Travelling academics: the lived experience of academics moving across countries

The article reports on a study that explored the personal narratives of two female travelling academics at a Swedish University who had moved from Australia. To complement previous accounts of difficult migration and enculturation within the research literature, this article focuses mainly on the successful experiences of the academics and how their own sense of agency allowed them to navigate the new educational context. The article identifies key factors that have enacted these achievements and contributes to the understanding of travelling academics and their needs as they move to new higher education contexts. In particular, the article contributes to the long-term migration to a non-English-speaking country (Sweden) by two academics who had previously studied and worked within an English-speaking university system (Australia). In conclusion, the article suggests ways pedagogy and policy can respond to support other international academics who choose to travel and work in another country, enhancing and ‘living’ internationalization within the global world.     

教育的工具理性化和乌托邦精神

在科学技术发展和市场经济背景下,升学率成为教育追求的目标,学校也为利益所驱动,使工具理性主义盛行于各项工作中。这不仅不能形成学生的创造性人格,而且造成了教育的文化价值失落。因此,必须强调教育的育人功能,形成反思现实,追求未来的乌托邦精神。     

乌托邦文学与反面乌托邦文学演变原因探究

乌托邦文学与反面乌托邦文学的演变都与乌托邦思想中两层固有矛盾的作用息息相关。理想与现实的矛盾以及个人利益与社会整体利益的矛盾使两种文学在不同的发展阶段各具特色。20世纪,当人们实践乌托邦理想受挫,个人利益取代社会整体利益成为人们关注的重心,乌托邦文学由于批判现实的功能弱化逐渐丧失了魅力,而反面乌托邦文学则顺应了矛盾发展的趋势,迎来了全面兴盛。     

自由主义的批判与乌托邦观念的合理性

一切以乌托邦观念作为运动纲领,主张通过激进方式一次性彻底实现一个完美新世界的运动,都可称之为乌托邦运动.自由主义者基于乌托邦运动给现实世界带来的消极后果,对乌托邦运动进行了较为系统的批判.然而,乌托邦观念本身也有其合理性及对人类生活的积极作用,因而有必要辩证地对待乌托邦观念及乌托邦运动.     

Redefinition of the relationships between academics and their university

This paper primarily deals with the relationships between academics and their university in European countries. The aim of this paper is therefore not to produce new results but provide a synthesis of the main trends that can be identified from the literature and then suggest what can be borrowed from sociological theories to highlight the on-going evolutions. The first section of the paper reviews the main results to be drawn from previous research on this issue and focuses on the management of academic careers and the management of academic activities at the university level. The second section suggests alternative interpretative frameworks to be borrowed from sociological theory in order to complete the already existing research and develop new perspectives to explain and interpret these changes in the relationships between academics and their institutions. Four perspectives are successively explored particularly useful here: a sociology of work; a labor market perspective; an analysis in terms of careers and trajectories and finally considerations about the traditional tension between organizations and professions.     

乌托邦视域中的旅游本质再认识

旅游与乌托邦都是颇有争议的概念,但是旅游所包含的审美和精神愉悦两种元素,所蕴含的人类生命自由价值、精神价值以及健康的乌托邦精神所包含的理想主义和超越批判的精神有助于消解现代性悖论带给人们的精神和情感危机,这些却是不可争议的。把对旅游的研究置于现代性和乌托邦相互观照的视角下,对旅游的本质进行重新认识和评价,在乌托邦的视域中寻求旅游在社会发展中的意义。由此来说,旅游是通往乌托邦的桥梁,旅游目的地是一个异域的理想化的乌托邦,是旅游者的精神家园。健康的乌托邦精神启迪旅游者的心智,美学向度的畅神使旅游者在批判现实中消除现代性悖论造成的苦恼,摆脱内心的浮躁,探索自我,超越自我,以乌托邦的方式实现内在精神生活的升华。     

中国早期启蒙中的乌托邦倾向和近代社会主义

早期启蒙学者在歌颂古代、批判封建制度时出现了乌托邦倾向。这对近代知识分子从中国文化资源出发阐释社会主义产生了积极影响。在西方文明的冲击下,中国社会进入剧烈变革中,早期启蒙学者对美好社会的追求,成为近代知识分子理解社会主义的文化前提,并在与西方社会思想相整合的过程中,形成了有中国特色空想社会主义。     

Changing attitudes of Australian academics

This article reports on the changing work-related attitudes and demographics of academic staff in Australia, in four universities and four former colleges of advanced education (CAEs, comparable to polytechnics), surveyed in 1979, 1984 and 1990. The surveys were of all academic staff in each institution, with response rates averaging 47%. As in other countries, the former binary system of education has recently been ended by reconstituting colleges of advanced education as universities. Differences in work-related attitude are examined, and shown to differ consistently between the types of institution, across the elapsed time, and between the sexes, ranks and academic disciplines of the respondents. In particular, each institution has shown a sustained increase in academic staff alienation and dissatisfaction over the eleven-year period. The differences in demographics and in work-related attitudes between original universities and former colleges of advanced education remain after the ending of the binary system. The differences are discussed in relation to a number of current policy issues, including the ending of the binary system of higher education. Since similar policy changes and similar pressures are occurring in a number of countries, the findings of the study have implications beyond Australia.     

