Higher Education Discourse Research Articles

A Cross-Cultural Genre Analysis of Leadership Statements in Italian and American University Sustainability Reports

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important issue in higher education (HE). Leadership statements in university sustainability reports (LSUSR) represent a unique genre for university leaders to communicate sustainability. This study aims to demystify the genre so that future leadership statements might be crafted with a greater degree of reflexivity. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review</b> : Sustainability discourse in HE has been regarded as a legitimacy tool and an opportunity for image improvement for universities. Some studies have examined university sustainability reports, whereas there is a lack of studies focusing on the section of leadership statements. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research question</b> : Are there any cross-cultural similarities or differences in terms of rhetorical moves and communicative purposes between the Italian LSUSR genre and the American LSUSR genre? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> Using cross-cultural genre analysis, this study investigates the rhetorical moves of leadership statements produced by Italian and American universities. A move scheme is established and is used to annotate the sample texts. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results and conclusion:</b> The findings show that although the Italian and American LSUSR genres share the communicative purpose of establishing a sustainable image, the degree of discourse force exerting on this communicative purpose varies. The image-building discourse force appears to be more noticeable in the American leadership statements, which tend to use a wider range and a larger quantity of image-improving moves. The Italian subcorpus, on the other hand, seems to pay more attention to the genre function of report-introducing, which is not explicitly linked to image improvement. This article suggests that practitioners could consider the potentials of the LSUSR genre in developing an institutional culture of sustainability.

Encouraging critique: a stimulating and provocative examination of dominant discourses in the higher education sector. Book review: Kinchin, I. M., and Gravett, K. (2022) Dominant discourses in higher education: critical perspectives, cartographies and practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Encouraging critique: a stimulating and provocative examination of dominant discourses in the higher education sector. Book review: Kinchin, I. M., and Gravett, K. (2022) Dominant discourses in higher education: critical perspectives, cartographies and practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Dominant discourses in higher education. Book review: Kinchin, I. M. and Gravett, K. (2022) Dominant discourses in higher education: critical perspectives, cartographies and practice. London: Bloomsbury.

Dominant discourses in higher education. Book review: Kinchin, I. M. and Gravett, K. (2022) Dominant discourses in higher education: critical perspectives, cartographies and practice. London: Bloomsbury.

HIGHER EDUCATION DISCOURSE: CHANGES IN THE USE OF VERBAL AND VISUAL DEVICES IN CROATIAN UNIVERSITY SELF-PRESENTATION

In this paper, we wanted to establish whether the higher education discourse in Croatia has shifted from the practice of self-presenting and foregrounding the quality of universities and positioning them within society, to new discursive practices with language devices used in marketing or advertising industries targeted at prospective students, with a view of persuading them to buy a certain service. As stated in Osman, the role of a university used to be educating and forming knowledgeable people and thinkers who would help change the world. However, this role started to change towards the end of the 20th century, especially in Western countries, as their governments gradually reduced financing for public universities, which forced these institutions to find other sources of income. Therefore, a different approach toward prospective students was required. This research and its results have demonstrated that, over the years, the University of Split has changed not only the mode of presenting information but also the mode of self-promotion in order to shape its public role and to attract students and, in so doing, increase its financial means. Its academic merits, its roles in setting scientific or artistic standards, or in providing a critique of social, economic or political processes were disregarded or ignored, in favour of a new identity as a service provider packaging education with new life experiences. At both levels, the verbal and the visual, the University was no longer represented as an academic institution which controlled processes and people. The results also showed that it had turned to a more pronounced use of a promotional discourse and the discursive practice of marketing, while simultaneously reducing the informativeness of its prospectuses. However, we cannot say that the University in question was engaged in serious marketization, especially when we compare our study with the results obtained by other researchers, who have elaborated on various significant promotional discursive practices at the universities they studied, some of which even function as enterprises. However, the trend is noticeable. Fairclough’s claim that discourse and society are inextricably intertwined is here confirmed, as social change has been reflected in the semiotic representations of academic institutions. These discourse shifts, which are interdiscursive examples of promotional activities, could impact on the professional role of universities in society and mark the beginning of a more extensive higher education marketization and consequently, of the use of market-oriented discursive practices.

Innovating policies for university internationalisation in the changing post-pandemic global field

ABSTRACT In the past several decades, internationalisation, which is featured by people and ideas’ unparalleled transnational mobility, has become a key discourse in higher education. Despite the spectacular outcomes that higher education internationalisation has achieved, scholars have detected weaknesses and vulnerabilities in its current policy and practice, which the COVID-19 pandemic have intensified. Informed by Marginson’s global higher education field framework, this study provides a critical reflection on the field’s evolution and the prospects for its future directions from experts’ perspectives. In unstructured interviews, 20 leading international scholars confirmed the global field’s dynamism and openness, and identified certain tendencies in its evolution, including a diversified and flattening structure. The experts highlighted the urgent demand for policy innovation on university internationalisation at the regional, national, and institutional levels in response to the changing global field in the post-pandemic era. The experts also stressed the significance of internationalisation’s cultural dimension, through which higher education internationalisation can escape the trap of the capitalist logic and address its shortcomings to achieve sustainable prosperity.

