Governing through Standards: the Faceless Masters of Higher Education

Governing through Standards: the Faceless Masters of Higher Education
Author: Katja Brøgger
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2018-11-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 303000886X

This book offers an empirical and theoretical account of the mode of governance that characterizes the Bologna Process. In addition, it shows how the reform materializes and is translated in everyday working life among professors and managers in higher education. It examines the so-called Open Method of Coordination as a powerful actor that uses “soft governance” to advance transnational standards in higher education. The book shows how these standards no longer serve as tools for what were once human organizational, national or international, regulators. Instead, the standards have become regulators themselves – the faceless masters of higher education. By exploring this, the book reveals the close connections between the Bologna Process and the EU regarding regulative and monitoring techniques such as standardizations and comparisons, which are carried out through the Open Method of Coordination. It suggests that the Bologna Process works as a subtle means to circumvent the EU’s subsidiarity principle, making it possible to accomplish a European governance of higher education despite the fact that education falls outside EU’s legislative reach. The book’s research interest in translation processes, agency and power relations among policy actors positions it in studies on policy transfer, policy borrowing and globalization. However, different from conventional approaches, this study draws on additional interpretive frameworks such as new materialism.

Governing by Numbers and Human Capital in Education Policy Beyond Neoliberalism

Governing by Numbers and Human Capital in Education Policy Beyond Neoliberalism
Author: Miriam Madsen
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2022-09-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3031099966

This book addresses governing by numbers and human capital policy in higher education by asking how higher education is quantified, how the quantitative information is used in educational governance, and how the information is perceived by students, teachers, managers, and policymakers, and affects decision-making. It also thematically discusses how human capital theory affects the quantification practices and, thereby, their effects. Based on these analyses, the book asks whether governing by numbers and human capital in education policy are necessarily neoliberal practices, and thus questions the theory of global convergence in educational governance. The book provides a thorough analysis of the quantification of graduate outcomes based on the philosophical framework of Agential Realism, thus offering a novel analytical approach to the study of data and indicators in educational governance. The book draws on a comprehensive ethnographic case study from Danish higher education, and relates the findings from this case study to empirical cases in other countries and international research in the field. The book brings together literature from various fields, including political science, accounting, education, and sociology of quantification, in order to provide a comprehensive account of how quantification practices affect education.

Higher Education Hauntologies

Higher Education Hauntologies
Author: Vivienne Bozalek
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000373207

Higher Education Hauntologies considers how higher education might benefit from thinking about Derrida’s notion of hauntology and its implications for a justice-to-come. It contributes to the imperative to rethink the university across and with/in global geopolitical spaces and thus, has appeal for both Southern and international contexts. The book includes ideas which push boundaries that previously served higher education teachers and scholars and proposes new imaginaries of higher education. Additionally, the collection makes a contribution to ongoing debates about the epistemological, ethical, ontological and political implications of hauntology in higher education policies and practices, particularly in line with contemporary concerns for more socially just possibilities and visions in higher education. This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students of posthumanism and new materialism who are looking for new perspectives to engage with, and for those who are concerned about a justice-to-come in education, higher education, and educational theory and policy.

Students’ Experiences of Psychosocial Problems in Higher Education

Students’ Experiences of Psychosocial Problems in Higher Education
Author: Trine Wulf-Andersen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2022-08-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 100064037X

Around the world, students in higher education suffer from and deal with psychosocial problems. This phenomenon is universal and seems to be increasing. A vast number of students enter higher education with problems like stress, anxiety or depression, or develop them during their student lives, due to, for example, loneliness, family crisis, mental health or study environment issues. Battling, belonging and recognition are the focal points of this book’s analyses, showing how students faced with psychosocial problems experience high degrees of stigma and exclusion in the academic communities and society as such. The book is based on research situated in a welfare society, Denmark, where students have relatively easy access to higher education and to public support for education as well as special support for students with psychosocial problems. Taking a student perspective, the book provides in-depth, qualitative analyses of what characterizes student life, which specific psychosocial and other problems students experience, how problems are constructed, represented and become significant in relation to studying, and, not least, how students deal with them. It will be of great interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of educational psychology, sociology of education and higher education. It will also be of interest to supervisors and administrators in higher education.

