‘Oh you must be very clever!’ High‐achieving women,professional power and the ongoing negotiation of workplace identity

This paper uses a gender perspective to problematise the connection between high educational achievement and a fulfilling professional career. Drawing data from an Australian study of women working as professional engineers in a range of locations, the paper investigates the ways in which the identities produced in the women’s educational experiences require further negotiation in dealing with the realities of their divergent workplaces. Through a deconstruction of the power relationships that form a key feature of the women’s reported workplace experience, the women are shown to engage in a range of tactics in the effort to achieve a degree of workplace acceptance and some professional recognition. The paper concludes by urging renewed attention to changing engineering education and workplace culture if the profession is to attract and retain able women.     

Attributional (explanatory) thinking about failure in new achievement settings

Attributional (explanatory) thinking involves the appraisal of factors that contribute to performance and is instrumental to motivation and goal striving. Little is understood, however, concerning attributional thinking when multiple causes are involved in the transition to new achievement settings. Our study examined such complex attributional thinking in the transition from high school to university, a shift from familiar to novel learning environments, in the context of Weiner’s attribution theory (1972, 1985, 1995, 2006). At the start of the academic year, students rated the extent to which each of six common attributions contributed to poor performance to ascertain their relative importance to each other. A fixed order of attributions was reported as contributing to poor performance that was identical across five independent cohorts of first-year students (effort, test difficulty, strategy, professor quality, ability, luck, respectively). Cluster analysis revealed that students differed in combining these attributions into clusters suggesting diminished or enhanced control over poor performance. These differences in attribution clusters were associated with cognitive and affective outcomes at the start of Term 1, and with course grades and GPA at the end of Term 2. Student differences in complex attributional thinking are discussed in terms of transitions to new achievement settings.     

Working the Borderlands: working-class students constructing hybrid identities and asserting their place in higher education

Abstract

Through the case-study experiences of 24 White and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) working-class students from three very different universities, we aim to illuminate the often hidden struggle for recognition and respect for classed, ‘raced’ and gendered ways of being in the university. We discuss how the students perceive their identities in relation to their universities and their peers, and whether they feel the need to adapt and change their classed/’racialised’ identities in order to survive and progress or whether they resist any pressures and expectations to do so. We explore the tension between ‘assimilation and belonging’ and ‘betrayal and exclusion’ for White and BAME working-class students and consider the intersectional implications. We draw on the concept of hybridity to show the fluidity and fusions of transitioning and developing identities. The article also seeks to contribute further to the illumination of habitus as generative, through a process of hybridity.     

Higher education choices of secondary school graduates with a Science,Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) background

Recently, there has been an increase in the Higher Education (HE) options (in terms of both courses and institutions) available to students in the UK. Given that the choice of institution and field of study are crucial for students’ future careers, we investigated how attributes of the institutions and courses determine students’ choices, and how they interact with student characteristics. Data on graduates with a STEM background, who started a course in 2010/11 in an English HE institution, was analysed using a conditional logit model. The research demonstrated that an institution’s prestige, degree subject area and distance from home play an important role in students’ choices. Furthermore, distance from home to the HE institution is a potential barrier to fair access, as socio-economically deprived students may have less choice if they are not able to travel as far.     

Supervision as a reciprocal learning process

Within educational psychology, as in other professions, there is a pervasive view of supervision as a one‐way learning process, with knowledge and skills being passed from supervisor to supervisee in a linear fashion. It is proposed that we need to shift our perspective in order to acknowledge the rich learning opportunities for both participants involved. This view is illustrated by an analysis of the author's own learning gains while supervising an Educational Psychologist in Training. It is suggested that viewing supervision as a reciprocal learning process has potential benefits for supervisors, supervisees and the profession as a whole.     

Building trust and shared knowledge in communities of e-learning practice: collaborative leadership in the JISC eLISA and CAMEL lifelong learning projects

Trust and collective learning are useful features that are enabled by effective collaborative leadership of e‐learning projects across higher and further education (HE/FE) institutions promoting lifelong learning. These features contribute effectively to the development of design for learning in communities of e‐learning practice. For this, reflexivity, good leadership and the capacity to engage in innovation is crucial to team performance. This paper outlines a serendipitously useful combination of innovative models of collaboration emerging from two 2005–06 UK e‐learning pilots: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) e‐Learning Independent Study Award (eLISA) and JISC infoNet Collaborative Approaches to the Management of e‐Learning (CAMEL) projects. The JISC‐funded eLISA Distributed e‐Learning (DeL) project set up a collaborative partnership among teachers to try out LAMS and Moodle using study skills in e‐learning. Simultaneously, the JISC infoNet CAMEL project developed a model of collaborative approaches to e‐learning leadership and management across four UK HE/FE institutions. This paper proposes two new theoretical collaborative team leadership and operational models for e‐learning projects, including indices of trust, reflexivity and shared procedural knowledge, recommending that these models are further developed in future communities of e‐learning practice in institutions promoting lifelong learning.     

Hard to reach parents or hard to reach schools? A discussion of home—school relations,with particular reference to Bangladeshi and Pakistani parents

In the authors' research with Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage parents, some teachers, head teachers and other educational professionals referred to the South Asian parents as ‘hard to reach’. Whilst it was clear from the parents that they were not very, and in some cases not at all, involved in their children's schools and knew little about the education system or what their children were doing in school, it was also very apparent that the parents were not ‘difficult’, ‘obstructive’, or ‘indifferent’—the kind of behaviour ‘hard to reach’ implies. The article therefore considers that rather than parents being ‘hard to reach’, it is frequently the schools themselves that inhibit accessibility for certain parents. The authors challenge the cultural interference model, arguing that it is incorrect and pathologises parents. The article arises out of a two‐year, Economic and Social Research Council funded, qualitative study of Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage families and schools, in the north‐east of England.