1,720,967 research outputs found
Demystifying the Academic Promotion Process
No full textAcademic promotion doesn't come easy: a successful application requires you to demonstrate continued growth in every area of your role as a researcher, educator and member of the academic community. Furthermore, the detail of the promotions process varies from one country to another and even from one institution to another. So where does an ambitious academic start?
Achieving Academic Promotion demystifies the process by bringing together international perspectives - both personal accounts and reflections on the structures and processes of promotion in different contexts - to help you understand the steps you can take at any stage of your career to move up the ladder. Featuring compelling and encouraging personal stories of success, as well as practical tips and takeaways, this timely book is essential reading for the academic who wants to be promotion-ready
Lifelong learning — national policy or global discourse? The provision of career education and guidance in New Zealand secondary schools
No full textFull Text is available to authenticated members of The University of Auckland only.Much of the popular and political debate surrounding career education – and education more generally – has focused on the need for a broad-based approach to learning, which develops resilience, creativity and adaptability, within a lifelong learning framework. This thesis seeks to answer the question, how is lifelong learning framed in the career documents and the broader curriculum; and what are the implications of this framing for the provision of career education and guidance? This question is not only an important one to ask since career education and guidance can play an important part in addressing inequalities, but a timely one given the current educational review. Career education and guidance provision and discourses of lifelong learning, within New Zealand secondary schools, are also areas that are under-researched. Working within a critical theoretical framework this study is interested in not only identifying and describing the discourse of lifelong learning in the career and curriculum documents under review, but challenging its interpretation, and the taken-for-granted understandings that underpin this discourse. The New Zealand Curriculum (MoE, 2007), Career Education and Guidance in New Zealand Schools (2009) and the Secondary Career Development Benchmarks (2016) are analysed using Critical Discourse and content analysis. Through this analysis, it becomes clear that there has been a rescaling of local and national interests within global discourses. While career education and guidance policy is presented as aligning with national interests, these interests are framed within global (neoliberal) discourses, with the responsibility (accountability) for outcomes lying at the local level. The implications of this framing of lifelong learning, for the provision of career education and guidance, and the students it is said to benefit, are significant. It is, therefore, critical to explore how career education and guidance might become a site of, or vehicle for, change
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Young children’s creativity in dramatic play in the diverse context of Aotearoa New Zealand
No full textThe topic of creativity has been of interest to researchers throughout time. Yet issues regarding the definition, genesis, assessment, and influential factors of creativity remain varied and controversial. Diverse experiences have been considered as one of the factors that has an influence on creativity. Although creativity in early childhood education [ECE] is perceived to be a widely recognised concept, few studies that relate directly to the influences which give rise to the genesis of children’s creativity have been done in this field. This thesis explores the influence of diverse experiences on creativity as it pertains to children’s everyday encounters with their environment, people and materials through investigating young children’s engagement in dramatic play in early childhood settings. Diverse experiences contain a variety of aspects, including the social and cultural context of the educational environment, the teachers’ background and ethos, as well as the materials provided in the physical settings. This research investigates how diverse experiences support the generation of young children’s creativity as interpreted through their engagement in dramatic play, and what a learning environment might look like where young children’s creativity is valued and encouraged. A sociocultural theoretical framework is selected to shift the location of creativity from the individual to the contextual factors such as interactions between self and others, and new and existing artefacts.
