Personal Life, Young Women and Higher Education


Book Description

The experience of higher education in the UK has become an increasingly common phenomenon in the 21st century. This book explores the emotional and moral significance of the relationships young women develop at university, such as friends, family and housemates, by using a seven-year qualitative longitudinal study of the transitional period.




Parenting to a Degree


Book Description

Helicopter parents—the kind that continue to hover even in college—are one of the most ridiculed figures of twenty-first-century parenting, criticized for creating entitled young adults who boomerang back home. But do involved parents really damage their children and burden universities? In this book, sociologist Laura T. Hamilton illuminates the lives of young women and their families to ask just what role parents play during the crucial college years. Hamilton vividly captures the parenting approaches of mothers and fathers from all walks of life—from a CFO for a Fortune 500 company to a waitress at a roadside diner. As she shows, parents are guided by different visions of the ideal college experience, built around classed notions of women’s work/family plans and the ideal age to “grow up.” Some are intensively involved and hold adulthood at bay to cultivate specific traits: professional helicopters, for instance, help develop the skills and credentials that will advance their daughters’ careers, while pink helicopters emphasize appearance, charm, and social ties in the hopes that women will secure a wealthy mate. In sharp contrast, bystander parents—whose influence is often limited by economic concerns—are relegated to the sidelines of their daughter’s lives. Finally, paramedic parents—who can come from a wide range of class backgrounds—sit in the middle, intervening in emergencies but otherwise valuing self-sufficiency above all. Analyzing the effects of each of these approaches with clarity and depth, Hamilton ultimately argues that successfully navigating many colleges and universities without involved parents is nearly impossible, and that schools themselves are increasingly dependent on active parents for a wide array of tasks, with intended and unintended consequences. Altogether, Parenting to a Degree offers an incisive look into the new—and sometimes problematic—relationship between students, parents, and universities.




Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education


Book Description

This open access book offers pioneering insights and practical methods for promoting diversity and inclusion in higher education classrooms and curricula. It highlights the growing importance of international education programs in Asia and the value of understanding student diversity in a changing, evermore interconnected world. The book explores diversity across physical, psychological and cogitative traits, socio-economic backgrounds, value systems, traditions and emerging identities, as well as diverse expectations around teaching, grading, and assessment. Chapters detail significant trends in active learning pedagogy, writing programs, language acquisition, and implications for teaching in the liberal arts, adult learners, girls and women, and Confucian heritage communities. A quality, relevant, 21st Century education should address multifaceted and intersecting forms of diversity to equip students for deep life-long learning inside and outside the classroom. This timely volume provides a unique toolkit for educators, policy-makers, and professional development experts.




The Rise of Women


Book Description

While powerful gender inequalities remain in American society, women have made substantial gains and now largely surpass men in one crucial arena: education. Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school, and are more likely to obtain college degrees and enroll in graduate school. What accounts for this enormous reversal in the gender education gap? In The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide a detailed and accessible account of women’s educational advantage and suggest new strategies to improve schooling outcomes for both boys and girls. The Rise of Women opens with a masterful overview of the broader societal changes that accompanied the change in gender trends in higher education. The rise of egalitarian gender norms and a growing demand for college-educated workers allowed more women to enroll in colleges and universities nationwide. As this shift occurred, women quickly reversed the historical male advantage in education. By 2010, young women in their mid-twenties surpassed their male counterparts in earning college degrees by more than eight percentage points. The authors, however, reveal an important exception: While women have achieved parity in fields such as medicine and the law, they lag far behind men in engineering and physical science degrees. To explain these trends, The Rise of Women charts the performance of boys and girls over the course of their schooling. At each stage in the education process, they consider the gender-specific impact of factors such as families, schools, peers, race and class. Important differences emerge as early as kindergarten, where girls show higher levels of essential learning skills such as persistence and self-control. Girls also derive more intrinsic gratification from performing well on a day-to-day basis, a crucial advantage in the learning process. By contrast, boys must often navigate a conflict between their emerging masculine identity and a strong attachment to school. Families and peers play a crucial role at this juncture. The authors show the gender gap in educational attainment between children in the same families tends to be lower when the father is present and more highly educated. A strong academic climate, both among friends and at home, also tends to erode stereotypes that disconnect academic prowess and a healthy, masculine identity. Similarly, high schools with strong science curricula reduce the power of gender stereotypes concerning science and technology and encourage girls to major in scientific fields. As the value of a highly skilled workforce continues to grow, The Rise of Women argues that understanding the source and extent of the gender gap in higher education is essential to improving our schools and the economy. With its rigorous data and clear recommendations, this volume illuminates new ground for future education policies and research.




Reimagining the Higher Education Student


Book Description

Drawing on the perspectives of scholars and researchers from around the world, this book challenges dominant constructions of higher education students. Given the increasing number and diversity of such students, the book offers a timely discussion of the implicit and sometimes subtle ways that they are characterised or defined. Topics vary from the ways that curriculum designers ‘imagine’ learners, the complex and evolving nature of student identity work, through to newspaper and TV representations of university attendees. Reimagining the Higher Education Student seeks to question the accepted or unquestioned nature of ‘being a student’ and instead foreground the contradictions and ‘messiness’ of such ideation. Offering timely insights into the nature of the student experience and providing an understanding of what students may desire from their Higher Education participation, this book covers a range of issues, including: Impressions versus the reality of being a Higher Education student Portrayals of students in various media including newspapers, TV shows and online Generational perspectives on students, and students as family members It is a valuable resource for academics and students both researching and working in higher education, especially those with a focus on identities, their importance and their constructions.




