This discourse on the concept of the ‘new university’ encompasses a number of interconnected topics, ranging from the impacts of the market forces on the old academic territory to current perceptions about relationships between teachers and students. The book focuses on the inside features of the new academia. Some examples of issues and questions covered include: - New media in education, which present opportunities and challenges for both learning students and teachers. But are these new possibilities for all, or just for members of the current ‘internet generation’? Moreover, How can new media be arranged to support a process of generic, collaborative learning? - A discourse on the ‘new student’. Nowadays, terms such as rationality and ‘Bildung’ have emerged coupled with a trend for searching for shortcuts and denying one’s interests in deeper understanding of subjects. But does there really exist a new student on a qualitative level? - Free dialogue has been brought forward by many educationalists as one important way to promote academic knowledge. How does free dialogue really contribute to this objective? The e-book relates such issues to the specific features of the ‘new university’. For a broad insight into the issues forming the education of the future generation, Inside the New University offers important clues for the understanding of the ‘new university’ concept to readers - including educationalists and government policy makers - interested in the qualitative evolution of contemporary educational institutions.

Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender have assembled an essential reference for policymakers, administrators, and all those interested in the history and sociology of higher education.

Interdisciplinary research is a method that has become efficient in accelerating scientific discovery. The integration of such processes in problem solving and knowledge generation is a vital part of learning and instruction. Promoting Interdisciplinarity in Knowledge Generation and Problem Solving is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on interdisciplinary projects from around the world, highlighting the broad range of circumstances in which this approach can be effectively used to solve problems and generate new knowledge. Featuring coverage on a number of topics and perspectives such as industrial design, ethnographic methods, and methodological pluralism, this publication is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on the promotion of interdisciplinarity for knowledge production.

What do we actually do when we research education policy and governance? Why do we tame the messy hinterland of research into smooth accounts and what do we lose in the process? In this volume, distinguished scholars in education policy and governance research discuss how the practice of methods is messy, subjective, and provisional. They approach methodology as riddled with tensions, doubts, troubles, and mundane decisions. Scholarship in this book shifts from recording the methodological hinterland to putting it to productive use as resources for thinking about the researched world and about research itself. This methodological openness helps to examine how research reproduces scholars’ metaphysics, how research is a deeply embodied process encompassing all senses, how scholars’ concerns interfere in the worlds they study, but also how these equally interfere with researchers. By challenging smooth methodological accounts which conceal the complex and provisional nature of research, this book offers new approaches in education policy and governance research that are more generative, insightful, and sincere. Offering new ways of thinking about research methodologies, the book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students in the fields of education research and education theory, as well as social scientists interested in research methodologies more broadly.

This open access book explores knowledge practices by five women from different European contexts. Contributors document, analyze, and discuss how women employed practices of privacy to pursue knowledge that did not necessarily conform with the curriculum prescribed for them. The practices of Jane Lumley in England, Camila Herculiana in Padua, Victorine de Chastenay in Paris, as well as Elisabeth Sophie Marie and Philippine Charlotte in Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, will help us to exemplify the delicate balance between audacity and obedience that women had to employ to be able to explore science, literature, philosophy, theology, and other types of learned activities. Cases range from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, presenting continuities and discontinuities across temporal and geographical lines of the strategies that women used to protect their knowledge production and retain intact their reputations as good Christian daughters, wives, and mothers. Taken together, the essays show how having access to privacy—the ability to regulate access to themselves while studying and learning—was a crucial condition for the success of the knowledge activities these women pursued. This is an open access book.

The book studies transformations of European universities in the context of globalization and Europeanization, the questioning of the foundations of the «Golden Age» of the Keynesian welfare state, public sector reforms, demographic changes, the massification and diversification of higher education, and the emergence of knowledge economies. Such phenomena as academic entrepreneurialism and diversified channels of knowledge exchange in European universities are linked to transformations of the state and changes in public sector services. The first, contextual part of the book studies the changing state/university relationships, and the second, empirically-informed part draws from several recent large-scale comparative European research projects.

This book considers a wide range of key developments and key areas of debate in China’s education system. Marketization, quality assurance, and issues of inequality and gender are all discussed, as are expansion in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, the impact of globalization, and the influence of education on China’s economic growth. The book, which comprises contributions from many leading authorities, will be of great interest both to comparative education specialists, and also to all those interested in China’s rise and development.

"This first major study of the Nordic model of enterprising universities will be of interest to theoreticians, analysts and practitioners alike, not least for the valuable factual detail that enables exploration of numerous, sometimes idealistic, concepts that ignore the barriers to communication among epistemic communities."

Social science researchers in the global South, and in South Africa particularly, utilise research methods in innovative ways in order to respond to contexts characterised by diversity, racial and political tensions, socioeconomic disparities and gender inequalities. These methods often remain undocumented – a gap that this book starts to address. Written by experts from various methodological fields, Transforming Research Methods in the Social Sciences is a comprehensive collation of original essays and cutting-edge research that demonstrates the variety of novel techniques and research methods available to researchers responding to these context-bound issues. It is particularly relevant for study and research in the fields of applied psychology, sociology, ethnography, biography and anthropology. In addition to their unique combination of conceptual and application issues, the chapters also include discussions on ethical considerations relevant to the method in similar global South contexts. Transforming Research Methods in the Social Sciences has much to offer to researchers, professionals and others involved in social science research both locally and internationally.

Enlightenment, Creativity and Education: polities, politics, performances presents some outcomes of the 24th Conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE), held in Uppsala, in summer 2010. Bringing together studies related to knowledge and educational policies, the volume deals with the role of knowledge, globalisation and new trends what have an effect of identities and policies. Changes in societies have changed the rhetoric concerning the position and function of education. What – in comparative perspective – are the historical forces and sociological and economic structures which are infl uencing our ideas and assumptions about identity and wisdom and the future of polities and economies? So the conference asked: what are the contemporary and emergent nature of polities, and the politics of the future – and who says so? This publication is structured along three themes for the purpose of giving illustrations to some of the questions asked. The themes are I. Comparative Education – The role of Knowledge and Educational Research, II. Globalisation and New Trends, III. New Knowledge – Identities – Policies. Lennart Wikander is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education at Uppsala University. His fi eld is Higher Education including its relations to the labour market. Educational policies in a comparative perspective have also been a major part of his lecturing and research. He is President of NOCIES (Nordic Comparative and International Education Society). He is also member of the CESE Executive Committee. Christina Gustafsson is Professor of Education at Uppsala University and Director of Research in Educational Science at the University of Gävle. She started as a classroom researcher, and spent some years working on evaluation as a research practice. For the past fi fteen years, she has been oriented towards higher education research, especially research related to teacher training and newly qualifi ed teachers. Ulla Riis is Professor of Education at Uppsala University and Director of the programme Studies in Higher Education (SHE) at the Department of Education. She also has publications in Science Education and Computer Education in school as curriculum issues. Her latest report deals with the outcomes of a reform of the promotion system for Swedish university professors.