Information literacy in South-East Europe: Formulating strategic initiatives,making reforms and introducing best practices

South-East Europe (SEE) is one of the geographic regions in the world which is lagging behind positive global Information Literacy (IL) developments. An informed, authoritative and enlightened understanding of the state of Information Literacy conceptual understanding and best practices across the region was recently provided by two important UNESCO co-sponsored workshops that addressed specific IL challenges in this part of Europe. The first meeting, the Workshop on Information Literacy Initiatives for Central and South-East European Countries, co-organized by UNESCO, with the support of the CEI (Central European Initiatives, an arm of the EU), took place in 2006 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The second, also co-organized by UNESCO, was held in Ankara, Turkey, as a part of a series of eleven Training-the-Trainers in Information Literacy («TTT») workshops that covered all regions of the world. This paper will review and analyse some of the main policy agreements reached by the participants at these meetings, as well as best practices shared by the participants at the two workshops, and discuss remaining Information Literacy advocacy and promotional barriers. The authors will endeavour to identify region-specific barriers to IL in the SEE region and, based on the aforementioned Ankara and Ljubljana workshop outcomes, define focal points for future local and regional IL events, meetings and other initiatives that could and should be taken.     

Voices of university students with disabilities: inclusive education on the tertiary level – a reality or a distant dream?

Twenty-four university students with disabilities were interviewed about their experiences studying at Czech universities. The interviews were analysed using the grounded theory approach. The most commonly experienced barriers faced by these students were institutional barriers, attitudinal barriers, and disability-specific barriers. The types of support mentioned by the students included family support, peer support, and support provided by assistants. The participants also shared strategies they used to deal with the barriers they faced. These were assertiveness, self-determination, metacognition, efforts to ‘fit in’, optimism, and career planning. The implications for policy and universities are discussed.     

Impediments to Partnership: A literature review of school‐university links

Partnership innovations between teacher educators on school and university sites have become ubiquitous. Calls for bridging the theory/practice gap have been answered with reappraisal and restructuring of programs. The literature on the rationale and implementation of a partnership approach has grown steadily since the early 1980s. Praise for measures that promote increased and meaningful interaction between the key players is now almost universal. Ironically, simultaneously, this documentation reveals the challenges as well as the promises of partnership. Clear impediments to the creation and nurturing of partnership have emerged. This paper takes as its principal focus an exploration of the literature that examines the range of barriers encountered by teachers of future teachers.     

Testing Inequality Constrained Hypotheses in SEM Models

Researchers often have expectations that can be expressed in the form of inequality constraints among the parameters of a structural equation model. It is currently not possible to test these so-called informative hypotheses in structural equation modeling software. We offer a solution to this problem using Mplus. The hypotheses are evaluated using plug-in p values with a calibrated alpha level. The method is introduced and its utility is illustrated by means of an example.     

Changing academic identities in changing academic workplaces: learning from academics’ everyday professional writing practices

In this article we examine issues of academic identity through the lens of academics’ everyday workplace writing, offering a complementary perspective to those already evident in the higher education research literature. Motivated by an interest in the relationship between routine writing and aspects of professional practice, we draw on data from interviews with 30 academics across three different universities. Our discussion is illustrated with excerpts from interview data, and is organised around three emerging themes: ‘reconstructing academic identities in a shifting academic workplace’, ‘considering new articulations of disciplinarity’, and ‘moving on from the golden age’. We conclude that the reconstruction of academic identities, through engagement with established and emerging workplace documents, may well be enabling academics to build new identities within the changing university.     

Twiplomacy in the age of Donald Trump: Is the diplomatic code changing?

This study employs digital methods in conjunction with traditional content and discourse analyses to explore how the US President Donald Trump conducts diplomacy on Twitter and how, if at all, diplomatic entities around the world engage in diplomatic exchanges with him. The results confirm speculations that Trump’s diplomatic communication on Twitter disrupts traditional codes of diplomatic language but show little evidence that new codes of diplomatic interactions on social media are being constructed, given that other diplomatic entities around the world mostly remain within the confines of traditional notions of diplomacy in (not) communicating with Trump on Twitter.     

Towards new learning environments—Collective civic actions as learning interventions in post-Communist Belgrade

This article focuses on the social dimension of well-being, based on a critical analysis of the way it is conceptualised in late capitalism: As the dimensions of individual state of mind and body, something that evolves in the individual realm, stressing personal responsibility and achievement of well-being as a solitary act. Then, the contemporary conceptualisation and approaches to policy making for well-being are compared with the policy of adult and youth education and learning. The perspective of a strong individual orientation, detachment from the social, community and collective aspects and efforts seem to be a common denominator. Agency is considered not only as a possibility for individuals to create and change the environment, but also as a process of active co-construction of social reality. This includes (re)connection with a community, very often through new ways of community learning, civic actions and civic activities. An analysis of how these perspectives converge in civic interventions in urban areas of Belgrade places togetherness at the core of the broader approach to well-being and learning. This article presents several examples of civic activities in urban spaces whose learning character is interpreted within the concept of public pedagogy. The examples presented prevail in the post-Communist countries because public spaces as zones of civic interventions can oppose the controlling authority and through the fight for human and civil rights represent the bottom line of togetherness and collective agency. Learning through collective civic actions thus provides new ways of understanding well-being.