Translating strategy,values and identities in higher education: the case of multi-campus systems

Tertiary Education and Management -     

Mr. Chips Meets Capitalism:ProfScam's Attack on the Professoriate

The author argues that whileProfscam, by Charles Sykes, is seriously flawed, the book presents a forceful attack on the professoriate. Sykes is successful in raising questions about the modern university that are difficult to answer.     

Personal Autonomy of Scuba Diver Trainees

Abstract

An investigation of personal autonomy levels as measured by the Pensacola Z scale was conducted on 147 scuba diving trainees at the University of California at Los Angeles. The study was part of an effort to develop insight into selection and training procedures for reliable underwater workers. Findings revealed that diver trainees described themselves as individualistically as did groups of astronauts and Antarctic scientists, but their Z-scale scores were not significantly different from other campus groups. Further, the Z-scale did not significantly differentiate between successful trainees and dropouts in the course. A weak relationship was found between the Z-scale score and scuba diving performance during pool testing. It was concluded that the qualities measured by the Z-scale test may be more important to the future diving careers of the subjects than to their selection and training.     

Future Economic Realities for Libraries: A Lesson in Current Events

This article focuses on three current events for learning about what is possible in library policy. The first is the run up in the price of fuel and food (“Too Expensive to Ignore”), the second is the cheapening of some kinds of communication (“Too Cheap to Matter”) and the hugely successful Obama for President Campaign that used the Internet to develop a new way of successful mass fund raising, voter activation and building grass roots support. The author explores the implications of these changes to interpret ALA's late October 2008 request for $100 million in federal funding as the antithesis of successful constituency development for public libraries.     

A Viable Future for Small and Rural Libraries

This document uses the issues and the findings of the 2008 national Summit on Rural and Small Libraries to introduce the two documents that follow this brief article. These reports mark efforts by librarians in the states of Delaware and Tennessee to deal with the issues—finances, staffing, training and what users want—that they see as imperative to solve to move their state's libraries forward. These three documents offer a convenient summary of the pressures that rural and small libraries are facing at the beginning of the 21st century.     

Partnerships in Social Work Education

Historically, society has associated a visit from a child protection worker with the removal of children. In Canada in the 1960s, Aboriginal children were removed from their communities in alarming numbers and were referred to as the “sixties scoop.” This may in part explain the difficulty in recruiting Aboriginal social workers into child welfare practice. This reality prompted the development of a post–bachelor degree certificate aimed at increasing the number of Aboriginal child welfare social workers in northern British Columbia. The results discussed in this article stem from three certificate cohorts and highlight the development of new partnerships and students’ experiences. Two years following the completion of the third cohort, nearly 80% of the students recruited were still employed in the North.     

Developing an interpretive learning framework for understanding action research projects

In contemporary educational settings, school leaders and teachers face increased accountability and pressure to raise student performance. Utilising professional learning to develop individual and collective capability is a common feature of these settings. In Australia, there is evidence that many schools have implemented action research to support the improvement agenda. A significant part of this agenda is providing evidence of outcomes arising from the action cycles. Indicators of progress and outcomes provide evidence of improvement to external audiences and afford insights and feedback for participants, which assist in developing further plans to address improvement. This paper outlines the development and use of an interpretive learning framework, incorporating a two-part reflection tool, developed to assess the quality of action research projects conducted by teacher researchers in schools. To do this, individual school case accounts were initially developed from analysis of action project data. A thematic analysis was then undertaken and the emergent themes, together with pertinent action research literature, informed the basis of the tool and its two integrated elements: an innovation matrix and rubric. Both elements permit understanding of project strengths and areas for further development within individual projects.