"While the economic benefits created by international education export are well documented, few systematic and qualitative analysis studies have been conducted to examine how academic staff perceive the presence of international students in their institutions. Using interview data from 80 academic staff from different disciplines in one higher institution in Australia, this study examines whether the presence of international students has an impact on staff teaching practice. Some of the academic staff reported that they made no adjustments to their teaching. They treated all students as one student group. Other staff members said that there have been changes in their teaching in response to the presence of international students in their classroom. The paper discusses some of the underlying causes of these responses, and implications for the practice of international education. The discussion of the findings is informed by Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, which helps us understand how people respond to cultural differences."

"Japan's current education system has its origins in postwar reform, overemphasizing individualism and underemphasizing on Japan's history, traditions, and culture, resulting in the continuing decline in scholastic, physical, and socializing ability to date. This essay reviews the IIPS proposal on educational reform, which was supervised by former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, with the addition of the author's personal views. The IIPS proposal set the ultimate goal of education in Japan to be raising healthy people who have self-confidence and pride as Japanese who can thrive in the era of globalization. Then, the proposal presents what a Japanese should learn and how he should serve at each life stage beginning with early childhood education through the compulsory education period, adolescence and young adulthood, maturity, and into the elderly period. Moreover, the organizational reform on administrating education policy is presented, with a focus on abandoning the current board of education system."

"In Not for Profit (2010), Martha Nussbaum has diagnosed that alongside a global economic crisis, a less visible, more insidious catastrophe is also affecting Western societies, namely the underfunding of the arts and humanities. Working against the increasing commercialization of the academy, Nussbaum sets out a vision of the arts, and especially literature, as central to the functioning of a healthy democratic society, first because they underpin skills of reasoning, argument, and critique, and secondly because they cultivate imaginative, caring, and empathic citizens. Nussbaum's passionate defense of the humanities coincides, and to some degree overlaps, with the emergence of the medical humanities over the past decade or so. Tying the notion of the "healthy" society more particularly to health-care institutions and systems, the medical humanities have pointed to a contemporary crisis of care in Western societies that emerges out of a number of factors, including the increasing bureaucratization and privatization of care services, and the fragmentation of the patient among subspecializations. Having thus diagnosed an ailing system of health care, the medical humanities have, like Nussbaum, prescribed the reading of literature as the cure, asserting that it is particularly good at making better health-care professionals by widening perspective and developing the sensibilities.1 In other words, literature is seen to be valuable because it can help doctors and other health-care practitioners to nurture an empathetic response to the suffering of those who are in their care. What seems emergent, then, across Nussbaum and the medical humanities, is a nexus of concern with a prevailing "health" crisis (whether of democracy or of systems of care), for which the revitalization of the humanities emerges as the necessary panacea, because the arts, and especially literature, make us more enlightened and"

"Many academic commentators have pointed to how the widening and deepening of a neoliberal reform agenda in Southeast Asia has brought about the end of developmental forms of state governance and the emergence of less directly market interventionist states pursuing economic 'competitiveness'. In this paper, I note how notions of competitiveness are increasingly fused with ideas regarding the contribution of gender equity and women's empowerment to national economic success. However, drawing upon a case study of Malaysia, this paper highlights how government policies stressing both the marketisation of social reproduction and the need to expand women's productive roles are constantly brought into tension with embedded social structures. Such an emphasis is essential to any understanding of the role of the Malaysian state in economic development - a role that has been fundamentally shaped by a localised politics of ethnicity. The paper draws upon examples from government policy-making that conceptualise women as key workers in the emerging knowledge-driven economy and as microentrepreneurs driving pro-poor economic growth and illustrates how such policies are brought into tension with traditionalist discourses concerning the appropriate role of women in society."

