1,720,997 research outputs found
The Covid-19 pandemic and the dissolution of the university campus: implications for student support practice
Get PDFPurpose: This paper problematises student support in higher education during the Covid-19 crisis and proposes an original approach of social network analysis for developing effective support for students from different socio-economic backgrounds. Design/methodology/approach: In this forward-thinking essay, the authors draw on theoretical ideas from Hannah Arendt in conceptualising the destructive and productive nature of societal crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. We also draw on literature on social network analysis in exploring student support. Findings: The authors propose a number of recommendations for university staff to consider when developing effective student support, ranging from nurturing their own professional capital to mapping student support networks and the role of faculty within these. Originality/value: This paper emphasises the importance of developing effective student support that works for students from different socio-economic backgrounds. This is essential to avoid regression in widening participation policies and practices, and to promote inclusive university environments
Student support as social network: exploring non-traditional student experiences of academic and wellbeing support during the Covid-19 pandemic
No full textThe Covid-19 pandemic has caused a global crisis in higher education, affecting all aspects of university work and practices. This article focuses on student experiences, in particular by problematising academic and wellbeing support available to non-traditional students. This article proposes an original approach to student support as comprising social networks that are dynamic, reciprocal and involving a variety of formal/informal actors. We draw on interviews with 10 non-traditional students from a UK university to explore the nature of their student support. Our findings suggest that support networks for non-traditional students tend to exclude formal support services and centre primarily around family (wellbeing support) and fellow students (academic/wellbeing support). While these findings problematise the lack of institutional support in student networks which is likely to further disadvantage these students, it questions the dominant deficit views of non-traditional students. In particular, the interviews highlight the resourcefulness of close interactions and emphasise the importance of approaching student support as a dynamic network of informal and formal actors when responding to crisis situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic
Student assessment in neoliberalised universities: issues of discipline and governmentality
Get PDFExtensive research has been done on learning-oriented assessment practices in higher education. Keywords such as formative assessment, peer-assessment and feedback dominate the scholarly discourses of assessment. This research, however, argues that not enough attention has been paid to the relationship between assessment policy, power in assessment and the effects of assessment policy and practice on academic and student subjectivities. This is particularly the case in neoliberalised universities where institutional policies are constantly reshaped and developed for the sake of quality assurance and accountability.
Guided by Michel Foucault’s work on discipline and governmentality, this doctoral research explores the ways in which assessment policies have been constructed in two European universities with different historical, political and social backgrounds: the University of Glasgow and Tallinn University. Furthermore, the study explores assessment as an institutional technology that can act on academics and students and shape their experience of their work and studies. In addition to policy analysis, the study involves interviews and focus groups with academics, graduate teaching assistants, students and assessment policy makers in both universities, as well as expert conversations with leading authors in the field. The analytic framework for the study is derived from Fairclough’s approach to discourse analysis. By exploring various discourses, the study traces the ways that assessment policies shape academics and students, and how they are negotiated and resisted by the participants.
The research findings demonstrate that assessment policy and practice draw on wider higher education policy discourses such as the discourses of neoliberalism. The study argues that student assessment is highly complex in neoliberalised universities: it not only operates as a disciplinary technology through which the assessor dominates over the assessed, but can become a neoliberal technology of government that relies on a high number of (ambiguous) regulations and self-governance of academics and students. The
issues of governmentality are particularly characteristic to a highly neoliberalised policy context in the University of Glasgow that shapes complex academic and student subjectivities. Both students and academics feel constrained and controlled in assessment processes, and they tend to accept rather than actively resist the institutional assessment policy and practice developments. However, some evidence of covert resistance was found. This can be conceptualised as a Foucauldian understanding of a subject who is not passively created through power relations but who has opportunities to create him/herself to some extent. As the study captured an early stage of neoliberalisation in Tallinn University, assessment can also be seen as operating, in this context, as a more traditional technology of discipline: little regulated, designed by academics and experienced by students as a subjective process. The findings demonstrate that a more traditional operation of assessment in Tallinn offers significant opportunities for individual pro-activeness and resistance, such as academics managing their practices and students manoeuvring within these practice contexts. These findings lead to the conclusion that assessment in higher education is not only an educational process but an institutional technology related to the issues of discipline and governmentality. Furthermore, they demonstrate that subjectification of academics and students through assessment policy and practice is complex and context-specific in which neoliberal policies tend to have a more constraining effect than that of the traditional understanding of assessment as the domain of the teacher
Mark Olssen on neoliberalisation of higher education and academic lives: An interview
Get PDFThis article is based on an interview conducted with Mark Olssen in October 2014, and the subsequent discussions. These conversations invited Olssen to reflect on his experiences of neoliberalism as a practising academic who has worked in the UK for some 14 years, and also to comment as a researcher and writer who is well known for his work on neoliberalism, especially in relation to higher education policy. While focusing on a question of how neoliberalism has changed the context in which academics work, following Olssen’s lead in his own research, in this interview he articulates a Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism that can be seen as a specific mode of government rooted in economic discourses of competition (Foucault, 2008). The accentuation of the competitive forces shaping higher education, linked in Britain to periodic audits such as the RAE and the REF, have become increasingly visible within higher education institutions through techniques, such as performance indicators and targets, the increasing role of non-academic managers, the adoption of line-management authority hierarchies, linked to strategic planning, quality assurance, annual appraisals and audits that now function as a regular part of university governance (Olssen and Peters, 2005) and which discipline the way academics ‘conduct their conduct’, in Foucault’s phrase. By drawing on various examples from Olssen’s experience, it is argued that academics in neoliberalised institutions have been seriously deprofessionalised, the sources of which must be traced to complex causes ‘in the whole network of the social’ (Foucault, 1982: 345). Although this complexity of power is increasingly constraining, it is also suggested that it still offers some opportunities for academic resistance. The summary of our conversations is presented in this article, aiming to address the ways in which neoliberalism has transformed academia. We argue that the replacement of traditional liberal collegial models of governance by neoliberal technologies has diminished the academic freedom and professional self-determination of academics within the university acting to the detriment of autonomous research endeavours and propelling an escalation of the ‘dark times’ so vividly depicted by Tamboukou (2012: 860). In general terms, the article contributes to wider scholarly debate on neoliberalisation of higher education and academic work.</p
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