1,721,046 research outputs found
Hard-to-assess research-impact nexuses in the humanities, arts, and social sciences
Full text linkThe chapter introduces the idea of ‘research-impact nexus’ and signposts some important areas of impact that are generative and valued within different communities across the arts, humanities and social sciences (HASS), but (may be) difficult to compress into the timeframes, contributory claims, and material evidence of benefit that are often associated with impact narratives ‘optimized’ for assessment purposes - such as those of the United Kingdom’s Research Excellence Framework (REF). The areas discussed in the chapter include: the critical, emancipatory, and subversive research-impact nexus; the discursive and conceptual research-impact nexus; the collective, reciprocal and deeply collaborative research-impact nexus; the creative, craft and design-based research-impact nexus; and the professionally-oriented and practice-based research-impact nexus. The chapter argues that, as research assessment is being reconsidered and reformed, it is important to reflect, not on ways to assimilate and domesticate hard-to-assess research-impact nexuses, but on how to recognise them as such and to draw on them to develop and sustain more responsible, caring and diverse cultures of research and impact
Map of the Handbook of Meta-Research
Full text linkThis chapter introduces each contribution contained within the Handbook of Meta-Research. The chapters in the handbook are organised into four sections which represent many of the key focus areas of past and current meta-research. These four sections include: Public value of research; Policy and governance of research; Knowledge dynamics; and Research cultures and careers. The chapter ends by stating the main objective of this Handbook, which is to facilitate discussions within the meta-research space towards a more inclusive and interdisciplinary production of knowledge that we can use to simultaneously produce valuable, high-quality research as well as enrich the understanding of the environment in which we work
Meta-research as discipline, field, or spectrum
Full text linkThis chapter examines the current state of meta-research. Specifically, we explore meta-research’s dynamic nature as a unique characteristic of an area of study that requires researchers to examine the practices, processes and norms within which their own work is situated. In addition, the interdisciplinary nature of meta-research presents epistemological tensions around notions of research quality, that also are an important area of study and of constant examination and debate for meta-researchers. This chapter examines the potential consequences of this diversity on the recognition of meta-research as a field or discipline. The chapter concludes with an acknowledgement that the field benefits from keeping disciplinary borders fluid as a way of encouraging and valuing interdisciplinary perspectives and experiences of meta research
The centrality of the state in the governing of higher education in South Korea: A critical discourse analysis
Full text linkThis thesis takes the critical incident of the suicide of a part-time lecturer in South Korea in 2010 and the subsequent policy response as paradigmatic of the problems of governing higher education. In terms of theoretical resources, it draws on state theories, especially a cultural approach to the state, in order to understand the multiple relations and the interplay of different layers of governing practices in the governing of higher education in South Korea. This thesis argues that mainstream theories of the state are often culturally 'blind' and that the specificities of the Korean state need to be understood with reference to its particular culture, history and context. The thesis also draws on literature on higher education governance, from which three governing principles are identified as topics for investigation, along with a process-oriented approach to professionalism. The research question emerging from this is 'how does the centrality of the Korean state play out in the governing of higher education in South Korea?' Methodologically, the enquiry is shaped by critical discourse analysis (CDA). This approach explores the ways in which higher education governing discourses are related to other social elements. By analysing policy texts and institutional characteristics, the first phase of the enquiry explores how the governing discourses have been indigenised, constructing particular state-academy relations in South Korea. The second phase scrutinises the case of part-time lecturer policy in order to illuminate the distinctive governing dynamics, by which the centrality of the Korean state is assumed to be practised
Expressions of global citizenship education in Chinese higher education
No full textGlobal Citizenship Education (GCE) focuses on cultivating in young people the inner aspirations and contextually situated behavioural orientations to contribute to a just and interdependent planetary civilization. Yet promotion of GCE’s grand and normative narratives of a ‘shared future’ can be critiqued as defined by a privileged few, dominated by Anglophone and Global North framings, and could also become enmeshed with political agendas of the state. The Chinese educational context presents a meaningful and curious site to explore the notion of GCE due to the context’s history, cultural symbols, civilizational dynamics, grassroots movements, societal relationships and philosophical underpinnings, embodied by different actors and artefacts in Chinese higher education. This context enables exploration of the rich possibilities of a culturally rooted GCE, attuned also to the country’s contemporary societal questions, as well as of the nationalism and patriotism potentially enmeshed in higher education’s compulsory political, ideological and moral education courses.