"How prepared are you to teach a course on "corporate" literature? What would you say to someone who does not recognize the value of a liberal arts education? How would you argue for the value of reading contemporary fiction-to someone who aspires to be an accountant? The ongoing challenges facing the humanities are making these questions more common-and responses to them more significant. Many believe that the future of the humanities hinges in large part on the ability of people who share a passion for the liberal arts to be able to articulate that passion to others. Seeing and hearing people who are fully committed to their art is often believed the best way of supporting the arts. The poet who intensely and emphatically reads her poetry reveals her commitment to her art; the philosopher who cleverly turns every statement into a question and undermines beliefs demonstrates the perennial and complex nature of philosophy; the novelist who convinces others to believe in her characters and care for their well-being shows the power of mimesis."

"As the only state university that bears the name of the country, the Universitas Indonesia (UI) has played an important role in the history of the Indonesian nationalist movement for over half a century. Now located at two sites, one in the center of the city and the other on the outskirts, the history of this leading state university-its architecture and location, as well as its campus life and student movement-reflects the clashes of various forces and competing ideologies. This study looks at the relationship between public space and nationalism in Universitas Indonesia in an interdisciplinary perspective. It relates architecture and urban history with the operations of power and memory in a campus, which is seen both as an arena of struggle as well as containment. In that sense the campus is a reflection of public space in a broader sense. This paper raises a question about the kind of civic space emerging from the tension between the physical structure and environment of the campuses and the inner space of campus politics and students movement."

Using the case of education, we consider how global cultural and economic forces affect national education spending policies. Our analysis includes both an historical analysis of the construction and transformation of ideas about education at the global level and a statistical assessment of the implementation of conflicting approaches to state education funding within countries. In the historical analysis, we show how the idea of free education, although institutionalized in international law, was subject to powerful challenges from international financial institutions, which advocated user fees for public services, including education. Ultimately, the principle of free education prevailed despite the financial clout behind the opposing view. Using data from poor- and middle-income countries from 1983 to 2004, we also show that the presence of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) advocating child rights was linked to an increase in the levels of state funding for education. This suggests that embeddedness in global discourses, as evidenced by country-specific linkages to INGOs, is critical in making governments more accountable for supporting institutionalized ideas concerning education.

"This article explores the presence of US institutions of higher education in Eastern Europe as one facet of the neoliberal global environment. It draws on policy documents, institutional statistics, materials produced by interest groups and NGOs, official mission statements, press releases and media coverage, and personal narratives. The American University in Bulgaria is examined as a case of this wider phenomenon. Exclusively structuralist, critical analyses of such institutions can easily lead to conclusions of homogenization and dominance through the hegemony of 'exporter' education institutions and programs. Post-structural analysis-attuned to multiplicities of meanings, nuances of context, and complex interplays of power and knowledge claims-allow for more attention to the local dynamics, while human interpretation and agency may point the way to more hopeful roles for US institutions of higher education abroad. In turn, these roles may challenge the one-way deterministic flow of influence suggested by structuralist analyses."

"This paper reflects critically on challenges and opportunities associated with developing a theoretical framework for an interdisciplinary Framework Programme 6 research project funded by the European Commission in the area of digital ecosystems. The paper first provides a description of the interdisciplinary structure of the research agenda of the project and the areas of digital ecosystem research prioritised by each discipline. Second, it discusses the challenging questions of epistemology that arose in the context of theorising interdisciplinary research and provides a summary of how these were dealt with in order to outline a theoretical framework for digital ecosystems research by the end of the project. Finally, it discusses the lessons that can be extrapolated from the project experience, arguing that it is impossible to develop a unified interdisciplinary theoretical framework due to irreconcilable epistemological differences, yet it is possible and very worthwhile for those adhering to various disciplinary perspectives to collaborate towards the achievement of a practical joint endeavour. These lessons, which are considered valuable to the broader research community, are summarised in a model of the (im)possibility of interdisciplinarity."