No student left behind: ‘Pedagogies of comfort’ or ‘pedagogies of disruption’?

This article explores the lessons learnt from the short-term emergency remote teaching and learning (ERTL) approach adopted to tackle the continuation of the higher education (HE) academic programme during the COVID-19 pandemic. It first examines the primary goals of the official South African “No student left behind” (NSLB) campaign, which emphasises the agenda to address a social justice concern about students’ participation and access to HE. It reflects on recent research studies around this matter which tended to foreground technical and operational considerations. Instead, this article presents an alternate lens for shifting the discourse of HE, especially postgraduate studies, to activate deep, critical and autonomous engagement in teaching and learning. The theoretical model presented highlights staff and students working outside pedagogies of comfort and expanding into spaces of disrupting previous habituated pedagogies. The article draws on the reflective experiences of facilitating postgraduate education programmes: two PhD cohort programmes in Mauritius and South Africa (involving students who were schoolteachers and HE lecturers) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education Studies (involving students from rural university settings in South Africa). The data reveals that despite intentions to drive an alternative mode of critical, disruptive online modalities in curriculum delivery, students subtly pushed back towards working within the comfort zones of their previous conceptions of front-led, teacher-driven pedagogies. A disruptive pedagogy was not fully activated as students professed preferences to revert to the old routine agendas in pre-COVID times. This article argues that this constitutes a missed opportunity to learn from the ERTL era to inform alternative, more robust, critical pedagogies for the long term. The responses suggest that the HE system will continue to bifurcate disparities between those more willing to look to the past and those embracing a learning opportunity for the future.

Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century, edited by Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol J. Oja

<i>Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century</i>, edited by Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol J. Oja

Contributions to the interpretation of the concept of autonomy in the light of the model change in Hungary

The notion of university autonomy is a principle that is often invoked in higher education discourse, despite the fact that its precise content needs clarification. Although there is a rich domestic and international literature on the autonomy of higher education over the historical period, the principles set out therein cannot provide the necessary starting point, since the concept of autonomy varies from one historical period to another and cannot be regulated definitively. Due to the model changes in Hungary, the concept of autonomy has come to the fore again, so it is necessary to examine what is generally understood by the concept in the Hungarian literature and to what extent it is in line with international terminology. To this end, this study reviews the domestic constitutional court case law on the concept of autonomy and its changes, and then discusses the international standards of university autonomy, as defined by the European University Association, its components and the aspects of international comparative studies. It then discusses the position of Hungarian higher education institutions among European universities and, points to possible changes.

Student Engagement in Concept Mapping

Student engagement has been an important discourse in higher education, and researchers have determined that engagement in educational activities is vital for student retention. Retaining students in learning is crucial in a stressful healthcare environment, hence the need to identify the associated engagement factors. Concept mapping offers students a realistic venue for critical thinking, clinical reasoning, and engagement in educational activities. Building on the results obtained from a basic qualitative study where, interviews and journals were analyzed, we examined the theoretical basis for students’ engagement during concept mapping in a flipped clinical learning. Accordingly, this article discusses the factors that influenced engagement while concept mapping within a stressful healthcare clinical learning environment and explains how the process of mapping patient care improved students’ engagement in learning. The impacts of concept mapping process went beyond participation to self-direction, higher-level thinking, and greater impact on clinical decision making for the student participants.

Relationship Between Research and Teaching in Business Education: Synergistic, Complementary or Parasitic?

The current relationship existing between research and teaching in contemporary Business Education in the higher education discourse is critical to the survival of quality education across the globe. Notwithstanding the different interpretations (marital status, impending divorce, holy alliance and useful link) ascribed to the relationship between research, subsequent studies have adopted several approaches to measuring these two core mandates of the individual academic and their possible integration. For the purpose of this study, research productivity and teaching effectiveness were used as proxies for gauging the relationship. Even though, several earlier studies have concentrated on espousing a clearer link between research and teaching, most of these studies have not been able to come out with this relationship in specific terms such as the relationship between faculty member’s research productivity and teaching effectiveness within the Business Education landscape. Using the stratified disproportionate sampling technique, 201 Business Education faculty members engaged from public universities in Ghana for the 2020-2021 academic year. A self-developed questionnaire was used for data collection. The questionnaires were validated through the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method. The data were analysed inferentially (i.e., regression analysis), and descriptively (i.e., means, standard deviations). In all, it was found that research productivity is a significant positive predictor of teaching effectiveness. It is therefore, recommended that as part of the university’s mechanisms for determining the teaching efficacy of faculty members, the management of universities are encouraged to incorporate research-teaching integration components into promotions and tenure-tracks by way of encouraging faculty members to promote research-based teaching. Also, faculty members should make the conscious effort to strike a balance between time devoted to teaching and time devoted for research in order to optimise the benefits derived from the perceived synergistic relationship between research and teaching. Keywords: Research, teaching, research productivity, teaching effectiveness, research-teaching nexus, faculty members, synergistic DOI: 10.7176/JLPG/120-14 Publication date: April 30 th 2022

