Conference Agenda

This study is to investigate student representatives’ perceptions of student voice in UK higher education institutions (HEIs). With Neoliberalism as a leading conceptual framework, it is expected to find out answers of the following research questions: (1) to what degree the student representation systems in HEIs work to promote student voice; (2) and assist HEIs to become more accountable to students? (3) how underlying diversity issues affect representing student voice?

Against the backdrop of Neoliberalism, tensions between managerialist approaches to quality assurance and socio-political commitments to democracy and citizenship, can be witnessed both in educational literature and practice (Carey, 2013; Matthews & Dollinger, 2022). Student voice advocates assume students are competent social agents and have a right to democratic participation in educational settings (Bourke & Loveridge, 2014). However, along with the prevalence of New Public Management, student voice nowadays is much used as a potential contributor to quality improvement in educational settings, rather than prioritising the democratic rights of students as young citizens (Thomson & Gunter, 2006). In other words, the emphasis on student voice currently is driven primarily through imperatives of marketised accountability (Fielding, 2001), which emphasises pre-determined objectives and foreseeable outputs (Blanco Ramírez, 2013).

In this case, engaging student voice has been critiqued as an instrumentalist technology associated with compliance and productivity (Bragg, 2007). This powerful impetus that position students as consumers, data sources, and tools for quality control can miss the emancipatory potential of their voice (Charteris & Smardon, 2019), because the essential characteristics of voice work—"dialogic, intergenerational, collective, and inclusive” (Pearce & Wood, 2019, p.118)—are often difficult to observe from the current voice discourse.

Student representative system, as one important component of the accountability regime in HEIs in the UK, is designed to collect student voice formally by elected representatives and transit voice from students to a multilevel of staff in institutions. It is faced with a number of difficulties in creating the conditions for such a student empowerment (Pearce & Wood, 2019). The responses from institutions (Carey, 2013), the time-bounded nature of dealing with student voice (Flint & O'Hara, 2013), complex motivations of student representatives (Seale, 2016) are all affecting the progress and validity of transiting student voice from students to institutions through representatives.

Moreover, the neoliberal notion of students as consumers is likely to reshape the relationships between student representatives and their institutions (Flint & O'Hara, 2013), where there has been an increasing convergence of the consumerist values and priorities between them (Brooks, Byford & Sela, 2016). Representatives are blamed for regulating themselves to align with existing structures, rather than challenging them (Pearce & Wood, 2019), from which the general student body tend to view their representatives as being co-opted by the institutions (QAAS, 2018), rather than creating a dialogical environment for authentic student voice. The legitimate positions that students should be entitled in this neoliberal environment imply the enactment of a representative role (Lizzio & Wilson, 2009), and this is also an essential question to answer for positioning student voice.

Considerable studies have been conducted in school settings to explore student representation issues in school governance, while there is insufficient discussion about this in the HE context. It particularly lacks investigations of students’ views of accountability, which can inform and deepen our understanding of student voice mechanisms based on their personal experience. In the UK, where there is a diverse student composition, it is also possible to get various insights.

Thus, this research uses questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to collect student representatives’ perceptions of HE’s accountability to student voice in the UK. Data collection and analysis will be carried out after March 2023.

Over the last couple of decades, higher education has undergone significant changes as a result of intensive globalization processes making the HE sector global, national and local at the same time (Marginson and Rhodes, 2022). The wave of neoliberal globalization associated with marketization and competition in different areas has also influenced higher education policies. One of the such policies in the recent decade has been a quest for ‘world-class university’ (WCU) and/or ‘global research university’ (GRU) among nations and their universities (Liu et al, 2011). With the emphasised importance of knowledge economy, the term ‘world-class university’ has gained the attention of various stakeholders in the higher education systems worldwide as these universities are thought to play a key role “in creating and disseminating knowledge, educating a highly skilled workforce for technological and intellectual leadership, and serving the needs of society” for their nation’s ability to compete in the global arena (Wang et al, 2012, p.9).

Kazakhstan is no exception and in 2010 established Nazarbayev University (NU) to be ‘a national standard of higher education for the rest of the country’ (Nazarbayev, 2010), to be a leader in higher education reform and modernisation in Kazakhstan and also to ‘contribute to the establishment of Astana as an international knowledge and innovation hub’ (nu.edu.kz). Unlike the rest of the HEIs, NU has been given a special status of an autonomous organisation of education which grants the university institutional autonomy and legislative independence from the bureaucratic system of the Ministry of Education and Science (MoES). This paper, based on the PhD thesis done in 2016-2019, aims to understand Kazakhstan’s quest for a world-class university with a focus on an interplay between global aspirations, national policies, and local context. It addresses the overarching questions of what the tensions and connections are between global, national, and local forces in Kazakhstan’s attempts to build a world-class university. Through qualitative case study design with semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, the author specifically explores the extent to which global practices advocated at a western-type elite university can be integrated within the setting of the local public universities as part of the bold policy reforms in the national HE sector. By doing so, the paper also explores the responses of the public universities on the prioritized emphasis on a single university made by the government.

