This book presents a comprehensive account of the educational experiences of community college students in Hong Kong, analyzed through a theoretical lens that intersects sociological theories of inequality, including Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital. The student narratives featured in this book reveal the interweaving personal, academic, and professional considerations and challenges affecting their individual choices in the pursuit of higher education. Chapters also reveal why, despite the relative expansion of educational opportunities, the class gap in higher education persists.
Increasingly, students worldwide are seeking post-secondary education to acquire new skill-sets and credentials. There is an explosion of community college models that provide educational opportunities and alternative pathways for students who do not fit the traditional higher educational profile. This book focuses on economic models to help local and national economies develop strong workforce training, humanitarian models to bring about social mobility and peace, transformative models to help institutions expand and keep up with societal needs, and newly created models that respond to the educational and training needs of a constantly changing world. These models seek to capture the imagination of those who are committed to learning about what works in higher education and in particular, the impact community college models are having on the changing nature of world social, political and economic landscapes. With contributors representing 30 countries, this book presents an international perspective.
There is evidence that the global COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating existing inequalities and marginalization of vulnerable groups, including exceptional learners, stateless, street, migrant, and refugee children and youths, and the limited use of frameworks of emergency planning with and for marginalized and at-risk individuals. These challenges are multi-sectoral and intersecting, and they require multi- and interdisciplinary interventions to inform inclusive responses. These issues include being at a greater risk of excluding vulnerable learners from gaining access to equitable education (online/remote and blended education). Intersecting forms of discrimination such as gender, socioeconomic and legal status further exacerbate the problem. This has alerted us to examine the living conditions of marginalized and vulnerable populations around the globe, and to reveal their experiences, problems, and needs from an educational perspective, thus bringing insights into their vulnerabilities during the pandemic.
The American-Style University at Large: Transplants, Outposts, and the Globalization of Higher Education is an edited collection by Kathryn L. Kleypas and James McDougall that analyzes the recent expansion of American universities overseas as well as the emergence of American-style universities in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The contributors examine the various ways that American models of higher learning have become instituted around the world and explore ways that these new configurations help to define the university as a force that organizes, develops, and controls methods of education, knowledge, power, and culture.
This book is based upon three interrelated open naturalistic studies conducted to better characterise the motivational orientation of students in higher education. Open semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with undergraduates, students at community colleges and students in taught postgraduate courses in Hong Kong. The analysis used an exploratory grounded theory approach and resulted in a motivational orientation framework with six continua with positive and negative poles. On enrolment students had positions on the six facets of motivation, which shifted as they progressed through their degree according to their perceptions of the teaching and learning environment. The framework can, therefore, be used to explain both initial decisions to enrol and motivation to continue studying. The interviews included descriptions of teaching approaches and learning activities and their effects on motivation. This made it possible to describe a teaching and learning environment conducive to motivation, with eight supportive conditions. Each facet of the teaching and learning environment is illustrated with quotations from the three groups of students, resulting in a guide to configuring a teaching and learning environment conducive to motivating students. The emerging community-college sector in Hong Kong is used as a case study of the effects on student motivation of the expansion of the higher education sector through private colleges. Cultural issues are discussed, particularly the performance of Asian students relative to those in the West.
This timely volume documents the immediate, global impacts of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) on teaching and learning in higher education. Focusing on student and faculty experiences of online and distance education, the text provides reflections on novel initiatives, unexpected challenges, and lessons learned. Responding to the urgent need to better understand online teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, this book investigates how the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) impacted students, faculty, and staff experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown. Chapters initially look at the challenges faced by universities and educators in their attempts to overcome the practical difficulties involved in developing effective online programming and pedagogy. The text then builds on these insights to highlight student experiences and consider issues of social connection and inequality. Finally, the volume looks forward to asking what lessons COVID-19 can offer for the future development of online and distance learning in higher education. This engaging volume will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in online teaching and eLearning, curriculum design, and more, specifically those involved with the digitalization of higher education. The text will also support further discussion and reflection around pedagogical transformation, international teaching and learning, and educational policy more broadly.
The last half century has seen a dramatic expansion in access to primary, secondary, and higher education in many nations around the world. Educational expansion is desirable for a country's economy, beneficial for educated individuals themselves, and is also a strategy for greater social harmony. But has greater access to education reduced or exacerbated social inequality? Who are the winners and the losers in the scramble for educational advantage? In Growing Gaps, Paul Attewell and Katherine S. Newman bring together an impressive group of scholars to closely examine the relationship between inequality and education. The relationship is not straightforward and sometimes paradoxical. Across both post-industrial societies and the high-growth economies of the developing world, education has become the central path for upward mobility even as it maintains and exacerbates existing inequalities. In many countries there has been a staggering growth of private education as demand for opportunity has outpaced supply, but the families who must fund this human capital accumulation are burdened with more and more debt. Privatizing education leads to intensified inequality, as students from families with resources enjoy the benefits of these new institutions while poorer students face intense competition for entry to under-resourced public universities and schools. The ever-increasing supply of qualified, young workers face class- or race-based inequalities when they attempt to translate their credentials into suitable jobs. Covering almost every continent, Growing Gaps provides an overarching and essential examination of the worldwide race for educational advantage and will serve as a lasting achievement towards understanding the root causes of inequality.
A continuous expansion of higher education has made it possible not only for more students to get straight into university, but also for more students to obtain a university place at their second attempt immediately after their first attempt fails. However, the educational experiences of students who seek such a second chance have been under-examined. In filling this empirical gap, this book offers an application of Bourdieu’s analysis of class reproduction through education (together with his three concepts of habitus, cultural capital, and field, and the concept of emotional capital derived from an extension of his framework) to make sense of educational experiences of 64 community-college students who seek such a second chance in Hong Kong. The option of community college as a second chance became available in Hong Kong in the year 2000. The book explores how specific characteristics of community college in Hong Kong impact on the ways in which respondents of the middle and working classes see and feel about their selves throughout the course of pursuing this second chance. It also revisits Bourdieu’s framework and suggests the possibility of theorising an observed class contrast in orientation to making sense of (academic) challenges posed in educational contexts as a form of classed habitus of middle-class situational interpretation as opposed to working-class direct understanding.
