Academic Life Experience Research Articles

A NARRATIVE DISCOURSE OF A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY EXPERIENCE IN A CHINESE UNIVERSITY

In this paper, through a personal narrative discourse, I explore the influence and the contribution of my cross-cultural study experience in China on my development as a young researcher. Through the Chinese academic culture, I learned some best practices that I consider essential for the blossoming and development of a student. Nonetheless, I also face some challenges such as language problems, communication with teachers, and even with classmates. Despite the issue of language and cultural disparities that were significant upon my arrival, I have managed to adapt and learn from Chinese society, teachers, and students. Also, the challenges that I had to overcome were not comparable to the knowledge acquired, and the rich experience that I have accumulated throughout the years spent in China. Through this personal narrative discourse, the different metaphors used to depict our academic life experience in China can enable the reader to have a kind of educative outlook.

Academic Life Experiences of Early Career Female Academics during the Covid-19 Pandemic

This study aims to find out the academic life experiences of early career female academics during the Covid-19 pandemic in Turkey. The study group consisted of 13 female academics working from home with their spouses. The interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to analyze the data collected through semi-structured telephone interviews. The findings were clustered under two main themes: the life before the pandemic, and academic life during the pandemic. The main theme of academic life during the pandemic consisted of the following sub-themes: adaptation problem, withdrawal from academic life, excessive workload interfering academic productivity, and integration of academic life into family life. The results indicate that the pandemic has deepened gender inequalities, and the working life of early-career female academics has drastically changed in terms of academic productivity. Based on our findings, we recommend that quantitative research with large samples of early-career female academics should be conducted to develop nation-wide policies for gender inequality prevention. We also recommend that the professional development and career advancement of female academics in the early career stage should be compared with their male peers to reveal any gender-based disadvantages.

Conceptual Development of Online Psychological Assessment Training Design for Guidance and Counseling Teachers on the Academic Life of High School Students

Assessment activities in guidance and counselling are fundamental activities essential for students' self-understanding and became the need assessment for guidance and counselling programs. In this new normal era, students' academic life experiences turmoil that can trigger various problems. This study aims to develop online psychological assessment skills training for guidance and counselling teachers. The research method used is conceptual development research with the 4D development steps (Define Focus, Design and Development Focus, and Dissemination Focus). The study results explain (1) the model of online psychological assessment skills training procedure based on the reflective-discussion and experiential learning, and (2) the construct of online psychological assessment media based on the Google platform. Reflective-discussion activities and experiential learning provide direct experience in training to improve online psychological assessment skills. The multi-use of the various platform in google makes the online assessment structured and systematic so that it can provide confidentiality, analysis, and report processing automatically. The Google Platforms could be used for free, simple but give comprehensive integrations. The product still needs to be tested and validated practically of its effectiveness in improving the online psychological assessment skills of high school guidance and counselling teachers.

Guest Editorial: Professors in Canada: Experiences of Academic Life— A Special Issue

Professors in Canada: Experiences of Academic Life— A Special Issue

Contemplation and Organization Studies: Why contemplative activities are so crucial for our academic lives

Contemporary emphases on calculating the impact of our scholarship can be deadening if they lead us to refrain from contemplation. Thus, in this essay, I show the importance of contemplation and what contemplative dimensions of our scholarship might include. Based on four lines from the poem “Sometimes” by the poet Mary Oliver, I summarize ways that many activities carried out by organizational scholars embody Oliver’s “Instructions for living a life,” which consist solely of “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” My summary shows some of the range of contemplative activities within our field, as well as integral relationships between contemplation and compassion. I conclude by highlighting the importance of the roles such activities play in our experiences of academic life and in our developmental journeys as scholars.

Evaluation of psychometric properties of scales measuring student academic satisfaction: A Systematic review.

