Search results

Educational institutions are investing heavily in the internationalization of their campuses to attract global talent. Yet, highly skilled immigrants face persistent labor market challenges. We investigate how immigrant academics experience and mitigate their double precarity (migrant and academic) as they seek employment in higher education in Canada.

We take a phenomenological approach and draw on reflective interviews with nine immigrant academics, encouraging participants to elaborate on symbols and metaphors to describe their experiences.

We found that immigrant academics constitute a unique highly skilled precariat: a group of professionals with strong professional identities and attachments who face the dilemma of securing highly precarious employment (temporary, part-time and insecure) in a new academic environment or forgoing their professional attachment to seek stable employment in an alternate occupational sector. Long-term, stable and commensurate employment in Canadian higher education is out of reach due to credentialism. Those who stay the course risk deepening their precarity through multiple temporary engagements. Purposeful deskilling toward more stable employment that is disconnected from their previous educational and career accomplishments is a costly alternative in a situation of limited information and high uncertainty.

We bring into the conversation discussions of migrant precarity and academic precarity and draw on immigrant academics’ unique experiences and strategies to understand how this double precarization shapes their professional identities, mobility and work integration in Canadian higher education.

The importance of teacher leadership in enhancing school outcomes is recognized, but there remains a scarcity of research addressing the conditions for principals to nurture such leadership. This study examined how school contextual factors, i.e. faculty trust and academic emphasis, moderate the impact of principals' distributed leadership lon teacher leadership.

A nationwide survey was conducted among junior high school teachers in Taiwan. The sample encompassed schools from different geographical regions and sizes, yielding a total of 1,340 valid responses. Hierarchical regression analyses were employed to analyze the potential moderating effects of interest.

There were interactive effects of principals' distributed leadership and school contextual factors on teachers' adoption of leadership roles. The impact of principals' distributed leadership on teacher leadership was amplified in environments marked by elevated levels of trust relations and reduced academic emphasis.

This study uncovers the critical prerequisites principals must address to cultivate teacher leadership. To effectively encourage heightened teacher engagement in leadership, principals must place a premium on nurturing trusting relations with their teaching staff and acknowledge that the influence of their leadership might be lessened in an environment where credentialism holds sway.

The exploration into faculty trust and academic emphasis yields insights into the conducive conditions for principals to foster teacher leadership. The identified attenuating impact of academic emphasis on principal effect within an Asian societal context highlights its significance not only as an organizational property but also as a manifestation of national cultural values.

Advanced education is often thought to respond to the demands of the economy, market forces create new occupations, and then universities respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills. Presented here is comparative research on an underappreciated, yet growing, concurrent alternative process: universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrollments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process referred to as academization of occupations has far-reaching implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations. Academization is also eclipsing the more limited professionalization processes in occupations. Additionally, it fuels further expansion of advanced education and contributes to a new culture of work in the 21st century. Commissioned detailed German and US case studies of the university origins and influence on workplace consequences of seven selected occupations and associated knowledge, skills, and degrees investigate the academization process. And to demonstrate how universal this could become, the cases contrast the more open and less-restrictive education and occupation system in the US with the centralized and state-controlled education system in Germany. With expected variation, both economies and their occupational systems show evidence of robust academization. Importantly too is evidence of academic transformations of understandings about approaches to job tasks and use of authoritative knowledge in occupational activities.

This study attempts to identify the drivers for change in Public Relations education and what assumptions are made about professional practice. The authors suggest signature pedagogy has the potential to deepen our understanding of the teaching and learning of Public Relations and what this means as the Public Relations curriculum adapts. The paper has theoretical and practical value. It forefronts the concept of signature pedagogy as a fresh way to look at Public Relations teaching and learning that can be developed.

This paper aims to explore the historical and contemporary context of teaching Public Relations within a university setting, how it has evolved and the assumptions that underpin it both nationally and internationally. Using a mixed methods approach, the paper investigates how the curriculum has changed since 2000, how it interacts with industry and how it reflects educational historical and contemporary frameworks. It also explores the assumptions on which Public Relations education was and is based and whether signature pedagogy is evidenced.

This study concludes that, from a signature pedagogy perspective, many current Public Relations curricula emphasise surface structures of learning. Deep structures, focusing on critical engagement and conceptual approaches to problem solving, are more variable, disconnected and contested. The data indicate the existence of an Anglo-American, skills-based approach to Public Relations knowledge, alongside international nuances around multi-culturalism. From a practical viewpoint, the paper contributes to how Public Relations programmes can be designed, taught and adapted in the future.

The paper evidences fully unique, primary research.

The internationalisation of industries has spilled over to academia, whereby institutions of higher learning (IHL) increasingly compete in the graduate quality and applied graduate knowledge capabilities that they can offer. With increasing global competition for students, combined with the evolving need for lifelong learning in dynamic industries impacted by digital knowledge management, there is an opportunity for IHLs to be able to evolve to ensure their business models enable services and service delivery to cater to and help shape industry demands. This chapter will look at micro-credentialing (MC) and how the provision of MCs has changed along with the evolving IHL education environment. The demands of students, employers and ecosystem considerations will be addressed through a review of the current landscape, pathways to MC and how MC may be operationalised. The Bersteinian approach to pedagogic classification, which identifies the framework of knowledge as being communicable via three axes of singularism, regionalism and a wider generalist approach is referenced as a framework. The resultant recommendations that draw upon these foundations will conclude the chapter.

