Workplace‐based Learning Degrees: a new business venture,or a new critical business?

There is increasing emphasis in higher education on preparing students for the workplace and recognising the learning that occurs in the workplace. Workplace learning has been exemplified in aspects of traditional courses by work experience, practicum, sandwich courses and practice‐based courses. Recently, however, academic attention has focused on the development of subjects and degree programs that are entirely workplace‐based. Such programs are negotiated with organisations to meet their own learning needs and promote the learning of individual company employees in the performance of their everyday work. Workplace‐based courses have developed in response to employer demand, restricted government funding for higher education and the need for universities to appeal to new markets. These factors have created a context of considerable tension between traditional academic practice and beliefs, and those that accompany this new approach. These tensions present challenges for universities as they attempt to respond in ways that maintain rigour and integrity while meeting the demands created by contemporary economic, political and social pressures.     

HPT and Six Sigma: Is There a Difference That Matters?

This article explores the major differences and similarities between Six Sigma and human performance technology or human performance improvement (HPT or HPI). It addresses the definitions and foundations of both Six Sigma and HPT as major performance improvement approaches. It explains how their methodologies are similar in some aspects and different in others. It compares the popularity and applicability of the two approaches in both small and large companies. It discusses the psychological elements underlying each method. Moreover, it considers the criteria of success in managing HPT and Six Sigma projects. It also addresses the reasons for the similarities and differences between the two processes and suggests an integrated approach that focuses on both human and nonhuman improvement in an attempt to overcome the limitations of each approach.     

Your place or mine? global imbalances in internationalisation and mobilisation in educational professional experience

International mobility programmes and opportunities have enthusiastically been embraced by universities as part of a growing demand for graduates with global, international and intercultural capital on the part of graduates. In this project, we take two universities, one Australian and one Indonesian, as illustrative case studies of some of the commonalities, differences and, in particular, imbalances, with regard to the conduct of international professional experience in the global north and south. Specifically, a recent visit by Indonesian pre-service teachers was used to inform an upcoming visit by Australian pre-service teachers to Indonesia. We used this opportunity to compare the accessibility of travel for Australian and Indonesian pre-service teachers, as illustrations of in/equality of access for northern and southern learners. We hope that this paper will prompt discussion about global imbalances of opportunity with regard to international experiences. We also hope that our mutual interview process adopted for this study might be a useful research tool.     

Excellence and choice: Friends or foes?

This paper explores the contrasts dividing the excellence and choice movements to date. The orientations of both are examined, along with key features and impacts of each. Particular attention is given the predicament and the challenge of at risk youngsters. Yet there are developments suggesting a growing mutuality between the two movements. The elaboration of a conception of Excellence that makes educational sense reveals the centrality of motivation to educational accomplishment. This in turn exposes the choice principle as an important aid to the pursuit of excellence.     

Professionalism and coordination: allies or enemies?

Professionalism arose concurrently with coordination policies among service providers and between parents and service providers in deaf education practices. The author examines the effects of professionalism on coordination among service providers from different disciplines (deaf education, speech-language pathology, elementary education, secondary education, audiology, otolaryngology, and pediatrics), as well as coordination between parents and these service providers in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary teams in the light of her own experience as a teacher of children who are deaf and hard of hearing in Cyprus. The author concludes that professionalism and coordination can coexist, and that the key issue in this relationship is the personal attitudes of those involved.     

Auditors of the managerial university: neo‐liberal business advisers or paternal controllers?

Universities are increasingly being seen as commercial enterprises, and are represented as particular types of business entities in manuals provided to university managers. Critical discourse analysis is employed in this paper to construct an analytical framework for the study of managerial advice, which is then used to examine the manual provided to Australian universities for the conduct of institutional audit by the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA). Institutions are represented as businesses, but contrary to the rhetoric of universities being colonised by ‘new managerialism’, the manual constructs institutions more as localised and constrained businesses than globally networked entities.     

Strategic assets or second-class citizens? Teaching-focused faculty in business schools

Business schools have significantly increased the percentage of teaching-focused faculty (defined here as full-time faculty with doctorates not on the tenure track) over the last decades. However, many schools have not adequately updated their policies to support these faculty, leading some teaching-focused faculty to feel like second-class citizens. In this article, we provide a literature review of teaching-focused faculty hiring trends, challenges faced by teaching-focused faculty and the institutions that hire them, and proposed improvements to these challenges. Next, we draw from these best practices provided in the literature, as well as from first-person interviews, to share how business schools address these challenges. Specifically, we use interviews from decision makers (current and former deans) to examine how schools approach hiring and supporting teaching-focused faculty. Our study shows improved institutional support and acceptance of teaching-focused faculty over the past two decades, but with room for continued improvement. We conclude by arguing that TF faculty should be treated as strategic assets within schools in order to support collegiality, acceptance, and professional respect, while also enhancing students’ learning opportunities. In doing so, we hope to start a discussion of best practices that can better equip schools to provide institutional support to teaching-focused faculty.     

