Instrumentalism amongst students: a cross-national comparison of the significance of subject choice

Both educational policies and academic literature assume that students take an instrumental approach to their studies at university. However, despite wide-ranging discussions in the academic literature about contemporary arrangements and practices in higher education, empirical examinations of these conditions are notably scarce. This article reports on a comparative qualitative study into undergraduate students’ accounts of studying business or sociology at universities in Britain and Singapore. Drawing on Eric Fromm’s distinction between learning as ‘having’ and ‘being’, the article demonstrates that – regardless of national context – those studying business displayed many elements of passive, instrumentalised, or ‘having’ orientations to learning, whilst those studying sociology showed clear signs of the more active and less instrumental ‘being’ mode of learning. By examining subject allegiance across national borders, this article underscores the importance of recognising subject choice, alongside other important contextual factors, in moving towards a nuanced understanding of student dispositions.     

Languages,script and national identity: struggles over linguistic heterogeneity in Switzerland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

For centuries, Switzerland has been a multilingual country (which currently has no less than four official languages.) Furthermore, one of those languages, German, is characterised by bigraphism (i.e. the coexistence of two different type styles). This article discusses the role played by language and writing systems in the great educational scheme that was designed to create a shared national identity among Swiss people – despite the friction caused by cantonal and local idiosyncrasies, different cultural backgrounds, and deep-rooted traditions. It focuses on the timespan from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the First World War, a period during which nation-states were formed all over Europe. The findings show how language and writing systems were intertwined with local, cantonal and national identities in a state (Switzerland) that had no uniform national language. It was through the use of language and writing that ideas of ‘us’ (herein, the Swiss) and ‘others’ (herein, the non-Swiss) were constructed, disseminated and perpetuated.     

Gaps in educational outcomes: analysing national examination performance of Singaporean Malay and non-Malay students in the past 20 years

Singaporean students generally perform very well in international tests of mathematics and science. Nonetheless, in multi-cultural Singapore, there exist gaps with the Malays, a minority group in Singapore, systematically lagging behind the other ethnic groups of the Chinese and Indians in many educational performance indicators. While there have been previous qualitative assessments of this issue, rigorous statistical analyses are lacking. In this article, I analyse data from 1991 to 2011 of aggregate percentage passes in national examinations for the different ethnic groups in Singapore. Using time series techniques and regression, I uncovered two major findings. First, the Malay trends in percentage passes for the last two decades were strongly correlated with the non-Malay, national trends. Second, despite the correlation, there remained fluctuations around the national trend by Malay cohorts in the past two decades. Malay cohorts tended to perform better during an upward national trend, but also performed worse during a downward national trend, indicating systematic volatility in performance. The implications of these findings are discussed in the light of current research on educational gaps and three decades of community self-help to improve the educational achievement of the minority Malays in Singapore.     

The Enduring Quest for Equity in Education: Comparing Norway and Australia

It has been a key goal to achieve equity in education in Australia and Norway over the last 50 years. This article offers a historical case-oriented comparative analysis of the promotion of equity in education in these 2 countries. While equity in education is primarily understood as students’ learning outcomes in national and international tests, such as the OECD’s PISA studies, the analysis in this article is based on Espinoza’s distinction between equality and equity, which allows for a more complex understanding. The article investigates striking differences in how the governments in Australia and Norway have attempted to enhance equity through education, and discusses factors that may have impeded this process.     

哈尼族服饰图案对现代服装设计的现实思考

云南少数民族服饰丰富多彩,在传统和现代巧妙融合的大背景下,我国少数民族服饰以其独特的款式、色彩、纹样为现代服装设计师带来了灵感。本文通过探析哈尼族服饰常用图案的表现形式及其特征,深入了解哈尼族服饰图案的文化内涵,并思考如何将这些民族元素运用在现代服装设计之中,为现代服装设计增添新的活力。     

Teaching national and regional cultures: the role of teacher identities in Martinique

Schooling is widely considered to be vital to the development of modern nation-states, yet little is known about how teachers might go about transmitting national culture within schools. Using the case of history–geography lycée teachers in the French overseas department of Martinique, this article makes the argument that teachers’ professional identities must be taken into account when considering the ways in which teachers implement curricula and understand their role in passing on national and other collective identities to students. Through local-level research in schools – comprised of interviews with teachers, school administrators, local officials and others, classroom observations and archival research – it becomes evident that teachers on the island, as elsewhere in France, enjoy considerable autonomy in implementing curricula. By training students to think critically, teachers encourage students to consider new meanings of ‘French’ and ‘Martinican’ identities on an everyday basis.     

