Negotiating the challenge of collaborative writing: learning from one writing group's mutiny

With continuing pressure to publish or perish, interventions such as writing groups are increasingly part of the academic landscape. In this paper, we discuss our writing group's experiment with collaborative writing, which came unstuck as simmering concerns led to a mutiny within the group. The mutiny provided insights into tensions that are inevitably present in writing groups and collaborative writing exercises but are seldom written about. We explore these tensions via a collaborative autoethnography, drawing on published literature on writing groups and collaborative writing. The mutiny revealed three key dynamics. Experienced voices can have an important role to play but these voices need to be moderated so that other voices might be recognised and valued. Pleasure and productivity are two necessary components for sustaining writing groups and writing collaborations. Finally, hierarchies in the academic context are inescapable but they can be renegotiated so that more enabling power relations can be generated.     

Blinded by the sun: The role of prosumers as niche actors in incumbent firms’ adoption of solar power during sustainability transitions

While extant research discusses how niche innovations develop in protected market niches and trigger regime shifts along sustainability transition pathways, we know less about the direct role of different niche actors as competitors in affecting regime incumbents’ investments in niche innovations. This study addresses this gap and builds on Strategic Niche Management and the Multi-level Perspective to distinguish two different niche actors: prosumers on the demand-side applying a niche innovation in a disruptive way to regime incumbents’ business model, and new entrants on the supply-side applying the niche innovation symbiotically with the regime. We examine incumbent responses to these different niche actors in different competitive and policy environments. Studying the United States’ electricity industry's sustainability transition toward solar from 2010-2017, we find that as more niche actors enter, regime incumbents are more likely to invest in the niche innovation, but the effect is influenced by policy and competitiveness of the environment. In competitive environments, incumbents are more likely to respond to disruptive niche actors (prosumers), while in traditional monopoly-like markets they are more likely to respond to symbiotic niche actors. We also find that the prosumer effect is stronger when the time that policies in support of the niche innovation have existed is shorter, indicating a potential substituting relationship of niche actors and policy. Our work contributes to the extant literature by demonstrating that the interplay between different niche actors needs to be understood within the context of policy, and that considering policy without accounting for the competitive environment may omit an important aspect of how regime actors become active participants in sustainability transitions.     

An examination of teacher–student interactions in inclusive classrooms: teacher interviews and classroom observations

Teacher–student interactions in 17 inclusive classrooms were examined using a mixed‐methods approach that involved quantitative analysis of interactions recorded during classroom observations and follow‐up interviews with seven general educators. Observational findings suggest that classrooms were organised along traditional lines with the vast majority of interactions provided by general educators to the whole class, followed by brief intervals of 1 : 1 interactions directed towards individual students, most frequently children with disabilities. Interview findings suggest that teachers were aware of the greater individual attention devoted to students with disabilities and described a number of ways that they adapt their instruction that are consistent with the research on effective teaching. In addition, participants struggled with the dilemma of balancing their attention between students whom they perceived as needing it most and ensuring that the class as a whole made adequate progress. The analysis of both observational and interview data indicates that paraprofessionals were responsible for a large portion of instruction and curricular decision making for children with severe disabilities in these classrooms.     

Higher education privatisation,internationalisation and marketisation: Singaporean versus Malaysian models of Asian education hub policy

The metaphor of an ‘education hub’ was initially promoted as also a policy concept for reversing cross-border student flows to the West in both Malaysia and Singapore. The Singapore version of ‘Asian education hub policy’ represents a distinct economic policy model of higher education which has since also influenced the very Western contexts it was derived from. However, it appears the Singaporeans might have actually borrowed the policy concept from the Malaysians whose aspirations to reverse international student flows to the West was rather aligned to related national capacity development plans as still something of a public good. This paper will use a Malaysia-Singapore contrast to compare distinct developing country (national/regional) vs. developed country (globalised) conceptions of the Asian education hub model. On this exemplary basis, it will also outline an integrated framework to better make sense of the related yet also often conflicting imperatives of privatization, internationalization and marketization.