欧文的空想社会主义及其当代价值

19世纪的三大空想社会主义者中,欧文的理想社会构建是建立在实践基础之上的,他将自己的理论首先应用到新拉纳克工厂之中,获得了很大的成效,并且进一步提出了劳动公社制度,这一制度成为了欧文理想社会体系的基础。虽然劳动公社的实验以失败而告终,但是其中成功的实践经验对当今中国和谐社会构建具有现实价值。     

French academics: Between the professions and the civil service

In France, where most higher education institutions are in the public sector, permanent academic staff at universities and other higher education institutions are tenured and enjoy a broad individual autonomy. The number of staff on short-term contracts is limited. Most part-time staff are drawn from professionals, business executives, and administrators – in both the public and private sectors. In recent decades, the number of teaching-only faculty expanded rapidly as tenured secondary school teachers were transferred to higher education institutions. As universities have acquired some autonomy, especially in academic matters, recruitment and promotion of staff combine elements of centralisation at the national level with local processes. Some degree of pay differentiation has been introduced through a growing use of supplementary compensation. As the system evolves toward increased self-governance of institutions, the autonomy enjoyed by the faculty is seen by administrators as an obstacle to the development of institutional policies.     

Brand equity of academics: demystifying the process

The current study endeavours to find out whether there is a relationship between university academics’ competence and their customer-based brand equity from the perspective of students. It also seeks to investigate the mechanism of the proposed relationship through trust, likability, and commitment. Data were collected from 384 postgraduate students in Malaysian universities using a structured questionnaire. Results of analysis using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) revealed there is a significant relationship (total effect) between academics’ competence and customer-based brand equity. We found that the path from competence to brand equity goes through trust, likability, and commitment. Given the growing popularity of higher education in the new millennium and important role of academics in leading students to success, findings of the present study can enhance our understanding of academics’ branding and universities’ overall image. The implications and contributions of the study to university administrators and academics are discussed.     

Internationalisation and migrant academics: the hidden narratives of mobility

In this paper, we present an analysis of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (SoTL) which contributes to SoTL both as a field of research practice and as a background to professional development in higher education. We analyse and describe the constitution of the field, and in so doing address its nature in the face of the dilemma of, on the one hand, its diversity and, on the other hand, its generally agreed set of purposes. Our analysis of SoTL knowledge is conceptualised as relational, connecting SoTL practitioners with the work they disseminate to the community at large. We describe and exemplify the internal horizon of the field in terms of five domains: the didactic and the epistemic, which we refer to as the knowledge building domains, and the interpersonal, the moral/ethical and the societal domains, which we refer to as the axiological domains. The external horizon is described in terms of four aspects of the context that can impact the production and implementation of SoTL knowledge: the disciplinary, the professional, the cultural and the political aspects. Methodological emphasis is equally on the axiological underpinnings of SoTL, its values and attitudes, as the ontological and epistemological underpinnings that are predominant.     

Utopian spaces and the promise of education: a conceptual analysis

Abstract

This paper states that modern education and utopian discourse share one common trait, that of being structurally founded on the promise of human betterment. The changing relations between concepts of education and utopianism will be developed through conceptual analysis of the dynamics of the promise in their interweaving process. This shall be discussed through three main topics. The first is the appropriation of space in early modern education (sixteenth century onward), with particular emphasis on the influence of print technology on framing a new conception of educational spaces and practices. Second, the promise of the idea of progress in the Enlightenment period, which will become the further technological promise of a society-to-come, no longer spatially but temporally presented. Finally, the promise of autonomy through and against the modern subject, in which such autonomy is presented like the end of the journey through education, supposed that there is an end to such a journey. The key frame uniting the three topics is that utopian discourse journeying towards a normative conception of human society, as well as modern educational schemes journeying towards a normative conception of adulthood, are limited insofar as their respective promises, which are more impatient than the slow project of creation, more than often outruns it. The paper thus inquires whether or not there is a way to uphold the creative and imaginative possibilities of utopia in education, by acknowledging the pervasive effects of the promise on the social imaginary.