This paper examines regulating discourses "spoken" within the complex multi-sector network of educational policy and provision that has grown from a recent introduction of choice advisers in England. Choice advice documentation from across the network is examined and four discursive themes are identified: equity; parental responsibility;…

Research into the practice of academics serves to inform higher education development (HED) theory and interventions, and is important for the development of the professional knowledge of the HED practitioner. Through such research HED practitioners gain access to what in another context is referred to as "guilty knowledge". The complex ethical…

Students readily see kindness as a mark of the good teacher. Yet the concept of kindness is singularly silent in accounts of teaching excellence, student satisfaction or professional values. It seems to have little place in a world driven by competitive individualism. In this article, the author discusses kindness, which extends beyond the private…

This paper investigates the possibilities of the use of dialogue, and the dangers of the use of monologue, in higher education in the early twenty-first century, in a period facing a number of smaller- and larger-scale crises--each interpreted as an "abyss" of some kind. How does higher education contribute, positively or negatively, to personal…

It is becoming increasingly clear that the notion of "removing barriers" offers a limited foundation for widening participation to higher education. Drawing on realist social theory, we consider how decisions to participate or not participate form part of a process to establish a "modus vivendi" or "way of life" for oneself. We explore factors…

This paper explores the idea of conceptual threshold crossing in the writing process and in particular stuck moments and the process of moving on, valuing the pricelessness of preliminality, the vision of a possible movement through a portal and the creative learning leap into focused, formed writing. Our work to date is based on formal and less…

The demands and challenges posed by the global economy help explain the growing importance of the internationalisation of higher education in European, national and institutional policy arenas. The discourse of internationalisation is driven primarily by economic factors, and an emphasis on competition, standards and skills has shifted attention…

Time and temporality have received little attention in the consumerism, marketing or, until recently, higher education literature. This paper attempts to compare the notions of timing implicit in education as "paideia" (transitional personal growth) with that implicit in consumerism and the marketing practices which foster it. This investigation…

This paper considers influences on the contemporary school curriculum in England. It does so mainly through a critical analysis of one significant critique of the curriculum made by the think tank Civitas in their collection of essays asserting the "corruption" of the curriculum, published in 2007. The paper places the Civitas position in a wider…

Examining the educational writings of three of the eighteenth-century's most innovative thinkers, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, Morelly and Helvetius, this article challenges the currently accepted view that it was a belief in human pliability which gave rise to the contemporary groundbreaking faith in the power of education to improve society. The…

In this paper I frame the totalizing dominance of performativity in educational arenas in terms of its effects on professional thinking and attitudes. The problem is that the education professional's cognition ends up artificially obsessed with defined performance indicators and closed by default to the fluidity that should accompany reflective…

Quality has clear meanings when associated with specific phenomena. The relative nature of quality in commercial contexts, specifically in relation to manufactured goods, has been studied. In service industries there is no satisfactory indicator of quality. The Likert-scale questionnaire does not allow the researcher to distinguish between…

There is a tendency in a good economic climate for research to focus on the sources of economic growth. Reactions to what is commonly called the credit crunch are worth having a look at. At first, analysts believed this crisis would be short-lived and that some adjustments would correct external turbulences. Then, the idea emerged that the…

Challenges facing the higher education sector globally include questions over what counts as knowledge and what are valid forms of both its reproduction and production. This paper addresses the question of how what counts as valid knowledge is challenged and how it changes over time. It does this via an analysis of examples of social…

Student transitions into the university are often conceived of via an apprentice-type model, or as entrance into a "community of practice". This paper disputes the applicability of these models to the indeterminate and opaque nature of student experiences of academic writing, and proposes that emotional destabilization and struggles around…