Despite the emergence of new scholarship, public higher education boards in the United States remain relatively under-investigated. While the literature on higher education governance and boards, in particular, tends to profess these knowledge gaps repeatedly, few works have scratched the surface as to why our understanding of boards is so…

How black faculty experience presenting their research in educational venues within the context of historical objectification of black people as sources of entertainment is an underexplored topic in higher education research. Presenting research has far-reaching implications for black academics' advancement, such as future employment and…

This article investigates the current state of faculty research activity within Tajik higher education institutions (HEIs), where the level of research productivity has substantially decreased in the past three decades. As part of a larger ethnographic study on professional lives of Tajik faculty members, we investigated and found enormous…

Scholarly evaluation practices in learning and teaching projects are under-reported in the literature. In order for robust evaluative measures to be implemented, a project requires a well-designed evaluation plan. This research study describes the development of a practical evaluation planning framework through an action research approach, using…

In this article, we explore the extent to which 42 newer researchers, in the academic sub-field of higher education, were aware of, responded to and negotiated their careers in relation to higher education policies. Participants, who were mainly from European countries, tended to divide into two similarly sized groups: one that engaged with and…

The teaching profession has a long history of providing mentorship to mentees (budding lecturers) through focused, collaborative, and one-on-one relationships. However, despite new lecturers' ongoing need for guidance and assistance, mentoring is relatively neglected as a concept in institutions of higher education. This study explores the concept…

This paper explores the experiences of 24 Early Career Researchers working in interdisciplinary and precarious employment conditions in which they are managing collaborations with multiple partners beyond the university as part of the AHRC's "Connected Communities" Programme. These conditions emerge from conflicting sources--from…

Within the current higher education context, early career researchers (ECRs) face a "risk-career" in which predictable, stable academic careers have become increasingly rare. Traditional milestones to signal progress toward a sustainable research career are disappearing or subject to reinterpretation, and ECRs need to attend to new or…

Despite the increased recognition of the role that professional agency plays in work-related learning, little is known about what supports it. Based on current theoretical notions, the first purpose of this paper is to show that professional agency is closely intertwined with work-related learning. The second purpose is to introduce some main…

This article analyses the determinants of job satisfaction amongst Spanish academics, paying particular attention to the impact of research productivity and differences across graduation cohorts. Research productivity is a very relevant factor in explaining job satisfaction in academics in different stages of their career. Interesting differences…

While teacher educator identities have received increasing attention over the past decade, there is a lack of research on teacher educators' professional identities in the complex and shifting higher education contexts. Informed by the sociocultural linguistic perspective, this study investigates two language teacher educators' professional…

Public engagement (PE) is habitually recognized and advocated across the higher education (HE) community--especially by regulator and funder constituencies--as an intrinsically good thing. In the UK, a number of initiatives focused on embedding a culture of PE within universities have sought to further this claim, yet have done so without…

Given the ongoing alarm regarding uncontrollable costs of higher education, it would be reasonable to expect not only concern about the impact of MOOCs on educational outcomes, but also systematic efforts to document the resources expended on their development and delivery. However, there is little publicly available information on MOOC costs that…

In this article the authors discuss developments in the Europeanisation of higher education policy context of Sweden, and in particular certain changes within the field of education science. Detailed career narratives from 30 interviews have been produced and analysed. These narratives illustrate how research careers in education are formed and…

Drawing upon findings from a UK-based and -funded study of academic leadership provided by (full) professors, this article focuses on research leadership as perceived by those on the receiving end of it. Research leadership is defined as the influence of one or more people on the research-related behaviour, attitudes or intellectual capacity of…