Impact of excellence programs on Taiwan higher education in terms of quality assurance and academic excellence, examining the conflicting role of Taiwan’s accrediting agencies

Higher Education Evaluation & Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT) was established in 2005 and began to accredit 76 four-year comprehensive universities and colleges in Taiwan in 2006. Commissioned officially with a dual mission, HEEACT has been encouraged to conduct various ranking research projects, including global and national ones starting in 2007. One of the HEEACT’s most influential rankings is “Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities.” Given the fact that more and more national accrediting bodies are developing ranking systems, these dual roles like in the HEEACT case have led to many discussions and raised severe criticism in the quality assurance community due to their different aims and approaches. Therefore, the purposes of the paper are to provide an understanding of the functions of varying quality assessment tools in higher education, to analyze their impact on Taiwan higher education and to examine the conflicting roles of HEEACT while conducting both accreditation and rankings over the institutions that have been granted the two major national Research and Teaching Excellence Programs.     

Tensions and challenges in China’s education policy borrowing

Abstract

Background: This article critically discusses the key tensions and challenges arising from the educational policy borrowing in China, through its current education reform. Focussing on the new curriculum reform (NCR), the paper highlights the interactions and conflicts between foreign and local ideologies and practices.

Sources of evidence: The main sources of evidence that form the basis of the analysis for this article were research data from an open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured interviews conducted with 166 school principals, vice-principals and teachers from China between 2013 and 2015.

Main argument: It is argued that the NCR has borrowed selective ideas and practices from elsewhere, such as a school-based curriculum, student-centred pedagogy and formative assessment. It is further suggested that the borrowed policies are mediated and moderated by the ideological attitude of the Chinese educational stakeholders, stemming from the notion of ‘theory-ladenness’ within an exam-oriented paradigm.

Conclusions: The example of China illustrates the effects of an ideological attitude on educational policy borrowing that challenges the notion of universally appropriate ways of teaching, learning and reforming an educational system.     

The recruitment of VET teachers and the failure of policy in England’s further education sector

England’s further education (FE) sector has been characterised by instability and policy churn for at least three decades during which time reform of vocational education and training (VET) has been piled on top of reform, with few resulting in lasting change. In the context of another ambitious new reform of VET in England, this article reports on a study that examined the chronic difficulties in recruiting teachers of vocational science, engineering and technology (SET) to FE colleges. We argue that these difficulties in recruiting SET teachers reveal persistent weaknesses in policy planning for the English VET sector and help to explain the serial failure of VET policy in England.     

Civic effects of higher education in Russia: religiosity,social capital and the ‘pure teaching effect’ of educational programmes

Tertiary Education and Management - Higher education is valued as one of the main sources of civic participation and social benefit. In spite of the significant growth in the number of students...     

Framing the framework: discourses in Australia’s national values education policy

In the past, many Australian state schools avoided teaching about values explicitly. However, the Australian government released Australia’s first official values education policy in 2005: the National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools (NFVEAS). This framework represents a local manifestation of the recent international values education movement. This study contributes to an exploration of what, and who, the government’s construction of Australian values privileges. It uncovered the dominant discourses inherent in the framework through a critical discourse analysis, framing it in relation to the 16 key values education approaches identified in the literature. The data revealed the document’s strong privileging of conservative values education discourses, particularly civics and citizenship education, values inculcation and character education. In practice, some Australian schools have been disrupting this move to conservatism by taking more critical and postmodern approaches. The paper argues for such alternative practices and policy that is more diversified and student-centred.     

Roles of women’s higher education institutions in international contexts

Women??s colleges and universities persist around the world, even as the vast majority of tertiary institutions are open to men and women. In nearly every nation, women can attend even the most elite formerly all-male universities, and in several nations women are the majority of all college students. Questions therefore arise about the continued need for a single-sex sector in the 21st century. In this study I examined the contribution of these institutions to their national systems of education and society. I used a qualitative, comparative, multiple case study approach to understand 14 diverse women??s colleges and universities in nine nations on five continents. Five key roles emerged: access, campus climate, gender empowerment, leadership development, and cultural paradox. I make recommendations for research and practice.     