The focus of this research is addressed through observations of children from two ECE settings in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. An understanding of the context of the children’s participation in dramatic play is supported through interviews with the parents and teachers. The conceptualisation of creativity in this research primarily draws on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of creativity. To reflect the nature of free play in New Zealand’s ECE settings, young children’s creativity was investigated through child-led dramatic play. Based on a sociocultural framework of distributed creativity, children’s creativity in dramatic play was described as generated and enacted in relation to the sociocultural context through interactions with peers and adults, and with play materials and cultural artefacts. This thesis presents a rich description of children’s creativity through dramatic play that critically illustrates how young children’s creativity is influenced by the diverse experiences in their daily encounters with people, places, and things. This study also provides an insight into the ways teachers and parents create supportive early childhood environments for creativity to be cultivated, while taking into consideration the diverse experiences children may bring to their dramatic play. This opens up the possibility for further studies in other art forms such as visual arts, music, and dance, to provide empirical evidence about planning, assessment, and pedagogical practices that contribute to enhancing an understanding of children’s creativity as it pertains to the diverse experiences children encounter in their everyday lives
Charting Futures: Local Parents’ Lived Experiences of Choosing Chinese Internationalised High Schools
No full textIn recent decades, international secondary education has gained momentum across China. As of 2023, the number of international schools in mainland China had reached 970. Although there is a growing body of research on Chinese students’ choice of international education at the tertiary level, studies examining Chinese parents’ decision-making experiences in the secondary school sector remain limited.
This study explores a relatively new field – that of Chinese internationalised high schools (CIHS). Adopting a qualitative, phenomenological approach and guided by the theoretical framework of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), my research provides a richly detailed account of how 15 Chinese parents from non-Tier-1 cities in mainland China navigated the process of selecting an internationalised high school for their child. Data were collected through semistructured interviews, where the parents were encouraged to share their personal experiences and subjective perceptions freely. Through interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), the data were analysed to reveal deeper insights into the parents’ lived realities.
By interpreting parents’ conscious choices of international schools, the study found that their preference for CIHS was deeply rooted in the cultural and historical contexts. Specifically, parents’ attitudes and considerations were profoundly influenced by their social networks and their own child’s voice during the decision-making process. Moreover, the parents’ pursuit of CIHS was undeniably a strategic plot to sidestep neijuan (involution) and optimise benefits that international education can offer for their child’s future success. In terms of selection criteria, academic considerations were paramount, with parents focusing on factors such as the perceived quality of teaching staff, the school’s past university admission rates, and the composition of the student cohort.
The findings of this research can augment the body of knowledge about CIHS selection and inform policymakers to better understand the complex phenomenon of parents opting to send their child to these institutions
The Self in Struggle: Indonesian Secondary School Teachers’ Multiplicity of Voices amidst Competing Discourses of Tolerance
No full textThe issue of tolerance has a long history as a contentious topic in Indonesian educational policy.
The emergence of religious, ethnic-based conflict and violence in several regions in the last two
decades has raised some questions about Indonesia’s identity as a moderate and tolerant
society. Amidst the increasing incidents of intolerance, the civil society movement called for the
nation to revive local wisdom and values of tolerance as catalysts for the unity of Indonesia’s
multicultural society. In response to the call, the government re-introduced character or moral
education into the school curriculum at primary and secondary levels to promote local wisdom
and the values of tolerance – perceived to be on a declining trend in society. The policy was met
with skepticism at best, as the inclusion and exclusion of character education have become the
norm over the years under different national leadership. Educational practitioners and scholars
have critiqued the limited hours dedicated to the teaching and development of students' soft
skills as an indication of the government’s lack of seriousness in addressing character education
vis-à-vis tolerance. Understanding the essence of tolerance, as perceived and experienced by
teachers, I argue, would help formulate a policy that resonates with the true colour of realities
in the local context.
This research employs Ricoeur’s phenomenological approach within the qualitative research
paradigm to examine tolerance as individually experienced and narrated by the teacher
participants. Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, particularly his theoretical constructs of double-voicedness, ideologically becoming, agency, and heteroglossia are used to analyse the data.
Ricoeur’s three levels of analysis complement the use of Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism to
provide a more robust analysis. Research findings identified participants’ varied views and
perceptions of tolerance. They drew on a repertoire of local wisdom and personal experience to
echo their aspirations and views of tolerance, rendering their voice heteroglossic as understood
within Bakhtin’s framework. The findings attest to the participants’ internal struggles in the
process of ideologically becoming as they attempt to appropriate different competing
discourses of tolerance. This research makes three contributions to the field of moral education.
