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The cry that today's higher education students are particularly individualist is a commonly-heard one. In England, the considerable personal cost of tuition is often blamed for creating a series of negative student traits, including consumerism (an idea that one has bought the right to a degree) and individualism (a sense of the individual as the beneficiary of the bought product, as against any sense of collectivism, or education as public good). This paper explores one element of students' purported individualism: their resistance to group-work as an aspect of assessment. Presenting interview data with university students in England, it argues that such student disquiet does not stem from a resistance to collectivism in general. Using pragmatic sociology, the paper considers students' often gentle and humorous comments about group-work as critique, not complaint. Rather than understanding students' resistance to group-work as individualist grievance about doing something they would simply rather not do, this way of conceptualising their comments understands students as making critical points about what should be assessed for at university. It argues that this way of thinking about resistance to group-work leads us to take that resistance seriously, and in turn to take students seriously as interlocuters on educational matters.

The purpose of this study was to explore the societal orientations (individualist vs. collectivist) of educational aims, in constructions of teacher professionalism framed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) insight and lesson reports. The critical discourse analysis of OECD TALIS documents suggests that the OECD discourse on teacher professionalism attested to a dual orientation: individualist and anti-collectivist. Our results contribute to the theoretical understanding of the educational aims of the OECD, which lead the global discourse in education, and of the cultural orientation that is part of its conceptualization of new professional teaching. The article discusses the implications of its findings.

This paper examines two American works of fiction concerning how teenage characters explore and manifest their identity, looking up to transcendentalist ideas, whether consciously or not. The paper puts forth the most individualistic protagonists and investigate their motivation, ways of escaping the society’s expectations and the interaction between them and their environment. The first source analyzed: the film Little Women directed by Gillian Armstrong tells the story of the March family living in the 1860s Concord, influenced by the spirit of transcendentalism. The second source discussed: John Green’s novel Paper Towns employs the notion of a character coming back to transcendentalist values and authors in the 21st century. This paper shows how the teenagers use the transcendentalist ways, whether they are aware of them, and defy the rules of the society frequently represented by the people in their closest environment.

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study that used in-depth interviews to understand the experiences and perceptions of six pre-service teachers as they engaged in microteaching at a tertiary institution in Hong Kong. Using a framework grounded in dialogism and positioning theory, the study describes the ways in which different discourses offer, as well as deny, positions to the pre-service teachers as they planned and implemented microlessons. The results suggest that competition between these discourses to position pre-service teachers can result in microteaching being associated with negative emotional experiences, such as disappointment, isolation, and frustration. This emotional dissonance is shown to lead some preservice teachers to question the efficacy of microteaching. The paper therefore argues that it is imperative for teacher educators to support pre-service teachers' engagement in microteaching by revealing the presence of these discourses and by exploring how the latter can exercise agency by accepting, resisting, or rejecting the positions made available to them during their microteaching experience. Suggestions for future research are also considered.

When academics’ opinions, which are published in academic journals as letters to the editor or commentaries, are retracted based on sensitivities and objections that are raised for example on social media, there needs to be a reflection on what this might represent. On one hand, an opinion is precisely that, i.e., a subjective and biased view about an issue. Those views might even be radical, unpopular, or insensitive, but ultimately approved by editors for publication nonetheless. To maintain a truly sustainable scholarly discourse, the best academic way to counter such opinions is by allowing disagreeing voices to express themselves, also as letters to the editor or commentaries. Pressure-induced retractions of opinions not only stifle academic debate, they send the message that opinions need to be moderated and standardized to meet a publishing market that is being increasingly driven by legal parameters, political correctness, as well as business and commercial values rather than academic ones. In an environment of restrictive academic freedom, what emerges is an academia in which the way things are said, tone, and the sensitivity of those that might be affected are given greater weight than the message itself. By cherry-picking parts of the message that detractors or critics might disagree with, the original message may be drowned out by the noise of the objectors. The struggle of academics to liberally voice their opinions in the scholarly publishing realm, and to preserve those opinions, has never been more acute in this age of misinformation and radicalism fueled by polarized social and mass media. Is the politicization and/or commercialization of academia, alongside the retraction of opinions, stifling open and healthy academic debate, or expressing itself as the retraction of opinions, and does this represent a distinct form of “cancel culture” in academia and academic publishing?

This article presents research relating to the experiences of union and community-based campaigns that have sought to challenge the establishment of academy and free schools in England. Such schools are removed from local government control and are seen as a defining element of the neoliberal restructuring of public education. The research draws on social-movement literature, and particularly mobilization theory, to better understand the dynamics of such campaigns and the contexts in which they can either thrive or wither. In the article, I argue that mobilization theory provides a useful framework for such analysis but that it fails to adequately reflect the importance of individual agency and the role of leadership at a local level. Leadership of such campaigns is often assumed by individuals reluctantly, and often defies traditional descriptions of "leadership," but must be recognized if mobilization theory is to avoid being overly deterministic.

