Search

Postsecondary institutions are expected to provide students with skills such as communication that are considered essential for success in school, work, and society. However, faculty are rarely tra...

While educators and policymakers increasingly link the ‘21st-century’ skills of communication, teamwork, problem-solving, and self-directed learning to graduate success in important high-technology...

This case study investigated how mentors and mentees in biology experience and understand race and ethnicity in their research mentoring relationships. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with mentors (n = 23) and mentees (n = 15) who had participated in an undergraduate biology summer research opportunity program at a large Midwestern research-intensive university. Interview transcripts were coded using an inductive, thematic analysis. Themes that emerged are presented, describing both participants’ experiences with and beliefs about race and ethnicity in research training contexts (e.g., mentoring relationships, lab and field experiences). Although similarities were identified, the experiences and beliefs of mentors and mentees were not always aligned. Implications of the findings for training interventions and institutional partnerships to enhance the effectiveness of research mentoring relationships are discussed, with the goal of positively impacting the educational success of students from historically underrepresented racial/ethnic groups in science career pathways.

In this research article, Ross J. Benbow and Matthew T. Hora explore the employability narrative, a view that focuses on whether colleges and universities provide students with the skills they need to be productively employed after graduation. Using sociocultural theory to problematize this narrative and qualitative methods to fore-ground the experiences of postsecondary educators and employers, the authors investigate conceptions of essential workplace skills in biotechnology and manufacturing fields. Their results show that though work ethic, technical knowledge, and technical ability represent core competencies valued across these communities, considerable variation exists in how members of different disciplinary and occupational subgroups value and conceptualize important skills. They found that respondents' conceptions of skills were also strongly tied to geography and organizational culture, among other contextual factors. With these results in mind, the authors conclude that skills are best viewed as multifaceted and situated assemblages of knowledge, skill, and disposition—or cultural models—and urge the adoption of more nuanced views among educators, employers, and policy makers that take into account the cultural and contextual forces that shape student success in the workplace.

Scholars have long recognized that teachers’ social interactions play an important role in their learning and professional development. Still, while a growing body of research shows that teaching-focused social ties can give precollege educators access to valuable information, knowledge, and advice—or “social capital”—that improves professional practice and student learning, empirical, mixed methods studies on the phenomenon in the higher education sector are rare, and few investigate what conditions are necessary for these social ties to develop among college instructors. Focusing on college faculty in 17 associate- and baccalaureate-level institutions in one U.S. city, this study uses survey and interview data to explore the connections between structural and positional educator characteristics and the “social networks,” or compilations of social ties, in which faculty reported discussing teaching. Regression analyses of survey responses (n = 244) indicate that fewer years of teaching experience, the time faculty take preparing to teach, discipline, and institution type are correlated with social network dimensions linked to improved professional practice. An inductive analysis of interview data from a subset of faculty (n = 22) supplements survey findings with descriptions of how teaching experience, organizational support, and other factors constrain and reinforce the development of teaching-focused social ties. Results confirm and extend prior research indicating that the development of teaching-focused social networks and the accrual of ties linked to social capital demand faculty and organizational investment. Findings also suggest that leaders hoping to foster beneficial ties should tailor instructional initiatives to more closely align with faculty experience and time commitments.

Employability skills are being on time, coming to work every day—just the rules of the work force—and soft skills are how you operate, on a personal level, with your supervisors and colleagues.You ...

This chapter explores how neoliberal higher education reforms in the United Republic of Tanzania (URT) during the 1990s and 2000s were shaped by the history of governance, schooling, and foreign donor involvement in the country following its independence in 1961. Against this backdrop, I examine how concepts of private versus public leadership, individualism, competition, and education’s place in the overall development scheme shifted over time, and the influence these changing conceptualizations had on the role of universities in Tanzania by the end of the first decade of the 21st century. In an international environment in which powerful funding agencies see neoliberal higher education policies and “knowledge societies” as the key to increased national competitiveness and poverty eradication in sub-Saharan Africa, this chapter shows how changes embedded in recent market-centered university reforms – in which the state is said to “steer” rather than “row” – have influenced the quest for equitable development.