Gender and Management in HEIs: Changing organisational and management structures

This paper reports on the second phase of a multi-country study examining cross cultural perspectives of gender and management in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). It examines the broader labour market context and legislative frameworks for higher education in each country and then analyses the literature on women in university management. The paper presents the findings of research with male and female senior managers about their perceptions of women as HEI managers within changing organisational and management structures. It concludes that although HEI’s are now largely aware of barriers to women getting into and on in senior management, they have not addressed the organisational structures and cultures that perpetuate this inequity.

     

Social software: new opportunities for challenging social inequalities in learning?

Enthusiasts for new social software do not always acknowledge that belonging to e‐learning communities depends upon complex and often unresolved identity issues for learners. Drawing on the author’s previous research on belonging in social learning, the paper presents a theory of identity congruence in social learning and brings to the foreground the importance of identities which arise from expressions of gender, class, ethnicity, age, etc. in the social, operational and, in particular, the knowledge‐building aspects of learning. These three dimensions of identity congruence are used to evaluate the potential of new social software. While social software might encourage some learners to engage in social and operational identity work, there are disadvantages for others, and learner‐generated knowledge and e‐assessment practices can be divisive. Inclusive e‐learning depends upon pedagogies and assessments which enable learners to shift and transform identities, and not solely on widening the range of technologies available. Such caution should underpin future research.     

Should ‘ought’ be taught?

The argument in this paper is that teachers and other education professionals could benefit from the opportunity to develop ethical understanding, in addition to other aspects of professional knowledge. Having first discussed the nature of ethics, the first main section of the paper establishes the case in favour of including ethical education in the initial or ongoing professional learning of teachers. The case focuses particularly on showing the negative effects of the fashionable claim that ‘values are relative or subjective’ which I argue is a key source of confusion for teachers. In the final part of the paper I discuss some of the kinds of consideration about values and ethics that teachers might find useful.     

University teacher approaches to design and teaching and concepts of learning technologies

This study investigates the experience of teaching of 19 teachers who are teaching on university courses involving face-to-face and on-line learning. The teachers are asked about how they think about learning technologies and how they approach the design and teaching of their courses across these two contexts. Results show that there are qualitatively different ways of thinking about learning technologies that relate logically and positively to qualitatively different ways of designing and teaching using learning technologies. The results have implications for teachers and those interested in maximising the likelihood of learning for university students when teachers teach with learning technologies.     

Participation,financial support and the marginal student

This paper examines differences between the decision-making of marginal and nonmarginal students about participation in higher education (HE). We distinguish between two kinds of marginality: being ‘borderline’ on account of prior achievements in school and being ‘unsure’ after taking prior achievement into account. We identify a significant minority of students in their final year of schooling who are unsure about participation in higher education even though they have prior school achievements typical of entrants to HE. Being ‘unsure’ is found to be unrelated to socioeconomic background, but it is associated with significantly different attitudes towards the potential benefits and risks of participation, different levels of knowledge about financial support that is available and different approaches to information search about participation in HE.

Writing and Reading Subjects: Fixing and Unfixing Identity through Close Literary Practices

For a number of years, Rebecca Luce‐Kapler and Dennis Sumara have been investigating the ways in which literary practices of close reading can help change how we think and how we remember. They have also considered how such practices might help make us more critical of normative representations of remembered experience. More recently, they have been joined by Claire Robson, who works with and investigates memoir writing. In 2009, Robson and Sumara were joined by their six older lesbian research participants at a conference held at the University of British Columbia entitled ‘Queerly Canadian: Changing Narratives’. The six women performed extracts from memoirs they had written as part of the research data and joined the researchers in offering theories and insights about the writing processes in which the group had engaged. That presentation and this paper represent the evolution of a two‐year collaboration between these researchers and the six women, who are listed as co‐authors on both the presentation and this paper.     

Dual Pathways to Expression and Understanding: Canadian Coming-of-Age Graphic Novels

In this article, the authors examine three Canadian coming-of-age stories, written as graphic novels, and pay particular attention to how the images and print text come together in the telling of the narrative. This approach reinforces the notion that form and content cannot be separated in this medium. Drawing on examples from each of the graphic novels and the interviews with the graphic novelists who wrote them, the article explores the complexity of the coming-of-age theme in each graphic novel, as well as how print text and image converge to make meaning.     

Child effortful control,teacher–student relationships,and achievement in academically at-risk children: Additive and interactive effects

The joint contributions of child effortful control (using inhibitory control and task accuracy as behavioral indices) and positive teacher–student relationships at first grade on reading and mathematics achievement at second grade were examined in 761 children who were predominantly from low-income and ethnic minority backgrounds and assessed to be academically at-risk at entry to first grade. Analyses accounted for clustering effects, covariates, baselines of effortful control measures, and prior levels of achievement. Even with such conservative statistical controls, interactive effects were found for task accuracy and positive teacher–student relationships on future achievement. Results suggest that task accuracy served as a protective factor so that children with high task accuracy performed well academically despite not having positive teacher–student relationships. Further, positive teacher–student relationships served as a compensatory factor so that children with low task accuracy performed just as well as those with high task accuracy if they were paired with a positive and supportive teacher. Importantly, results indicate that the influence of positive teacher–student relationships on future achievement was most pronounced for students with low effortful control on tasks that require fine motor skills, accuracy, and attention-related skills. Study results have implications for narrowing achievement disparities for academically at-risk children.