Image FIRE, Volume 01, Issue 02 (2014) Chinese Doctoral Student Socialization in the United States: A Qualitative Study Although international students annually contribute billions of dollars to the US economy, meaningful intercultural interaction between international students, peers, and faculty is often missing at US host campuses. Feelings of isolation, loneliness, and alienation are pervasive among international students at US campuses; these feelings can negatively impact students' ability to engage in academic and social activities. This study is designed to explore how Chinese doctoral students socialize into a US doctoral program and how they perceive their socialization experiences. View Item
Image FIRE, Volume 01, Issue 02 (2014) Governance and Coordination of the Higher Education System in Namibia: Challenges and Prospects The authors are thankful to the reviewers of this article. Their suggestions helped to significantly improve this paper. We are also grateful to all the interviewees who participated in this study. Considering that coordination can take many forms, and may be instituted through an array of policy instruments and tools, we take the position that coordination is both a consequence of pressures on higher education some of which are brought by market forces (globalisation) but also that state coordination of higher education can be a trigger for change. Our objective is to demonstrate this through a review of literature and legislative and policy instruments in Namibia. We complete the review with an in-depth analysis of key informant interviews on coordination in Namibia. View Item
Image FIRE, Volume 01, Issue 02 (2014) Consent and Dissent: A Study of the Reaction of Chinese School Teachers in Guangzhou City Schools to Government Educational Reforms This paper presents detailed qualitative evidence from a case study of teachers in five Chinese schools in one city. It explicitly seeks to show how developments in government policy towards education have altered the management of teacher labour inside schools as well as the teacher labour process as expressed by the teachers themselves in interviews and questionnaires. In this paper, we explore supervision, work intensification, and the erosion of professionalism. View Item
Image FIRE, Volume 01, Issue 02 (2014) COLLABORATIVE BOOK REVIEW: Baker, D. P. (2014). The Schooled Society: The Educational Transformation of Global Culture For many years the discussion of education as a global and social institution has been prevalent in Comparative and International Education. In his book, The Schooled Society, David P. Baker offers up a unique perspective on a much-discussed theoretical framework in which to view education as an institution. Through this work, Baker uses a multidisciplinary approach to explain the influence that mass education has on societies and informs the readers of new educational paradoxes that are being discussed in the field. View Item
Image FIRE, Volume 01, Issue 02 (2014) Hunger for an Education: A Research Essay on the Case of South Sudan and the Voices of Its People This manuscript is a research essay, which is distinguished by its reliance on systematic and empirical data coupled with an essay approach to the interpretation and presentation of the authors' perspectives and opinions. The Republic of South Sudan is one of the newest of all African countries having become an independent state on July 9, 2011. After years of prolonged war, beginning in the mid-1950s, among different political, tribal, and military factions, and with the Sudan, the South Sudan is now a full-fledged country. The country continues to deal with the legacy of colonialism, genocide, and oppression, and is involved in a civil war. View Item
Image FIRE, Volume 01, Issue 02 (2014) Women's Rising Share of Tertiary Enrollment: A Cross-National Analysis The author thanks Claudia Buchmann, Thomas DiPrete, Pamela Paxton, Francisco Ramirez, Rachel Dwyer, Randy Hodson and Ryan Brooks for comments on earlier drafts of this article. In recent decades, a dramatic shift occurred in higher education throughout the world. Women now enroll in and complete more education than men in the majority of countries. Using a lagged cross-sectional design on a dataset of 75 countries from 1990 to 2008, this study examines the predictors of the current gender gap in tertiary enrollment. I find that prior arguments developed by neo-institutionalist theorists do predict the gender gap in tertiary enrollment to some degree. View Item