Schools and Moral Education: Conformism or Autonomy?

In pluralistic Western societies, schools have a specific task in moral education. This task is to be understood neither as the transmission of specific values, nor as the development of moral reasoning skills or universal values, but as teaching pupils to handle plurality in an autonomous way. The concept of autonomy is interpreted from a Vygotskian and Deweyan position, where learning in school means learning to participate in cultural activities in a reflective and critical way. Participation has both intellectual and moral aspects, and thus moral education can never be separated from cognitive education.     

Boffin and geek identities: abject or privileged?

High achievement, and in particular, the role of the academically diligent and successful ‘boffin’ or ‘geek’, are notably under-researched areas in the sociology of education. Issues around gender and other aspects of identity in relation to such pupils are particularly under-researched. In this Viewpoint article we draw on evidence from our recent research projects including young people interpolated to, or identifying with, the subject position of ‘boffin/geek’ and media representations of such positions. We debate some tensions between our work, drawing out shared findings. The article considers issues around capital, experience, and the extent of exclusion/inclusion for boffins/geeks, discussing to what extent such young people can be considered marginalised and abjected or agentic and privileged. We argue that structural factors such as gender, social class, ‘race’, age, and institutional location impact on these constructions and outcomes.     

’Courting business’: the rhetoric and practices of school‐business partnerships

This paper explores an increasingly popular form of business involvement in public education in industrialized countries ‐ school ‐ business partnerships. Beginning from the articulation of such partnerships by the OECD, the Conference Board of Canada and the Alberta government, the paper goes on to present a case analysis of the partnership between a large corporation and a secondary school in Calgary, Alberta. This shift from ‘macro’ to ‘micro’ levels contextualizes political discourse around partnerships and allows us to see where this discourse is adopted by local proponents, but at the same time where it is challenged by certain groups of employees, students and teachers. Such challenges problematize these relationships and raise issues around who is involved in planning partnerships, contradictions within and between the motives of proponents, and the relationship between such corporate involvement and government educational reform.     

Informal Mentors and Education: Complementary or Compensatory Resources?

Few studies have examined the impact that mentoring (i.e., developing a special relationship with a non-parental adult) has on educational achievement and attainment in the general population. In addition, prior research has yet to clarify the extent to which mentoring relationships reduce inequality by enabling disadvantaged youth to compensate for a lack of social resources or promote inequality by serving as a complementary resource for advantaged youth. Results from a nationally representative sample of youth show (1) a powerful net influence of mentors on the educational success of youth and (2) how social background, parental, peer, and personal resources condition the formation and effectiveness of mentoring relationships. The findings uncover an interesting paradox-that informal mentors may simultaneously represent compensatory and complementary resources. Youth with many resources are more likely than other young people to have mentors, but those with few resources are likely to benefit more from having a mentor-particularly teacher mentors-in their lives.     

Educational inclusion and critical neuroscience: friends or foes?

Momentum is continuing to grow in the circulation of neuroscientific discourse, informing aspects of how we live but affecting too how we think about education and learning. Neurologically informed intrusions into education frequently align with psychology which has until now largely adopted a ‘medical model’, supporting policies and practices which ultimately invoke psychopathology and arguably render individual young people more vulnerable to various forms of social and educational exclusion. This paper urges caution in respect of understandings of educational neuroscience that focus on individual deficits and diagnoses. Rather it holds in mind the broader historical context for neuroscience and its implications for our understandings of what it is to be human in the twenty first century and thereafter for education and learning. Theoretical resources from critical and affective neuroscience but also critical educational psychology are brought together specifically to support the principles of inclusionist policies and practices in education.     

HPS and school science education: remediation or reconstruction?

Concern to incorporate historical and philosophical insights within school science curricula is an international phenomenon. Whatever the intrinsic merits of these insights, it is suggested that any willingness on the part of science educators to enter into a rapprochement with scholars in the history, philosophy and sociology (HPS) of science stems mainly from the perceived shortcomings of contemporary school science curricula. Some of the difficulties of incorporating HPS within school science are reviewed and it is argued that, together with broader questions about the role of science in society, historical, philosophical and sociological insights point towards a radical reappraisal of school science education. The article suggests three ways in which such education might respond to some recent work in the history, philosophy and sociology of science.