Grounded in narrative theory, this book offers a case study of a liberal arts college’s use of narrative to help build identity, community, and collaboration within the college faculty across a range of disciplines, including history, psychology, sociology, theatre and dance, literature, anthropology, and communication. Exploring issues of methodology and their practical application, this narrative project speaks to the construction of identity for the liberal arts in today’s higher education climate. Narrative, Identity, and Academic Community focuses on the ways a cross-disciplinary emphasis on narrative can impact institutions in North America and contribute to the discussion of strategies to foster bottom-up, faculty-driven collaboration and innovation.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Section I Interrogating and Framing Reality: Identity and Cultural Perceptions -- 1 Old and New Technologies of Asynchronous Communication: Virtual Narratives and "Presence"--2 Onitsha Market Literature: Narrating Identity and Survival in a Colonial African City -- 3 Narrative Identities in India's Global Age -- 4 Narrative Text and Photographs: A Case for Ethnographic Research Poetry -- Section I Summary An Author Conversation -- Section II Narratives at the Intersection of the Public and Private -- 5 Finding Story in Unexpected Places: Branding and the Role of Narrative in the Study of Communication -- 6 The "Not Yet Pregnant": The Impact of Narratives on Infertility Identity and Reproductive Policy -- 7 Letter-Writing and the Eighteenth-Century Scientific Community: Constructing Narratives and Identity -- Section II Summary An Author Conversation -- Section III Performing Bodies, Creating Stories -- 8 Narratives of Pain -- 9 Narrative and the Performing Arts: A Symposium -- 10 Stories and Objects: Narrative and the Construction of Connective Links in an American Quilting Guild -- 11 The Currency of Stories: Anthropologists, Nawaals, and the Strange World of Academe -- Section III Summary An Author Conversation -- Conclusion: Narrative Diffusion -- List of Contributors -- Index

Offering an interdisciplinary qualitative approach, this book examines and evaluates the role and benefits of a Learning Community (LC), a high-impact practice for student retention in higher education. A powerful demonstration of the effects of connection and comradery on learning, this account explores how the LC helps the decision-making of those in higher education administration regarding high impact student interventions.

*Winner of the Best Book Award from Researchers and Students and Study Abroad Programmes at the CIES2019 conference 2019 This book examines learning-mobility tensions and ties caused by convergences and divergences of social, organizational and cognitive forces in global higher education. As some of these forces generate status anxiety, and others enhanced self-worth, this volume asks the questions: How can students navigate treacherous education markets to reduce the former and increase the latter? Which specific forces and confluences enhance the quality of self-discovery? Does the search for identity and meaning produce better results when conducted internationally? Which transformative drivers of global mobility enhance social mobility? What allows some students to gain the capacity for impactful higher learning at a time when others lose it? Why are strategically minded students increasingly concerned about equality and the quality of contribution to the common good of education, rather than about their own status? What makes some places of learning stand out when students recount their journeys of self-discovery and roads to self-worth? This book includes a broad range of stories and firsthand perspectives that are often overlooked in the process of internationalization of higher education. The narratives offer important insights to consider, given the ever-increasing disquiets of competitiveness-oriented global higher education.

Higher education has been presented as a solution to a host of local and global problems, despite the fact that learning and assessment can also be used as mechanisms for exclusion and social control. Developing Transformative Spaces in Higher Education: Learning to Transgress demonstrates that even when knowledge may appear to be the solution, it can be partial and disempowering to all but the dominant groups. The book shows the need to contest such knowledge claims and to learn to transgress, rather than to conform. It argues that transformative spaces need to be found and that these should be about the creation of new opportunities, ways of knowing and ways of being. Working in and through spaces of transgression, the contributors to this volume develop frameworks for the possibilities of transformative spaces in learning and teaching in higher education. The book critiques the ways in which Western higher education culture determines the academic agenda in relation to dialogue on social differences, minority groups and hierarchical structures, including issues of representation among different groups in the population. It also explores the personal and political costs of transgression and outlines ways in which transitions can be transformative. The book should be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of higher education, education studies, teacher training, social justice and transformation. It should also be essential reading for practitioners working in post-compulsory education.

