Conceptualizing higher education students as social actors in a globalizing world: a special issue

This introductory essay describes an analytical framework that locates students, staff, and institutions within both local and extra‐local patterns of stratification and clarifies our theoretical understanding of ethnographic data concerning student perceptions and practices in higher education. The essay introduces four articles based on ethnographic research that utilizes such a framework.     

Self-determination theory,morality, and education: introduction to special issue

ABSTRACT

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is an empirically based organismic theory of human motivation, development, and well-being that shares many points of interest with the fields of moral development and moral education. Yet, SDT has been largely disconnected from these fields so far. How can we define and empirically assess autonomous moral motivation? How is moral autonomy achieved in the course of development? And what are the relationships between leading a moral life and happiness? These questions have been occupying moral psychologists and educators for a long time. They are focal for SDT, as well. This special issue highlights various lines of intersection between SDT, morality and education. Contributions either expand SDT into the moral domain or incorporate elements of SDT into moral theory with the ultimate goal of integrating fields that inherently belong together.     

Differentiation and social selectivity in German higher education

In this paper we investigate social selectivity in access to higher education in Germany and, unlike most previous studies, explicitly devote attention to semi-tertiary institutions such as the so-called universities of cooperative education. Drawing on rational choice models of educational decisions we seek to understand which factors influence upper secondary graduates from different social backgrounds in their choices of diverse tertiary institutions in Germany. We find that scholastic performance, expected job security, study duration, monetary costs and preferences for study content considerably contribute to the creation of socially selective choice patterns of post-secondary careers. The characteristics of semi-tertiary institutions—such as universities of cooperative education that combine firm-based training with tertiary education—constitute a potential alternative that could reduce inequities in access to higher learning.     

An introduction to the special issue on wisdom and moral education

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the present special issue on wisdom and moral education, which draws on a conference held in Oxford in 2017. Some of the seven contributions (by Sanderse; Ferkany; and Hatchimonji et al.) make use of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom, while others focus more on the wisdom concept as it has developed in contemporary psychology (Huynh and Grossman; Ardelt; and Brocato, Hix and Jayawickreme). One (by Swartwood) straddles the distinction between the two. All the contributions, however, address in different ways practical questions about how wisdom can be evaluated and how it relates to issues of moral development and education.     

Differentiation and work: inequality in degree attainment in U.S. higher education

While much stratification research has focused on understanding the patterns and consequences of differentiation, previous studies have not considered similarly important variation in students’ trajectories through higher education, and particularly their participation in the labor market. Results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1997 (NLSY97) indicate that degree completion in a differentiated system of higher education is related to students’ employment patterns. Students who begin their educational journeys in community colleges as well as students from less advantaged family backgrounds are more likely to dedicate longer hours to paid employment, which has negative consequences for degree attainment. Employment patterns contribute to gaps in degree completion among students from different family backgrounds and to a lesser extent to inequality in degree completion between students beginning postsecondary education in community colleges vs. 4-year institutions. A more complex set of patterns is revealed when examining the relationship between employment, family background, and degree attainment across different institutional types and educational credentials. These findings highlight the importance of developing a more comprehensive understanding of inequality in educational attainment by considering the relationship between differentiation and work.     

Listening and reflecting: an introduction to the special issue

The topic of listening has been broadly neglected in educational studies. This special issue presents studies on the connections between listening and reflecting in educational contexts.

Computer-based tools for instructional design: An introduction to the special issue

Modern instructional theories are characterized by their focus on rich, multidisciplinary and often collaborative learning tasks that are somehow representative for authentic, real life tasks. This new view on learning heavily increases the complexity of the design process and the resulting instructional systems. It is argued that computer-based instructional design (ID) tools may help to deal with this growing complexity. A framework to distinguish different kinds of ID tools is presented. This framework is then used to introduce the contributions to this special issue.