‘Measuring Up’? Assessment and students with disabilities in the modern university

In this article, I ask how university students with disabilities negotiate with staff arrangements for alternative assessment practices. I draw on three case studies using a personal pronoun perspective to challenge the conventional view that educational policy and teaching practice are forms of rational action. I demonstrate how the lives of students and staff are typically characterised by unexpected events, disorder, emotion and prejudice. The analytic perspective offered here establishes how meanings, intentions and different viewpoints and alliances emerge as social actors work to create specific faculty and institution cultures. The case studies also reveal what does and what does not work – some of the obstacles – and what needs to be done if we are serious about equity and inclusive education. They include practical assistance in recognising the specific requirements of students with disabilities and how to design alternative assessment for students with specific ‘conditions’. I argue that professional development and specific techniques in curriculum design are needed. Some staff also require help in recognising their policy and legal obligations. A cultural change which identifies and challenges prejudice is a larger task if universities are to become places in which equal opportunity principles and inclusive education are present and actively practised.     

The subjectivities of ‘included’ students with disabilities in schools

The contextual precept of this paper is to re-theorise inclusive education beyond technical rational solutions to the ‘problem’ of disability. Drawing on Foucauldian and critical disability theories, I make the case for the analysis of inclusive schooling through the lens of students’ ‘included’ subjectivities – notwithstanding the presence of diagnosed special educational needs. I contend that there is a theoretical mismatch between humanist inclusive schooling and the posthumanist position of disability: an epistemic fissure that impedes inclusive development. Through analysis of the voices of students with disabilities from two different schooling contexts in Australia and Spain, I demonstrate how fragmented virtues of normalcy suffused their subjectivities. I conclude the paper with a discussion of the roles that DisHuman disability studies might play in recasting inclusive schooling by troubling normative discourse.     

Being ‘at’ university: the social topologies of distance students

This paper considers how online, distance students enact the space of ‘the university’, in the context of the rise of distance education within a traditional, ‘elite’ institution. Aiming to provide insight into how students translate into distance the space of a university which has traditionally had its basis in conventional on-campus education, it locates itself within the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm (Urry in Mobilities. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007), drawing on four different kinds of social space delineated by Mol and Law (Soc Stud Sci 24(4):641–741, 1994) and Law and Mol (Environ Plan D 19:609–621, 2001) in order to analyse narrative and visual data generated with distance students at the University of Edinburgh. The paper shows that the material campus continues to be symbolically and materially significant for a group of students who may never physically attend that campus. Distance students, we find, need their own version of the ‘spatial certainties’ of bounded, campus space. Yet, in exploring the ‘new proximities’ of online distance education, we also argue that to define institutional and academic authenticity solely in terms of this bounded, ‘regional’ space is inadequate in the face of the other topologies which also come into play throughout distance students’ accounts of what it means to be ‘at’ university.     

‘You need a system’: exploring the role of data in the administration of university students and courses

Universities generate a mass of data related to students and the courses that they study. As such, ‘data work’ using digital technologies and digital systems is integral to educational administration within higher education. Drawing on in-depth interviews with administrative and managerial staff in an Australian university, this article examines the data practices and processes that have grown up around students and courses. In particular, the article explores the ‘back-stage’ issues surrounding data – e.g. concerns and tensions associated with appropriate uses of data; the organisational cultures that form around the use of data; and the (un)intended consequences of data work. These findings point towards an implicit ‘black-boxing’ of data that shapes the generation and use of digital data in ways that are predominantly restricted and bounded. The article concludes by considering how these constrained forms of data use might be problematised and reconsidered.     

‘Empty signifiers’ and ‘dreamy ideals’: perceptions of the ‘international university’ among higher education students and staff at a British university

This paper reports on a mixed-methods case study investigating how higher education staff and students understand, experience and envision the ‘international university’. As it is becoming clear that international student mobility is not in itself a panacea for universities seeking to internationalise, ‘internationalisation at home’ and ‘global citizenship’ are increasingly permeating university policy documents and mission statements. However, little is known about how students and staff on the ground perceive and experience these concepts. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected at one British university through focus groups (N = 19) and through an online survey (n = 148). Findings revealed a conventional mobility-focused understanding of the international university among students and staff, and a great deal of cynicism as regards ‘internationalisation at home’ and ‘global citizenship’. We discuss implications for practice and a research agenda.     

Guys and ‘the rest of us’: tales of gendered aptitude and experience in educational carework

A history of framing the teaching of young children as a matter of ‘natural’ female aptitude has led a number of researchers and educators to oversimplify men's experiences as a foil or antidote to the ills of schooling. In this qualitative study of men, women, and ‘feminisation’ in early education and care environments, interview data (N?=?4) are discursively analysed to provide a more nuanced understanding of how male and female careworkers construct and orient themselves in relation to masculinity and maleness.     