"Public-private partnerships in education (ePPP) are acquiring increasing centrality in the agendas of international organizations and development agencies dealing with educational affairs. They are designed as an opportunity to correct inefficiencies in the public delivery of education and to mobilize new resources to increase the access to and cost-effectiveness of education in low-income contexts. This article explores the emergence of ePPP as a 'programmatic idea' and, in particular, the semiotic strategies by means of which this idea has been located in the global education agenda and promoted internationally among practice communities by a network of policy entrepreneurs. The analysis is supported by extensive fieldwork and by a new approach to the analysis of the framing and mobilization of new policy ideas, which incorporates literature on agenda setting, policy entrepreneurs, and policy frame analysis. The approach reveals the complex way in which policy ideas, political actors, institutions, and material factors interact to strategically put forward new policy alternatives in developing contexts."

"The nature of academic development in contemporary universities has been a recent focus in the literature. Highlighting the diversity of practices that exist under its name, 'academic development' has been described by some as an ambiguous project and a fragmented field, while others suggest a more coherent project, pointing out a near universal concern with, in particular, teaching and learning. Through an exploration of the practices of the first academic developers in New Zealand, and a consideration of the particular institutions in which they were operating, this article draws on the work of Foucault to consider the modalities of power that were available to them. This exploration is used as a basis from which to consider the systems of truth that began to emerge as a result of the early appointees' practice, in particular their original and enduring concern with teaching and learning as objects of knowledge."

"This essay addresses the question of how to best teach interdisciplinarity through a detailed discussion of a common upper-division gateway course for multiple majors housed in an interdisciplinary studies unit. It argues for a shift in the problematic within which discussions of interdisciplinary pedagogy generally take place by emphasizing the practice of interdisciplinarity itself."

"This article examines the intensification, since the creation of the so-called Shanghai list of world universities in June 2003, of a political struggle in which a variety of actors, universities, national governments, and, more recently, supranational institutions have sought to define global higher education. This competition over global higher education has highlighted issues such as the internationalization and denationalization of higher education, the international mobility of students, the role of English language as the language of science, and the privatization of higher education. In contrast to IPE or Marxist analyses, we analyze the symbolic logic of ranking lists in higher education, their uses, and the European Commission's initiative to create an alternative world university classification (see World Social Science Report, UNESCO Publishing; Europa zwischen Fiktion und Realpolitik/L'Europe-Fictions et réalités politiques, Transcript for analysis). This initiative represents a political move in a process of rapid restructuration of higher education at the global level."

"Change is a fundamental ingredient of interaction patterns in biology, technology, the economy, and science itself: Interactions within and between organisms change; transportation patterns by air, land, and sea all change; the global financial flow changes; and the frontiers of scientific research change. Networks and clustering methods have become important tools to comprehend instances of these large-scale structures, but without methods to distinguish between real trends and noisy data, these approaches are not useful for studying how networks change. Only if we can assign significance to the partitioning of single networks can we distinguish meaningful structural changes from random fluctuations. Here we show that bootstrap resampling accompanied by significance clustering provides a solution to this problem. To connect changing structures with the changing function of networks, we highlight and summarize the significant structural changes with alluvial diagrams and realize de Solla Price's vision of mapping change in science: studying the citation pattern between about 7000 scientific journals over the past decade, we find that neuroscience has transformed from an interdisciplinary specialty to a mature and stand-alone discipline."

"The authors explore the challenges inherent in traversing the multiple boundaries between sociology and social work, and the academy and the community, by examining a service learning course on hunger and homelessness taught by two sociology professors and two social workers on the staff of a community service organization. The authors draw on instructional team meetings and correspondence, observation of class sessions, and formal and informal course evaluations to analyze three "moments": the planning process, a pivotal class session, and students' final presentations. They found that both their teaching and students' learning were enriched by disciplinary differences in knowledge claims, the design and utility of qualitative research, and the process of drawing conclusions from, and making arguments using, qualitative data. The authors conclude that experiential learning has value beyond providing students hands-on experiences. It can also provide a laboratory in which students and instructors can explore the similarities and differences between sociology, social work, and other disciplines."