Brazilian writer Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) was born in a rural community and spent most of her life in a slum. Despite this, her literary work achieved remarkable editorial success, having its value recognized by critics and academic circles. This paper analyzes Carolina Maria de Jesus's autobiographical narratives in the light of John Dewey's aesthetic theory, with the purpose of investigating the factors responsible for the development of her aesthetic sensitivity -- intellectual and emotional dispositions favorable to involvement with artistic practices. The results suggest that Carolina Maria de Jesus's literary skills, which express not only individual but also collective yearnings, resulted from the incentive she received to think about things that do not exist and from her relationship with people who favored the formation of a personality open to varied experiences. Such results are presented as requirements for a democratic and humanist education that aims at the flowering of aesthetic sensitivity and encourages educators and students to believe in their creative potential.

The Algerian universities have witnessed significant changes since the establishment of the three-tier system composed of Licence, Master, and Doctorate (LMD). The latter necessitates many changes in the learning process as well as teaching methods. Yet, to achieve self-directed learning, the learner should first achieve autonomy at the personal level. Thus, this paper is mainly devoted to analyzing the impress of Algerian cultural and social traditions on the development of self-directed learning. This study addresses the following question: Do the Algerian cultural and social traditions enhance and facilitate self-directed learning or impede its implementation at university? The main aim of this paper is to investigate the aspects of the Algerian culture that hinder the promotion of self-directed learning. The research has been conducted in Saida University among Master students. To investigate the socio-cultural impact on the development of self-directedness, the researcher used a questionnaire and an interview that was related to Hofstede's six-D Model. Discussing the Algerian culture through the lens of Hofstede's six-D Model helped the researcher to diagnose the reasons behind the failure to promote self-directedness. The main finding of this research is that the collectivist nature of the Algerian culture retards the progress of self-directed learning. This paper also suggests that if the Algerian culture does not favor self-directed learning, educators should adopt new approaches and strategies that engage their learners in the learning experiences. Educators should counterbalance the parochial and paternalistic traditions with glocalization and multiple perspective curricula.

In this essay Charlene Tan offers a philosophical analysis of the Singapore state's vision of shared citizenship by examining it from a Confucian perspective. The state's vision, known formally as "Our Shared Values," consists of communitarian values that reflect the official ideology of multiculturalism. This initiative included a White Paper, entitled Shared Values, which presented pejorative assessments of the ideals of "individual rights" and "individual interests" as antithetical to national interests. Rejecting this characterization, Tan argues that a dominant Confucian perspective recognizes the correlative rights of all human beings that are premised on the inherent right to human dignity, worth, and equality. Furthermore, Confucianism posits that it is in everyone's interest to attain the Confucian ethical ideal of becoming a noble person in society through self-cultivation. Tan concludes by highlighting two key implications for Singapore from a Confucian perspective on the Shared Values: first, schools in Singapore should place greater emphasis on individual moral development of their students, and second, more avenues should be provided for residents to contribute actively to the development of the vision of shared citizenship. (Contains 43 footnotes.)

This article aims to raise education researchers' self-reflection about their treatment of teachers as workers through introducing the term "creative work ethic." At its core, the creative work ethic is the belief that good work entails innovation. Additional features of this ethic are the prizing self-motivation, work done individually, and a flexible schedule that mixes labor with leisure activities. The danger of the creative work ethic is a tendency for self-exploitation and devaluing workers who do not fit into the ethic. After defining the features of the creative work ethic and describing its drawback, the paper reads closely three education papers in order to show how this ethic colors their analysis of teachers' work or their prescription for better teaching.

Policy classifies and shapes people/subjects in particular kinds of ways. Focusing on the context of Health and Physical Education (HPE), this paper analyses policy documents from Australia, the United States of America (USA) and Wales. We pay particular attention to how learners are represented within and across the three policy documents, and we apply Bacchi's 'What's the Problem Represented to be?' approach to guide the analysis. For us, problematization is a fruitful and positive process that enables educators to engage with a critical dialogue regarding the policies they are expected to enact. Our analysis highlighted that common across the policies were overlapping discourses of idealism, neoliberalism, healthism, and individualism, which serve to reinforce deficit language and a focus on what learners 'lack'. The problem of 'learner as lacking' is represented within the policies via at least three subject positions: 'the sedentary learner', 'the un-educated learner' and 'the naïve learner'. The findings suggest that the three policies were producing an ideal and perhaps impossible learner (subject) whilst at the same time representing the learner as a problem that the policy could 'fix'. This paper is important because it: (i) demonstrates how certain discourses and voices are amplified and silenced within curriculum policy documents and policy work more broadly; (ii) makes educational and health politics visible; and (iii) creates space for the profession to develop greater critical consciousness related to policy. In terms of future directions, we urge curriculum policy writers and other stakeholders to carefully consider how learners are categorised, represented and governed in and through policy. If curriculum policies, by their very nature, need to produce problems -- in this case, the (im)possible subject - we invite educators to engage in critical conversations regarding the policies they are expected to enact.