The deviant university student: historical discourses about student failure and ‘wastage’ in the antipodes

The emergence of academic development in Anglophone higher education was linked to post Second World War massification and concerns about student failure. These concerns were driven by increasing statistical investigations into student attrition and degree times to completion, particularly in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. There was a dominant discourse about student ‘wastage’ (the deviant student). However, if we fast-forward to the late 2000s, we can see that these discourses have been replaced by discourses about university responsibility and teaching quality. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis, this paper aims to trace the historical roots of contemporary teaching and learning dilemmas and to show how the responsibility for student failure was gradually shifted from perceptions of deviant students to perceptions of teacher ‘deviance’, which academic development units were designed to ameliorate.     

‘Feedback interpreters’: the role of learning development professionals in facilitating university students’ engagement with feedback

Understanding how students engage with assessment feedback is a key concern of higher education professionals. Research commonly represents the perspectives of students and academic staff, yet little consideration is given to the role of learning development staff, despite these individuals supporting students when interpreting and implementing feedback. We report the findings from interviews with learning developers working in a UK University, exploring their insights into the barriers students confront when engaging with feedback, and into the role of learning developers within the feedback landscape. This study suggests that, while many challenges exist for staff and students in the context of assessment feedback, learning development professionals are able to provide a meaningful source of guidance, in partnership with academic staff, and are able to promote students’ development through dialogic interactions. Hitherto these interactions have not been fully explored, yet they provide powerful insight into the hidden processes of feedback recipience.     

‘Wrighting’ the self: new technologies and textual subjectivities

The expression of the self through multimodal texts is a central theme in education. While it has been suggested that new technologies act as important mediators in the relationship between texts and subjectivity, the mechanisms underlying such mediation has been a neglected topic of research. This paper considers the theoretical assumptions upon which speculation so far has been based and explores the methodologies that are best suited to investigating further the relationships between text, self and technology.     

Filling up silences—first in family students,capital and university talk in the home

Internationally, research has indicated that returning to education for older learners provides the means for growth and change, for some students this can translate into a sense of ‘empowerment’ and control in their personal lives. However, what is not so well researched is how having a significant ‘other’ present within the university landscape impacts the household and other family members. Exploring how this return to education influences others provides a basis for institutional approaches to engaging with and supporting the lifelong learning of family members, ultimately assisting in the access and participation of current and future generations. This article draws on research conducted with first in family students to explore how their participation in the higher education environment led to conversations in the family around learning. Drawing upon theories of social and cultural capital, this article reflects upon the flow of capitals between home and university.     

‘It’s not fair’: policy discourses and students’ understandings of plagiarism in a New Zealand university

Plagiarism is a concept that is difficult to define. Although most higher education institutions have policies aimed at minimising and addressing student plagiarism, little research has examined the ways in which plagiarism is discursively constructed in university policy documents, or the connections and disconnections between institutional and student understandings of plagiarism in higher education. This article reports on a study that explored students’ understandings of plagiarism in relation to institutional plagiarism discourses at a New Zealand university. The qualitative study involved interviews with 21 undergraduate students, and analysis of University plagiarism policy documents. The University policy documents revealed moral and regulatory discourses. In the interviews, students predominantly drew on ethico-legal discourses, which reflected the discourses in the policy documents. However, the students also drew on (un)fairness discourses, confusion discourses, and, to a lesser extent, learning discourses. Notably, learning discourses were absent in the University policy. Our findings revealed tensions between the ways plagiarism was framed in institutional policy documents, and students’ understandings of plagiarism and academic writing. We suggest that, in order to support students’ acquisition of academic writing skills, plagiarism should be framed in relation to ‘learning to write’, rather than as a moral issue.     

