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Despite existing empirical work that explores the multiple ways in which students develop a sense of belonging in higher education, there is a dearth of comparative research about the extent to which the concepts of community and belonging are central to what it means to be a student and how students in different national contexts (beyond Anglophone countries) construct community and belonging. Drawing on qualitative data from students from six European countries, we provide an account of conceptualisations of community and belonging. Specifically, this paper extends discussions around community and belonging in higher education through comparative inquiry. Notwithstanding the individualised and consumerist framing of students accompanied by market reforms in higher education across Europe, it shows that the notion of community and/or belonging features prominently in students' narratives. We also demonstrate how a sense of community and belonging is experienced on different levels. Crucially, the emphasis placed on community in students' sense of belonging varies by the country, pointing towards the continued influence of distinctive national traditions, structures and norms of higher education. Our analysis contributes to wider debates about the development of a European Higher Education Area and its impact on European homogenisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the construction of international students in continental Europe, aiming to broaden the existing literature that primarily focuses on English-speaking countries. It explores the structural influences of policy, practices, and representations in shaping the experiences of international students and suggests using the concept of "internationalised" students instead.

This paper explores how university staff in Denmark, Germany, and England perceived higher education (HE) policy as impacting the experience of being a student in their respective countries. While, in each nation, different policy mechanisms were identified as having triggered transformations in the experience of being a student, the transformations themselves were described in a strikingly similar manner across all three countries: staff stressed that students had become more instrumental in their approach to learning; that the student experience had become more circumscribed; and that students were under greater stress. We analyse how staff's narratives about the impact of policy on the experience of being a student were mediated by their own ideas about what constituted 'good education', which in turn were strongly rooted in national traditions. Furthermore, in each country, staff's assessment of the impact of specific policies on HE differed sharply from those of policy actors. Our findings contribute to the scholarship on the marketisation of HE, through drawing attention to how the rationality underpinning policy does not determine how it is engaged with by key stakeholders on the ground, and by demonstrating how the neoliberalisation of HE can unfold in different formats, some more explicit than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the gender gap in a wide range of labour market outcomes (income, skill utilisation, work autonomy, job security and work-life balance) for higher education graduates in different economic sectors, using combined REFLEX and HEGESCO surveys from 17 European countries. In particular, it assess how specific institutional characteristics (gender composition, different levels of educational attainment of the labour force, skill specificity and the private or public nature of employment) within sectors influence the early career gender gap in job quality for highly educated workers in Europe. The study finds that from the start of their careers, male higher education graduates receive higher wages, yet women report better skill utilisation, work autonomy and job security. In terms of institutional factors that influence gender differences in job quality, the paper finds support for the view that in sectors in which women are predominant they suffer an income penalty, but not in other aspects of job quality. Skill specificity of the sectors has been found to have very little explanatory value when it comes to graduate labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass higher education has promoted the development of larger, costlier, and more heterogeneous systems. Like many public services, HE faced tight competition for funding, alongside pressures to become more efficient in their use of public funds. One major development in public funding has been the introduction of performance-based funding. In this paper, we analyse the dissemination of PBF in European HE and discuss its main institutional effects. We will start by discussing the rationales for the introduction of these financial incentives regarding the behaviour of HEIs and their organizational response to externally led stimuli. We then present the dissemination of PBF across European higher education and reflect about the main institutional effects of the dissemination of PBF. We present some concluding remarks about the management challenges created by the emphasis on competitive rationales in public HE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of scholarship on how students see themselves, and also on how they are conceptualised by other social actors. However, what has been less explored is how students believe they are seen by others, and how this impacts them. Drawing on focus groups with students across Europe – and particularly plasticine models students made to depict how they felt they were seen by relevant others – this paper will illustrate how the four most common ways in which students felt they were constructed were as hedonistic and lazy; useless and a burden; clever, hardworking, and successful; and a resource to be exploited. It will argue that such stereotypes had significant material impact on students' lives and how they experienced being a student. Finally, it will analyse how specific national contexts accounted for a range of variations in how students articulated these constructions. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2021.2007358. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the initiation of the Erasmus programme in 1987, intra-European student exchanges in higher education are expected to promote a sense of European identity and citizenship among European exchange students. Panel studies grasping students' identification before and after participating in an exchange programme, however, remain remarkably scarce today. Moreover, the few existing studies report conflicting results. This paper adds to this debate, presenting the results of a survey conducted in 2009 and 2010 among non-exchange and exchange students from thirteen European countries, based on a pretest - posttest nonequivalent groups design (n = 400). My analyses did not find any statistically significant differences over time within and between the groups of exchange and non-exchange students, and neither between students with similar identification scores at wave 1. Finally, an analysis of the relationship between social network types and identification patterns did also not yield any significant results. Altogether, these findings suggest the impact of European exchange programmes on European citizenship and a sense of European identity is relatively limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents and discusses an arts-based project, carried out by the first-year students in the classroom, at the Department of Social Work, in Athens, Greece. The project was designed for raising ethical awareness and knowledge of the 2015 Europe's refugee crisis among social work students. The purpose of this project was three-fold: (1) to help students to better understand the refugee crisis as an emerging problem in Europe and in the rest of the world; (2) to help students raise their ethical awareness about the plight of refugees and to learn how to avoid discrimination and racism and (3) to improve student's abilities to work effectively with refugee populations. The project used art-based activities (drawing, writing, photos, etc.) as a powerful pedagogical tool for teaching students and supporting their learning in the classroom. As the literature has shown, the use of arts in social work education helps student to learn through an artistic and creative way and provides a secure base, from which they can explore real-life situations and try to give meaning to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Spolsky's definition of language policy, this introductory paper offers a brief reflection on the three main lines of research that are represented in this special issue regarding the relationship between internationalisation and language policies in higher education: management and planning, practices, and beliefs. In the first part, we comment on Englishisation and the establishment of multilingual policies as responses to the globalisation of higher education. The attitudes deriving from the interaction between English and local languages as a consequence of internationalisation are presented in the second part. Finally, the third part points at the interest of studying how the members of the academic community accomplish the management of language diversity in specific settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Higher Education (HE) is experiencing disruption from technologies, demographics, the globalising world and longer life expectancy. Historically Higher Education has had a legacy of being seen as the requirement for an educated ‘elite’, there has been a policy ambition set in various countries (including the UK) for it to become the expectation for much wider segments of the population as a whole. As students become ‘everyone’ and learning becomes ‘all the time’ Distance Teaching and Research Institutions have a tremendous opportunity but there are also many disruptions and barriers to overcome. Higher Education institutions have an important role within Education for Sustainable Development and sustainable lifestyles; one of the important goals and targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development goals for 2030. Higher Education can contribute to sustainability in many ways – social, technical and environmental; globally and locally. In particular distance-learning universities due to the flexibility in the learning process, use of technologies, and inter-disciplinary approach to teaching and learning, constitute key factors in education for sustainable development. But what will this contribution look like? In this paper, the responses from senior leaders in four major European distance-learning universities are presented, compared and discussed. The tentative conclusions draw out some strategic imperatives for sustainable higher education in the twenty first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on higher education policy points to changes in the dominant discourse over the years. In particular, the ascendance of a discourse marked by concepts of new public management, using language inspired by neoclassical economic theory which characterizes education as a marketplace where students are customers, has led scholars to critically question the foundations of modern higher education policy. This paper uses critical discourse analysis to trace the development of higher education policy discourse in Denmark from the late 1970s until today. The authors find that the discourse has moved from a pluralistic one embracing not only the economic benefits of education, but also emphasizing on democracy, citizenship, and equality, towards a predominantly economic one, focused squarely on notions of globalization and competitiveness in a knowledge society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just a decade ago, the liberal British and cautious