Higher Education System Reform

Higher Education System Reform
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2019-04-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9004400117

The Bologna Declaration started the development of the European Higher Education Area. The ensuing Bologna Process has run for already 20 years now. In the meantime many higher education systems in Europe have been reformed – some more drastically than others; some quicker than others; some with more resistance than others. In the process of reform the initial (six) goals have sometimes been forgotten or sometimes been taken a step further. The context too has shifted: while the European Union in itself has expanded, the voice for exit has also been heard more frequently. Higher Education System Reform: An international comparison after Twenty Years of Bologna critically describes and analyses 12 Higher Education Systems from the perspective of four major questions: What is currently the situation with regard to the six original goals of Bologna? What was the adopted path of reform? Which were the triggering (economic, social, political) factors for the reform in each specific country? What was the rationale/discourse used during the reform? The book comparatively analyses the different systems, their paths of reforms and trajectories, and the similarities and the differences between them. At the same time it critically assesses the current situation on higher education in Europe, and hints towards a future policy agenda. Contributors are: Tommaso Agasisti, Bruno Broucker, Martina Dal Molin, Kurt De Wit, Andrew Gibson, Ellen Hazelkorn, Gergely Kovats, Liudvika Leišytė, Lisa Lucas, António Magalhães, Sude Peksen, Rosalind Pritchard, Palle Rasmussen, Anna-Lena Rose, Christine Teelken, Eva M. de la Torre, Carmen Perez-Esparrells, Jani Ursin, Amélia Veiga, Jef C. Verhoeven, Nadine Zeeman, and Rimantas Želvys.

Education in Flux

Education in Flux
Author: Mathias Decuypere
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000511200

This book aims to gain a better grasp of how education, both inside and outside school, is shaped by our understanding of time. Over the last decennia, both education and policymaking have undergone radical changes, transcending them far beyond the historical limits of the modern nation-state where their contemporary shape originated. The often-discussed shift from government to governance in education policy, together with the crystallization of newly emerging spaces of transnational education, are illustrative in this respect. The national grammar of schooling is set out to arrange time in class hours, schooldays and yearly cohorts. Its curricula establish what the past should teach to future generations. But when education shifts perspectives towards transnational, European or even global levels, this past increasingly seems to lose relevance when understood as continuity and as tradition. Instead, in education as in policymaking, the discontinuity expected to result from a future deemed open and undetermined becomes an endless resource for the development of new political and educational (re)forms. How are contemporary education and education policy creating and reacting to particular forms of presents, pasts or futures? How do specific forms of education (such as lifelong learning) relate to our shifting understandings of time? How are progress, acceleration and time related in educational reform processes? Through showing the contingency of time-making in educational practices, the contributions to this book seek to answer these questions and thus open avenues to think education and time anew. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Performative Approaches to Education Reforms

Performative Approaches to Education Reforms
Author: Dorthe Staunæs
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2020-05-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000008290

The purpose of this book is to investigate with conceptualization how reforms change educational organizations and subjectivities, and how educational organizations change reforms. The book gives an account of the power of conceptual endeavors, with close readings of empirical material. The book elaborates this through empirical investigations of the intertwinement of different educational reforms, of policies, standards, and everyday educational lives across the globe. As well as telling stories of reforms and how they transform and are transformed by the educational organizations and subjects they engage, the book highlights how a careful enactment of methodologies and critiques might enable a tracing of not only intended but also unintended effects of reforms. In this way, the book explores performative approaches to education reform and thus attempts to nuance the idea of causality and linearity in the implementation of education reforms. Engaging with performative approaches, this book scrutinizes how reforms are involved with the creation and shaping of the world and thus offers insight into what happens when reforms are borrowed, translated, and taken up in a range of ways. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Towards Social Justice in the Neoliberal Bologna Process

Towards Social Justice in the Neoliberal Bologna Process
Author: Iryna Kushnir
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2023-01-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1801178828

Towards Social Justice in the Neoliberal Bologna Process is essential reading for higher education scholars, policymakers, and postgraduate students across the EHEA, as well as countries beyond the EHEA that have been aligning their systems of education to the Bologna Process.

Educational Standardisation in a Complex World

Educational Standardisation in a Complex World
Author: Hanne Riese
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2022-04-20
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1800715897

This book presents the reader with tools to challenge accepted ideas about the standardising forces transforming educational reality, by discussing standards and standardisation from a range of different theoretical perspectives and contexts.