Complicating ‘student behaviour’: exploring the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’

When educators consider ‘student behaviour’, they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view of ‘student behaviour’ not only fails to acknowledge children as educational actors in a wider sense, but also narrowly positions educators as either in control or out of control of their classroom. Mainstream educational psychology’s responses to ‘challenging behaviour’ point educators to numerous ways to prevent its occurrence, through, for example, changing their disciplining approaches and techniques. However, much of the advice directed at improving student behaviour fails to interrogate the core notion of ‘student behaviour’ itself, as well as the conceptual baggage that it carries. The focus is squarely on eliminating ‘problem behaviour’ and often resorts to a pathologisation of students. Meanwhile, when considering ‘student behaviour’ through a Foucauldian post-structuralist optic, behaviour emerges as something highly complex – as spatialised, embodied action within/against governing discourses. In this opening up, it becomes both possible and critical to defamiliarise oneself with the categorisation of ‘challenging behaviour’ and to interrogate the discourses and subject positionings at play. In this paper, we pursue this task by asking: what happens with the notion of ‘behaviour’ if we change focus from ‘fixing problems’ to looking at the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’? What does it become possible to see, think, feel and do? In this exploration, we theorise ‘behaviour’ as learning and illustrate the constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’. Drawing on two case scenarios, we explore how children accomplish themselves as learners and how this accomplishment links the production of subjectivity and embodied action, and illustrate how ‘student/child behaviour’ appears significantly different to what mainstream educational psychology would have us see.     

From the fear of death to the fear of ‘dissimilar other’: a research in elementary school classrooms

Social stereotyping and prejudice constitute pressing societal problems and have many causes. Terror Management Theory offers a compelling and heavily researched account of individuals’ reactions towards ‘dissimilar others’ when faced with thoughts of mortality. Building from previous research with adult samples, the present study aimed to explore whether terror management processes can have an effect on children's attitudes towards members of an ethnic out-group. We used focus group as a method of collecting the data. Results showed that reminders of mortality led to an increase in stereotypic thinking, to negative evaluations of the out-group and to ethnic labelling. The results of the present study emphasise the necessity for interventions that would take into account, besides the role of cognition and the role of micro- and macro-level environment, other determinants, such as the role of incidental affect, which contribute to the genesis and maintenance of prejudice and in-group bias in children.     

In the physics class: university physics students’ enactment of class and gender in the context of laboratory work

This article explores how the doing of social class and gender can intersect with the learning of science, through case studies of two male, working-class university students’ constitutions of identities as physics students. In doing so, I challenge the taken-for-granted notion that male physics students have an unproblematic relation to their chosen discipline, and nuance the picture of how working-class students relate to higher education by the explicit focus on one disciplinary culture. Working from the perspective of situated learning theory, the interviews with the two male students were analysed for how they negotiated the practice of the physics student laboratory and their own classed and gendered participation in this practice. By drawing on the heterogeneity of the practice of physics the two students were able to use the practical and technological aspects of physics as a gateway into the discipline. However, this is not to say that their participation in physics was completely frictionless. The students were both engaged in a continuous negotiation of how skills they had learned to value in the background may or may not be compatible with the ones they perceived to be valued in the university physicist community.     

Iranian university students’ experiences of and attitudes towards alternatives in assessment

This study investigated the effect of assessment type (self vs. peer vs. teacher) on university students’ academic achievement and students’ attitudes toward them. In the main study, 82 undergraduate English-as-a-Foreign-Language students in four classes at three universities in Iran were randomly assigned into one of self-, peer- and teacher-assessment or control groups. A pre-test was designed to measure students’ initial knowledge in the subject Teaching Methods. Then experimental groups were subjected to one of the assessment types; however, the control group received no intervention. Thirty-eight students from experimental groups completed an attitude questionnaire. A similarly designed follow-up study was conducted with two classes of BA Chemistry students taking a General English course at Urmia University. The application of one-way analysis of covariance on the main study post-test data indicated differences in performances of all groups, with peer-assessment group performing the best. Quantitative and qualitative analyses indicated that both self- and peer-assessment, as well as the teacher-assessment group, had positive attitudes toward their assessment experiences. The application of one-way analysis of variance on replication study data showed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on the post-test and that students in the former group had positive attitudes toward self-assessment.     

Learning about sex and relationships among migrant and refugee young people in Sydney,Australia: ‘I never got the talk about the birds and the bees’

In a multicultural nation such as Australia, it is important for young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds to have access to quality relationships and sexuality education, as they are known to be less well engaged with mainstream services. A study was undertaken to explore the complexities and opportunities for engaging this group with sexual and reproductive health information and care in Sydney, Australia. Interviews were undertaken with 27 migrant and refugee young people (aged 16–24 years), and 34 expert informants. Relationships and sexuality education was a dominant theme throughout both data sets. Nearly all young people reported that they were unable to discuss sexuality or sexual health with their parents, and most identified secondary school as the place where they first learned about these issues. Other sources of information were identified as the Internet, friends, health professionals and pornography. Participants appeared to have limited awareness of the different services available to them. Schools, as well as other education settings such as universities, private colleges and intensive English centres, are well placed to deliver relationships and sexuality education, and for migrant and refugee young people these may be valuable settings in which to access information rarely discussed in family or community environments.