconfidence and indicated that this was greater for males, older participants and particularly, for Chinese students. Consequently, interventions designed to moderate overconfidence may be particularly valuable for these sub-groups. In terms of its potential implications for learning, the research indicated that better metaknowledge was positively associated with higher levels of academic performance, particularly for those in their first year studying at the university. Consequently, while metacognitive skills, such as accurate self-monitoring, are typically poorly addressed in business schools, the findings from this study suggest that initiatives to improve self monitoring accuracy may be effective in enhancing student learning. Additionally, such interventions have other potential benefits for learners, since metacognitive monitoring skills may also usefully inform lifestyle decisions, as well as improving the chances of success in business and may therefore be particularly beneficial for business students.

Whilst there have been calls to theorize and explore how disability and ableism are constructed through organizing processes as a contribution to the critique of knowledge construction in organization studies (Harlan and Robert, 1998; Hearn and Parkin, 1993; Mumby, 2008), to date such calls have not been developed. Drawing upon the disability studies literature, a disability studies informed theoretical lens is developed and fused with the epistemological project in organization studies to answer the research question “What can disabled academics’ career experiences offer to studies of organization?” The theoretical potential of a disability studies lens is developed through a narrative inquiry with eight disabled academics. To interpret disabled academics’ narrative accounts the voice-centred relational method (Mauthner and Doucet, 1998), genealogical snapshot(Carabine, 2001) and voice and visibility framework (Simpson and Lewis, 2005; 2007)were fused. This enabled an approach to interpreting how disabled academics both construct through narrative and are constructed through discourse to explore their career experiences. Through a fusion of the disability studies lens and disability studies, boundaryless and academic career literatures, in-depth interpretations are offered which identify new insights into, and surface some of the discourses contributing to, the career boundaries disabled academics experience. This focus contributes to the boundaryless and academic career literatures by extending research to participants whose experiences are underresearched and under-theorized. The thesis offers insights into the different career boundaries disabled academics experience to those currently identified within the boundaryless and academic career literatures. The importance of, and negating responses to, disability and impairment effects related ways of organizing are argued to contribute to the career boundaries disabled academics experience. Ableism is argued to inform some of the discourses theorized, contributing to the perception of disability and impairment effects related ways of organizing as negated differences outside of normative expectations. The UK Higher Education context is complex. The career boundaries and discourses informing perceptions of disabled academics’ organizing requirements are argued to contribute to a hyper-complex organizing context. Within this hyper-complex context, disabled academics, and those they relate with, must negotiate to organize academic careers. This thesis offers a disability studies lens to organization studies as a productive theoretical lens through which disability and ableism are theorized and identified as productive categories for analysis, and as contributions to, studies of organization.

The purpose of this research is to further understanding of faculty-based academics’ views on what influences their understandings, behaviours and attitudes towards their continuing professional development. Informed by critical realist ontology, it is argued that it is necessary to explore academics’ understandings and accounts of professional development in their practice context in order to gain a better understanding of the complexity and differential practices that underlie professional development in academia. In doing so, the research addresses the current under-representation in the literature of the voices of faculty academics about what influences their approaches to professional development. The data collection was carried out during the academic year 2007-8, using a qualitative multi-case study approach. Methods included semi-structured, narrative interviews with academics, more structured interviews with ‘key informants’ and examination of relevant institutional documents. Findings from this research have enabled new themes and areas for reflection to emerge about the constraints and enablements academics perceive in respect of their professional development. In particular, themes such as issues of interpretation and meaning; concepts of professional status and academic values; misaligned initiatives and priorities; the influence of supportive networks; and emergent personal, individual concerns have surfaced. The conclusion is drawn that the significance of agency raises the importance of opening the debate and responding to the ‘voices from below’.