BACKGROUND:Student satisfaction has an impact on student motivation, recruitment of new students, and retention of existing students. Hence, it is important for researchers and academic institutes to assess student academic satisfaction by valid and reliable scales. The aim of this study was to rigorously assess methodological quality and psychometric properties of scales measuring student academic satisfaction.METHODS:In this systematic review, databases including Scopus, PubMed, ProQuest, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science, and two Persian databases were searched using relevant keywords such as academic satisfaction, student satisfaction, university satisfaction, campus satisfaction, academic life experience, validation, and psychometric and factor analysis from 1970 to December 2018. Considering eligibility criteria, studies were selected after titles and abstracts screening. The methodological quality assessment was performed by the COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) checklist and the Terwee quality criteria.RESULTS:Of 814 retrieved articles, 13 studies were included in the study. Based on the COSMIN checklist, structural validity (84%), content validity (53%), and hypothesis testing (53%) were the most reported properties. One study reported cross-cultural validity, one for criterion validity, and none reported measurement error.CONCLUSION:The results of our study showed that in spite of ≥48 years of development in student satisfaction scales; however, each scale has at least one “poor” psychometric property based on the COSMIN checklist. Quality appraisal of scales is necessary after developing and performing psychometric process.

Recollection-as-method in social welfare practice: dirty work, shame and resistance

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology for critical welfare practice research, “recollection-as-method”, and to use this to demonstrate the social relations of social welfare institutions.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyses a series of personal recollections from the author’s experiences of academic life and welfare work to establish a methodology for critical welfare practice research. This uses concepts memory, dirty work, shame and complicity, and is grounded in critical feminist and critical race work, and psychosocial and socio-cultural approaches to governance.FindingsThe paper establishes a methodology for critical welfare practice research by demonstrating the significance of using an ontologically driven approach to governance, to achieve a realistic and complex understanding of statutory welfare work.Research limitations/implicationsRecollections are post hoc narrations, written in the present day. The ethics and robustness of this approach are deliberated in the paper.Practical implicationsThe focus of the paper is on statutory welfare practice that involves the assessment and regulation of homeless people. Principles and arguments developed in this paper contribute to reflective and reflexive debates across “front-line” social welfare practice fields in and beyond homelessness. Examples include assessment of social groups such as unemployed people, refugees and asylum seekers. Arguments also have application for criminal justice settings such as for prison work.Social implicationsThis foregrounds practitioner ambivalence and resistance in order to theorise the social relations of social welfare institutions.Originality/valueThe recollection-as-method approach provides a methodology for critical practice research by demonstrating an alternative way to understand the realities of welfare work. It argues that understanding how resistance and complicity operate in less conscious and more structural ways is important for understanding the social relations of social welfare institutions and the role of good/bad feeling for these processes. This is important for understanding interventions required for anti-oppressive social change across the social worlds of policy-practice life.

Paying the piper: the costs and consequences of academic advancement

In many professions there are qualifications to gain and professional standards to achieve. Lawyers pass the bar and doctors pass their boards. In academic life the equivalent is a doctorate, closely followed by a profile of peer-reviewed publication. To hold a doctoral degree is the common requirement to become ‘academic’ but does it prepare individuals to advance in an academic career? In choosing the idiom ‘paying the piper’ (i.e. where one must pay the costs and accept the consequences of one's actions) we recognise that in seeking to develop our scholarly profiles we had to choose to adapt successfully to global workplace expectations, modify our professional aspirations or refuse to participate. In this paper we examine the challenges we faced as academics in physical education as we progressed from beginning to mid-career stages. We focus particularly on challenges related to seeking external research funding, exploring our assumptions about academic life and the perceived expectations that lie under the surface around research funding, teaching and service. Through the use of self-study we demonstrate how our perceptions of academic career progress meant paying personal and professional costs that we were largely (and perhaps naively) unaware of when we entered the academic workforce. Data consisted of Ashley’s reflective diaries generated over the past six years, which were analysed deductively based on an understanding of salient experiences of academic life, most notably, those related to the pursuit of funding and its relationship to academic advancement. Tim played the role of critical friend by asking probing questions, relating personal experiences to instances in Ashley's data, and offering alternative interpretations of Ashley's insights. By sharing our experiences we hope early career academics (ECAs) may relate to and learn from our naivety. In this way, there may be implications for the induction and mentoring of future ECAs.