The purpose of this study was to critically review the reform movement of Higher Education by the Ministry of Education and how its reform policy toward global competition has created a discrepancy between the knowledge produced and the needs of local society. The study found, first of all, that the state‐driven reform policy has decreased the autonomy of South Korean universities, although the state, including the Ministry of Education, did not increase financial support. South Korean universities have enjoyed little autonomy in terms of financial expenditure, offering courses, recruitment of professors, the number of students, etc. Bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education are able to filter most of the policies and measures. Secondly, the study looked into the consequences of the policy emphasis of global competition. The governance and management of South Korean universities have again turned towards the 'business university,' rather than toward the research university and as such, tends to produce knowledge and human resources for immediate societal needs. To support these assertions, the study examined how the reform policies for global competition surrounding the emphasis of SSCI journals might produce globally competitive but also perhaps locally unsuitable knowledge. The study found that there is indeed a disjoint between the knowledge produced in the research sphere and the needs of the local society. Local researchers are compelled to adopt mainstream theoretical frameworks of North America and Europe in order to get their work published in the indexed journals. Local issues and problematics are subsequently neglected and/or relegated to the margins of pertinent academic research interests.

To varying degrees, education policy reforms around the world are driven by educational discourses relating to globalisation. At the same time, national and local histories, cultures and politics mediate the effects of globalisation discourses. This paper employs methods of analysis that draw on the concepts of 'vernacular globalization' and 'policy archaeology' in order to examine the ways in which the effects of globalisation on National Curriculum policy reform are mediated by conditions and priorities that are specific to national contexts. The enquiry focuses on three curriculum policy problems that are associated with the English school curriculum and have recently been identified as requiring reform: inappropriate curriculum knowledge, the skills deficit and the one-size-fits-all curriculum. The paper concludes by summarising the results of the analysis, identifying some curriculum issues arising from it and offering reflections on the methodological approach it has employed.

The race to establish regional education hubs is a recent development in cross-border higher education. This article briefly examines the rationales and strategies used by three countries in the Middle East and three in South East Asia which are working towards positioning themselves as regional education hubs. The different approaches and purposes among the six countries highlight the need for a typology of education hubs. Three types are proposed: the student hub, the training and skilled workforce hub, and the knowledge/innovation hub. The final section of the paper takes a closer look at Malaysia's cross-border education initiatives and its actions to establish itself as a competitive education hub in a region where Singapore and Hong Kong have similar intentions. Whether Malaysia has the ability to make a quantum leap from being a student hub to becoming a knowledge/innovation hub remains to be seen and appears to be an optimistic outlook.

In this article, we wrestle with the core issue of how early career researchers translate central tenets and core concepts of critical theory and critical methodology into their research practice. By way of creative representation, we draw from bell hooks and Cornel West's (1991) written rendition of their verbal dialogue in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. Their hope was to offer the book in a dialogic format in such a way that mirrored the synergy in their verbal discussions as friends and intellectual colleagues. In a similar vein, we hope to share with readers the synergy and depth of the narratives that have transpired during our ongoing discussions on the important topic of critical praxis as part of a collaborative research group called the Disruptive Dialogue Project (Gildersleeve, Kuntz, Pasque & Carducci, 2010; Kuntz, Pasque, Carducci, & Gildersleeve, 2009).

"In this article I seek to reconsider the social and economic purposes of higher education. It begins with the premise that there appears to be a general trend towards governments positioning higher education primarily in terms of the economic role that it can fulfil. Such a trend, however, has attracted considerable criticism. In this article I argue that the problem for higher education is not it having an economic role, but the narrowness of the way in which that role is often conceptualised. Drawing on critical theory I explore the interrelation of economic and social factors within higher education and the wider society in which it is situated. This article argues for a redefinition of the purposes of higher education to ensure that both universities and workplaces are sites of human creativity and that the profound and exciting work within institutions of higher education benefits all members of society."