Despite economic difficulties, the emphasis on and investment in teacher professional development (PD) across the world continues, as countries strive to improve educational standards to compete in a globalised knowledge economy. However, researchers have little evidence of its impact on teachers’ professional practice. While it is acknowledged that PD needs to be assessed and evaluated, there is little guidance as to how this might be achieved. Much focus is on short-term impact, with longer-term impact often ignored despite sustainability of practices being highlighted as critical for school improvement. This study set out to explore the impact of a collaborative PD initiative on teachers’ professional practice in five urban disadvantaged primary schools in the Republic of Ireland. A qualitative approach was used to explore shortterm and longer-term impact, along with factors that helped or hindered the development and sustainability of the PD practice. The literature review revealed gaps in existing frameworks for evaluation, resulting in the development of a ‘Professional Development Impact Evaluation Framework’ which is presented in the thesis. It demonstrates how the framework was both developed from extant literature and critiqued through application, and discusses its potential for evaluating the impact of a range of PD activities and answering the call for accountability in these straitened times. Findings revealed a PD legacy that resulted not only in practices being sustained, but demonstrating a PD multiplier, where the impact of the collaborative PD initiative extended beyond the initiative itself to include many changes, even at a cultural level. Given the significance of the PD multiplier, this study suggests that PD facilitators support such cultural changes on a larger scale in schools. A significant feature of change is the teacher as a change-agent, and this study proposes a number of typologies of teacher engagement which may have some implications for teacher PD. Impacting on these typologies were three key elements that contributed to ii teachers’ professional learning and which reflect a developing notion of agentic teacher professionalism: bottom-up approaches with top-down support; autonomy and professional trust; and collaborative practices and collective responsibility.

This study investigates the ways in which parents' and teachers' experiences and representations mediate their child's mathematics learning as they make the transition between home and school to either a multiethnic or mainly white school. In particular, it examines if the forms of mediation they adopt can shed light on the academic success of the child in school mathematics. The focus on mathematics learning has been chosen for the study because of its relative neglect, until recent times, to be seen as a subject influenced by cultural representations. Furthermore, there are significant implications in the relative neglect of understanding the achievement of ethnic minority pupils in mathematics. The research was framed by Vygotskian sociocultural theory and Wenger's (1998) communities of practice to explore the construction of meaning, identity and representations of practice. The amalgam of Wenger's communities of practice with sociocultural theory provided three key theoretical facets: (i) multiple levels of understanding in the form of meaning, practice and identity, (ii) the scope to explore the social and cultural worlds of the learner and (iii) understanding the ways that past experiences impact on current practice. Three different forms of qualitative data collection were used within the context of an ethnographic approach: (i) investigations in the form of classroom observations, (ii) in-depth semi-structured interviews and (iii) a child identity task. Twenty-two parents, eight teachers and fifty-eight children took part in the interviews, which form the main part ofthe data analysis. Out ofthese fifty-eight children, twenty-seven undertook the child identity task. The research took place in three schools with different ethnic make-up: a multicultural school, a mainly white school and a predominantly South Asian school. Two year groups were chosen, year 2 (ages 6/7 years) and year 6 (10/11 years), balancing high and low achievers. This study has provided data, which suggests that the way parents and teachers mediate the child's learning involves more than representations of mathematics. In making meaning of the mathematical, they draw on wider representations of the educational world, which include aspects like child development, notions of achievement, past experiences and the child's projected futures. This complex picture emerged from studying the highly interwoven aspects ofthe construction of meaning, identity and representations of practice. Representations of learning can be borrowed from both communities, providing the ethnic minority pupil with the potential to create hybrid representations of learning as they make the transition between home and school, which may be attributed a cultural status within the home. Each social actor has the potential to borrow from the home or school community to a greater or lesser degree. lfthe gap between the shared representations of the home and school are large, then this increases the likelihood of difficulties for the child in transition. However, the data suggests that even if the cultural representations of the home are very different from the school, the identification of high achievement and the engagement in mathematical activity at home can still provide success in learning. From the school community perspective, classrooms were represented by the teacher informants as 'cultureless' in both the multi ethnic and mainly white school. For example, in the multicultural school the teachers felt that there were so many ethnicities that differences were not visible. In the mainly white school, there were so few ethnic minority children that teachers also struggled to identify issues of culture. In the predominantly South Asian school, issues surrounding culture were brought to the forefront of the teacher discourse. However, in many ethnic minority homes, parents described how culture was influential in mediating representations ofleaming. This has implications in the educational arena with respect to the teachers' understanding of the transitional process that ethnic minority children undergo and the levels of visibility that culture and ethnicity is given in the school community.

