Achieving social justice within and through higher education: the challenge for critical pedagogy

While the term critical pedagogy embraces a range of writers and literature, a common feature of all is a belief that education and society are intrinsically inter-related and that the fundamental purpose of education is to improve social justice. However there are perceptions that critical pedagogy has been more successful in critiquing educational and social practices than in achieving actual change. In this paper I explore two areas that critical pedagogy can address to move beyond critique: the importance of a movement formed by diverse elements, in which difference and disagreement are harnessed to help drive change; and the use of this diversity to direct change at a range of levels. My analysis draws specifically on literature that challenges managerialist assumptions about change as a simple, technical process, focusing instead on the complexities of the social world and the attendant complexities of achieving educational and social change.     

Scaling critical pedagogy in higher education

Across the globe, neoliberal reforms have produced effects in the higher education sector that are multiple, convergent and embodied or performed. In this context, a growing number of activist-scholars, from a range of disciplines, have explored the role of critical pedagogy within the space of the classroom. Yet, persistent critiques and challenges suggest that the field of critical pedagogy needs to build upon a richer set of theoretical and practical insights. While the discipline of geography has proven to be a generative source of learning and renewal, a recurring tendency exists within the educational literature to treat the key geographical concept of scale as a discrete, pre-given unit of analysis. Consequently, scale remains largely under-theorised and misunderstood leading to simplistic binary oppositions and choices. This binary filter underpins a comfortable but problematic ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ paradigm. Drawing upon contentious debates in the field of geography, this paper explores how the intersections between diverse spatial concepts, including scale, might be strategically deployed to rework the spatial imaginings of critical pedagogy.     

经济全球化背景下的高等教育国际化

经济全球化使高等教育国际化超越了传统的政治外交的价值标准,高等教育国际化成为国家间高等教育资源的交换过程。发达国家成为高等教育国际化的最大受益者,新兴工业化国家和经济快速发展的经济转型国家为高等教育国际化做出了巨大贡献。高技术在教育领域的广泛应用,为高等教育国际化提供了新的技术手段,使国际间高等教育资源不再依附于人员流动,形成高等教育国际化新的增长点。     

Estranged students in higher education: navigating social and economic capitals

ABSTRACT

Family is widely regarded as a cornerstone of student support. When family support exist as an essential form of social capital making, rupture of family ties places students in a disadvantageous position. This paper focuses on estranged students’ accounts of their experiences of higher education, highlighting how capital dynamics shape their academic trajectories. Based on interviews with 21 estranged students, our research uncovers different dimensions of estranged students’ struggles and successes as they move through academia. This paper explores the social imagination that surrounds the university student, or ‘student experience’, as resting upon family support. The authors propose that widening participation policies and practices need to be more attuned to the realities that mark estranged students’ experiences, as they are not only impacted by the scarcity of either economic or social capital, but also by the instability of interrelated capitals that contribute to precarious and volatile experiences.     

基于新经济增长理论的高职教育改革策略

高职院校教学模式与社会和企业需求的矛盾不断显现,根据近年来经济学领域研究热点新经济增长理论的含义和主要观点,分析了高职教育在国家经济持续增长中的作用。高职院校需要加强高质量师资队伍建设,与区域经济有效对接不足,亟待进一步完善培训课程体系。通过优化教师队伍,打造特色专业,完善课程体系等措施对高职教育进行改革。     

高等教育学学科建设研究综述

近10年来高等教育学学科建设的相关研究体现在研究取向、理论体系构建方法、研究方法论、元高等教育学、学科建制及合法性等五个方面。高等教育学学科建设呈现出愈益明显的多元化、复杂化趋势,这一方面说明高等教育学学科发展仍处于起步阶段,另一方面也说明复杂多样的高等教育现实为理论研究提供了可以借鉴的丰富资源。     

Virtuous mess and wicked clarity: struggle in higher education research

This article considers the value of clarity – of theory, method and purposes – in educational research. It draws upon the work of early critical theorist, Theodor Adorno, and particularly his notion of negative dialectics and his challenge to the traditional dichotomy of theory and practice. Using the notions of virtuous mess and wicked clarity, I argue that we need to accept the messy, contingent nature of the social world we research. I further suggest that it then follows that such research can and should influence and change that world. The researcher is necessarily part of the world she researches and, once one accepts that, it is hard to sustain ethical or political isolation; it is hard to ignore the struggle.     