Early research on overqualification suggested that overqualification is primarily associated with negative attitudes and behavior. As a consequence, hiring practitioners were advised against hiring overqualified job applicants. However, recent studies have revealed that there are several potential positive consequences of overqualification. Given this change in perspective on overqualification, we examine how hiring practitioners nowadays look at overqualified job applicants, and what their considerations are for hiring an overqualified job applicant or not.

We have interviewed 33 hiring practitioners to examine their attitudes and considerations toward hiring overqualified job applicants.

Results show that hiring practitioners are aware of potential positive as well as negative consequences of overqualification and consider a variety of factors to assess how beneficial hiring an overqualified candidate will be. These factors fall under three categories: Individual considerations, interpersonal considerations and contextual considerations.

We show that overqualification is not a stigma anymore and that the decision to hire an overqualified job applicant or not depends on a mixture of factors that are carefully considered. Two of these three considerations transcend the individual level (i.e. the overqualified person), whereas most research and theories on the consequences of overqualification do not go beyond the individual level. As such, our findings call for more theory and research on interpersonal and contextual factors shaping the consequences of overqualification.

Pulse check on discipline degrees for changed status quo is vital to ensure global futures for international enrolments (IEs). While employers spend less on training and more on innovating, can IEs manage time spent wisely and profitably (self-sufficiency) via collecting demand-driven credentials (micro-credentialing, Mc)? Due to limited research on Multidisciplinary, Micro-credentialing (MdMc), communication among stakeholders becomes difficult – there is no sense of self-sufficiency and course crossbreed lags; thus, diploma initiatives rarely succeed. Hence, MdMc aims to generate industry-necessitated, new knowledge hybrids where courses could generate adaptable Md links and intersections towards self-sufficiency. We propose a methodology based on Md content analysis on rapidly deployable knowledge bases suitable for multisector employability: a market survey to identify new knowledge areas. The outcome is to be knowledge mapped to identify gaps in skills required for applications to meet across disciplines. Finding the nature of these gaps intends to present possible knowledge links and intersections among courses. Diagrammatised and textual analysis of self-sufficiency-related benefits that could forge robust faulty-industry partnerships will be discussed – to demonstrate fluidity between credentials and careers. The resulting MdMc rigour model would present avenues for new content, training programmes, and a potential HE-industry manifesto. This MdMc model may offer a quick and dynamic process of epistemic, accessibility and instructional rigour checks to achieve professional currency towards self-sufficiency for IEs.

Offsite construction (OSC) is a modern method of construction (MMC) that involves manufacturing and assembly of buildings. Industry 4.0-driven technological advancements have accelerated OSC uptake causing many skilled construction workers requiring re-skilling or up-skilling. Quantity surveyors currently play an important role throughout a construction project life cycle, and hence, their knowledge on OSC projects is vital for the continuity of quantity surveying (QS) profession. The purpose of this paper is to critically review QS education in an OSC perspective and to propose strategies for up-skilling.

This research includes a detailed literature review of QS and OSC to evaluate how OSC affects the QS profession. Publicly available information on the university websites on accredited QS and construction management degrees was reviewed to identify OSC and MMC references, specifically the content listing and learning outcomes.

Out of the 315 degrees offered by 157 universities, only 69 degrees in 32 universities refer to OSC or MMC. OSC concept is explicitly referred in subjects related to construction technology, production management, lean construction, digital construction and MMC. As such, the research suggests including lean production principles, OSC techniques and design philosophies such as design for manufacture and assembly be added to the QS curricula.

This research is a comprehensive desktop study that does not involve empirical data-based evaluation. Research findings inform strategies to improve QS education and professional competencies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first of its kind that evaluates accredited QS degrees and learning requirements in an OSC perspective.

The concept of digital badges (DBs) as a form of microcredentialing has gained considerable traction in higher education and workplace settings in recent years. This scoping review aims to map the empirical research conducted on DBs in higher education and workplace settings.

The design of this study is a scoping literature review. This scoping review adopts the five-stage scoping framework proposed by Arksey and O’Malley (2005).

Based upon our review of the 45 studies that comprised this scoping review of the empirical literature on DBs, we advance a typology that segments the empirical research based on whether DBs are used as pedagogical tools (PTs) or microcredentials. The authors found some confusion regarding nomenclature, numerous theories offered to explain DBs and divergent findings that suggest room for further exploration of this relatively new phenomenon.

This scoping review of the literature helps make sense of the emerging research landscape on DBs. The findings suggest that using DBs as a PT or as a microcredential has implications for a wide range of stakeholders regarding promoting lifelong learning, upskilling and reskilling the workforce. With the financial constraints facing higher education in a postpandemic environment, understanding the impact of DBs is needed before making an investment in this arena.