Supporting students' preparation for the viva: their pre-conceptions and implications for practice

In universities theories and concepts are created and used within a disciplinary context, and some understanding of this context is necessary if students fully are to make sense of their studies. Thus, we investigate computer scientists' perspectives on their discipline. Biglan characterises Computer Science as being hard, rather than soft and as being applied, rather than pure. Therefore, Computer Science is associated with the engineering disciplines. Although many computer scientists support this view, others see the discipline as being identified more properly with Mathematics and/or the sciences. We suggest some reasons for the difference of opinion and highlight the implications for what students might learn about the disciplinary context.     

About the Editor and Contributors

In the last decade ‘quality’ has assumed the status of one of the meta-discourses across many domains of public policy, including education. This paper focuses on the specific example of quality policy in Australian higher education of the 1990s, and in particular, on the micro level of quality policy practice as experienced by academic practitioners in 6 universities. As such, it forms a follow-up to an article published earlier in the Journal of Education Policy (Vidovich and Porter 1997) which examined macro (national) and intermediate (the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) levels of a quality policy cycle consisting of contexts of influence, policy text production and practice, as articulated by Ball and colleagues (Bowe, Ball and Gold 1992, Ball 1994). The findings of in-depth interviews with key university personnel provide evidence of the ‘messy’ realities of the policy process and considerable variation in quality policy practices at local sites, particularly in terms of the different historical contexts of universities which were categorized as ‘traditional’, ‘alternative’ and ‘former college’ types. However, despite such variation, the ‘bigger picture’ effect of the quality policy under investigation was to enhance Australian national Government control of higher education, albeit at a ‘distance’, characteristic of the culture of performativity increasingly pervading higher education across many OECD countries. A further effect was to increase inequalities, both between and within universities.     

Running into trouble: constructions of danger and risk in girls' access to outdoor space and physical activity

This paper considers girls' participation in running and other outdoor physical activities in their local areas in London, UK. The paper is concerned with the operation of risk discourses in and around this participation and looks at the way that such discourses impacted on girls' opportunities to take part in physical activities that required outdoor space. Drawing on data from longitudinal research into girls' participation in sport and physical activity, the findings suggested that girls, in particular, were subject to risk discourses around their participation in physical activities which constructed the girls as ‘weak’, and ‘vulnerable’. I look at the ways in which girls understood these messages and how they came to define certain spaces and activities as either ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’. I look in particular at how girls were able to resist certain constructions of their embodied physical capacities and also at the ways in which this was constrained by specific incidences of sexual harassment.