Learning outcomes across disciplinary divides and contrasting national higher education traditions

In many quarters, attempts are underway to identify learning outcomes in higher education which are context-neutral or ‘generic’; such measures could provide new ways to assess and compare outputs from higher education. This paper considers potential challenges in using such broad learning outcomes across contrasting disciplinary and national settings. An empirical contribution is provided by an analysis of data from the international REFLEX survey for Norwegian and English bachelor’s degree graduates. This sheds some light on the relationships between graduates’ broad learning outcomes (general competencies), their national contexts and their disciplinary area. It finds variations in competencies across subjects and countries, suggesting that general competencies of the type often suggested as generic learning outcomes may be unstable and problematic to compare across contrasting settings. It highlights the need for comparative research into variations in learning outcomes and graduate competencies considering disciplinary and national factors.     

当前获取高等教育机会的不均等——依附于经济之上的社会资本的作用

本文首先分析了教育与社会的关系,教育在社会中的重要地位,从社会学的角度分析了社会系统中教育的功能,然后进一步分析了我国当前社会中高等教育存在的机会不平等的现状,最后从社会资本的角度来对当前社会中高等教育机会不平等的问题进行分析。     

中国近代高等教育的社会信任习惯及其形成

我国近代高等教育的社会信任由科举信任、官本位型信任和职业获得型信任混合构成,并成为过去乃至现在人们信任和认同高等教育的习惯。这一习惯影响着人们对高等教育的认知图式和交往方式。     

Employability and mobility in the valorisation of higher education qualifications: the experiences and reflections of Chinese students and graduates

ABSTRACT

In the last two decades, we have witnessed a rapid expansion of higher education in Mainland China and Taiwan, recording a significant increase in higher education enrolments in these two Chinese societies. The massification of higher education in China and Taiwan has inevitably resulted in an oversupply of university graduates, with growing social concerns for skills mismatches being found in the labour market, stagnant graduate employment and social mobility. This article critically examines how university students and graduates in these two Chinese societies reflect upon their employment experiences. Human capital theory predicts that other things being equal, raising participation in higher education will initially increase inequality as rates of return rise, and then it will reduce inequality as expansion reaches mass levels and rates of return decline. If the output of graduates outpaces the demand for their skills, which appears to be the current case in many countries, then supply and demand pressures reduce the pay premium for degrees and lower income inequalities. However, this study clearly demonstrates that the massification and the universalisation of higher education in Mainland China and Taiwan, respectively, have actually intensified inequality.     

Brain drain and the disenchantment of being a higher education student in Portugal

The efforts made by most countries to accelerate economic development have included a significant investment in education. It has been argued that investment in education, particularly higher education, was itself a potential factor in economic development. Education has become a relatively easy means of improving access to the labour market. However, in Portugal, the recent trend has been reversed, and the country now faces a growing number of university graduates in several fields of education and training that do not have a job based on their formal qualifications. Despite the differences of unemployment by area of education and training, unemployment of the young skilled has been a problem in recent years. Therefore, following this unemployment trend, there has been growing the exodus of highly skilled professionals from the Portuguese economy, leaving it with a reduced supply of skilled people. This article discusses the employability of graduates from several academic areas and discusses the educational and economic policies that generate a real brain drain.     

