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This paper explores the potential for using practice-based assessments in higher education in preparing humanities and social sciences specialists. The authors tested a set of innovative methodologies for practice-based summative assessment of the progress made in learning certain disciplines by students majoring in Law, International Law, and History and Archaeology at Sumy State University (Ukraine). To assess the effectiveness of practice-based assessments, the authors employed anonymous surveying, tested students' level of mastery of key theoretical concepts, and carried out a comparative analysis of the performance of students who took part in practice-based assessments and those who took exams in a traditional way. The conducted pedagogical experiment indicates the advisability of employing practice-based assessments as part of teaching humanities and social sciences disciplines. It revealed a significant increase in the level of preparation of students on subjects summative assessment around which was based on practical assignments. Having students train their practical skills can help them assimilate theoretical knowledge better and for a longer time and become more confident in their preparedness for their future profession. Practice-based assessments can also serve as a yardstick for gauging the effectiveness of instructors' teaching methods and stimulate the quest for new ways of teaching and learning that can help meet the needs of the labor market and the interests of students pursuing a higher education as much as possible.

This paper examines patterns of knowledge production in the social sciences (SS) and in the arts and humanities (A&H) in Latin America (LATAM). We report on a longitudinal analysis of 127,515 journal articles published between 2002 and 2018. The analysis reveals six major patterns: (i) a rapid growth in the production of journal articles; (ii) large differences in article production across nations; (iii) significant variations in the magnitude and the growth of articles across disciplines within the SS and the A&H; (iv) a present predominance of single-authored articles that has nevertheless been declining in favour of collaborative articles; (v) a significant variation in the magnitudes of collaborative articles with researchers outside LATAM, a collaboration that tends to be with the global North; and (vi) differences in research leadership across LATAM nations. A set of possible explanations is offered for each of these patterns, set within a dynamic global knowledge production context.

This paper presents a two-year pedagogical, teacher-as-researcher, action research project at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Sousse, Tunisia, which investigates how the integration of the Soliya Connect Program, a facilitated dialogic online exchange programme, with a theoretical course on critical intercultural communication helped students develop critical interculturality. Despite some initial concern about the extra time commitment, students were unanimously positive about integrating the two aspects, claiming that the Connect Program helped them to develop criticality in real life, and that the online communication was much more effective because they participated with the critical perspective developed in class. The findings support the integration of theoretical and practical online components in developing students' critical intercultural communication skills, and the use of action research to inform adjustments to both components in order to improve the outcomes.

This paper assesses prospects for the relationship between educational studies and educational practice, with reference to the current institutional and policy context in England. Drawing on the sociology of educational knowledge and practice, it is argued that educational studies can be conceptualised in contrasting ways, by considering internal structures, external relations and how disciplinary problematics are defined, but also by how educational practice is portrayed. To develop the analysis, Bernstein's work on knowledge structures and academic and professional discourses is articulated with philosophical work that distinguishes between different conceptualisations of practice prevalent in the humanities and social sciences. This enables critical reflection on three arrangements of educational studies (the foundation disciplines, the new science, and the deliberative traditions) each with their own internal dynamic, socio-epistemic assumptions, relationship to policy, and implications for the future production of knowledge. This process of reflection is illustrated with reference to some recent developments in England that illuminate the current position of educational studies in relation to educational policy and practice.

Sharing research results internationally has become a hallmark of modern science. In many countries, scholars are expected to publish in journals that promise high citation scores, boosting the recognition of the authors and institutions they represent. Since most of such indexed journals are English-medium, these expectations influence the choice of the publication language, a problem particularly relevant in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), where research is often embedded in specific cultural contexts. This paper presents the results of a study on multilingual publication practices among SSH scholars at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. It looks into the present and future language choices, reasons for these decisions, and the role of science policy in shaping the linguistic landscape of the SSH disciplines. The analysis is based on data collected in a survey and retrieved from the university publication reports for the evaluation period 2017-2021. The results demonstrate the dominant position of Polish and a strong and growing position of English, with a small share of publications in other languages. The findings point to the role of evaluation schemes in decisions regarding the publication language and the need for a science policy that fosters multilingual research practices.

