scholarly journals Educational innovation and university academics: the challenges of incorporating change into teaching and management practice

Author(s):  
Aldo A. VERDÍN-ZEA ◽  
Felipe ABUNDIS-DE LEÓN ◽  
Sofía de Jesús GONZALEZ-BASILIO

The processes of educational and curricular innovation have been presented in recent decades within the Higher Education Institutions in a remarkable way by the emergence of new policies by the governments in charge, as well as by the various social movements that have promoted improvements in the processes of student learning. However, the accelerated work that has been done to incorporate change into education systems has left two issues unresolved, on the one hand, the careful and in-depth analysis of the concept of innovation and on the other, the way in which academics incorporate change into practice both in classroom and in academic management. The purpose of this research is to make progress in these two aspects, and to do so, it addresses innovation from the perspective of globalization and identifies academics as factors of change.

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter P. Smith

The United States is in a bind. On the one hand, we need millions of additional citizens with at least one year of successful post-secondary experience to adapt to the knowledge economy. Both the Gates and Lumina Foundations, and our President, have championed this goal in different ways. On the other hand, we have a post-secondary system that is trapped between rising costs and stagnant effectiveness, seemingly unable to respond effectively to this challenge. This paper analyzes several aspects of this problem, describes changes in the society that create the basis for solutions, and offers several examples from Kaplan University of emerging practice that suggests what good practice might look like in a world where quality-assured mass higher education is the norm.


Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Epongse Nkealah ◽  
Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji

Ideas of nationalisms as masculine projects dominate literary texts by African male writers. The texts mirror the ways in which gender differentiation sanctions nationalist discourses and in turn how nationalist discourses reinforce gender hierarchies. This article draws on theoretical insights from the work of Anne McClintock and Elleke Boehmer to analyse two plays: Zintgraff and the Battle of Mankon by Bole Butake and Gilbert Doho and Hard Choice by Sunnie Ododo. The article argues that women are represented in these two plays as having an ambiguous relationship to nationalism. On the one hand, women are seen actively changing the face of politics in their societies, but on the other hand, the means by which they do so reduces them to stereotypes of their gender.


Author(s):  
Steven J. R. Ellis

This chapter introduces the topic of retailing in the Roman world and outlines some of the important developments in its study. It establishes why the focus of the book zooms in from retailing in general to the retailing of food and drink in particular; thus from shops to bars. Another aim is to demonstrate the scope of the study, which is an in-depth analysis of specific shops and bars at Pompeii on the one hand, and on the other a broader survey of the retail landscapes of cities throughout the Roman world. Essentially this chapter provides the theoretical and methodological framework for the book, while also arguing for the value of it in the first place.


Author(s):  
Hugh H. Benson
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

This chapter presents a reading of Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. These dialogues, in which Plato depicts the weeks leading up to Socrates’s last day, are replete with various philosophical explorations. Among those explorations is the question of how to live our lives. On the one hand, Socrates is clear and straightforward. We should live the examined life—making logoi and examining ourselves and others in order to determine whether we are as wise as we think we are, and we should live the virtuous life. This is how Socrates lives his life. On the other hand, the examined life undercuts, or at least should undercut, the confidence with which he seeks to live the virtuous life. It may help bring some stability to the general principles by which he lives his life, but it can do so only defeasibly and without certainty.


Author(s):  
Andrew Linn ◽  
Anastasiya Bezborodova ◽  
Saida Radjabzade

AbstractThis article presents a practical project to develop a language policy for an English-Medium-Instruction university in Uzbekistan. Although the university is de facto English-only, it presents a complex language ecology, which in turn has led to confusion and disagreement about language use on campus. The project team investigated the experience, views and attitudes of over a thousand people, including faculty, students, administrative and maintenance staff, in order to arrive at a proposed policy which would serve the whole community, based on the principle of tolerance and pragmatism. After outlining the relevant language and educational context and setting out the methods and approach of the underpinning research project, the article goes on to present the key findings. One of the striking findings was an appetite for control and regulation of language behaviours. Language policies in Higher Education invariably fall down at the implementation stage because of a lack of will to follow through on their principles and their specific guidelines. Language policy in international business on the other hand is characterised by a control stage invariably lacking in language planning in education. Uzbekistan is a polity used to control measures following from policy implementation. The article concludes by suggesting that Higher Education in Central Asia may stand a better chance of seeing through language policies around English-Medium Instruction than, for example, in northern Europe, based on the tension between tolerance on the one hand and control on the other.