Facing Crises of Unsustainability: Creating and Holding Safe Enough Spaces for Transformative Learning in Higher Education for Sustainable Development

The multiple crises of unsustainability are provoking increasing stress and unpleasant emotions among students. If higher education is to fulfill its mission to support transformation processes toward sustainable development, it must adapt its pedagogical approaches to help students deepen their critical thinking and empower them to engage in these transformation processes. For this reason, emotions – which can also prevent critical thinking – should be carefully addressed within transformative learning journeys. However, these journeys are themselves challenging for learners and educators. They push them to abandon stable meaning perspectives, causing feelings of incoherence and tension. Learners need safe enough spaces to navigate these situations of uncertainty. The central questions of this manuscript are: What is meant by safe enough spaces? How can learners, educators, and higher education institutions create and hold such spaces? These questions are explored on three different levels: (1) the intrapersonal level, (2) the interpersonal level, and (3) the organizational and systemic level of discourses in higher education. For the intrapersonal level, perspectives inspired by neurobiology are used to discuss reaction patterns of our autonomous nervous system and present insights into stress development. Learners should feel bodily safe when engaging in transformative learning processes. This is supported by balancing the challenges learners face with the resources they have. For the interpersonal level, the manuscript argues that focusing solely on rational discourse is insufficient to support safe enough spaces for transformative learning. We call for a culture of edifying conversations supported by respectful relationships among learners, as they are more adequate for regaining self-direction. For the organizational and intertwined systemic level, the ambition is followed to make higher education institutions offer learning environments that feel safe enough for all involved. However, as these institutions are strongly influenced by dynamics of economization and competition, they do not necessarily empower learners to challenge and disrupt unsustainable and neoliberal discourses. The manuscript explores how learners and educators can cultivate engaged critique by acknowledging their own embeddedness in neoliberal dynamics and opening up so-called transformative spaces for institutional change. Finally, recommendations for educational practices in higher education for sustainable development are offered.

Student Subjectivity in the Marketised University.

We present data from an exploratory qualitative interview-based pedagogical research project on the development of student agency in higher education. Our aim was to respond to Nick Zepke’s claim that what is often missing from the current neoliberal discourse of higher education ‘is students having a voice in what and how they learn and how they can action their voice in the wider community as agentic citizens.’ Informed by Lacanian discourse analysis, our project investigated the opportunities and threats facing some of our undergraduate students as they struggled to exercise agency and develop autonomy in the marketised university. Repeat interviews (n = 15) with final year students focussed on the psychosocial categories of power, affect, intersubjectivity and desire. The analysis was guided by Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, an account of the vicissitudes of agency. We found that students can move between discourses depending on the extent to which their agency (operationalised here as Lacan’s ‘object cause of desire,’ the objet petit a) was enabled or thwarted. Our critique of the metaphor of the ‘student journey’ addresses the implications for learning and teaching and the university’s mission to develop its students in light of perceived commercial pressures.

Managing higher education and neoliberal marketing discourses on Why Choose webpages for international students on Australian and British university websites

International education is impacted by multiple discourses, in particular the discourse of university as an educational institution responsible for producing and curating knowledge for the public good, pursuing truth and transforming student life, and the neoliberal marketing discourse which portrays the university as a business organization providing a service for international students as customers/consumers. Following a multimodal discourse analytic perspective, this study examines ‘ Why Choose’ webpages of one British and two Australian universities to identify how the apparently conflicting higher education and neoliberal marketing discourses are managed in the interdiscursive space using language, images and videos. The results reveal that ‘ Why Choose’ webpages are hybrid texts where the discourse of higher education is upheld in relation to the neoliberal marketing discourse through multimodal strategies of accentuation, infusion and progression. The study argues for the necessity of undertaking a multimodal discourse approach to understand how various positions are negotiated interdiscursively in online media.

