The Bologna Process has significantly shaped recent higher education policies across Europe but the impact of the social dimension has been neglected. This book provides an overview of the major Bologna reforms and through a cross-country comparative study discusses whether this social aspect can ever successfully be incorporated into policy.
Since 1999 European higher education has been engaged in the most radical reform of its 900 years of history. This volume brings together a group of higher education researchers across Europe and looks into the implementation of the Bologna Process in the countries often attributed a peripheral status. In addition to cultural and political issues, the volume pays particular attention to the role of students as well as the changing position of the intellectuals under its impact.
The Bologna Reform has been implemented in a large part of the European Union and it is time to take a short pause to reflect over some of the lessons learned up to now. The aim of this book is to share experiences and reflections on English for Specific Purposes pedagogy in Western European higher education. Taking as a starting point the development of the EU policies during the past couple of decades and their national implementations, the chapters in this book provide various perspectives, both theoretical and practical, on the ways in which the reform has been implemented and its effects on the teaching of ESP. Experiences of developing programmes and courses incorporating Content and Language Integrated Learning and Autonomous and Lifelong Learning are described, as well as Problem-Based Learning and Process-Genre Pedagogies. The book also includes chapters on the crucial, but often neglected issue of teacher support in meeting the challenges of teaching content through the medium of English.
This book provides a central, authoritative source of reference on the most essential topics of higher education. The International Handbook of Higher Education combines a rich diversity of scholarly perspectives with a wide range of internationally derived descriptions and analyses. Chapters in the first volume cover central themes in the study of higher education, while contributors to the second volume focuses on contemporary higher education issues within specific countries or regions. Together, these volumes provide a centralized, easily accessible, yet scholarly source of information.
The author shows that comparative perspectives and the search for an internationally”best” or “most modern” solutions at times lead to convergent trends.
Processes of knowledge production and dissemination are increasingly set in an international context. In research and higher education the links between local actors and the international environments are both proliferating and intensifying. Individual level self-organised international collaboration is increasingly supplemented by national and supranational organised activities, and by market oriented activity with a global scope. Starting from these observations, this book analyses patterns of internationalisation comprising the national and supranational level, the level of higher education institutions and private companies, as well as the level of individual researchers and graduates. As a laboratory for studying internationalisation the book uses the case of Norway, a small knowledge system set in an open society, political system and economy. The case offers exceptionally good data on the developments in its research and higher education system that record changes over time and across the different parts and levels of a national knowledge system
This paper summarizes the experiences to date of the new EU countries (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia-the EU8) in the reform of higher education systems in a period of growing demand; changing patterns of access; rapid expansion and increased participation rates; and an apparent dilution of average quality. The study discusses the growing experience with a variety of financing mechanisms in EU8 countries, drawing on detailed country case studies, and seeks to develop some useful lessons from experience, mindful that each country will continue to develop its own solution based on national priorities.
In March 2010, the European Higher Education Area was officially launched, proclaiming the culmination of a ten-year timeframe projected at Bologna in 1999, when the education ministers of 29 European states signed a declaration that would fundamentally influence the future of their higher education systems. Forty-seven countries, including all EU Member States and other countries as far afield as Kazakhstan, now take part in the so-called 'Bologna Process'. Remarkably, this vast enterprise, which has led to rapid and sweeping changes in almost all higher education systems in Europe, has taken place outside the framework of the European Union and the Council of Europe. In fact, as this important legal analysis shows, it appears that with the Bologna Process the Member States have tried to sidestep the EU's growing influence on higher education. Although the Bologna Process has generated an impressive literature addressing what it might mean, where it suddenly came from, and how it has become so powerful, until now the legal implications of the process, and its tense relationship with EU law, have been left almost entirely unexamined. This work fills that gap. Among the often controversial issues raised are the following: ; avoidance of the democratically legitimate procedures of the EU's institutional framework for cultural reasons connected with state sovereignty; the scope of EU legal competence for various kinds of activities in the educational sector; specific areas of overlap between EU law and the Bologna Process and their implications; voluntary intergovernmental cooperation as a paradigmatic global shift of internationalization policies in education; the idea that the university is being redefined, from a social institution to an industry; the increasingly influential role in the process, by means of funding and coordination, of the European Commission; financial support programmes and devices to enhance credit and degree recognition; students as recipients of services; and teachers and the free movement of workers. The author describes how the scope of the Bologna Process was significantly broadened during a series of meetings during the decade, analyses the relevance of the case law of the European Court of Justice and provides a detailed description of the adoption of the process into the national laws of France, Germany and the United Kingdom. A concluding normative assessment scrutinizes the process on the basis of democracy, transparency and accountability. As the first study of the legitimacy of Bologna from a European law perspective - and by extension of the 'Europeanization' of higher education, including the role of the EU, EU law, and law in general - this is a critically important contribution to a contentious debate that clearly holds great significance for the future of law and society. Educators and education policymakers are sure to read and study it with interest.