German approaches to labour migration policy (LMP) counted as institutional spillovers of two opposed varieties of capitalism. Since 2014, however, Germany has offered one of the most liberal labour migration legislations across the rich world, while the Coalition government in London has severely curbed the rules of admission. Is the explanatory power of capitalist variation already exhausted for comparative labour migration policies? To what extent has the economic crisis disrupted policy paths? By adopting a cultural political economy perspective, this paper examines the interaction of crisis discourses and capitalist varieties in explaining LMP changes. A comparison shows that Britain treats the liberal market economy’s openness to foreign workers as a root cause for a deeply felt migration control crisis and seeks to tame firms’ profitability strategies with restrictive policies. By contrast, German decision-makers have come to view the skill provision mechanisms of the coordinated market economy as key cure to the perceived demographic crisis, liberalising migration routes alongside this economic coordination model. Overall, the paper dethrones capitalist varieties as seemingly deterministic informants of labour migration policies. Instead, policies have both the aim and capacity to negotiate national capitalisms according to shifting notions of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International student mobility amongst and between countries has become increasingly common and forms a central feature of the global higher education system. This paper examines the key learning experiences relating to the student mobility component of the Canadian-European Initiative for Health Promotion Advanced Learning (CEIHPAL) project. CEIHPAL was a unique and innovative project that fostered advanced intercontinental education and learning in health promotion from 2005–2008. With co-funding from the European Commission and the Canadian Government, the project facilitated institutional, student and faculty cooperation, by developing a high level of international communication. In particular, this paper focuses on the student mobility component and experiences of the CEIHPAL programme, a central part of the project activities. Feedback from both Canadian and European students themselves is used to document their participation in the programme, including the benefits derived from taking part as well as the problems and difficulties they encountered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on experiences with international learning and teaching in a European (ERASMUS) programme on geography and gender during the period 1990–1998. This programme forms an example of collaborative work in which the author and colleagues experimented with an array of models to bring geography students and teachers of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds together. International learning and teaching is a confrontation with diversity. Diversity in language, in the mastery of English and the resulting hierarchies, in learning and teaching cultures and in defining geography form both challenges and opportunities to profit. In this paper the author will expound on the different strategies to deal with linguistic and cultural differences and to break down hierarchies. Furthermore the opportunities to "use" the differences as learning and teaching contexts will be discussed. Geography is a discipline concerning diversity. Direct contact between persons with different cultural backgrounds can form an efficient, effective and stimulating method to learn about differences in geographies and in teaching methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparisons of international child welfare systems have identified two basic orientations to practice; a 'child protection' orientation and a 'child welfare' orientation, which are founded upon fundamentally different values and assumptions regarding the family, the origins of childcare problems, and the proper role of the state in relation to the family. This paper describes a project which sought to compare how undergraduate social work students from three European Universities perceive risk in referrals about the welfare of children and to explore the impact of different cultural, ideological and educational contexts on the way in which risk is constructed by students. Students from Northern Ireland, Germany and Poland examined three vignettes via 10 online discussion fora each of which provided a narrative summary of their discussion. The paper presents some findings from the analysis of the qualitative data emerging from the student discussions and draws out the lessons learned in terms of how the project was designed and implemented using online discussion fora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principles of sustainable development are becoming extremely relevant for organisations. In the case of universities, these institutions can act as agents in promoting these principles within society. The literature contains a wide range of studies which show how universities may play a critical role in disseminating sustainability principles on the one hand, and their translation into practice, on the other. At present, many higher education institutions are becoming more aware of their impact on the environment, and trying to understand the environmental needs and implications of their operations. Going further, some universities are incorporating sustainability principles into their activities. One of the questions that universities are now facing is how education for sustainable development can be translated into practice so that it can be effective in transforming society. This paper will discuss the need for and the usefulness of integrative approaches to implement sustainable development in higher education. In addition to a theoretical review of the state of the art, the paper will use case studies from the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (Germany) and Bournemouth University (UK) to illustrate the effectiveness of integration of sustainable development principles in university research and teaching activities, and the many benefits integrative approaches may bring about. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobility is one of the buzzwords in political discourse regarding solutions for youth unemployment in times of crisis. Young Spaniards are seen to be leaving en masse. However, there is no statistical basis to confirm this hypothesis, especially regarding the Schengen Area, and little is known about the predisposition of highly skilled young people to move abroad. This paper answers the research questions: (1) How many university students consider emigrating?; (2) What are their profiles?; (3) What are their motivations and expectations?; and (4) Where do they want to go? Our results were obtained through an online survey on Catalan university students and contrasted with data from different Catalan youth services. Our results show a high predisposition to emigrate for temporary stays. The EU, in particular the UK, is the favourite destination; however, this situation could change drastically with Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The project of the Bologna process to create a 'European Higher Education Area' (EHEA) has established the necessary conditions for the emergence of a new sociopolitical space of higher education in Europe. This space has become a cooperation/competition area that changes the European and national balance of power: the relations the countries maintain both between them and with the European Commission are situated in a cooperation/competition game. The European Commission plays a central role in this area, alongside actor organisations who see themselves forced to discuss issues that had previously divided them and to modify their relationships at a national level. This article can be seen as a contribution to the analysis of international strategy in a global knowledge economy, especially to the two-level game theory of Putnam for which international agreements are negotiated with success only if they lead to national advantages. In particular, it studies the role of the European Commission in this sociopolitical area and the mechanism by which it has taken the piloting of the Bologna process, which was launched in a field of national competency, to make it an instrument for the realisation of the Lisbon strategy aimed at making the European Union the most competitive economy in the world. This paper is based on data sources provided by the analysis of papers produced by the actors of the process and on 50 interviews of these actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines international student mobility between member states of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), a group of 47 countries that committed to reforming their higher education systems to improve the comparability and compatibility of degrees. While increased student mobility is a key goal in its official documents, little research has empirically investigated student mobility patterns in respect to the EHEA. The analysis employs multivariate techniques to identify trends in student mobility between 1999 and 2009, using a spatial approach to visualise the relationships between member states as constituted through student mobility flows. Results show that within the analysis timeframe student flows in the EHEA became more even in their distribution, but that in terms of the relationships between states, the EHEA became more centralised and segmented, meaning that key actors mediated exchanges between peripheral states and the region was more easily divided into self-contained clusters. These trends indicate a need to critically reconsider the nature of the EHEA and its role in the globalisation of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This short paper recognises the growth in emphasis in work-based learning as Europe moves forward on economically driven life-long learning. We support such a move and point to issues which still need to be resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades regional agreements have become more significant in educational and training. This paper situates and analyses the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), the Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy and explores their influence on the integration of higher education systems in Mercosur (the Southern Common Market of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela). Mercosur is still a customs union, and the project of integrating higher education is at an early stage. Lacking organically established regional bodies, coordination of integration in Mercosur has focused on summits and meetings of officials. However, in a context of unequal maturity in regional integration, there is emerging evidence that the EHEA project is influencing the reforms of national systems of higher education and even Mercosur’s model for a regional area of higher education. A nascent Europeanization of higher education systems in the Mercosur region is emerging, by-passing Mercosur’s regional structures. The formulation of policies has been permeated by policy transfer from Europe to national territories within Mercosur. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Bologna Declaration focuses on skill acquisition as a means of improving student employability and fieldwork is considered to be a pivotal teaching method for geography students to obtain such skills. This paper presents results from a major substantive survey of European geography academics and students which investigated their perspectives with regard to the role of geography fieldwork in the gaining of transferable employability skills. Results are compared with past research in the wake of the European Commission's geography ‘TUNING’ project, which provided a set of subject-specific and generic skills attained through fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Designing political institutions is a balancing act between upholding democratic ideals and accommodating constraints. Advocates of deliberative governance in the European Union live this tension in a particularly polarized manner, torn between the deliberative ideal of consensual decision-making and the reality of power politics. To which extent does deliberative governance provide a suitable conceptual framework as well as a mode of governance in its own right for European policy-making? This paper applies five features of deliberative governance suggested by Teague (2001) in his study of European social policy to the genesis of the Bologna Process and subsequent domestic reforms. The Bologna Process has, since the Sorbonne declaration of 25 May 1998, aimed at creating a European Higher Education Area. This study concludes that deliberative governance has the potential to start a long-term process of progressive domestic policy change and therefore deserves further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In many parts of the world, higher education is viewed as a prime 'motor' for the development of a knowledge-based economy. Under the banner of this 'new economy', higher education policies, programmes and practices have been increasingly co-opted and shaped by wider geo-strategic political and economic interests. This paper explores three, interlinked, higher education policy spaces - in Europe, the United States, and Australia. It explores how the growing range of educational initiatives at the European level has affected - both directly and indirectly - American and Australian policymaking in higher education. The European higher education project, which is increasingly perceived as having some significance to the global economy, has set off a series of dynamic reactions in both Australia and the United States, which is leading to multiple new logics and new imaginaries about the global higher education landscape. Through this, a more integrated and relational global system of higher education is emerging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is now a relatively large literature on young people's aspirations with respect to their transitions from compulsory schooling, the body of work on the aspirations of those within higher education is rather less well-developed. This article draws on data from undergraduate students in six European countries to explore their hopes for their post-university lives. It demonstrates that although aspirations for employment were discussed most frequently, non-economic plans and desires were also important. Moreover, despite significant commonalities across the six nations, aspirations were also differentiated, to some extent at least, by national context, institutional setting and subject of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the complex relations between two social processes – standardisation and quantification in measuring migration. We explore how international migrant populations in the European territories of the former USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia have been defined, counted and presented in European population statistics. Our analysis led us to conclude that the category of international migrant, defined as a person born abroad according to the present-time borders, has low contextual validity in postsocialist European contexts. Perceived as universally applicable, however, the category is persistently used in enumerating migration in postsocialist Europe. We argue that the unchallenged transferability of the category of international migrant across contexts is based on the West–East methodological bias – a preconception embedded in the standardisation and quantification of migration. The West–East methodological bias plays a dual role. It fuels the initial perception of the category, forged in Western geopolitical contexts, as standardised and applicable across different settings. Then, in combination with the perceived power of the quantified representation of reality, the West–East methodological bias contributes to the further objectification of the standardised category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out the context and rationale of a project on which the author is currently engaged in collaboration with Roy Lowe. It records a network of American, European and British scholars, including Lowe, who in the last four decades of the twentieth century developed research on the history of universities. At a personal level it recalls the entry into this research activity of one Japanese historian of higher education, and his encounter with Roy Lowe. The historiography and the relevance of Lowe’s contributions are recounted from a Japanese perspective, leading to a subsequent sharing of research questions and the launch of a project on which both individuals are currently engaged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is often assumed within much of the academic literature and by many of those working in higher education that universities across Europe are homogenising, converging around an Anglo-American model as a result of neo-liberal pressures and the aim of creating a single European Higher Education Area. However, drawing on an analysis of 92 policy documents from six different European countries, this article demonstrates that enduring differences remain – at least in so far as constructions of students are concerned. While European policy may assume that higher education students can move unproblematically across national borders, as part of the Erasmus mobility scheme, for example, the article shows that understandings of 'the student' differ in significant ways both across countries and, to some extent, within them. This has implications for both European policy and academic theorisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative studies of European social policy have pointed to significant differences with respect to the way in which diversity is valued and understood, contrasting nations that have adopted strongly compulsory and integrationist policies with others that have pursued more voluntary and pluralistic approaches. Within the higher education sector specifically, although there have been numerous European-level initiatives to encourage national governments to take action to widen access to university, we know relatively little about how key policy actors conceptualise diversity with respect to the student population, and the extent to which such understandings are shared across national borders. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a range of 'policy influencers' in six European countries and an analysis of relevant policy documents, this article suggests that dimensions of difference are not always valued equally and that, despite policy imperatives promoting higher education homogenisation across the continent, some significant differences between nation-states endure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Training of behaviour analysts for autism services, has improved notably within a European higher education context. However, regional discrepancies associated with economic, health care, social services, and institutional policies magnify the importance of creating appropriate unified training and consumer protection. Although the European Association for Behaviour Analysis (EABA) has endorsed the Behavior Analyst Certification Board's (BACB) designations, the absence of European and national regulations, recognition, and accreditation remain significant barriers to quality training and implementation. These challenges are particularly pertinent in light of BACB decision to limit certification to residents in the USA and Canada after 2022. Advances, challenges, and future directions are discussed within the context of higher education in the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Norway, and Sweden. The post-Bologna European agenda for higher education, globalization and opportunities for the training of behaviour analysts within European higher education are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apart from teaching, research and service to society, since 2015 higher education systems and institutions in Europe have faced an additional expectation – to respond to the largely unexpected yet nevertheless growing demand for higher education by refugees. This study explores system and organizational level responses to such environmental pressures in Germany and Flanders, both affluent systems, but different in terms of size, attractiveness as destination and the extent to which their languages are widely spoken. Relying primarily on document analysis and interviews, the study highlights three elements of policy dynamics: policy styles, main drivers, and extent of involvement of non-state actors. While, as expected, in both systems the dynamics were re-active, solution-driven, and with strong involvement of non-state actors, contrary to expectations both countries responded primarily in a bottom-up manner. The study provides a conceptual tool and a first empirical insight into this novel phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative education was established in Greek universities in the 1980s, with the creation of pedagogical departments and two laboratories, and the publication of a journal. There was an early emphasis on education policy analysis, in terms of assumptions about the 'semi-peripherality' of Greece within Europe. Later, the emphasis shifted to what was also called 'modernisation' - framed by entry to the European Economic Community. There was an emphasis on education policies in other European countries, and the educational policy of Europe, in contrast with Greece which had not yet absorbed what was becoming 'a European discourse'. There was a continuing motif - reflections on methodology - but the changing concepts of modernisation, the more or less permanent anxiety about reforming Greek education, and the theme of education within the European Union dominated academic work in comparative education in Greece - even after 2010 and the major new economic crisis. An optimistic view is that comparative education will continue to develop in the Greek university through teaching and research. There is, however, a question to be asked about the silences within Greek comparative education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the emergence of European business education in the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on archival analysis the typological study which this article proposes, attempts to show that business education before 1870 seems to have been a geographically and institutionally broader expression than has been described up to now. It identifies four organisational models of business education and reveals that higher business education was not limited to the Higher Schools of Commerce alone. It concludes that the European states took, directly or not, an interest in business education well before the end of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent economic crisis provided a shock to the system, and led governments to scramble for solutions to problems of falling economic growth, high unemployment and weak job creation. Many European governments responded to protectionist calls by restricting immigration policies, even towards the highly skilled. Yet countries have faced different challenges and thus the cross-national variation in the demand for policy closure or openness is remarkable. Some seized the opportunity to restrict their high-skilled immigration policies, while others took advantage of the crisis for further liberalisation. The article explores different reasons for this variation, ranging from socio-economic conditions, the inflow of labour migrants to the role of labour market institutions and political actors. Countries badly affected by