Building Cross-Cultural Sustainability Discourses in Higher Education: A Virtual Exchange Program between Egypt and the United States

Building Cross-Cultural Sustainability Discourses in Higher Education: A Virtual Exchange Program between Egypt and the United States

The Funding Models and Efficiency Discourse in Higher Education

After 30 years of transformation, the government of Kazakhstan has created own higher education system shaped by various social-economic and political factors. Nowadays the higher education system operates with stable institutions despite its challenging environment. There is no doubt that global trends in education also have an impact on the country’s policies. At the same time, the public finance system of Kazakhstan had also faced several major reforms. For instance, the term “Public Sector Audit” or “State Audit” was introduced by the new Law in 2015 which completely changed the approach of the Public Sector Institutions. The focus has become so called “efficiency” instead of “financial control”. In this regard, this paper identifies critical dimensions of effectiveness in higher education of developed countries based on technical articles and empirical research. The article reveals the features of the education funding models in OECD countries and efficiency measuring grounds of higher education.

From Diversity to Dignity

This article promotes closer rhetorical analysis of the current trend in higher education to institutionalize equity, inclusion, diversity, and access (EIDA) work without routinely interrogating the orienting terms used in such efforts. It may be easy to mistake the intentions of EIDA work as determining its value, thus discouraging a critical examination of the rhetorical outcomes it produces and the rhetorical effects it invites. We suggest that one insight such analysis could offer is a better account of the rhetorical constraints of the term “diversity.” In this article, we review a range of compelling critiques that have been offered of the limitations of “diversity” as it appears in higher education discourse. We suggest “dignity” as a promising alternative to “diversity” as an alternate orienting term for EIDA work in higher education.

‘Coming out’ of Thai students in the Discourse of Higher Education

This study aims to explain coming out of Thai students in the discourse of higher education. Thus, prior research and literature reviews are discussed and argued critically to extend the knowledges of “coming out”. The in-depth interview is employed to be the method for gathering data from Thai university students in the discourse of higher education by using purposive sampling. Lastly, the finding is contented and analyzed into narrative description.

‘An a for a lay’: A governmental approach to the sex for grades discourse in higher education

Although #MeToo raised vital awareness of sexual harassment in higher education, conventional knowledge surrounding gender, sex and power in university life is often based on zero-sum analyses: one person holding and exercising power over another. Consequently, established conceptualisations of sexual harassment might fail to acknowledge how female students, compelled to operate within the male-biased environment of higher education, may, simultaneously, both resist effects of power and succumb to them. Based on 24 unstructured interviews with women in UK universities, this paper investigates the subjectifying effects of the apparently widely circulating discourse that female students in higher education may exchange sex with their male lecturers for higher grades. By utilising a governmental approach, it explores how knowledges of gender, sex and power in academia may be (re)produced and distributed, suggesting that students and lecturers hold multiple and complex subjectivities, guided and managed into understanding sex for grades in diverse, contradictory ways.

From ‘intercultural-washing’ to meaningful intercultural education: Revisiting higher education practice

This is the first special issue that JPHE hosts—and could there be a more suitable forum for an issue dedicated to exploring and encouraging a critical dialogue around transformative intercultural communication teaching practices in higher education (HE)? What has led us to engage with the theme of making intercultural education meaningful is a shared observation that there seems to be an increasing disconnect between recent developments in intercultural communication theory and practice. With so much critique published over the years, we are perplexed as to why traditional notions of culture still prevail not only in mainstream intercultural communication research but also in institutional discourses in HE and in popular discourses as articulated by the people who sit—or have once sat—in our classrooms. In this editorial and Special Issue, we approach intercultural communication from a critical angle, akin to the theorization of interculturality as a discursive and contingent, unstable and contradictory, political and ideological construct. We are thrilled to see this approach gain ground in the field of intercultural communication. However, at the same time, we are worried that the terrain of intercultural communication teaching across HE settings has become quite unruly and is characterized by pedagogical solutions that do not have a stable connection to state-of-the-art theory, and that might lead to naive, simplistic, and essentialist understandings of ‘culture’ and ‘the other’.......

Pedagogies of mattering: re-conceptualising relational pedagogies in higher education

ABSTRACT This article engages posthuman theory to propose a rethinking of the theory and practice of relational pedagogies within higher education (HE). There has been renewed emphasis within HE discourses on the significance of relationships within learning and teaching as a means to offer a counter-view to an uncaring marketised HE system. This article argues the need to build on and extend the current framing of relational pedagogies. It argues for an ethically affirmative reframing, through a posthuman, feminist materialist theoretical lens. The theory we elaborate on is put to work through illustrative examples from our experiences and practices as educators, which illuminate how and why relational pedagogies, considered as pedagogies of mattering, need to involve the nonhuman and more-than-human. Our examples sketch potential shapes for a pedagogy of mattering across three key areas of teaching in higher education: curriculum, teaching and learning and assessment.