The current study was based in one higher education institution and examined pre-service teachers’ use of social media to support their own professional development whilst on school placement, through a community of practice lens. The trainees were registered on a one year secondary course designed to lead to a Post Graduate Certificate in Education with 60 credits at Masters Level combined with Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) for England and Wales during which the researcher repeatedly interviewed a focus group sample from each subject cohort and analysed transcripts of these interviews through the lens of Wenger’s (1998) concept of a community of practice. The research took place in a national context of review and reform of teacher education in England. Some trainees, for example those studying at the higher education establishment at question, might experience considerable challenge in the school placement. Authentic self-reflection requires a safe place in which pre-service teachers can openly articulate with others what they might see as their own failures as well as successes in the classroom in order to develop a greater sense of self-efficacy and new ideas about teaching. In some instances, such as in the area of behaviour management, the national focus on maintaining good order means that it may become even more challenging and ultimately riskier to share the experience of failure because acknowledgement of this risks the possibility of failing to achieve the requisite standard for qualified teacher status. Besides, to gain qualified teacher status a trainee must attain the Teachers’ Standards (DfE, 2013) which include a requirement that a professional teacher upholds the ethos of the school to which the trainee might not be sympathetic. Findings from this research cannot be generalised. However, in this small-scale study it was found that pre-service teachers used private social media to support each other on the course in a number of ways: to establish a group that might be viewed as a community of practice and then, as part of the core enterprise of becoming a qualified teacher, to offer or to receive shared practice or support from another pre-service teacher in the role of more knowledgeable other and to broker new ideas about teaching to each other and to schools themselves from the other communities to which they belonged. Those who networked socially as part of the community of practice were more organised around deadlines. They also more likely to manage risky and stressful situations collaboratively and present an enhanced image of “…a body of common knowledge, practices and approaches” (Wenger, McDermott and Snyder, 2007, pp. 4-5) during their school placement which was unavailable to the trainee who did not participate within the online community. The scope for openly sharing practice and the development of learning communities among pre-service teachers is potentially restricted by the current national and local context of teacher education. However, one conclusion from this study might be that social media can potentially enable pre-service teachers to communicate privately in important ways that support their professional development whilst undertaking their training.

This thesis explores the educational inclusion experiences of children with Williams syndrome (WS) in Irish primary schools from the perspectives of the children, their parents and teachers. Almost equal numbers of parents chose mainstream and special-education placements for their child with WS, although this choice was complex. Parents were very satisfied with their child’s education regardless of setting. Parental and teacher perceptions of the WS educational profile differed little. Teachers presented a slightly broader profile, yet showed less awareness than parents of anxiety in the children. Findings indicate a capacity in the children to learn Irish and other languages successfully, despite their entitlement to exemptions from language learning in the Irish educational system. Some features associated with WS (such as sociability) enhance the inclusion of learners with WS, while certain maladaptive behaviours impede it. Evidence suggests that maladaptive behaviours may be caused by high anxiety and poor expression of emotion due to poor comprehension of negative emotions. In addition, these children display more internalizing and self-regulatory behaviours, when parent and teacher data is compared, than has previously been noted in the literature, which may actually negatively impact on the child’s educational inclusion. Both parents and teachers support the children’s learning but teachers’ special education experiences and professional development influenced quality of supports and, hence, quality of educational inclusion. Some strategies used successfully by individual teachers to support learners with WS are those traditionally associated with autism, despite the sociability associated with WS. The children had clear images of themselves as learners and could identify personal learning strengths and challenges. Their liking for physical and social activities may be important aids to concentration, participation and, hence, inclusion. Different interpretations of inclusion were evident from parents and teachers. A definition of inclusion was proposed to compare educational placements. Such a comparison showed that Irish mainstream placements should not necessarily be viewed as the most inclusive educational setting for learners with WS. Consequently, a framework, based on the individual education planning process, proposes a way to maximize the educational inclusion of children with WS, regardless of setting.

A critical exploration of seven peer-reviewed published papers supports the author’s contention that learning in Higher Education is a fragile system of conscious and unconscious transactions that serve to weaken a process that is already precarious. Over the course of this essay and the accompanying papers, the submission is that learning is brittle, and easily broken. The Fragile Learner is described as someone close to conceding defeat to circumstances that threaten his education. The Fragile Learner might be a student of a Higher Education Institution, but also might be an appointed educator. Alongside notions of barriers to learning, this submission explores identities and tensions. Although some of the ideas that make up my picture of Fragile Learning have been researched by other contributors (notably Meyer and Land; Britzman), my own contribution sees the complexities through various psychoanalytic lenses. Fundamentally, it is the addition of psychoanalysis that makes Fragile Learning original. It is argued that anxiety is an important part of adult learning. Fragile Learners might experience anxieties that are internal and complex but which appear to be attacks from other people. Alternatively, Fragile Learning might be a consequence of learners having suffered illness or indisposition. It is important that something can be blamed. The themes of fragility and anxiety – not to mention the difficulties that arise from distance learning – are present throughout.