1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Callard

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Morgan ◽  
Joshua A. Solomon

AbstractIt is usually assumed that sensory adaptation is a universal property of human vision. However, in two experiments designed to measure adaptation without bias, we have discovered a minority of participants who were unusual in the extent of their adaptation to motion. One experiment was designed so that targets would be invisible without adaptation; the other, so that adaptation would interfere with target detection. In the first, participants adapted to a spatial array of moving Gabor patches. On each trial the adapting array was followed by a test array in which but all of the test patches except one were identical to their spatially corresponding adaptors; the target moved in the opposite direction to its adaptor. Participants were required to identify the location of the changed target with a mouse click. The ability to do so increased with the number of adapting trials. Neither search speed nor accuracy was affected by an attentionally-demanding conjunction task at the fixation point during adaptation, suggesting low-level (pre-attentive) sites in the visual pathway for the adaptation. However, a minority of participants found the task virtually impossible. In the second experiment the same participants were required to identify the one element in the test array that was slowly moving: reaction times in this case were elevated following adaptation. The putatively weak adapters from the first experiment found this task easier than the strong adapters.


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
João Carlos Coimbra ◽  
Tiago Menezes Freire

A robust biostratigraphic zonation based on microfossils supports the stratigraphic framework and correlation of the interior basins of the Lower Cretaceous of NE Brazil. This zonation has also allowed correlations with coeval sections in the Brazilian marginal basins and in the Gabon and Congo basins (central-west Africa). These records, consisting mainly of non-marine sediments, were a great challenge with regard to the correlation with the International Chronostratigraphic Chart. Therefore, local stages were used, the most recent being the Alagoas local Brazilian Stage, with which the Post-rift Sequence I of the Araripe Basin is related. Regarding lithostratigraphy, this sequence includes the Rio da Batateira (Barbalha for some authors) and Santana formations, the last one with the famous Crato, Ipubi, and Romualdo members, from the base to the top. Although currently there is a consensus on the age of the Alagoas local Brazilian Stage in the Araripe Basin, recently a new age for at least part of the Post-rift Sequence I was proposed. This new proposal, based on isotopic analysis of Re-Os, arose as a panacea to correlate the Rio da Batateira Formation and the Crato and Ipubi members with the international stages. Surprisingly, their authors, although on the one hand, they seem to underestimate biostratigraphic results, on the other they seek to support their proposal from microfossils studied by previous authors, but they do so in an inappropriate way, leading readers to misinterpret their results. Therefore, this paper presents a critical review on the age of the Alagoas local Brazilian Stage in the Araripe Basin and nearby basins, refuting a Barremian age for part of the Post-rift Sequence I. Keywords: Alagoas local Brazilian Stage, biostratigraphy, ostracods, palynomorphs, radiometric ages.


2018 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Franz A. J. Szabo

In his great 1848 historical drama,Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy:Das ist der Fluch von unserm edeln Haus:Auf halben Wegen und zu halber TatMit halben Mitteln zauderhaft zu streben.[That is the curse of our noble house:Striving hesitatingly on half waysto half action with half means.]True as those sentiments may be of many periods in the history of the monarchy, the one period of which it cannotbe said is the second half of eighteenth century. The age of Maria Theresa, Joseph II, and Leopold II was perhaps the greatest era of consistent and committed reform in the four-hundred-year history of the monarchy. What I want to address in this article are some aspects of the dynamic of this reform era, and this falls into two categories. On the one hand, there is the broad energizing or motive force behind the larger development, and on the other, there are the ideas or assumptions that lay behind the policies adopted. As might be evident from the subtitle of my article, I propose to look primarily at the second of these categories. I do so because I think while Habsburg historiography has reached considerable consensus on the first, it has not looked enough on the second as an explanatory hermeneutic.


2020 ◽  
pp. 161-176
Author(s):  
Ian Maclachlan

This chapter focuses on Louis-René des Forêts’s poetic sequence, Poèmes de Samuel Wood (1988) in order to highlight the relationship between poetic form, authorial voice and the genre of autobiography. Des Forêts’s sequence comprises a 559-line poem divided into thirteen sections, attributed by its title to the heteronymous author-figure Samuel Wood. Notwithstanding its form and authorial disguise, the poem is obliquely autobiographical and forms part of the overall project of the long, final phase of his writing, best exemplified by the fragmentary work of 1997, Ostinato. My analysis seeks to stake out a distinctive way of conceiving the relation of poetic form to autobiographical genre (taking a distance, notably, from Lejeunian typological approaches), and in order to do so endeavours, on the one hand, to work with the idea of form as active, dynamic and mobile, a process of forming, deforming and reforming which is always temporally emergent and variable, rather than a structure that might simply contain something like content or experience, and on the other hand, to connect that mobility of form to des Forêts’s pursuit of a distinctive autobiographical mode. Far from reflecting and securing authorial identity, this mode might be considered as one that concerns an impersonal or anonymous level of experience that is fundamentally insecure and ultimately inappropriable; we might think of this mode as a kind of degree zero of autobiography, an autobiography in the neuter, or an ‘autobiographie intérieure’.


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