the crisis and with a recent influx of labour migrants were more likely to respond to mobilised groups lobbying for restrictive policies than those countries weathering the crisis relatively better but suffering from continuing labour shortages. The article examines the changing conditions and the role of mobilised stakeholders to explain policy change in selected European countries. It also presents an updated index on states’ openness to high-skilled immigrants to measure change over time. The findings are based on position statements of stakeholders, official documents and media coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do sub-state nationalists respond to the growing presence of cultural diversity in their ‘homelands’ resulting from migration? Sub-state nationalists in Europe, in ‘nations without states’ such as Catalonia and Scotland, have been challenging the traditional nation-state model for many decades. While the arguments in favour of autonomy or independence levelled by these movements have become more complex, sub-state nationalist movements remain grounded by their perceived national community that is distinct from the majority nation. Migration to the ‘homeland’ of a sub-state nation, then, presents a conundrum for sub-state elites that we label the ‘legitimation paradox’: too much internal diversity may undermine the claim to cultural distinctiveness. We engage with three common intervening variables thought to influence how sub-state nationalists confront the ‘legitimation paradox’: civic/ethnic nationalism, degree of political autonomy, and party competition. Our overarching argument is that none of these factors have a unidirectional or determinate effect on the sub-state nationalism-immigration nexus, which is why the nuanced case studies that comprise this Special Issue are worthwhile endeavours. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents the outcomes of a European study on the main training needs which pre- and in-service teachers, teacher trainers, and coordinators consider they have in order to adapt to a bilingual education model. The macro-study has designed, validated and administered four sets of questionnaires to 706 informants across the whole of Europe, which have allowed a detailed diagnosis of language teachers’ training needs in terms of linguistic and intercultural competence, theoretical and methodological aspects based on the new options associated to Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), teaching materials and resources, and ongoing professional development. After framing the topic against the backdrop of prior investigations, the article expounds on the research design of the study and outlines its main findings in relation to the afore-mentioned fields of interest. A detailed diagnosis of where we currently stand in this process of preparation for CLIL models in Europe is provided and within- and across-cohort comparison is carried out in terms of a series of intervening variables. The ultimate aim is to base decisions regarding language degrees and teacher training courses on empirically grounded guidelines in order to guarantee a success-prone implementation of CLIL in our continent, country and region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides an account of how people’s career management is given prominence in contemporary European policy documents pertaining to career education for entrepreneurship in higher education and in vocational education and training. This study concerns the ways in which policy discourses of career management and governmental practices invoke individuals to understand themselves as entrepreneurial.Proceeding from post-Foucauldian theorizing of the concept of governmentality, the analysis draws attention to technologies and procedures designed to foster career self-management. Focus is also directed to the practices of self-knowledge, self-actualization and self-control as part of the formation of the subjectivity. It is argued that the governance of self-management operates in two interrelated ways: as a practice of inducing individuals to shape an entrepreneurial relation towards their needs and desires, and as a power to enterprise career education. In relation to this, the analysis elucidates how the discourse of competence acts upon individuals to capitalize themselves and engage in a permanent self-assessment of their needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Higher education in developing nations is typically viewed from a dependency perspective – institutions are seen as merely recipients of Western knowledge, aid and reform efforts. Nevertheless, universities in both the centre and the periphery are dealing with tensions between protecting the public good and embracing neoliberal values based on a market approach to higher education. In the USA and Europe these competing interests are typically cast as mutually exclusive. Our study on the market approach to higher education in Kenya, however, suggests that public and private interests can be complementary, contributing to a re-envisioning of the traditional mission of higher education. This article seeks to examine more fully the nature of reform efforts at two universities in Kenya, to elucidate lessons for universities undergoing market-oriented reform in the West and to suggest a reciprocal relationship between institutions in Africa and Europe, upending the centre-periphery paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Competence-oriented restructuring of curricular content for the study of geographic information system (GIS) in higher education has become a primary educational enterprise in Europe due to the Bologna Reform. Although there are different international curricular documents for outcome-based design of learning activities within the geographic information science and technology domain, it has not yet been clarified which competences should be considered essential components of a university-level course of study in GIS. Our content analysis of those curricular documents demonstrates that there are three dimensions of core competences foundational to the study of GIS in higher education, which are GIS knowledge and skills, spatial thinking, and problem-solving. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The requirements placed on Olympic and professional athletes in contemporary world sport are such that they need to dedicate themselves more and more to achieving excellence. This immediately implies that most athletes' time is dedicated to developing their sporting career, with very little time left to develop other aspects of their lives outside their sport. The reality facing many elite athletes is that few are sufficiently financially rewarded to allow them to make a living out of their sport, and even fewer can rely on measures in place in their own country to assist with the financial and psychological impacts of their retirement from sport [Stambulova, N., Stephan Y., and Japhag U. ‘Athletic Retirement: A Cross-National Comparison of Elite French and Swedish Athletes’.Psychology of Sport and Exercise8 (2007): 101–18.]. This places even more importance on the need for the athlete either to have a ‘dual career’ or to prepare for a post-athletic career while still participating in elite sport. The current work is an attempt to identify both the opportunities and constraints that have been experienced by student-athletes in combining an academic and sporting career successfully in three European contexts: Finland, France and the UK. It also proposes a rationale outlining eight reasons that student-athletes identified to justify their decision to pursue a dual career path. This is an important contribution to this field of research, as till date there has been hardly any evidence that claims that the two careers were not simply mutually compatible but in fact mutually complementary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

European education ministers and officials signed a Bologna Declaration with a goal to reform, strengthen, and standardize higher education programs and degree structures by 2010. Graduates will become more mobile and marketable to employers throughout Europe. These programs shall also attract students worldwide. Higher education programs on other continents have taken notice and are in the process of initiating similar goals and outcomes. All of these events are creating new research opportunities for academic business librarians in all aspects of library support and services including collection development, reference, and instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses two processes of higher education regionalisation, MERCOSUR-Educativo in Latin America and the Bologna Process in Europe, from a comparative perspective. The comparative analysis is centered on the content and the governance of both processes and, specifically, on the reasons of their uneven evolution and implementation. We support the comparison by using theories of governance and globalisation/regionalisation. We also focus on the external and non-educational influences affecting MERCOSUR-Educativo and the Bologna Process. In this respect, we conclude that, despite the regional scope of the two processes analysed, both are directly and indirectly affected by economic globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jayasuriya's conceptualisation of 'regulatory regionalism' is particularly useful for examining the presence, significance and effect of new higher education governance mechanisms in constituting Europe as a competitive region and knowledge-based economy. In particular he argues that we need to take sufficient account of the role of domestic political economies in constituting regions, on the one hand, and the role of governance mechanisms, on the other, and the constitutive role of these processes in region-building. Focusing on the current moment of this regionalising and globalising project in Europe, I argue that 'regulatory regionalism' can be further nuanced if it takes into account 'extra-regional' dynamics that have effects on region-building through the way they thicken and embed new structures, processes and social relations within and beyond the region. I conclude by arguing that in the case of Europe, this current moment of regulatory regionalism through higher education might also be conceived of as part of a wider project around statehood called 'regulatory state regionalism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates planning education programmes and attempts to re-orient them in the context of both an international 'problematique' in reforming planning education, and European Union directives about the creation of a common European space in higher education. First, the article reviews the international trends in changes and challenges in planning and planning education in the 21st century and proposes an 'integration model' of planning education programmes in a European and international context. Second, the article focuses on the development of planning studies in Greece. It presents their history and development as well as the institutional framework in which planning and planning education operate. It then analyses the Greek educational curricula in two ways: (1) a quantitative analysis classifying courses into different thematic areas and thereby, revealing the basic structure of the curricula; and (2) a qualitative analysis based on interviews with academic staff in charge of educational curricula and examining the content of courses, the adopted pedagogies and possible restrictions (e.g. human capital, institutional framework, etc.) in introducing effective planning curricula. Finally, the article proposes guidelines for re-orienting educational curricula in Greek schools of planning and draws out wider implications for planning studies in the wider European and international context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]