This paper conceptualises and explores 'the art of critique' in student writing in the humanities and social sciences [Foucault 1997. "What is Critique?" In: "The Politics of Truth." English Translation. Translated from French by Lysa Hocroth & Catherine Porter. In "Dits et Ecrits" for original French. Los Angeles: Semiotexte. Accessed July 10, 2015. http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Foucault-Critique.pdf]. Its starting principle is that education lacks vigour without an understanding of how to play with and disrupt the rules of Western reason, as well as respect them: a practice of playing and interrupting the same to generate something new that is beyond 'use-value' [Derrida 2006. "Specters of Marx." New York: Routledge Classics, 201] yet can also be used to signify 'use-value'. Fundamental to this idea is the question of the 'agency' of the subject in orders of discourse, oscillating between consent and resistance. To conceptualise the dynamics of interrupting the historical traditions of academic writing more closely, Foucault's notion of 'care of the self' and Derrida's field of analysis, deconstruction, are interrogated. A few examples of such dynamics in student work are then tentatively presented as heuristics for catalysing the 'art of critique' in writing.

Mathematics is not just the queen of the sciences; it permeates through art, commerce, and in fact, every aspect of modern life. However, while we as mathematicians see beauty in the mathematical way of thinking and problem-solving, our students tend to think of mathematics as a set of rules and abstract computations. Our pleasure of doing mathematics usually does not transfer over to our students. In this paper, we describe two liberal arts general education courses which seek to develop a broad appreciation of mathematics for students who may not require any technical mathematics course for their academic major or chosen career path. We present mathematics as it relates to everyday life, with the goal of improving student appreciation of mathematics.

Although the potential of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) for intercultural learning and teaching is acknowledged, few studies have explored the teaching of culture in EMI programmes in higher education contexts. Thus, this study examined the perceptions and practices that six EMI teachers from a variety of disciplines have of culture and cultural instruction at a Chinese university. Data were obtained from 24 classroom observations and six post-observation interviews. Drawing on Larzen-Ostermark's tripartite culture-teaching orientations and Rasouli and Moradkhani's culture-teaching taxonomy, the findings revealed that teachers with a humanities and social sciences background had a fluid and dynamic view regarding the understanding of culture, while teachers with a science, technology, engineering and mathematics background did not recognise the need to incorporate cultural instruction into their EMI classes. In analysing classroom data, five categories of cultural instruction were identified: contrast, authentic material, groupwork, codeswitching and guided discussion of culture. The five categories are mainly in line with the affective and action orientations in Larzen-Ostermark's three-orientation framework. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of the study's findings for EMI policymakers and EMI teacher training programmes.

Humanities scholars can today engage in research inquiry using data from a range of varied collections which are often characterised by poor subject access, often resulting in systems that underperform and even effectively prevent access to data, information and knowledge. In spite of the availability of professional standards and guidelines to provide quality-controlled subject access through knowledge organisation systems (KOS), subject access in such collections is rarely based on KOS. At the same time, KOS themselves may come with problems such as being slow to update, being rigidly structured and not incorporating end-users' vocabulary. It may therefore be useful to consider methods for remediating these deficiencies in KOSs, such as collecting user-generated metadata via social tagging or complementing automated indexing techniques with manual ones. To help address the above problems, the paper discusses these challenges and points to possible solutions in different contexts. It does so by reflecting on an open educational resource (OER) devoted to this theme, titled Introduction to Knowledge Organisation Systems for Digital Humanities. It was developed as part of an EU project called DiMPAH (Digital Methods Platform for the Arts and Humanities), 2021-2023, creating seven OERs for inclusion in DARIAH Teach.

As a part of the DiMPAH-project, the authors have developed an open educational resource (OER) on netnography. In this paper, the OER is presented and critically discussed as the broader problem identified during course-development is made explicit and explored through two research questions: 1) How can an OER be designed that positions netnography as a viable methodology for the digital humanities? 2) How can an OER be designed that theoretically and methodologically combines both quantitative and qualitative approaches for doing netnography? An up-to-date theoretical overview of netnography as a methodology for studying social experiences online is provided. Methodological considerations are presented, aimed for sensitizing students to nuances of active (participatory) and passive (non-participatory) netnography through two analytical concepts. The OER is presented through three case studies and a learning scenario offering flexible and authentic technology-integrated learning. Netnography is found to contribute to the digital humanities, overall characterized by method-driven and quantitative approaches, with reflexivity and a potential for critical research and pedagogy. The two analytical concepts community-based netnography and consociality-based netnography allow for a nuanced methodological understanding of how and when qualitative and quantitative approaches should be employed, and how they may complement each other.

