Changing Identities in Higher Education: Voicing Perspectives

by Ronald Barnett (Editor), Roberto Di Napoli (Editor)

Overview

In this timely and innovative book scholars from Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, explore their own sense of identity, reflecting both on their research and scholarly interests, and their work experiences.

Taking the form of a debate, Changing Identities in Higher Education helps to widen the contemporary space for debates on the future of higher education itself. The book is split into three parts:

• part one presents a set of essays each on a set of identities within higher education (academic, student, administrative/managerial and educational developers).
• part two includes responses to Part one from authors speaking from their own professional and scholarly identity perspective
• part three illustrates perspectives on the identities of students, provided by students themselves.

With its original, dialogic form and varied content, this book is of interest to all those concerned in current debates about the state and nature of higher education today and those interested in questions of identity. It makes especially useful reading for students of higher education, lecturers in training, academics and managers alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415567084
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/18/2009
Series:	Key Issues in Higher Education
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Professor Ronald Barnett is Pro-Director for Longer Term Strategy and Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Roberto Di Napoli is Senior Lecturer in Educational Development at Imperial College London. He has extensive teaching experience in higher education, both in the UK and other parts of Europe.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Higher Education: Why Identities and Voices? Preamble: Knowledge Identities Part 1: Identities and Voices in Higher Education 1. Being an Academic Today 2. Have Students got a Voice? 3. Identities of Academic Developers: Critical Friends in the Academy? 4. The Changing Voices and Identities of Professional Administrators and Managers 5. Managers: Academics and/or Business People? Part 2: Perspectives 6. The Managers’ Perspectives 7. The Academics’ Perspectives 8. The Staff Developers’ Perspectives 9. The Students’ Perspectives. Conclusions. Changing voices and Identities in Higher Education?

Editorial Reviews

This is a timely book of exploration that seeks illumination from experiences as well as theories. It moves forward studies of academic identities in a number of critically important ways. Taking as its point of departure the supercomplexity confronting and pervading contemporary higher education, it locates studies of identities firmly in the diversity of actors that shape and are shaped by it. A central feature is the exploration of voice in the "historical process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction" that epitomises identity development for the editors. It succeeds in incorporating not only a variety of voices but also a dialogue between them characterised by an openness to the other as well as by individual integrity. Crucially, too, it gives due place to knowledge identities in giving first voice to a discipline-rooted critical exploration of the potential for interdisciplinarity to contribute alongside the disciplines in the construction of identities in higher education.

Mary Henkel, Professor Associate, Brunel University, UK

I was captivated by this book's vibrant expression of fragmented identities. It's wide variety of voices speak of the complexity of higher education with authenticity and candour and without easy simplifications. A good read that left me much to ponder over.

Stephen Rowland, Professor of Higher Education, University College London, UK

From the Publisher