‘To benefit the world by whatever means possible’: Adolescents' constructed meanings for global citizenship

This article reports on the ways that 77 students in an international studies programme constructed meanings for global citizenship. The focus was on their personal meanings for the topic and how they articulated a global identity with their national civic beliefs. Data were collected from online discussion boards, written essays and 20 interviews. A key finding was that the students' political language for global citizenship, examined here in terms of purpose, membership and relationship with national citizenship, was predominantly a moral commitment framed in universal language. A second finding was that the students understood global citizenship as a heterogeneous and complex affiliation shaped by a range of sources. The implication is that citizenship education emphasizing a narrow notion of patriotism may encourage students to disengage from civic life because it does not represent their lived experiences and identities. Insights for making citizenship education practices more inclusive are discussed.     

The Doctorate in the Nordic Countries

This article gives an overview of the research training systems in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden with emphasis on the structure, organisation, time span of the degree, completion rates, labour market and internationalisation of postgraduate education. Even though the various national research training systems in the Nordic countries seem to be becoming more similar, there are still differences in their organisational models. In addition, the article compares the Nordic doctoral systems with those of the USA, the UK, Germany and France-the four countries which traditionally have been the most important recipients of Nordic students seeking research training abroad. The model of the US 'graduate school' has been the inspiration and basis for many European initiatives to improve doctoral degree education. In all these countries such schools have been introduced, but often in a modified form and to a limited extent. The main conclusion is that the trend is towards a common international PhD where the content, breadth, length and quality are equivalent.     

高等职业教育国际化策略:新加坡的经验与启示

国际化是全球一体化背景下高等职业教育发展的必然要求。新加坡始终把国际化作为发展高等职业教育的引导思想,通过教育主体的双向国际流动、课程内容和设置国际化、将国际先进的办学理念和管理方法本土化、聘用外籍教师和教师海外培训、与国际企业保持双向合作、开展跨国培训项目等策略,形成了别具一格的新加坡高等职业教育国际化模式。借鉴新加坡经验,我国可以通过国家层面健全高等职业教育国际化相关政策法规、落实各地区发展自主权、兼顾全日制留学生和外籍员工在职培训、推动我国高等职业教育国际化师资队伍的建设等方式促进高等职业教育的国际化发展。     

Student Interior Design Projects in Saudi Arabia

Interior design students should be able to use research and evidence‐based design outcomes to make decisions that promote health, safety and wellbeing. This approach will contribute to resolving social, environmental and community issues through design‐oriented thinking Accordingly, the aim of this research in a senior design studio course is to promote a better connection to the local environment needs without losing the creativity aspect. This study covered two semesters and used multiple data collection methods, including interviews, observational field notes, discussions and personal reflections. The findings showed that jury critiques and case study analysis were the most beneficial sources of information for students to develop their project ideas and solutions. The paper illustrates processes, products and aspects that are used in senior projects to find solutions to environmental needs. In addition, the study offers lessons learned and reflections to raise students’ awareness of the cultural needs in relation to the interior design field. This study shows findings similar to earlier research that found that students who identified and analysed a local case study understood the design problem better and were creative in linking their project design solution to the society's needs. The study also reveals that students who relied on analysis of well‐defined local case studies developed focused and detailed concepts and design solutions according to the instructor's and jurors’ assessments. The study also contributes to literature by using a multi‐method approach and offers implications for local and international policy‐makers on interior design curricula.     

Vulnerability,gender and resistance in transnational academic mobility

Focusing on Tanzanian and Mozambican PhD students funded by Swedish development aid, this article investigates how everyday academic work life is gendered in Sweden and in the students’ home academic departments. In particular, it focuses on the role of ‘important others’, such as international donors, universities, colleagues and family, in enhancing or alleviating vulnerability and how this shifts across spatial contexts. Integral to this is exploring how obstacles are managed and negotiated by PhD students, and how they articulate capability and therefore resist a position as a victim. The results indicate the glonacality of vulnerability as something that stretches over institutional and national boundaries, and how vulnerability can be (re)produced at local university level despite the good intentions of donors and universities operating ata global level. In addition,a translocational and intersectional perspective highlights how situations of vulnerability are gendered and radicalised differently in different academic contexts.

     

Students and the Governance of Higher Education in Norway

The article discusses the question of student participation in higher education governance at the national and the institutional levels in Norway. Two ideal-type perspectives on governance are developed in order to illuminate the Norwegian case: a democratic perspective and a market perspective. The article provides a brief overview of the historical development of student participation in higher education governance, emphasizing how students view their own role in the governance arenas in which they participate. Close attention is paid to student participation and influence in quality assurance schemes at both the national and the institutional levels. In the conclusion, the article discusses how the recent developments are changing the balance towards the market model of higher education governance, without obliterating significant elements of the hitherto predominant democratic governance model.

