Student voice and engagement: connecting through partnership

This paper draws on research conducted across an English higher education partnership to investigate the ways in which student voice was engaged in further education colleges offering university awards through partnership arrangements. Such collaborations are characterised by the marginal presence of higher education students in an environment that is dominated by further education structures, culture and practice. This provides challenges for both colleges and universities in developing higher education student identity and appropriate mechanisms of student engagement that comply with expectations within the higher education sector but also recognise the contextual situation of students within the college environment. It is argued that student partnership collaboration can be a positive driver in an increasingly marketised global environment, where student voice and feedback mechanisms are at the forefront of quality assessments and institutional reputation. An ideal types framework is suggested as a heuristic device for the evaluation of college strategies of engagement.     

Popular Illustration

Posterbooks, a roundup of seven paperback titles

Images of an Era: The American Poster, 1945-75 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975---$12.50, paper)

Harry Harrison's Mechanismo (London: Pierrot Publishing Ltd./Morgans Run, Danbury, N.H.: Reed Books (Addison House)

John Lewis' Typography: Design and Practice (New York: Taplinger, 1978---$17.50 with a paperback also apparently available)

W.R. Miller et al's Graphic Arts (Bloomington, Ind.: McNight Publishing Co. (distributed by Taplinger in New York), 1978--- $3.96/2.64)

Bill Gray's More Studio Tips for Artists and Graphic Designers (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1978---$4.95, paper)     

Race,Media, and the Cultivation of Concern

These reflections on critical communication and cultural studies of race draw on Bruno Latour's idea of ‘matters of concern’ to propose that scholars expand the focus of inquiry from empirical questions of veracity and accuracy in representations of race to concerns with how (and where) media gather and mobilize sentiments and affective investments that increasingly underwrite quotidian practices of racial inequality and racism in the post racial period.     

Collaborative Research in Scotland: a New Departure

A programme of collaborative research has been attempting to decentralize control over the process of research into Scottish education. Teachers and other practitioners have been involved in analysing data collected in surveys of Scottish school leavers, and stored in the Scottish Education Data Archive. Some of their analyses have been published in the Collaborative Research Newsletter. This paper briefly describes the programme, and summarizes some of the Newsletter articles in two areas of study: the secondary school curriculum, and the attitudes and experiences of non‐Certificate school leavers.     

Finding an identity and meeting a standard: connecting the conflicting in teacher induction

This article has the apparently contradictory aims of describing a discourse of new teachers that is at odds with the policy‐derived competence‐based discourse of the professional standard for teachers, and of also seeking to find some points of connection that may help start a dialogue between policy and research. The experience of new teachers is conceptualised as personal stories of identity formation with a clear emotional‐relational dimension and a sense of self and intrinsic purpose in which others, especially colleagues and children, are central – themes not visible in the standard. The empirical context is that of new teachers in Scotland but the argument is supported through a wider literature that extends beyond the traditional limits of teacher education, drawing on, for example, notions of self‐identity, pure relationship and ontological security in the work of Giddens. Whether a more constructive dialogue can begin depends partly on the extent to which the formal standard can be expected to capture the complex, personal nature of the beginner’s experience, and partly on the possibility of research identifying particular areas of competence, such as understanding difference, that connect in some way to the standard.     

AFRICAN AMERICAN ADMINISTRATORS' EXPERIENCES IN PREDOMINANTLY WHITE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

The purpose of this study was to better understand the experiences of African American administrators in predominantly white colleges and universities. In depth interviews were conducted with eight executive level administrators: six presidents and two associate vice chancellors. The interview process used a phenomenological approach focusing on the participants' interpretations and evaluations of their respective administrative careers. The participants were asked questions relative to their experiences which led them to predominantly white colleges and universities, their current administrative positions and responsibilities, and provided advice to African Americans seeking similar administrative positions.     

AN ETHICAL DECISION-MAKING MODEL: A NECESSARY TOOL FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGE PRESIDENTS AND BOARDS OF TRUSTEES

How can community college presidents and boards of trustees safely manage the ethical dilemmas they face as they lead their institutions into the future and important resources continue to diminish? And what happens when a board member violates the board's code of conduct or the president either fails to consult a professional ethics code or ignores it? This article considers such a scenario. Recognizing that ethical dilemmas are complex and involve emotional responses, this article presents a nonlinear, multidimensional ethical decision-making model that can help presidents and boards maneuver through difficult situations in an ethical manner. This decision-making model consists of six steps to guide presidents and boards as they consider the most ethical course of action for their college and the community. These steps include (a) identifying the ethical dilemma; (b) gathering facts, self-monitoring, and consulting; (c) asking important questions; (d) creating alternate courses of action; (e) evaluating alternatives by the ethics code, law, and moral motivation; and (f) implementing a course of action by moral follow-through and virtue ethics.