This article examines the predictors of gender-specific literature production in the field of social sciences and humanities (SSH). The research used bibliometric information on 1132 gender-related articles by authors with Romanian affiliations. Binary logistic regression shows the individual and institutional factors of a paper's likelihood of including gender-related words in its title. Weak institutionalisation of Gender Studies marks this national context, reflected in the marginal and discontinuous integration in the curriculum of higher-education institutions. Our findings suggest that the female gender of the first or a single author, as well as the authors' affiliation with Romanian universities running master's programmes in Gender Studies, are positively associated with the outcome variable. Likewise, single-author articles have greater odds than co-authored articles of including a reference to gender in their titles. Conversely, articles published in journals in the JIF third quartile of the JCR hierarchy have less chance of having a title that conveys an orientation towards gender-specific research. The implications of our findings suggest that the decision-makers at the level of faculties and research institutes in SSH must focus on creating a facilitating environment for scholarly interest in feminist research. We propose tackling the negative stereotypes regarding feminism's ideological underpinnings and its ostensible lack of epistemological foundation. Romania is a country still facing significant domestic violence and poor gender equality, so these findings have further implications at the societal level.

The digital humanities (DH) remain a growing area of interest among researchers and a locus of new positions within libraries, especially academic libraries, as well as archives, museums, and cultural heritage organizations. In response to this demand, many programs that train information professionals have developed specific curricula around DH. This paper analyzes courses offered within two overlapping contexts: American Library Association (ALA) accredited programs and iSchools. In addition to documenting the scope and extent of DH courses in these settings, we also analyze their contents, relating our findings to previous research, including analysis of job ads and interviews with professionals.

W. Speed Hill, ed. New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, III: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1997-2001. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 270. Tempe: Arizona Center [...]

Karl Schuhmann. Selected Papers on Renaissance Philosophy and on Thomas Hobbes. Eds. Piet Steenbakkers and Cees Leijenhorst. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004. xiv + 278 pp. index. bibl. [...]

Thomas M. Lennon, ed. Cartesian Views: Papers Presented to Richard A. Watson. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 116. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003. xii + 240 pp. index. [...]

This is a theoretical paper that addresses the challenge of educational access to the Humanities and Social Sciences. It plots a theoretical quest to develop an explicit pedagogy to give "disadvantaged" students in the Humanities ways of working successfully with texts. In doing so it draws on Bernstein, Moore and Maton's work to theorize the nature of knowledge in the Humanities, and also on Brandom's analysis of inferential reasoning. It uses elements of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyse student texts. The empirical work reported on here is work-in-progress and represents no more than an indication of the approach advocated. The approach is illustrated by examples from comprehension exercises designed to promote students' inferential reasoning. Selected findings are presented to illustrate the extent of the challenge entailed in facilitating access to Humanities texts. The paper concludes by suggesting that mastery of ways of working with texts in the Humanities entails attending to the acquisition of both recognition and realization rules for reading and writing.

This paper offers a medical-education perspective that I will hope complement other disciplinary perspectives in examining the value of reflection for learning in tertiary education. The paper outlines some of the theoretical strands of reflective practice facilitated in a unique course subject for professionalism and patient safety, within the new spiral curriculum at Leeds University School of Medicine. The material presented in this paper outlines some of what is delivered during the medical students' interactive sessions; this material is continually modified based on feedback from both students and learning facilitators. The paper discusses why both students and clinicians need to reflect, some of the theoretical dimensions and models and examples from the Leeds context of how reflective competence can be progressively developed over the course of an undergraduate program. The focus of the final section suggests directions for reflective practice in the future, where reflexivity takes the form of more collective endeavours requiring some change in culture and perceptions of professional identity. The paper concludes with the proposition that collaborative forms of reflection need to include more involvement of patients, interprofessional communities of practice and the use of learning from other disciplines; all of these require different levels of thinking and different ways of working.

This paper explores the dissemination of human rights through English language learning in Pakistan and builds on the knowledge that contributes to the development of democratic educational outcomes. Textbook discourses have long been the domain of critical linguistics; critical linguists understand textbook discourse primarily as a language in the context of schooling while the discourse analysts understand such discourses as systems of knowledge and ideology. The question of how the learners are expected to engage with the subject knowledge is explored from two theoretical perspectives: linguistic analyses are executed using tools such as choice of pronouns, mood, and modality from Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday et al., 2014), a social semiotic theory of language as a meaning potential, and reinterpreted according to the intercultural paradigm (Piller, 2010) to familiarize the ways interactants choose to build relations in the textbook narratives because in exploring interpersonal meanings it is very easy to focus on what is said and why. Additionally, the image analysis is done by representational analysis that of how images reflect ideologies (Kress & Van Leeuwen., 2006). The contributions of this study are of particular importance to make visible elements of interpersonal meaning-making which were explored in the context of cumulative knowledge building in humanities.

False Papers: Deception and Survival in the Holocaust, by Robert Melson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 199 pp. $26.95. There is certainly no shortage of Holocaust survival accounts. We [...]