In this study, I explore the expression of GCE in Chinese higher education on non-compulsory topical courses at one university site, which was engaged in vibrant citizenship and moral education activity. I further investigate how teachers and students practice and understand GCE in these topical courses and their wider learning environments. Adopting a remote ethnographic approach to conduct the study, I enrolled as a ‘remote participant observer’ and ‘collaborative learner’ on two topical courses over a 6-month period at the University: ‘Citizenship Education’ and ‘Moral Education’. Through these courses, I gathered pedagogical artefacts including student and teacher PowerPoint presentations, syllabi, student drawings,photographs, screenshots of learning environments, ran participant mediated remote ethnographic tours, and conducted semi-structured interviews with 4 teachers and 9 students in order to unfold the different layers of meaning within their views on and practices of GCE.
Drawing on ethnographic descriptions and the complementary data, I developed four prevalent themes which enable a closer reading of GCE’s particular expression among a community of citizenship learners: encounter, embody, empower and enact. These four themes foreground the intellectual and social situatedness of GCE in the lives of teachers and students, the prevalent philosophers and philosophies encountered which inform their perspectives, and the creative, brave and innovative approaches teachers and students take in the classroom and their wider learning environments. Though ambiguities persist concerning GCE meanings in Chinese higher education, I found teachers and students committed to speaking on GCE related topics, drawing connections between its ideals and the wider societal forces they discerned in their lives. In articulating the rich descriptions of classroom practices as well as teachers’ and students’ understandings of GCE, I attempt to offer an empowered account of GCE’s rooted expression in a Chinese university, thus adding further cross-cultural depth to empirical scholarship of GCE
Christian postgraduates in England - Exploring religious identity and the university experience
Full text link63% of postgraduate students in England identify with a religion or belief (HESA, 2023a). There is a small but growing body of literature concerned with religious students, exploring the Christian undergraduate experience (Guest, Aune, et al., 2013), the role of chaplains (Aune et al., 2019, 2023), religious student societies (Aune et al., 2024; Perfect et al., 2019) and interfaith relations on campus (Peacock et al., 2023). These studies, however, focus on undergraduates, even though the number of postgraduates grew by 65% in the last decade to 30% of the student population (HESA, 2023b). Little is known about the postgraduate experience, or about religion as a protected characteristic in higher education (Wolbring & Nguyen, 2023). This mixed methods study focuses on Christian postgraduate students’ university experience as it pertains to their religious identity. The thesis employed a convergent parallel multiple case study design at three types of universities in England. Through thematic analysis of 48 semi-structured interviews and descriptive statistics of 165 survey responses I explore both the difficulties and the advantages of being a student of faith. Findings indicate that a lack of religious literacy can lead to stereotyping and exclusion of Christian students for their perceived value differences, resulting in faith concealment and invisibility, making a tentative empirical contribution to our understanding of the complexities of secularisation as it plays out on campus. Uniquely, this study also explored the potential benefits of faith and found that Christian postgraduates’ beliefs in a loving God are a source of meaning and purpose. Positive religious coping, their personal faith, practices and religious service attendance bolster Christian postgraduates’ mental health and flourishing. I argue that universities should develop religious EDI frameworks and should also utilise benefits of faith in student mental health provisions. Collaboration with churches and religious organisations can build bridges, enhance belonging and pastoral care. Ultimately, a general normalisation of religion within academia is needed in order for religious members to flourish
Possibilities of plurality: exploring the disciplinary, institutional and system level features of research culture in Indian higher education
Full text linkAs the third largest higher education system in the world, India is ambitious about improving its research performance and impact. However, achieving this vision is hindered by several challenges, including inadequate funding, challenges in governance and crucially, the need to foster a productive research culture. Both domestically and internationally, India’s research culture has been largely described as mediocre and disjointed.
However, culture as a concept has different orientations and tensions, ranging from the view that culture is everything, through to seeing culture in specific ecological and aesthetic terms. However, literature specific to research culture conceives of this concept through at least three distinct lenses. First, disciplinary research culture explores the norms of researchers within shared epistemological communities. Disciplinary research culture overlaps with, but is distinct from the second lens, that of research culture at the level of higher education institutions (HEI). HEI research culture emphasises values, attitudes, and behaviours towards research itself and is positioned as a lever through which to drive changes in research performance. Finally, research culture is also explored at the level of national and regional higher education systems. Here, research culture is expected to fulfil a broad range of ideals, including contributing to national economic and social development. Discourse in relation to research culture at the system level is closely linked with research ethics, regulation, policy, funding and values. It also considers the important role of regional and national identity as well as languages. This qualitative study seeks to identify the specific features of research culture within Indian higher education and considers the interaction between these features.