This book is a study of cross-border activity in and around Japanese universities, employing ‘Asia’ as the cornerstone of inquiry. It offers qualitative, case-based analysis of Asia-oriented student mobility and partnership projects, framed by critical evaluation of discourses and texts concerning Japan’s positioning in an era of Asian ascendancy. This combination of Asia as theme and international higher education as empirical subject matter allows the book to shed new light on some of the fundamental policy currents in contemporary Japan. It also furnishes a fresh approach to comprehending the modalities of regionalism and regionalisation in the sphere of higher education.

Research into ethnic attainment differences in British higher education and elsewhere tends to depict students from minority ethnic backgrounds as disadvantaged, marginalised, discriminated against and excluded. In The Minoritisation of Higher Education, Mieschbuehler demonstrates that this idea is shaping theoretical perspectives and informing higher education policies and practice across the country, yet current university policies and practices perpetuate, rather than ameliorate, the educational status of so-called minority ethnic students. Including an examination of current theories, as well as a wealth of empirical data from students, this book explains how group-based social differentiation and student-centred education foster the idea that ethnic and social attributes matter, losing any sense of our common humanity. Considering the consequences of this for students and university education as a whole, and challenging all pre-existing ideas of how to approach reported ethnic attainment gaps, The Minoritisation of Higher Education is a thought-provoking read. The book will be of great interest to scholars, postgraduate students and professionals in the areas of higher education; learning and teaching; equality and diversity; ethnicity; and attainment. It is also an important work for policymakers concerned with higher education.

Universities and the Occult Rituals of the Corporate World explores the metaphorical parallels between corporatised, market-oriented universities and aspects of the occult. In the process, the book shows that the forms of mystery, mythmaking and ritual now common in restructured institutions of higher education stem from their new power structures and procedures, and the economic and sociopolitical factors that have generated them. Wood argues that universities have acquired occult aspects, as the beliefs and practices underpinning present-day market-driven academic discourse and practice weave spells of corporate potency, invoking the bewildering magic of the market and the arcane mysteries of capitalism, thriving on equivocation and evasion. Making particular reference to South African universities, the book demonstrates the ways in which apparently rational features of contemporary Western and westernised societies have acquired occult aspects. It also includes discussion of higher education institutions in other countries where neoliberal economic agendas are influential, such as the UK, the USA, the Eurozone states and Australia. Providing a unique and thought-provoking look at the impact of the marketisation of Higher Education, this book will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of higher education, educational policy and neoliberalism. It should also be of great interest to academics in the fields of anthropology, folklore and cultural studies, as well as business, economics and management.

Student writing has long been viewed as a problem in higher education in the UK. Moreover, the sector has consistently performed poorly in the National Student Survey with regard to assessment and feedback. Academics Engaging with Student Writing tackles these major issues from a new and unique angle, exploring the real-life experiences of academic teachers from different institutions as they set, support, read, respond to and assess assignments undertaken by undergraduate students. Incorporating evidence from post-1992 universities, Oxbridge, members of the Russell Group and others, this book examines working practices around student writing within the context of an increasingly market-oriented mass higher education system. Presenting a wealth of relevant examples from disciplines as diverse as History and Sports Science, Tuck makes extensive use of interviews, observations, texts and audio recordings in order to explore the perspectives of academic teachers who work with student writers and their texts. This book will be of interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of academic literacies, higher education, language and literacy, language in higher education, English for academic purposes and assessment. Furthermore, academic teachers with experience of this crucial aspect of academic labour will welcome Tuck’s pioneering work as an indispensable tool for making sense of their own engagement with student writers.

As one of the pioneers and leading advocates of neoliberalism, Britain, and in particular England, has radically transformed its higher education system in recent decades. What was once a public good has turned into a market in which universities are required to perform like businesses, with students being increasingly referred to as customers. The Idea of Higher Education and the Student investigates precisely this relation between the changing function of higher education and how we see the student. But instead of offering yet another critique of neoliberalism and marketisation, it widens the view beyond the present.