Wesley Shumar

College for sale : a critique of the commodification of higher education

Commodification elements of bureaucratic identity recent history of higher education political economy of higher education imagination and the university collective bargaining in higher education planning, advertising and consumption symbolic struggles real struggles.

The Centrality Of Culture And Community To Participant Learning At And With The Math Forum

In this chapter, the terms culture and community are problematized, and their centrality to participant learning at and with The Math Forum (mathforum.org) is discussed.2 Culture, as it is used here, refers to the rituals and norms that come to be associated with a site and its functioning. Community describes recognition of connections to and identification with other participants. The Math Forum is an interactive and inquiry-informed digital library, or virtual resource center, for mathematics education. Previous chapters have addressed the ways in which The Math Forum has leveraged the concept of community in order to become a dynamic and resource-rich educational site (Renninger & Shumar, 2002; Shumar & Renninger, 2002). In the present chapter, this analysis is taken a step further. The culture of The Math Forum is described as providing its participants with a unique set of opportunities for learning and for making the relationship between the individual and the community one in which individual and community

Global pressures, local reactions: higher education and neo‐liberal economic policies

As a summary piece, this essay describes more fully the wider globalizing context in which both students and institutions of higher education are now located. It explores three transitions that signal this new configuration: the creation of new information and media technologies; the transformation of time and space; and the expansion of the culture of consumption and the consumption of culture. The essay then discusses the four ethnographic articles in light of these new social realities.

Making Strangers at Home: Anthropologists Studying Higher Education

Reviewing some of the major developments in cultural anthropology over the last thirty years, this article discusses the implications of these developments for the study of higher education. The article argues that one of the most fruitful directions in anthropological work comes from the efforts to combine neo-Marxist theory with forms of poststructuralism so that the relationship between history, political economy, signification and forms of subjectivity can be explored.

Student and Team Agency in VMT

Agency is inherently a central concern for constructivist education. CSCL researchers need to think about the effectiveness of online learning environments in terms of how they encourage student groups to take active control of their learning activities. This chapter draws on the anthropological, psychological and sociological traditions and their concept of agency in order to consider the relationship between individual and group agency and to understand the differing constraints on interaction in classrooms and online. It then investigates agency in sessions of mathematical discourse in the VMT chat environment. Our empirical discourse analysis displays instances of significant agentic behavior and our theoretical review suggests that there are structural features to the VMT online environment that encourage agentic behavior on the part of students, individually and as a group. This has important implications for understanding learning and for designing pedagogic activities.

Ethnography in a virtual world

This article situates the discussion of virtual ethnography within the larger political/economic changes of twenty-first century consumer capitalism and suggests that increasingly our entire social world is a virtual world and that there were very particular utopian and dystopian framings of virtual community growing out of that history. The article also situates the discussion of virtual ethnography within the anthropological ‘crisis of representation’ discussion to suggest there are many parallels between the two discussions. These discussions suggest that while ethnographers have recognised that all societies are virtual except, maybe the smallest, new information technologies, and particularly, the Internet create a persistent virtual space that transforms earlier notions of the imagined society. Finally, the article suggests that educational ethnographers are in a position to discuss the new pedagogical issues that arise when attempting to do ethnography in our contemporary virtual world.

A tale of two studies: is dissemination working?

In this paper we describe preliminary results from two ongoing research projects that investigate the dissemination practices surrounding digital STEM learning materials for undergraduates. This research consists of two related studies, : 1) survey research about the dissemination practices of NSF-funded PIs; and, 2) a case study on the dissemination practices of courseware developers who won the Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education. The vast majority of PIs reported in the survey that they do not take advantage of digital dissemination methods such as education digital libraries. Premier Award-winning innovators reported using multiple dissemination methods - traditional and digital. Recommendations are provided regarding how digital library developers might work with PIs to improve dissemination.

Universities as Societal Drivers: Entrepreneurial Interventions for a Better Future

This paper argues for a novel view of the entrepreneurial and asks, can faculty and universities play a role in reshaping neoliberalism? In the last ten years there has been a significant literature talking about the impact of neoliberalism and its accountability regime on faculty and universities. This neoliberal regime is about recreating the university as a site of knowledge production for global capitalist expansion. Superseding philosophy, it elevates a particular view of the economic to be the purpose of the university. Further, that discourse often talks about creating entrepreneurial scholars and universities, with a particular neoliberal definition of entrepreneurial. Our alternative definition of entrepreneurship suggests entrepreneurship is a process whereby individuals bring about a much wider range of values than simply the economic. This alternative view of entrepreneurship is already operating in the world through social entrepreneurial projects, the craft economy, and democratic community projects. Following in the Humboldtian tradition, this paper argues that the university could be the site of an alternative entrepreneurial spirit broadening the range of values that are embraced and help bring about a world that is affluent and beneficial for a larger segment of society.

Designing Interactive Technology to Scaffold Generative Pedagogical Practice

This chapter introduces a web-based assessment environment, the EnCoMPASS Environment, that was purposefully designed to scaffold activities consistent with a group of mathematics teacher educators’ practices as well as research-based instructional practices. The chapter details the design of the tool and then presents preliminary findings from our analysis of 21 practicing teachers’ collective mathematical activity mediated by the tool. Findings indicate that the software environment supported teachers’ participation in common practices for examining student work as well as more generative practices such as providing evidence-based feedback. The study has implications for a way in which to conceive of the design of technologies to support generative professional development at a distance.

7 The Digital Age and the Social Imaginary

Benedict Anderson (1991) first coined the term “imagined communities” in 1983 when the first edition of the publication by the same name came out, and was an instant success with cultural anthropologists. Shortly after the publication of the book and before it caught on with a wider scholarly public, he mused about how anthropologists were more interested in his work than colleagues in his own field, political science. Anderson touched on a couple of key ideas that dramatically impacted how anthropologists thought about culture and society. One was that community and identity are products of the collective imagination. And as such they are always tied up in a process of remembering and forgetting. And secondly, that media is always central to how that social imagination is articulated and disseminated. But even more importantly, media shapes the process of remembering and forgetting that goes into the collective imagination.