     

Working against globalisation: the role of the media and national education in Singapore

This article discusses how the media and schools are used as disciplinary apparatuses to resist and work against globalisation in Singapore. Aihwa Ong calls the deployment of state ideological apparatuses, such as the media and schools, acts of ‘reassemblage’, when technocrats resort to assemble institutions, diverse Government practice and political values to engage in citizenship production. The National Education curriculum package introduced to Singapore schools is one example of ‘reassemblage’, which aims to reinvent subject‐citizens who are perceived as lacking cultural mooring and a national identity. I argue that in the context of globalisation, this cultural experimentation of constructing a national identity and creating a sense of belonging is fraught with ruptures, as ‘youthscapes’ and new communication technologies are potentially the liminal spaces where other sources of identities are up for grabs. These liminal spaces further allow youths to perform ‘elective belonging’ rather than a sense of belonging bound by the ‘national’ and ‘local’.     

Designing for learning in the Yellow House: a comparison of instructional and learning design origins and practices

ABSTRACT

For the past two decades, there has been persistent debate around whether there is a difference between the fields of instructional design (ID) and learning design (LD). While differences in the two approaches are certainly apparent, there are cross-over points that can provide ID and LD researchers and practitioners with opportunities for dialogue about the purposes and remit of research-based practices for optimal design. Though potentially disruptive, initiating dialogues among learning and instructional designers could lead to more thorough and critical analyses of both ID and LD repertoires. Should boundary crossings occur, there is a potential for a third space for the contemplation, research, and practice of design. A goal of this article is to use the notion of Van Gogh’s Yellow House as an anchoring metaphor for the third space – a location for shared discourse, inspiration, collaboration, and challenge for a community of designers of/for learning. Using the impressionist and expressionist terminology to help elucidate the ways of thinking of designers of both traditions, this article examines the history, underlying philosophical approaches, methodologies, and design goals of ID and LD. We conclude that the emergence of a third space for design can help us move beyond the LD and ID dichotomies. We suggest that a socio-materialist perspective alleviates issues of incommensurability by acknowledging ontological multiplicity.     

The ‘grand simulation’ and dreams of success by assessment: Baudrillardian reflections on (trans-)national school policy

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, European school policy has been steered by management dreams that systematic monitoring and assessment would guide schools and society toward a future of greater quality, efficiency, and growth. This article, drawing on Jean Baudrillard, explores whether it makes sense to rearticulate this dream of optimization by assessment in terms of a ‘grand simulation’ that brings into circulation a play of signs in terms of global quantifiable comparability supported by the aura of objectivity, statistics and big data. Does this dream of optimization suck us into a virtual world of ‘ingrowing obesity,’ where an uninterrupted supply of statistics and digital platforms loosens our grip on the real by the alchemical use of numbers, algorithms, and signs? The article argues that by observing school policy as seductive effects of a larger crisis-producing and competition-motivating (self-)assessment simulation, it becomes possible to rearticulate a persistent trend in (trans)national school policies in a language different from this trend’s own self-referencing logic – and thus to question the trend itself. Danish school policy demonstrates as a European national case how the simulation changed local educational traditions by building up a national curriculum that made schools and students comparable and hereby amenable to increased assessment.     

The politics of PISA: The media,policy and public responses in Norway and England

Using the PISA 2015 releases in Norway and England, this article explores how PISA has been presented in the media and how the policy level has responded to the results. England will be used as an example for comparison. The article presents early media responses from the 20 most circulated daily newspapers in the two countries and discusses them in relation both to the national PISA reports in Norway and England, as well as the international report of the OECD. The media responses are further interpreted in light of previous research in both countries, with a particular focus upon Norway, where previous Ministers of Education have been interviewed about assessment policy and education reforms.     

Fortress State,Cultural Continuities and Economic Change: Higher education in mainland China and Taiwan

Since 1949, the higher education systems in mainland China and Taiwan have been developed in disparate geopolitical and social contexts, but have faced similar dilemmas between economic and cultural tasks. The dilemma has lasted in China for more than two centuries and nowadays can also be located in many developing industrializing countries. The article offers the concept of 'fortress state' to explain how between 1949 and 1995 these two were affected by both domestic and international factors. In particular, the role of higher education as an agent of both political socialization and economic modernization is analyzed in the context of the transformations in the two contemporary Chinese societies. The article also examines how cultural traditions, the upholding of a national belief system, nation building and the foreign relations of mainland China and Taiwan help maintain the two-century old tension between economic modernization and the preservation of a cultural and national identity.     

在“概念书籍设计”教学中培养学生的创造性思维

基于＂概念书籍设计＂的概念,阐述在教学中通过加强发散性思维的训练、激发学生动手设计的灵感等途径来培养学生的创造性思维。同时,引导学生了解传统书、现代书以及未来概念书的设计之美,从而达到培养学生审美意识的目的。