The paper explores tensions in the articulation of progression in learning across the Humanities disciplines. Informed by our review of research in the Humanities disciplines, international curricula on progression in these areas and reflections from professional activity within the newly defined Humanities 'Area of Learning and Experience' in the new Welsh curriculum, this paper describes how learning progression in Humanities has been conceptualised within the new curriculum and then delineates and critically reviews four challenges that emerged when identifying and describing the progression in learning in the new Humanities curriculum. Tensions include the relationship between disciplines; the balance between knowledge, skills and values; the differences between underlying models of progression in Humanities; and balancing the complexity of learning with practical considerations for a national curriculum. Underpinned by the Integrity Model of Change, this paper makes a contribution, through providing new insights on broad aspects of learning progression in Humanities and highlighting the potential benefits and challenges of taking particular decisions within each of these four tensions. Implications for curriculum planning and future research are offered, including the fundamental role of professional learning in curriculum development and enactment.

As a host of published books, journal articles and opinion pieces attest, the university lecture is now distinctly out of step with contemporary Higher Education discourse. Academics across university disciplines confidently proclaim the format's obsolescence, arguing that only inertia and familiarity could satisfactorily account for the lecture's survival. We propose in this paper to offer a philosophical revisiting of this most maligned of pedagogical forms. Drawing on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, we argue for the lecture not as a mode of dissemination but as a mode of address. On this model, the lecture is to be understood as a special form of human encounter where the voice of one is modulated specifically for the hearing of another. Thus, we propose in this paper to offer a philosophical defence of traditional university teaching. We argue that this defence has particular relevance for teaching and learning in the Humanities.

Article History: Registration Date: 05/10/2004

This paper focuses on how contributions are argued in research proposals in the humanities. Due to standardizing tendencies in research funding towards formats characteristic of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, there has been concern that the humanities are marginalized. In this study, 'contribution statements' were identified in proposals funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation across the humanistic disciplines. These statements were systematically analyzed in terms of type and structure of contributions advanced. The results suggest that the humanities differ from the sciences in terms of specificity of focus, a high level of 'acceptable serendipity' in proposed outcomes, but that these disciplines structurally tend to adhere to the same types of research contribution arguments as STEM. A better understanding of the way in which humanities scholars frame contributions offers insight into how these fields change and how they relate to developments in the science policy and funding landscape.

A number of new metrics based on social media platforms—grouped under the term “altmetrics”—have recently been introduced as potential indicators of research impact. Despite their current popularity, there is a lack of information regarding the determinants of these metrics. Using publication and citation data from 1.3 million papers published in 2012 and covered in Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science as well as social media counts from Altmetric.com, this paper analyses the main patterns of five social media metrics as a function of document characteristics (i.e., discipline, document type, title length, number of pages and references) and collaborative practices and compares them to patterns known for citations. Results show that the presence of papers on social media is low, with 21.5% of papers receiving at least one tweet, 4.7% being shared on Facebook, 1.9% mentioned on blogs, 0.8% found on Google+ and 0.7% discussed in mainstream media. By contrast, 66.8% of papers have received at least one citation. Our findings show that both citations and social media metrics increase with the extent of collaboration and the length of the references list. On the other hand, while editorials and news items are seldom cited, it is these types of document that are the most popular on Twitter. Similarly, while longer papers typically attract more citations, an opposite trend is seen on social media platforms. Finally, contrary to what is observed for citations, it is papers in the Social Sciences and humanities that are the most often found on social media platforms. On the whole, these findings suggest that factors driving social media and citations are different. Therefore, social media metrics cannot actually be seen as alternatives to citations; at most, they may function as complements to other type of indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Princeton—Stanford Working Papers in Classics (PSWPC) is a web-based series of work-in-progress scripts by members of two leading departments of classics. It introduces the humanities to a new form of scholarly communication and represents a major advance in the free availability of classical-studies scholarship in cyberspace. This article both reviews the initial performance of this open-access experiment and the benefits and challenges of working papers more generally for classical studies. After 2 years of operation PSWPC has proven to be a clear success. This series has built up a large international readership and a sizeable body of pre-prints and performs important scholarly and community- outreach functions. As this performance is largely due to its congruency with the working arrangements of ancient historians and classicists and the global demand for open-access scholarship, the series confirms the viability of this means of scholarly communication, and the likelihood of its expansion in our discipline. But modifications are required to increase the benefits this series brings and the amount of scholarship it makes freely available online. Finally, departments wishing to replicate its success will have to consider other important developments, such as the increasing availability of post-prints, the linking of research funding to open access, and the emergence of new cyber-infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]