Class, Place, and Higher Education


Book Description

Higher education is seen to be a means to “the” good life and is a dominant way societies distribute hope for social mobility. But does higher education deliver on its promise? This book attends to the hopes, experiences, and trajectories of working-class students and graduates from Western Sydney – an area that is imagined, from the outside, to be a place of lack and stagnation, the “other” Sydney. This book challenges the myth that participation in higher education necessarily leads to upward social mobility and traces how the rewards of higher education are unevenly distributed. It considers how visions of a good life are class differentiated and makes an argument for the significance of place when examining experiences of higher education. Rather than focus on university as a means to becoming middle class, Class, Place, and Higher Education examines how university becomes a means to “a” good life, not “the” good life, a good life that is embedded in place, in working-class places like Western Sydney, and one that becomes more complex and ambivalent through the process of going to university. Through an attention to the existential and social dimensions of mobility, Alexandra Coleman develops the term “homely mobility” to describe the pull of people and place, and small-scale degrees of mobility in place – to a better street, the suburb next door, the university down the road. Structural inequalities are an embodied dimension of social being and action, and through the lens of homely mobility, this book affords insights into broader processes of social reproduction and transformation.




Mothers in Academia


Book Description

Featuring forthright testimonials by women who are or have been mothers as undergraduates, graduate students, academic staff, administrators, and professors, Mothers in Academia intimately portrays the experiences of women at various stages of motherhood while theoretically and empirically considering the conditions of working motherhood as academic life has become more laborious. As higher learning institutions have moved toward more corporate-based models of teaching, immense structural and cultural changes have transformed women's academic lives and, by extension, their families. Hoping to push reform as well as build recognition and a sense of community, this collection offers several potential solutions for integrating female scholars more wholly into academic life. Essays also reveal the often stark differences between women's encounters with the academy and the disparities among various ranks of women working in academia. Contributors--including many women of color--call attention to tokenism, scarce valuable networks, and the persistent burden to prove academic credentials. They also explore gendered parenting within the contexts of colonialism, racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, ageism, and heterosexism.




Relational Pedagogies


Book Description

What do meaningful connections in learning and teaching look like, and how might we foster these? How might the concept of mattering be helpful for our understanding of higher education? In this book, Karen Gravett examines the role of relationships, and in particular of relational pedagogies, where meaningful relationships are positioned as fundamental to effective learning. She explores concepts of authenticity, vulnerability, and trust within learning and teaching, as well as the potential of working with students in partnership. This book examines the role of relationships between colleagues: how educators can learn from others both within and beyond higher education, as well as considering how teachers can support one another when working within challenging contemporary contexts. Drawing upon a rich theoretical perspective that interweaves posthuman and sociomaterial theory, the book also introduces a broader conception of the relational, where relational pedagogies are understood as encompassing objects, spaces and materialities, as part of an interwoven web of relations. In exploring mattering, Gravett explores both who matters – who should be considered and valued – and the material mattering of learning. In this innovative conception of relational pedagogies, Gravett offers a broad and rich reworking of our understanding of relationality, offering fresh ways in which we might understand and conduct higher education theory and practice.




Handbook of Qualitative Research in Education


Book Description

This updated second edition unpacks the discussions surrounding the finest qualitative methods used in contemporary educational research. Bringing together scholars from around the world, this Handbook offers sophisticated insights into the theories and disciplinary approaches to qualitative study and the processes of data collection, analysis and representation, offering fresh ideas to inspire and re-invigorate researchers in educational research.




Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Higher Education


Book Description

Higher education has come under increasing public scrutiny in recent years, assailed with demands for greater efficiency, accountability, cost reduction, and, above all, job training. Drawing upon examples from across the world, with an emphasis on Anglo-American higher-education systems, this handbook employs sociological approaches to address these pressing concerns. The second edition is thoroughly updated and adds several new chapters to shed further light on the transformations wrought by the interrelated processes of massification, vocationalization, and marketization that have swept through universities in the wake of neoliberal reforms introduced by governments since the 1980s. The handbook explores recent developments in higher-education systems and policy as well as the everyday experiences of students and staff and ongoing problems of inequality and diversity within universities. In doing so, the chapters address a number of current issues concerning the legitimacy of higher-educational credentials, from the continuing debate regarding traditional pedagogies and the role of universities in social class reproduction to more recent concerns about standards in mass systems. Collectively, this handbook demonstrates that the sociology of higher education has the potential to play a leadership role in improving the myriad higher-education systems around the world that are now part of an interrelated set of subsystems, replete with both persistent problems and promising prospects. This book is therefore necessary reading for a variety of stakeholders within academia as well as professionals and policy-makers interested in understanding higher education and the acute challenges it faces.