This study primarily uses semi-structured interviews with research-active staff, early career researchers, and research leaders across a range of Indian HEIs including public comprehensive universities, private higher education institutions and publicly funded national institutes of significance, across two regions in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. The study has traced the experiences of researchers working in biomedicine, computer science and historical studies, complementing these perspectives with fieldwork and interviews with expert informants at various levels of government and in policymaking contexts. Data analysis and interpretation has involved reflexive thematic analysis, drawing on participant insight to address the aims of the study.
The major findings of the study explore the similarities and differences in motivation, values and perspectives at the level of disciplines, HEIs, and regions. It considers practices including the flow of resources and the role of performance incentives, the relationship dynamics between the Indigenous and the global and the crucial role of languages in the shaping of research culture. Moreover, the study conceptualises research culture as a model that integrates the disciplinary, HEI and system lenses that is nested within India’s social relations. The study goes beyond comparative labels of culture as weak, strong, less or more and reflects a fuller diversity of values and practices.
In turn, a plurality of research culture imaginaries emerge that allow researchers to work towards parallel visions of success, institutions to nurture different types of research capability and systems to harness the diversity of research practices in the country. Drawing on participant data, the study asserts four such imaginaries: Technology Titans, Conflicted Comprehensives, Indigeneising India and Entrepreneurial Elites. Each has their distinct features and dynamics. The imagining of research culture as multiple is vital to India, where the diversity of traditions and knowledges means that research cultures are contending with many ambitions, all at once. This study will be of value to scholars and policymakers alike who wish to develop a rigorous and comprehensive understanding of research culture within Indian higher education
Young adults’ perspectives on their experiences of different types of placement in Romania
Full text linkThis study explores the childhood experiences and transitions to adulthood of 39 Romanian care leavers and adoptees, born around 1989 - 1990. In the past, Romania’s children in care became known to the world as 'the Romanian orphans' and some of them have been subjects to neurodevelopmental research studies focusing on the setbacks posed by institutionalisation in early life. This research project takes a different angle by: • Using life history approach and therefore capturing the participants’ in-depth accounts of how they recall their childhoods and the challenges they encountered in their transition to independent life; • Exploring four different types of placements and how they affect transition to independent life, from a user’s perspective. The fact that Romania undertook reform of the child protection system within the timespan of this generation of children provided a research opportunity to collect the users’ views on different types of placement that belonged to the unreformed system of the 1990s (large residential care and intercountry adoption) and the new types of placement (small group homes and foster care). For comparison purposes, I also included domestic adoption, a type of placement that was less controversial than the others at the time reforms were being introduced. Thus, the types of placement that are analysed through the research participants’ accounts are: • Residential care (institutions and small group homes) • Foster Care • Domestic Adoption • Intercountry adoption The study addressed two research questions: 1. How do Romanian born young people who grew up in care understand and narrate their experiences in different types of placement? 2. What narratives of agency are constructed by Romanian-born adults who grew up in different types of placement when they describe their transition to adulthood? By taking an interpretive stance, this study brings in the academic arena the voices of care leavers and adoptees. By using narrative analysis and focussing on the concept of dignity by employing identity theories, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Capabilities Approach, the study makes an important contribution to knowledge, with implications for further research, policy and practice. While interventions in child protection are influenced in each country by cultural, political and socio-legal factors, understanding the basic needs of children who are not raised by their birth families is important across different child protection systems. Therefore, the relevance of the research findings is not limited to Romania
The education experiences of eight American adolescents in cancer survivorship
Full text linkThe aim of this thesis is to understand the experiences of eight American high school students who have been diagnosed with cancer. By increasing understanding of the challenges that adolescents in cancer survivorship experience, better support can be identified. The experience of cancer survivorship influences the physical, psychological, and social experiences of patients. As the survival rate of childhood cancers continues to increase, death becomes less likely making the need to maintain educational engagement during survivorship increasingly important.
The research questions for this study were designed to address two main gaps in the current field of research. The first research question aims to address how the physical and psychological effects of cancer and treatment impact the participants' engagement with school. The second research question aims to understand the role that school plays for adolescents in cancer survivorship, including how participants experienced supplemental education during and after cancer treatment. This study uses a qualitative research methodology to address the research questions utilizing primarily semi-structured interviews and an adjusted version of the Adolescent Coping Scale. When used in combination with the interviews, the scale provides a picture of what the participants experienced and how they have been able to cope with the challenges they have faced. Interpretive phenomenological analysis was used to provide structure to the interview analysis.