First, I propose Javanese local wisdom, “tepo sliro”, as the most genuine conception of
tolerance as it transcends the superficiality of the practice of tolerance, one that is anchored in
the consideration of the feelings of others as the most subtle aspect of human beings.
Methodologically, my research makes useful contributions to research in the humanities and
social studies regarding how we can better understand the essence of human experience and its
idiosyncrasies in an increasingly complex world so as to allow for multiple perspective-taking.
Lastly, it is highly recommended that the use of phenomenological research be integrated into
educational policy-making processes which consider local contexts so as to promote higher
levels of programme participation and ownership
Teaching Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories: Teacher Sensemaking of a Policy Implementation
No full textThe Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories curriculum is a recent policy change that requires students from Years 0 to 10 to develop conceptual understandings and knowledge of New Zealand’s multiple histories. The implementation of this policy change for primary, intermediate, and secondary schools began in 2023. The concepts of transformative learning and localised curriculum featured prominently in this new curriculum, and in the subsequent materials that have been published to support this policy change. This thesis examines secondary school teachers’ experiences of implementing this policy change, making an important contribution to the limited research of teacher and student engagement with New Zealand’s contested past. This interpretivist mixed methods study analyses data from a quantitative survey and five qualitative case study interviews to develop understandings of the factors that are enabling and challenging teachers in this policy change. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model and subsequent adaptations of his work in educational change policy scholarship form the theoretical framework of this research. In this study I adapt Bronfenbrenner’s model further within the context of this curriculum policy change. Descriptive analysis of the quantitative data and thematic analysis of the qualitative data reveal the contested nature of this policy change. Study findings indicate that while most teachers have made sense of the ANZH and support the reasons for the policy change, they are grappling more with the ‘how’ of implementation. Additionally, this study finds that the school and community environments in which this policy change is being implemented have a substantial influence on the successes and challenges of the implementation of this policy change, especially the requirement to build a localised curriculum. This thesis provides a foundation of knowledge of policy change factors that signals the need for further support mechanisms for teachers in order to meet the intended transformative goals of Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories curriculum. This thesis makes an important contribution by providing tools to assist middle and senior school leadership to reflect on their implementation of this policy change, and identify practical steps they could take to further realise the transformational goals of the Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories curriculum
A call to action: Challenging a fragmented university commitment to Pasifika equity
No full textPasifika peoples are largely underserved and under-represented in higher education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Many reports and strategies have been published by the New Zealand Government through the Ministry of Education and the Tertiary Education commission to support equity provision for Pasifika students in the form of participation and achievement. However, recent critical research studies have revealed that deficit theorising is commonly applied to explain disparities and informs the motivation for governmental and institutional pursuits for equity and success. This research identifies some of the systemic barriers experienced by Pasifika students seeking to gain entry into higher education and explores the role that economic, social and political complexities play in university bridging programmes. Analysis illuminates how student’s experiences in university bridging programmes are reflective of fragmented university equity policy and practices.
Talanoa (Vaioleti, 2006) was utilized for this research, drawing on a narrative inquiry developed from Pacific people’s oratory tradition to engage with eight current Pasifika students who accessed equity services and transitioned into degree level studies at the University of Auckland. Group and individual talanoa were imperative in identifying meaningful insights into student’s experiences with equity. Results reveal irreconcilable differences between Indigenous ways of being and knowing and the ideologies, policies and practices of a higher education institution informed by neo-liberal and colonial foundations. The results indicate that motivation for engaging with Pasifika students must come from a strengths-based response valuing Indigenous knowledges and honouring cultural onto-epistemology (practices of knowing-in-being). Pasifika students’ experiences in higher education highlight the urgent need for universities to overturn current systemic policies and practices that exclude Pasifika peoples and demonstrate a consolidated commitment to equity university wide
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