Higher Education


Book Description

Criticism of Shakespeare's comedies has shifted from stressing their light-hearted and festive qualities to giving a stronger sense of their dark aspects and their social resonances. This volume introduces the key critical debates under five headings: genre, history and politics, gender and sexuality, language and performance.




Higher Education: A Critical Business


Book Description

Higher Education: A Critical Business is a bold statement about higher education in the modern age. It continues Ronald Barnett's thinking of his earlier books but offers a completely new set of ideas in a challenging but engaging argument. A defining concept of the Western university is that of critical thinking, but that idea is completely inadequate for the changing and unknowable world facing graduates. Instead, we have to displace the idea of critical thinking with the much broader idea of critical being. In this idea, students reflect critically on knowledge but they also develop their powers of critical self-reflection and critical action. This critique is transformatory. An education for critical being calls for a new approach to the process of higher education. It also has implications for the organization and management of universities, and for the relationship of universities to the wider worlds of work, professionalism and intellectual life. "Barnett reviews what the academy customarily means when it talks about critical thought, explains why that talk is so often shallow and pessimistic, and holds up for contemplation a positive conception of a 'very wide self' formed through education.... He breathes completely new life into the dead notion of academic as intellectual" - Professor Sheldon Rothblatt, University of California, Berkeley and Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Anyone interested in understanding how we might develop universities and higher education for the modern world should read this important book.




The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education


Book Description

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education provides a single compendium on the nature, function, and applications of critical thinking. This book brings together the work of top researchers on critical thinking worldwide, covering questions of definition, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, research, policy, and application.




Changing Identities in Higher Education


Book Description

In this timely and innovative book scholars from Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, explore their own sense of identity, reflecting both on their research and scholarly interests, and their work experiences. Taking the form of a debate, Changing Identities in Higher Education helps to widen the contemporary space for debates on the future of higher education itself. The book is split into three parts: part one presents a set of essays each on a set of identities within higher education (academic, student, administrative/managerial and educational developers). part two includes responses to Part one from authors speaking from their own professional and scholarly identity perspective part three illustrates perspectives on the identities of students, provided by students themselves. With its original, dialogic form and varied content, this book is of interest to all those concerned in current debates about the state and nature of higher education today and those interested in questions of identity. It makes especially useful reading for students of higher education, lecturers in training, academics and managers alike.




The Business of Student Affairs


Book Description

This book is as a primer on the business-related aspects of student affairs that practitioners should understand. The author discusses a variety of skill sets to equip student affairs practitioners-educators with the means to analyze circumstances, alter environments, invest in structures and programs, and lead campus progress.




Learner Relationships in Global Higher Education


Book Description

Providing the academic community with a robust and highly practical insight into the importance of implementing relationship building into the learning environment and experiences of all students, underpinned by current research, this innovative volume explores intercultural learning and critical pedagogy in the borderless university. By revealing cutting-edge theoretical perspectives and practice which can facilitate critical connections between diverse students, their learning, curriculum, each other, and their communities, Learner Relationships in Global Higher Education integrates academic and student perspectives on relationship development into academic practice. Drawing upon case studies and examples of good practice from across the globe, this book illustrates how practitioners in diverse contexts are designing student experiences in face-to-face and online contexts on- and off-campus to advance learner relationships. By situating this work in a critical pedagogy perspective, the book advances internationalisation in and for a global and multicultural world. In the changing contexts of global higher education, this book is a valuable tool for higher education researchers and practitioners at all stages of their careers.




International Students Negotiating Higher Education


Book Description

In the current economic climate, more than ever, international students provide an important income to universities. They represent much-needed funds for many institutions, but they also come with their own diverse variety of characteristics and requirements. This insightful book offers a critical stance on contemporary views of international students and challenges the way those involved address the important issues at hand. To do this, the authors focus specifically on giving voice to the student experience. In particular, the authors show how international student experience can be a ready asset from which to glean valuable information, particularly in relation to teaching and learning, academic support and the formal and informal curriculum. In this way, the issues affecting international students can be seen as part of the larger set of difficulties that face all students at university today. Integrating contributions from a academics and student voices from a range of backgrounds issues raised include: Academic Writing for International Students The Internationalisation of the Curriculum Identities: The use of stereotypes and auto-stereotypes International Students’ Perceptions of Tutors, and The system in reverse, English speaking learners as 'international students'. This book will be of interest to education management and administrators, higher education professionals, especially those working or training to teach large numbers of international students, to which it offers a unique opportunity to understand better the students’ point-of-view. Because of this the book will likely appeal to academics in all English speaking countries that recruit significant numbers of international students, as well as the growing number of European universities which teach in English and those in the Indian sub-continent that send large numbers of international students to the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US.




Service-Learning in Higher Education


Book Description

Advocates have positioned service-learning as a real-world, real-time opportunity for students to encounter academic knowledge in a meaningful and relevant manner. Service-learning in higher education settings offers a powerful alternative to traditional models of teaching and learning. Students are encouraged to develop links to local institutions, volunteer their time, and create a special bond between the university and the community in which they live. Service-learning has become a very popular alternative to standard courses in higher education and is gaining significant popularity. This book takes a serious look at the unintended consequences and alternative conceptualizations of this mode of learning and explores what it could offer us in the future.




Higher Education for Business


Book Description




The Great Mistake


Book Description

A remarkable indictment of how misguided business policies have undermined the American higher education system. Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL Higher education in America, still thought to be the world leader, is in crisis. University students are falling behind their international peers in attainment, while suffering from unprecedented student debt. For over a decade, the realm of American higher education has been wracked with self-doubt and mutual recrimination, with no clear solutions on the horizon. How did this happen? In this stunning new book, Christopher Newfield offers readers an in-depth analysis of the “great mistake” that led to the cycle of decline and dissolution, a mistake that impacts every public college and university in America. What might occur, he asserts, is no less than locked-in economic inequality and the fall of the middle class. In The Great Mistake, Newfield asks how we can fix higher education, given the damage done by private-sector models. The current accepted wisdom—that to succeed, universities should be more like businesses—is dead wrong. Newfield combines firsthand experience with expert analysis to show that private funding and private-sector methods cannot replace public funding or improve efficiency, arguing that business-minded practices have increased costs and gravely damaged the university’s value to society. It is imperative that universities move beyond the destructive policies that have led them to destabilize their finances, raise tuition, overbuild facilities, create a national student debt crisis, and lower educational quality. Laying out an interconnected cycle of mistakes, from subsidizing the private sector to “the poor get poorer” funding policies, Newfield clearly demonstrates how decisions made in government, in the corporate world, and at colleges themselves contribute to the dismantling of once-great public higher education. A powerful, hopeful critique of the unnecessary death spiral of higher education, The Great Mistake is essential reading for those who wonder why students have been paying more to get less and for everyone who cares about the role the higher education system plays in improving the lives of average Americans.