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The European Universities Initiative (EUI), created by the European Commission in 2017, is a recent novel phenomenon within the European Union policy toolkit that explicitly targets the development of transnational cooperation in higher education (HE). To date, the EUI counts 44 European university alliances, involving around 340 HE institutions. In this paper, we argue that the EUI can be seen as a case of a transnational institution building process representing a potentially significant structural reform for European higher education. Anchored in new institutionalism, we explore the regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive dimensions of the EUI. Methodologically, this study analyzes the perspectives of European policy actors (n = 4), a set of policy documents (n = 13) and the mission statements of the EUI's partnerships funded before 2022 (n = 41). The results show that the EUI emerges as the 'next level of cooperation' in European HE since it aims to transform European cooperation (regulative dimension), to create and diffuse a new model for European HE following a challenge-based approach (normative dimension), and to work as a way to reinforce and institutionalize European and global scripts for European HE (cultural-cognitive dimension).

As humanity reaches the 5.0 industrial revolution, education plays a critical role in boosting the quality of human resources. This paper reports bibliometric research on emerging TiP during 1993-2022 in the educational field to analyse its development on any level of education during the last three decades. This study employed a Scopus database. The findings are that the trend of TiP publication in educational fields has tended to increase every year during the past three decades and conference paper became the most published document type, the USA is the country which produces the most publications; "Students" being the most occurrences keyword and total link strength. The publication of the TiP is ranked to the Quartile 1, which implies that a publication with the cited performance is a publication with credibility because the publisher has a good reputation. Researchers can find the topics most relevant to other metadata sources such as Web of Science, Publish, and Perish.

This paper examines the interplay of creativity, education, and the expressive arts. We begin by presenting a narrative literature review focusing on the use of artistic tools to promote creativity, self-expressiveness, and meaningful aspects of emotional and social learning. This review reveals strong connections between the different components of this interplay, and a special attention is given to the use of arts to promoting creativity and meaningful learning. We then propose the Empowering Creative Education Model (ECEM), which aims to provide a practical framework for employing artistic tools in each of the model's four developmental circles: I, Us, Educational and Community. Each of the four circles includes unique aspects of personal development.

Immigrant minority (IM) languages have a significant presence in certain European regions. Nonetheless, these languages are not usually included in the school curriculum. This paper aims to analyse the studies published between 2010 and 2020 considering IM languages in multilingual European education contexts. The method included a search of academic papers published in the databases ERIC, Web of Science and Scopus, which yielded 42 studies. The studies were analysed by considering: (1) the demographic characteristics of the countries where the studies were conducted, (2) the sociolinguistic or psycholinguistic focus of the papers in relation to the European country, and (3) the characteristics of the bi-multilingual education programme including IM languages. The results indicate that: (1) the demographic characteristics of the country are not strictly related to the number of studies published, (2) most studies have a sociolinguistic approach even though many studies analyse both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors, and (3) only seven multilingual education programmes including IM languages were described in these papers. We conclude that there is a lack of research focusing on IM languages in educational settings and discuss how addressing these gaps could create opportunities for building equitable multilingual communities in Europe.

This study reviews the literature published on job crafting using bibliometric techniques. It utilizes the papers published on the topic from 1990 to 2023, retrieved from the Scopus database. The purpose of the paper is to draw the intellectual, conceptual and social structure of the field of research on job crafting. It uses the bibliometric method to review the literature on "job crafting." The findings of the study reveal both the micro and macro aspect of the research published so far such as Europe is the epicenter of research on the topic, while experiments and questionnaires a popular choice in methods adopted. This review gives a unique view of the past and outlines a number of future directions for research on the topic and it will be of interest to existing scholars in the field as well as doctoral students who might be interested in the topic.

Applying qualitative methods, this paper examines the burgeoning of quality assurance databases, processes and networks of actors in the field of higher education in Europe. Our main argument is that there has been a move from the Bologna Process being the near singular focus for European-level coordination and harmonisation of higher education, towards the making of a much more diverse and complex quality assurance and evaluation infrastructure. This infrastructure involves a range of distinct but interdependent actors and processes and contains explicit and implicit interlinkages with the production of wider policy agendas, such as the rise of the European Education Area. The aim of this paper is to analyse the growth and complexity of Quality Assurance (QA) in higher education (HE) in Europe, as a way of understanding the multifaceted and continuously developing process of Europeanisation.

The political, social, and institutional environments in which contemporary universities operate have changed rather dramatically over the past two decades in ways that threaten the resilience of the academic core, both in its ability to map knowledge comprehensively and also to maintain a balance between the branches of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. This paper traces historical changes (2003-2019) in the academic core of two "flagship" research-intensive universities located in Northern Europe. The results show that some branches of the academic core are undergoing dynamic processes of program churn that make them resilient. Furthermore, the data show that this resilience is enabled in large part by bridging different branches of knowledge by establishing what we term interbranch programs. In addition to the abovementioned findings, the paper links ongoing discussions regarding change in HE systems and institutions to the literature on organizational resilience, and it advances insights for a possible future theory of how adaptation plays out in the academic core over time.

Living and working through the challenges of a pandemic offered a unique research opportunity to engage with some core questions about what really matters in Religious Education (RE) in countries across Europe. The "What COVID Reveals to Religious Education Specialists" research project sought to provide a reflective space for RE specialists, drawn from the board members of the European Forum for Teachers of Religious Education (EFTRE), to consider their experiences of RE during the COVID-19 pandemic and to begin to articulate what they might want in the future for RE in light of their experiences. Areas explored in the online qualitative survey included: challenging questions and issues, social unrest, student-teacher relationships, learning scenarios, valued dimensions in RE, opportunities for the future, and 'ideal' RE. Respondents were from sixteen of the twenty-two countries present on the EFTRE Board, offering their individual perspectives from Western, Northern, Central and Southern Europe. Using the tool ATLAS.ti, an inductive analytical approach was employed; a number of key group 'themes' emerged from the responses, which provided a basis for further analysis. This paper will present some of the main findings in dialogue with the focusing research stimulus question: "What does COVID-19 reveal to RE specialists about their subject?" The project is a European collaboration involving researchers from Austria, Germany, Hungary, Ireland and Wales.

Although education is arguably one of the most central institutions in contemporary European societies, only recently scholars have started to study opinions that relate to the perceived legitimacy of education among the public at large. This paper contributes to this emerging literature. Based on data from the most recent wave of the European Quality of Life Survey (N = 23,073; 30 countries) we assess what individual- and country-level factors predict citizens' satisfaction with educational quality and the perceived fairness of/corruption in education. At the individual level, we find that indicators of one's material vs. educational position are inversely related to the perceived quality, fairness, and corruption of the education system. At the macro level, it turns out that in countries that perform better on PISA tests the perceived educational quality is higher and the perceived corruption lower. In the conclusion we elaborate on the implications of our findings.

This paper provides an alternative lens of viewing digital technologies and networked spaces in outdoor intercultural learning, by introducing the Taoist philosophy of Ziran (nature) and Wuwei (inaction). The application of digital technology to outdoor learning has become prevailing and triggered critical debates and discussions among scholars and practitioners. The majority of the perspectives are, however, oriented in Western ideologies, and very rarely has any research considered this issue in the context of outdoor intercultural learning. A mini-ethnographic study was conducted to reconcile the nature-technology dichotomy during an EU-exchange sail-training voyage. Methodological implications are provided for conducting fieldwork in outdoor learning research, in line with the Ziran-Wuwei principles. The findings suggest that educators and facilitators follow the dialectical, relational, and contextual orientations to manage the (non)use of digital devices to maximise learners' outdoor experiential engagement and reflections.