While writing is undeniably an essential part of higher education, in music education, musical performance skills form the core of assessing students' results. However, higher music education is experiencing growing demands on research activities parallel to heightened requirements on music performance students' abilities to formulate themselves around their main field of study. This paper turns to theses as discursive acts embedded in higher music education. The present study investigates how master theses construct educational ideals by analysing written components of successfully completed theses within music performance programmes in Sweden. The paper shows that the theses treat a variety of subjects which are justified from five different perspectives: "Improve," "Succeed," "Share," "Acclaim" or to "Discover." Two diametrically opposed kinds of purpose statements are revealed; they appear as either impersonal and distanced or intimate and personal. Influences of traditional academic writing manifest themselves while conservatory ideals around craft, individualism and hierarchies are reproduced. It is argued that the self-exploratory approach -- which is a characteristic feature on an overall level -- excludes collective knowledge building as well as social perspectives on art and music.

This paper studies how Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' offers a meaningful account of political and moral self-education in Western democracies. Emerson's moral perfectionism involves an ethical, political and democratic individualism that needs to be reconsidered. This paper explores a perfectionist interpretation of the modern forms of self-education as political and ordinary practices, first with the case of conspiracy theories, which express an individual desire for self-education but appear as the result of a lack of self-reliance and a failure of political self-education, and then through the explicit claim to self-education made by activists in ecological, anti-racial or feminist organisations, which embodies the democratic need for self-reliance. These two examples reveal a new kind of efficient and ordinary political power at the edge of civic commitment. This leads us to define an alternative conception of pedagogy, in which equality in self-reliance matters. This also underlines our moral and ordinary political responsibility and challenges the traditional philosophical opposition between personal and public, subjective and universal. This paper underlines the accuracy of Stanley Cavell's interpretation of Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' in order to provide a perfectionist interpretation of activism. It also opens a new crossed perspective between the French and American approaches.

This paper discusses the phenomenon of teacher awards with particular reference to one bestowed in Spain. This phenomenon is analysed in line with the consequences of free market ideology in education and the ideology of influencers and followers. Drawing on qualitative research based in participant and non-participant observation, in-depth interviews and document analysis, the results show that education practice was determined by the award requirements, and complying with its criteria became the overriding objective. The need for recognition was highlighted but critical views were also brought to light in relation to the notions of microcelebrities, performativity, individualism and competitiveness. The paper contributes to critical reflections on the already existing controversies regarding awards in education and specifically those presented to individuals. School teachers' perceptions of and reasons for participating in these initiatives and the repercussions in their classrooms are examined.

The paper presents a critical review of major works on reflective practice in teaching that mainly define reflection as a technical and isolated process, taking place in an individual's mind. Critiquing the cognitive nature of reflective practice promoted in mainstream research, the paper directs attention to the increasing recognition of sociocultural factors in teacher professional learning, and highlights the significance of reflection as a social practice. Starting with the ideas of John Dewey on reflective practice for teachers, the paper delineates Schön's successive works on the subject, followed by a discussion of Wallace's reflective model. The final part of the paper describes how Vygotsky's sociocultural theory provides a theoretical framework for teachers to effectively engage in reflective practice by moving from individualism to social constructivism in their efforts to enhance their professional competence.

This paper highlights the perspective of five doctoral students' socialization in a feminist focused research group. Utilizing collaborative ethnography, this paper challenges the current conceptions of graduate student socialization that emphasizes neoliberal values such as individualism and competition that is normalized within doctoral education. In this collaborative effort we highlight the lessons we learned and provide a critique of the norms of the socialization and intellectual growth based on our interactions with each other and faculty members of the Feminist Research Collective. This paper showcases the unique experience of each doctoral student. Each author provides first-hand accounts of the transformative work of participating in a research group that is feminist centered and based in an epistemology of care. We acknowledge the tensions we experienced in confronting our own held beliefs about the research process grounded in our own social conditions that are informed by our diverse backgrounds.

