Hidden treasure: successful international doctoral students who found and harnessed the hidden curriculum

This paper draws from an institutionally-funded phenomenological study of international PhD students’ academic acculturation, which focuses on the distinctive strengths, challenges, and hidden opportunities facing this cohort within the context of their transition from one academic culture to another. The first section introduces the theoretical base employed in the study and is then followed by exploring the conceptualisations of the hidden curriculum and its associated concepts: ‘the third space’ and ‘darkness in higher education’. Drawing upon our study findings, the second section illustrates practical exemplars of finding and harnessing the hidden curriculum. Without discounting the wide range of formal and informal institutional support provisions designed to facilitate international PhD students’ acculturation to a new academic setting, our study findings strongly endorse that students themselves have a crucial role to play in their complex transitional journey. Our study also offers a unique insight, i.e. if found, the hidden curriculum is an effective tool not only for international PhD students’ coping and survival but even more importantly, in thriving in new societal and academic contexts.     

Students as epistemological agents: claiming life experience as real knowledge in health professional education

Higher Education - University teachers’ practices of resistance against dominant epistemological norms have been described in recent critical higher education literature, but comparatively...     

Collaborative research in contexts of inequality: the role of social reflexivity

This article reports on the role and value of social reflexivity in collaborative research in contexts of extreme inequality. Social reflexivity mediates the enablements and constraints generated by the internal and external contextual conditions impinging on the research collaboration. It fosters the ability of participants in a collaborative project to align their interests and collectively extend their agency towards a common purpose. It influences the productivity and quality of learning outcomes of the research collaboration. The article is written by fourteen members of a larger research team, which comprised 18 individuals working within the academic development environment in eight South African universities. The overarching research project investigated the participation of academics in professional development activities, and how contextual, i.e. structural and cultural, and agential conditions, influence this participation. For this sub-study on the experience of the collaboration by fourteen of the researchers, we wrote reflective pieces on our own experience of participating in the project towards the end of the third year of its duration. We discuss the structural and cultural conditions external to and internal to the project, and how the social reflexivity of the participants mediated these conditions. We conclude with the observation that policy injunctions and support from funding agencies for collaborative research, as well as support from participants’ home institutions are necessary for the flourishing of collaborative research, but that the commitment by individual participants to participate, learn and share, is also necessary.     

Lifting the flaps on information: purpose and play in non‐fiction texts

Books with flaps comprise a small, but recognisable sub‐genre of non‐fiction texts for children. Whilst they are popular with young readers, they sit unhappily within an educational discourse of non‐fiction that is dominated by notions of information retrieval and genre theory. This article considers the purpose and function of flaps in a number of texts and proposes that the best of these books provide pertinent lessons for readers about the nature of ‘information’, and about the playful nature of reading itself.     

Capturing visual metaphors and tales: innovative or elusive?*

Despite the exponential growth of visual research in the social sciences in the last three decades, continuing empirical enquiries are arguably more relevant than ever. Earlier research employed visual methods primarily to investigate distinct cultural practices, often seeking the views of marginalized, challenging or hard-to-reach participants. In this study, non-British postdoctoral academics took photographs that visually or symbolically represented the highlights of their academic acculturation experience as international PhD students in the UK. The semi-structured interviews of academic and non-academic related experiences that made a significant impression revolved around participants’ visual metaphors. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, a widely employed inductive qualitative technique, was utilized, with visual data complementing the narrative evidence. This innovative method both aesthetically and insightfully enhanced the representation of participants’ lived experiences and was instrumental in validating participants’ narratives. Additionally, this article examines the pragmatic utility of employing metaphors in a photo elicitation technique (also critically reflected upon by the participants who are academic researchers themselves). The paper therefore offers a collective reflection not only on the features and advantages of this approach, but also on the key challenges and some recommendations to inform contemporary visual methods practice.     

Empowering teachers: empowering children? How can researchers initiate and research empowerment?

The relationship between reading and empowerment, though often taken for granted, is complex. The paper describes a pilot research project, which sought to explore how teachers might change their practice in such a way as to empower the children in their care, rather than enculture them into the rather more passive and compliant practices of schooled literacy in the time of the National Literacy Strategy. The paper particularly explores the challenge of methodology: a project about empowerment needs emancipatory research methods. Can research empower, and can teachers, so dominated by the status quo, find the confidence to take on the responsibility that power confers? The paper describes the attempt to empower teachers and the researchers' attempt to gather evidence of that empowerment.     

Conceptualizations of Female Empowerment and Enjoyment of Sexualized Characters in Reality Television

This study explores how young women's definitions of empowerment relate to their reception of The Girls Next Door, a popular reality show that documents the life and fun times of Hugh Hefner's three sexy, live-in girlfriends. Specifically, we examine whether young women's general attraction to reality television relates to their endorsement of different views of women and empowerment, how these endorsements relate to the women's own sexual permissiveness, and finally how these views relate to perceptions of The Girls Next Door. Results suggest that reality television preferences relate to greater endorsement of sexual empowerment and traditional feminine roles. However, sexual permissiveness is elevated only when sexual empowerment is endorsed, and perceptions of the show appear to be most positive only when sexual permissiveness is elevated.     

‘It’s not fair’: policy discourses and students’ understandings of plagiarism in a New Zealand university

Plagiarism is a concept that is difficult to define. Although most higher education institutions have policies aimed at minimising and addressing student plagiarism, little research has examined the ways in which plagiarism is discursively constructed in university policy documents, or the connections and disconnections between institutional and student understandings of plagiarism in higher education. This article reports on a study that explored students’ understandings of plagiarism in relation to institutional plagiarism discourses at a New Zealand university. The qualitative study involved interviews with 21 undergraduate students, and analysis of University plagiarism policy documents. The University policy documents revealed moral and regulatory discourses. In the interviews, students predominantly drew on ethico-legal discourses, which reflected the discourses in the policy documents. However, the students also drew on (un)fairness discourses, confusion discourses, and, to a lesser extent, learning discourses. Notably, learning discourses were absent in the University policy. Our findings revealed tensions between the ways plagiarism was framed in institutional policy documents, and students’ understandings of plagiarism and academic writing. We suggest that, in order to support students’ acquisition of academic writing skills, plagiarism should be framed in relation to ‘learning to write’, rather than as a moral issue.