Learning in and from the West: international students and international women’s organisations in the interwar period

This article explores the importance of higher education to international women’s organisations such as the International Federation of University Women, the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and asks how studying abroad contributed to the international cooperation and understanding promoted by these organisations in the interwar period. In particular, it assesses how the movement of ‘Eastern’ women, especially East Asian, to the West for educational purposes at the beginning of the twentieth century benefited the expansion of these organisations beyond Europe, North America and white settler countries such as Australia and New Zealand between the world wars, and to what extent the experiences of international students in the ‘West’ influenced their political activities back home and their involvement in international women’s organisations.     

The World Bank’s position on early child education in Brazil: a critical assessment of contributions and shortcomings

In 2010, the World Bank published a policy study on early child education (ECE) developments in Brazil, entitled Early Child Education: Making Programs Work for Brazil’s Most Important Generation. Development. This paper analyses the report’s assessment of ECE policy in Brazil as well as the recommendations it provides. A critical analysis of ECE shows that the report’s insistence that financial constraints necessitate a trade-off between coverage and quality privileges the influence and position of the private sector and urges public–private partnerships as a cost-saving strategy. While it commends the Brazilian Government for its commitment to universal access to preschool, it argues for more targeted investment in quality rather than access. This paper argues that the quality-coverage debate should be set aside and overall investment in ECE should be increased. It also argues that issues excluded from the report such as disability, race and rural access to ECE must be considered in the development of sound social policy.     

Listening to children’s voices on intercultural education policy and practice

The overarching purpose of this research is to investigate native and immigrant children’s experiences of intercultural pedagogical practices in Cyprus schools. It also explores their suggestions for the improvement of policies and practices for intercultural education. Last but not least, it examines whether Cypriot and immigrant students share similar or different conceptualisations and understandings regarding the above aspects. To this end, interviews were carried out with 40 pupils, aged 11–12, of five primary schools, which presented high concentrations of immigrant students. On the basis of our analysis of our data, the children appeared to perceive intercultural education in terms of culturally responsive discussions, collaborative learning and language learning.     

The ‘[h]unt for new Canadians begins in the classroom*’: the construction and contradictions of Canadian policy discourse on international education

In Canada’s first-ever strategy, international education (IE) is linked to immigration policy with international students (IS) recruited as ‘ideal’ immigrants. This paper engages in policy sociology and Ball's concepts of 'policy as text' and 'policy as discourse' (10). It follows three stages of critical policy discourse analysis. The first a simple tally of the most commonly used words/phrases in the Strategy; the second analyses it using Van Leeuwen’s framework and the third presents results from a study on the perception and experiences of IS, exposing the gap between policy rhetoric and practice. The paper concludes that critical discourse analysis is a powerful tool to uncover policy values/ideologies, identify legitimation strategies and reveal perpetuation of power relations/status quo within Canadian society.     

International education and meaningful contributions to society: Exploration of postgraduate international students’ perspectives studying in a Malaysian research university

International education is sought after by students primarily for career development. However, very little is known about other meaningful educational outcomes of students pursuing international education in a Malaysian university system. This paper investigates how international students perceive their meaningful contributions to society upon study completion in one research university in Malaysia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in the university with 33 international students, mainly from Nigeria, Pakistan and China. Findings show that postgraduate international students not only want to contribute to their home society through research and teaching at higher education institutions but also to their host-country and third-country communities. The analysis illustrates the interplay between macro internationalisation of higher education policies and factors shaping the micro-level experiences of international students. This study contributes new insights into vital nuances of the international educational outcomes relating to meaningful contribution to society and community development.     

Mrs Thatcher’s first flourish: organic change,policy chaos and the fate of the colleges of education

This paper revisits the abolition of the colleges of education in England and Wales, specialist providers of teacher training which were effectively eradicated in the years after Margaret Thatcher’s 1972 White Paper Education: A Framework for Expansion. Its central argument is that the way in which change was enacted thereafter represented a significant break with the model of policymaking which had held sway since the end of World War Two. Whilst more far-reaching change would come after Mrs Thatcher’s ‘conversion’ to neo-liberalism later in the decade, the fate of the colleges of education was, I argue, an important if largely overlooked episode in the history of education – especially in terms of violating the collaborative relationship between central government and local authorities which had, until that point, dominated education policy in post-war Britain.     