The results of this study show that fatigue and a compromised immune system have an impact on school attendance more than other physical effects during cancer treatment. As a result, adolescents are most at-risk of experiencing challenges in educational engagement during treatment. The results of this study also show that the feeling of uncertainty throughout cancer survivorship promotes fear and the feeling of a loss of control. Once treatment ends, fear of relapse is common. Physical and psychological effects were felt to improve as time passed. Another key result of this study is that the cancer experience results in a shift in perspective that becomes incorporated into the formation of identity. Participants feel different from peers as a result of the physical and psychological effects of the cancer experience. The results from the Adolescent Coping Scale indicate that school achievement, relapse and the worsening of physical side effects, and being treated different by peers were common concerns for the participants regarding their school, illness, and social concerns, respectively.
Lastly, the participants view supplemental education as successful if it meets their personal academic and physical needs, is implemented consistently, and helps them to feel emotionally supported and socially connected. However, more research is needed that focuses on the implementation of policy at the state and district levels to discern whether this is a common challenge unique to this population of students with a physical or medical disability. The sample available for this research topic is not only limited to an extremely small population, but they are also a highly guarded population, making access for recruitment challenging. However, while generalization is difficult with a study of this size, the evidence collected on the participants' experiences during and after treatment provides valuable data on aspects of supplemental education implementation.
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How do care experienced adults who were also excluded from school make sense of belonging?
Full text linkThe voices of adults who have been in care as a child and were also excluded from school are almost absent in the academic literature about care, education and exclusion. More than that, children who are excluded from their home, in whatever way that has come about, and are also excluded from school face a double challenge in relation to making sense of the fundamental need to belong, that is, to feel safe, to feel accepted, to be connected and to have access to relational wealth. This research seeks to fill that gap in the literature and carve out further opportunities for research on the intersection of school exclusion and being in care as a child, from the lens of the adult that the child became. The research explores this group of adults’ accounts of their childhood experiences of exclusion, of what supported and hindered growth from these experiences, and of their sense of belonging. It also considers what it means to be asking these research questions while having shared lived experiences with the participants, and intends to support those working with children to use and engage with the knowledge of those who have lived through these experiences.
The methodological approach takes the view that knowledge acquired through lived experiences should be considered as more than simply ‘data’ and chooses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to build an understanding of what it is like to be an adult with both care and school exclusion experiences. IPA provides a clear framework for gathering knowledge from participants regarding their lived experiences and sense of belonging, and for a narrative, idiographic interpretation of participants’ sense-making of significant experiences, and of convergence and divergence in participants’ accounts. The ten participants self-identified as care-experienced and also as having been permanently excluded from an education setting. They were invited to take part in this research through contact made with two organisations, one working with adults who are care experienced, and the other working with care-experienced adults within and on the edge of the criminal justice system, alongside a request made via the author’s Twitter account. Ten participants submitted a biographical writing task and took part in individual semi-structured interviews.
The methodological rigour is demonstrated by close listening and attention to participants’ unfolding individual narratives (Personal Experiential Themes), a thorough analysis and interpretation with idiographic depth, and through attending to convergence and divergence across the different Personal Experiential Themes in order to build a coherent experiential account of the knowledge gathered across the group, as Group Experiential Themes.
Through the analysis of the knowledge shared by the participants, nine themes were identified: Movement, Trauma, Power, Stigma, Survival & Resilience, Relationships, Rejection of Stigma, Searching for Belonging, and Finding Belonging. The research findings call attention to the interrelationship between Movement, Trauma, Power and Stigma at the intersection of the experience of care and the experience of school exclusion. Then Survival & Resilience, Relationships and the Rejection of Stigma form the basis by which overcoming disadvantage is explored. Finally, Searching for Belonging and Finding Belonging demonstrate the strategies the participants employed in order to find belonging, regardless of how successful or not those strategies were.
Conclusions suggest that understanding our need to belong, and how belonging is cultivated, needs centralising into practice in education settings and in settings where children in care live. Challenging professional and societal stigmatisation of the experiences of being in care and of being excluded from school also needs active attention in order to reduce the self-stigma that can be carried into adulthood. Finally, strategies employed to find belonging often result in more abuses of power, further stigmatisation and often, system trauma. A deeper understanding of the lengths undertaken by those searching for belonging having experienced being in care and school exclusion could result in more compassionate responses to distress and a desire for settings, services and systems to work in ways that understand the impact of movement and then centralise the need to belong into practice, policy and legislation
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