The paper compares Anglo-American and Chinese approaches to the outcomes of higher education, primarily but not solely collective outcomes, by examining the Western domain of 'public good' and 'public goods' and parallel or near parallel activities in China. It reviews scholarly discourses of society, state and higher education in the respective political cultures ('traditions'), including individualism and collectivism, university autonomy, the critical function, higher education in civil society, and global "tianxia" and global common good. A key issue in symmetrical cross-cultural comparison is the position from which it is made; and as well as elucidating similarities and differences the paper develops what Sen calls a 'trans-positional' view based on integrating the two positional views. The two traditions are not closely aligned. However, aside for the Anglo-American public/private dualism in economics (which occludes collective outcomes), all ideas in both traditions can contribute to transpositional understanding of the individualised and collective outcomes of higher education.

School autonomy policies have circulated through various modes of educational governance internationally, endorsing the view that more autonomy will improve schools and their systems. When subject to the discourses and practices of marketization, however, school 'autonomy' has been mobilized in ways that generate injustice. These injustices are the focus of this paper. We draw on preliminary findings from a three-year study that is exploring the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across four Australian states. Drawing on interviews with 42 stakeholders, the paper identifies four key areas of paradox for social justice currently confronting public schools and school systems. The language of paradox is drawn on to narrate the oppositional politics between the discourses and practices constituting school autonomy and the pursuit of social justice. Such narration raises important questions for Australian public education. It highlights how these discourses are changing what is meant by the public in public education. Engaging with the language of paradox in thinking about school autonomy reform, we argue, is important given the broader landscape where public schooling is being reconstituted and where traditional links to social justice and the common good are under threat.

Purpose: This paper aims to examine the mediating role of relational mobile usage on the relationship between personal values (individualism, collectivism and academic self-efficacy) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) among the faculty members of higher education/degree-awarding institutes (DAIs) in Pakistan. The paper also examines the moderating role of gender on the relationship between relational mobile usage and OCB. Design/methodology/approach: Cross-sectional data from 217 faculty members of higher education/DAIs in Pakistan were collected through an online questionnaire. Structural equation modeling technique using SmartPLS was used to assess the measurement and structural model. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21 was used for data normality analysis, missing value analysis and variable calculation. Response and non-response bias were also examined. Findings: The findings confirmed that individualism was not significantly related to relational mobile usage; however, collectivism and academic self-efficacy were significantly related to relational mobile usage. The relationship of relational mobile usage and OCB was also significant. The mediating role of relational mobile usage on the relationship between individualism and OCB was not significant; however, the mediating role of relational mobile usage between collectivism and OCB, and academic self-efficacy and OCB was significant. The moderating role of gender on the relationship between relational mobile usage and OCB was also significant. Practical implications: DAIs' administration should strive to encourage individuals to value group priorities over the individualistic interests. Valuing group interest over the individualistic interest would promote the usage of mobile technology for relational purpose. This relational perspective of mobile usage will ultimately develop OCB among individuals. Also, academic self-efficacy through relational mobile usage can lead to OCB; therefore, another important policy implication for the administration of DAIs is to develop academic self-efficacy among the stakeholders of the institutions. Originality/value: Although OCB has become a theoretically mature concept, the framework proposed for this study has rarely been discussed in previous scholarships, particularly from the perspective of relational mobile usage. Arguably, this study is the first in testing the mediating role of relational mobile usage between the personal values and OCB within the context of academia in Pakistan.

The existing literature provides compelling evidence on the effect of school leadership on the collective efficacy of teachers, which is highly correlated with teaching--learning outcomes. However, the results of studies that examined the relationship between these variables have not reached a consensus. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to determine the extent to which school leadership influences collective teacher efficacy through a meta-analysis. The study identified 47 research articles with a total of 25,645 respondents. The results suggest a large-level effect of school leadership behaviors on collective teacher efficacy. Moreover, three variables; "leadership style," "country culture," and "school level," moderate the effect of school leadership on collective teacher efficacy. Especially, the impact of instructional leadership is stronger than those of transformational and other types of leadership. In addition, the magnitude impact of school leadership on collectivist culture is larger than that of individualistic culture. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the main effect size of school leadership on teacher collective efficacy in high schools is greater than those in other school levels. Lastly, the paper presents the implications and limitations of this study as well as recommendations for future research.

This paper discusses the influence of cultural dimensions on Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) introductory videos. The study examined the introductory videos produced by three universities on Coursera platforms using communication theory and Hofstede's cultural dimensions. The results show that introductory videos in MOOCs are influenced by the national culture of the country in which the university is based. Based on this finding, this paper raises interesting questions about the effect of these cultural elements on potential learners from different countries and cultures around the world. The paper also makes suggestions about introductory video production in MOOCs.