A question of autonomy: Bourdieu’s field approach and higher education policy

The concept of field forms the centre of Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology and the notion of ‘autonomy’ is its keystone. This article explores the usefulness of these underexamined concepts for studying policy in higher education. It begins by showing how Bourdieu’s ‘field’ approach enables higher education to be examined as a distinct and irreducible object of study. It then explores the value and limitations of this conceptualization through analyses of policy during two contrasting moments of transition in the same field. First, the insights offered by a field approach are illustrated by analysing the new student debate over the creation of new universities in early 1960s English higher education. This shows how the field’s relatively high autonomy shaped the focus and form of policy debates by refracting economic and political pressures into specifically educational issues. Second, considering contemporary changes in policy highlights how the erosion of the social compact underpinning higher education has increasingly fractured autonomy, necessitating the development of Bourdieu’s conceptualization. A distinction between positional and relational dimensions of autonomy is introduced to capture an increasing disjuncture between the origins of the actors running higher education and of the principles they are adopting, respectively. These concepts are utilized to illuminate the effects of current moves towards marketization and managerialism in higher education on principles, practices and identities within the field.     

Trends and developments in postgraduate education and training in the UK†

This paper argues that ‘partnership’ is an essential part of the marketization of education. Whilst the market fragments and promotes individualism, ‘partnership’ promotes involvement, commitment and responsibility. It is, though, an involvement, commitment and responsibility based on individual vested interest; a necessary prerequisite to protect one's ‘investment’. In harnessing this, control upon the individual is exerted. ‘Partnership’ is presented here as double‐edged for both parents and teachers. Whilst parents may call teachers to account, ‘partnership’ acts as a form of control upon parents. Employing ‘surveillance’ as a conceptual framework, the nature and purpose of ‘partnership’, together with its management by teachers, is discussed. The paper argues that partnership serves as a device for monitoring parents and engendering what Foucault describes as ‘disciplinary power’ which is ensuring that parents learn to be ‘good’ parents as defined by the teachers and adopt a set of values that match those of the school.     

Students’ perceptions of the academic environment and approaches to studying in British postgraduate business education

Recent research on student learning in higher education has identified clear associations between variations in students’ perceptions of the academic environment and variations in their study behaviour. This study investigated a general theoretical model linking students’ demographic characteristics, perceptions and study behaviour with measures of outcome, and in particular, compared three accounts of the causal relationship between perceptions and study behaviour. Data were obtained from 469 postgraduate students at six British business schools. Path analysis was used to assess the causal relationships among the students’ age and gender, their scores on the Course Experience Questionnaire, their scores on the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory and their ratings of general satisfaction with their programmes. This yielded evidence for the causal efficacy of most of the paths identified in the general theoretical model. In particular, as in the case of students taking more traditional academic subjects, there exists a bidirectional causal relationship between variations in students’ perceptions of the academic environment and variations in their study behaviour.     

UNICEF’s lessons learned from the education response to the COVID-19 crisis and reflections on the implications for education policy

COVID-19 triggered mass innovation that grew flexible learning modalities and pathways that can be built upon in future sector plans to make education systems more resilient. These tools must be paired with investments in the people expected to use them and strengthened data systems. To ensure plans are rooted in ever-pressurised budgets, Education Ministers will increasingly need to turn to economic analysis. Expansion of partnerships will be necessary to secure greater and more innovative forms of finance but also affordable digital learning solutions. If these opportunities are seized alongside the disruption wrought by the pandemic, they can equalize opportunities and accelerate progress.     

Co-operatives and education in the Basque Country: the ikastolas in the final years of Franco’s dictatorship

This article analyses the creation of the schools called ikastolas throughout the Basque Country from the 1960s onwards. The name ikastola refers to a unique school model whose major characteristic is to teach the majority of subjects in the Basque language, or euskera. It outlines the reasons why some of these schools took a co-operative organisational form and describes their major characteristics. The first part analyses the opportunities created under the Francoist regime for this kind of school, despite the repressive character of the dictatorship in other fields. The second part of the paper examines the important influence of the Mondragón co-operative movement, especially through its financial institution, in the creation of these educational co-operatives. The third and last part emphasises the role played by social mobilisation in defence of the Basque language in the creation of these schools and how this factor tied in with a co-operative governance system.