The significance of materiality in shaping institutional habitus: exploring dynamics preceding school effects

This article examines the objective possibilities of Swedish schools to offer an equal and functional pedagogical practice for students’ acquisition of knowledge and skills. The data consist of policy documents, observations, and interviews with students, teachers, and head teachers in three educational settings distinguished by different social demographics. The focus allows for a comparative understanding of how tangible objects generate formations of schools as a relational phenomenon depending on geographic location and social background of students. The article indicates that the impact of materiality lies in its preceding power. It shapes the condition of institutions visualised in architecture, buildings, and the quality of and design of facilities and artefacts. From this material root emanates schools’ values, appeal, social status, and pedagogical organisations – school effects – that empower or weaken the school’s attraction and self-confidence. Different materialities influence each school’s institutional habitus, producing school effects with unequal educational outcomes.     

Upwardly mobile working-class adolescents: a biographical approach on habitus dislocation

Habitus dislocation is a much debatable term. By presenting life-histories of working-class adolescents, this article argues (i) that not all upwardly mobile working-class adolescents experience habitus dislocation and, (ii) that habitus dislocation has its roots in the self-initiated ruptures that face some of those who want to be upwardly mobile and who are trying to replace ‘second-nature’ dispositions with newly made schemes of action and with self-understandings disconnected from their childhood socialisation. It is not that social mobility produces habitus dislocation but that social mobility feeds and intensifies something that existed prior to their educational achievement. For this reason the authors consider that biographical method is an extremely powerful tool for grasping the way adolescents deal with the discontinuities created in their teen life-world experiences.     

Evaluating the impact of an academic teacher development program: practical realities of an evidence-based study

This study aimed to assess the impact of an entire academic teacher development programme at a Midwestern masters comprehensive university in the United States over a period of five years by examining changes in teaching and student outcomes of nine randomly selected programme participants. Researchers analysed syllabi, course evaluations, grade distributions, programme activity reports, interviews and vita, and concluded that the centre’s impact was greatest on tenure-track faculty who struggled with their teaching. Far more useful to future improvement, however, were the insights gained from reflection on study methods, the researchers’ emotional responses to their findings, their struggle to make sense of the data and grappling with the definition of ‘impact’. In this paper, the researchers share useful lessons learned and illustrate the difficulties inherent in evaluating academic development programmes, with a view to qualifying recommendations currently prevailing in the literature.     

Teachers’ perspective on institutional barriers to academic entrepreneurship – a case of Uttarakhand state,India

The study explores the institutional factors which influence the impact of education in building academic entrepreneurship in higher educational institutes of Uttarakhand state, India. In order to understand the institutional barriers, the author interviewed 68 senior-level educationists, who were working in the capacity of Director General, Professor, Head, or Director in three different universities or their affiliated institutions. Based on the qualitative data obtained from interviews, we identified five major and four minor factors which were influencing the impact of education in building academic entrepreneurship in the state. The major barriers identified were – poor entrepreneurial ecosystem, poor entrepreneurial orientation, and inclination of universities and institutes to prepare students for jobs, inadequate content of the subject, need for training of entrepreneurship faculty, or specialized entrepreneurship faculty and ineffective teaching methodology. The results so obtained were further reviewed and validated on the basis of past research. The study also takes into account the institutional problems in developing academic entrepreneurship in other developing countries and compares the results. The study will help policy-makers, teachers, and educational institutions to recognize the possible shortfalls in the education system, which eventually result in poor academic entrepreneurship. Suggestions for improvements are included.     

“Theorizing teacher mobility”: a critical review of literature

In this critical review of literature, we summarize the major theoretical frameworks that have been used to study teacher mobility. In total we identified 40 teacher mobility studies that met our inclusion criteria. We conclude that relatively few theoretical frameworks have been used to study teacher mobility and those that have been used are lacking in several key areas. Specifically, none of the current teacher mobility theories are able to adequately account for the many teacher- and school-level factors that likely influence teachers’ professional decisions. Finally, we suggest a theoretical framework from the organizational psychology literature that can address the shortcomings of theories identified in this review.     

Shaping global teacher identity in a short-term mobility programme

This article explores the shaping of Australian and Malaysian pre-service teachers’ possible selves in a short-term mobility programme. With the theory of possible selves, individuals imagine who they will become based on their past and current selves. The focus of the research was on pre-service teachers’ possible selves as global and culturally responsive teachers. The experiential learning through participation in the programme allowed participants to consider their future possible selves as teachers with a deeper understanding of diverse learners’ needs and how they might strive to address these needs in their own classrooms. The scaffolding of reflections in the programme encouraged the pre-service teachers to take on multiple perspectives, to step outside their comfort zones and in many ways to see the world from different eyes. The research found that through experiential learning in the short-term mobility programme both the Australian and Malaysian pre-service teachers gained in positioning their cultural selves currently and as future teachers, suggesting that there is merit in utilising the theory of possible selves in future research in the area of shaping teacher identity.     

Mobile self-fashioning and gendered risk: rethinking Chinese students’ motivations for overseas education

This article complicates dominant instrumentalist understandings of international student motivation by focusing on Chinese female tertiary students in Australia. Based on longitudinal fieldwork with 56 such students, it analyses motivations described by students and their parents in interviews, showing that these far exceed instrumentalism and engage tactics of both gendered risk management and cosmopolitan self-fashioning. Discussion of the gendered risks in post-socialist China that students seek to mitigate through study abroad illustrates the complexity of students’ motivations, and underlines the limitations of western European sociological theories of risk society which assume that gender inequality tends to decrease in late modernity.     

Stretching the academic harness: knowledge construction in the process of academic mobility in Chile

In this article, we analyse the impact of academic mobility on the construction of knowledge for Chilean scholars who have studied abroad. We conducted 41 semi-structured interviews with Chilean-born scholars in the social sciences and humanities, who accepted jobs at national research universities in Chile after receiving their doctorates abroad. Findings show that international academic mobility allowed these participants to question legitimised ways of doing knowledge, where they can stretch the academic harness that increasingly rules their knowledge construction. Our main argument is that knowledge construction process is neither linear nor unidimensional and it occurs as a rhizomatic process in a multidimensional space.     

西部大开发中关于制度的经济学分析

西部大开发中,要素投入和制度投入都具有重要作用。文章从制度的定义入手,应用博弈理论分析了制度的重要性,西部地区制度的滞后表现,并提出了西部地区实施制度创新的切入点。     

企业技术创新人员腐败:成因及对策研究

本文首先阐述企业技术创新人员发生腐败的可能性,以及这类腐败行为对企业技术创新活动产生的X效率影响。其次在评述与组织腐败相关研究文献的基础上,本文按照对人类行为由表及里的认识逻辑,从主观认知和制度缺陷两个维度入手,着重讨论推动技术创新人员实施腐败行为的动力因素,包括心理契约、资源稀缺以及制度的设计和应用。最后针对技术创新人腐败行为产生的成因,提出相应的预防对策。