A heterotopology of the academy: mapping assemblages as possibilised heterotopias

Heterotopias are counter-sites of enacted utopias through which reality is simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. They are physical or mental spaces where, although norms of behaviours are suspended, there are connections with a plethora of other spaces. This article constructs a collective biography as a heterotopology of the academy. Academic subjectivities are produced and often constrained within powerful Higher Education discourses. Constructing an affective assemblage of becomings as a heterotopology, the authors deploy poststructural philosophy to re-story academic life experiences and conceptualise agency in the academy. Taking licence with the notion of academicity and heterotopia, the article describes how spaces in the measured university can be deterritorialised through generative lines of flight. An affective assemblage is presented that ruptures the discursive orientation of category boundary work where academics are constituted as ‘productive metric-minded knowledge workers’. The collective biography research approach facilitates a mapping of affective cartographies as a heterotopology and a critique of the discursive production of selves. The subjectivations of identity politics in matricised assemblages may be, even if momentarily, evaded, refused and agentically resisted.

Transição e adaptação à universidade: apresentação de um questionário de vivências académicas (QVA)

Este artigo analisa o processo de transição e adaptação universidade e apresenta o Questionário de Vivências Académicas (QVA – Almeida & Ferreira, 1997). Este questionário, enquanto instrumento de despiste, conceptualiza o processo de transição e adaptação à universidade como um processo complexo onde, tanto as variáveis pessoais como as variáveis académicas e contextuais, interagem, afectando o modo como os estudantes se adaptam, realizam e desenvolvem na instituição do Ensino Superior em que estão inseridos. O QVA foi administrado a uma amostra de 1273 alunos a frequentar o primeiro ano de 41 licenciaturas da Universidade do Minho. Os resultados nas 17 subescalas que compõem o QVA, demonstram boas qualidades psicométricas, quer no que se refere aos valores de consistência interna, quer à dimensionalidade, o que corrobora a sua utilização enquanto um instrumento de despiste.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17575/rpsicol.v14i2.510

International Faculty in American Universities: Experiences of Academic Life, Productivity, and Career Mobility

AbstractThe increasing presence of international faculty members is validated using multiple data sources, and their professional experience is examined in terms of the perception of academic life, productivity, and career mobility.

International Faculty: Experiences of Academic Life and Productivity in U.S. Universities

Using the 2003 Survey of Doctoral Recipients, we examined satisfaction and research productivity of international faculty as compared to U.S. faculty. The study found that foreign-born, foreign-educated faculty are significantly more productive than their U.S. counterparts after controlling for personal, professional, and institutional variables. No significant difference in the productivity was found between foreign-born U.S.-educated and U.S. faculty. The concentration of international scholars on a campus positively affects productivity for U.S. faculty but not for foreign-born, foreign-educated faculty.

International Faculty: Experiences of Academic Life and Productivity in U.S. Universities

Using the 2003 Survey of Doctoral Recipients, we examined satisfaction and research productivity of international faculty as compared to U.S. faculty. The study found that foreign-born, foreign-educated faculty are significantly more productive than their U.S. counterparts after controlling for personal, professional, and institutional variables. No significant difference in the productivity was found between foreign-born U.S.-educated and U.S. faculty. The concentration of international scholars on a campus positively affects productivity for U.S. faculty but not for foreign-born, foreign-educated faculty.

A family of strangers: the fragmented nature of academic development

This paper draws on the experiences of 20 academic developers as they examine the proposition that the organisation and work of academic development in higher education is fragmented. Academic development was seen to have neither the status of a field nor a profession, and there was recognised tension between an institutionally focused service model that could be everything to everyone and one that could be distinguished as more conventionally ‘academic’ with theoretical knowledge as the basis for practice. Against the proposition, there was evidence of shared values and acceptance of diversity of purpose. We conclude that academic development has been fragmented since its inception and it remains resistant to cohesive change. Data suggest that to develop a unified community, academic development could seek field-status by encouraging all staff to provide their services by way of research-led teaching with each developer using their research knowledge and experiences of academic life to underpin practice. Only then will it have the necessary credibility and foundation from which it can work out its broader purposes and provide a quality service.

The Saltatory Sheaf-Odyssey of a Monadologist

An odyssey to a monadological quantum brain dynamics is told here. The very spirit of the odyssey would be violated by ab-straction, literally the lifting out of abstract order, which presumes a metaphysical lifter, a Cartesian subjectivity that does the lifting. A true odyssey, if anything, is existential, unabstractable segments of academic life experience along stalks of a fractal sheaf structure, a saltatory story.