Impacts of social economic status on higher education opportunity and graduate employment in China

Based on a nation-wide survey of higher education graduates, this paper analyzes the impact of family background, using paternal occupation and education as indicators, on their scores in the National College Entrance Examination, the level and type of higher education institutions they attend, their employment after graduation, and the income they receive from their first job. It has been found that there are wide disparities among students with different family backgrounds in both access to higher education and their potential employment in China nowadays. This paper also studies how those influences happen. __________ Translated from Peking University Education Review, 2005 July (3)     

论高等教育大众化进程中高等职业教育的地位和作用

在实现高等教育大众过程中，发展高等职业教育有利于优化高等教育结构，促进高等教育向多样化发展；有利于满足社会发展对人才规格提出的客观要求，促进经济发展，为实现高等教育大众化提供物质基础；有利于我国终身教育体系的建立，为实现高等教育大众化开辟有效途径。     

Tronto's notion of privileged irresponsibility and the reconceptualisation of care: implications for critical pedagogies of emotion in higher education

This article takes on some of care theorist Joan Tronto's ideas on care and responsibility and asks what implications they have for critical pedagogies in higher education. The authors argue that Tronto's political ethics of care framework enriches the transformative potential of critical pedagogies, because it helps expose how power and emotion operate through (ir)responsibility. In particular, Tronto's notion of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ is analysed in relation to the gendered and emotional ideologies and practices that are constructed discursively and materially. It is argued that critical pedagogies of emotion grounded in Tronto's political ethics of care provide the concepts and openings to critically explore the emotions arising from failing to recognise different teachers' and students' needs and from engaging in practices of privileged irresponsibility. Also, critical pedagogies of emotion encourage students and educators to be attentive to their own emotional positions and practices with regard to caring responsibilities and (gendered and other) privileged irresponsibilities.     

经济全球化背景下中国高等法学教育改革

世界经济全球化要求各国遵循统一的经济活动规则 ,在全球建立统一的法律秩序。高等法学教育也应与法律这一变革保持同步发展 ,按照全球化的坐标重新定位。因此 ,中国高等法学教育应在教学目标、教学计划、国际教学合作和留学生培训、外语教学和资源拓展等多方面进行改革。同时 ,必须对法律专业的学生加强国家主权和民族文化意识的教育 ,警惕“法律全球化”的文化殖民主义思想。     

Student-perceived organizational support and perceived employability in the marketing of higher education

In the current context, the need for marketing in institutions of higher education is undeniable. The specification of the student not merely as a ‘customer’ means that traditional marketing no longer has sufficient capacity to explain the behavior of the student body. In this study, a four-level relationship marketing model is tested to check the influence of perceived organizational support (POS) and perceived employability on identification with the institution and the perceived price-quality ratio and how these influence student satisfaction. In addition, the constructs prior to POS and perceived employability are identified, which are explicit enough to enable specific marketing actions to be carried out. As POS is a construct defined for the labor market, its use applied to relational marketing comes up as something innovative.

To this end, Likert scales have been designed and validated to measure these constructs. The results of this test show how the perception of organizational support depends on the relationship of the student body with the administration and management of the center. Likewise, the perception of employability depends on the perceived reputation and the perception of the promotion of employability. Furthermore, it is confirmed that satisfaction is positively related to identification and the perceived price-quality ratio, which in turn are positively related to organizational support and perceived employability.     

社会科学方法论与高等教育研究

在自然科学、社会科学与人文科学这种知识分类框架下,教育学的学科地位非常尴尬。从早期的“(自然)科学化”、到后来的“人文化”,再到晚近的“社会科学化”,教育学的学科性质始终变动不居。作为教育学的分支学科,高等教育研究面临同样的困境。本文认为高等教育研究若要从根本上提升自身的学术地位,成为真正意义上独立的学术性学科,积极引入社会科学方法论是极其关键的一步。     

精英高等教育与大众高等教育:两个体系的解读

高等教育机构应该按功能分化,而不是趋同。精英高等教育与大众高等教育作为两个体系,既是概念层面的划分,也是操作层面的划分。绝大部分的高等教育机构应该有清晰的定位,或者属于精英高等教育,或者属于大众高等教育。有质的差别的教育应该在不同质的教育机构内完成。精英高等教育与大众高等教育的关系既是冲突的,又是和谐的。我们既要防止精英高等教育压抑大众高等教育,又要防止大众高等教育消解精英高等教育。     

福建省高等教育与经济增长的协调度研究

本文从福建省高等教育和经济增长的现状入手,利用复合系统整体协调度原理,研究测算1994-2004年福建省高等教育与经济增长之间的协调度,揭示两者之间的协调度较低但基本呈现出逐年提高的态势,并探讨了相应的政策建议。