Theoretically, this study uses Marginson and Rhoades’ (2002) glonacal agency heuristic for its relevance in explaining the dynamic of global, national and local dimensions in which HE is said to exist. Moreover, the approach is helpful in the way to interpret “the intersections, interactions, mutual determinations of these levels (global, national, and local) and domains (organizational agencies and the agency of collectivities)” (p.289). Hence, this approach is seen as a tool to understand and uncover how global, national and local forces interact where NU is regarded as a product of the national government to become globally visible while reforming and modernizing the local HE and more importantly, the public institutions' response to internationalizing policy of the government.

The number of students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at universities has increased in the last few years. These students face many barriers that make participation and learning difficult (Bakker et al., 2019; Fabri et al., 2020). Specifically, some research states barriers related to interaction with others, adaptation to university environments and handling changes (Jansen et al., 2017). Other studies describe obstacles regarding the perception of information and executive functioning (Elias and White, 2019; Waisman et al., 2022). Also, there have been detected aspects related to the emotional well-being of students with ASD, who tend to feel anxiety and stress during higher education (Fabri et al., 2020).

Universities have to ensure the right of every person to access and participate in higher education. In the case of Spain, since the creation of the European higher education area (EEES), valuing diversity and promoting quality education are two objectives that universities have assumed. Autism Spectrum disorder symptoms are diverse depending on the person, so, in this way, laws, policies and regulations require students with ASD to be educated in an inclusive environment (Al Jaffal, 2022). In that sense, based on Universal Design for Learning, it is essential to promote the personalization of learning and provide multiple options so that students can choose the most appropriate to them.

It is clear that faculty staff become a key factor in the inclusion process of students in higher education, nevertheless, sometimes they are considered a barrier. Some research identifies many obstacles to inclusion related to teachers, such as the scarce awareness of autism (Cage and Howes, 2020; Fabri et al., 2020; Oliver Kerrigan, 2021) and developing more inclusive practices to attend these students (Moriña and Carballo, 2018; Sarret, 2018; Sullivan, 2021). Interventions often focus on traditional academic accommodations, such as extended time on exams or noiseless locations for taking them (Cox et al., 2020), which sometimes are not what students with ASD need (Jackson et al., 2018).

From the literature review that has been carried out, the need to place more emphasis on studying how faculty staff face the attention to students with autism in university classrooms has been detected. More specifically, an attempt will be made to identify the barriers that current university teaching staff face in relation to their inclusion. On the other hand, and in response to this, we will try to give some suggestions that can help faculty staff to teach inclusively.

Internationalization has become one of the important agendas for countries, higher education institutions, and university students due to global systems which transformed higher education into a more cooperative as well as competitive context. This research investigates the perceptions, expectations, and push-pull factors of higher education students about studying abroad.

Internationalization in universities is performed in various forms, such as branch campuses and joint degree programs, yet student mobility is the most well-known form (Van Damme, 2001). Despite the discussions on the inclusiveness of physical mobility (De Wit & Jones, 2018; Van Mol & Perez-Encinas, 2022); according to OECD (2021) data, international student mobility has been expanding quite steadily in the last 20 years. In 2019, 6.1 million higher education students worldwide went to study in another country, more than double the number of mobility that took place in 2007. In other words, the number of international students in higher education increased by an average of 5.5% per year between 1998 and 2019. Parallel to these developments, there is an increasing demand by higher education students in Türkiye to study abroad.

The push-pull theory was chosen as the conceptual framework for this study which was adapted from migration theories (Li & Bray, 2007; Lee 2014, McMahon 1992) and became important and frequently used to analyze international student mobility (Almeida, 2020). In the relevant literature, push factors are associated with negative conditions in the student's home country, while pull factors are related to positive aspects in the country of destination (Altbach 1998).

There are various studies in the literature that analyze student mobility using the push-pull theory. Most studies in the literature (Chen, 2017; Eder, Smith & Pitts, 2010; Gbollie & Gong, 2019; Kondakcı, 2011; Kondakci et al., 2016; Lee & Stewart, 2022; Maringe & Carter, 2007; Özoğlu et.al., 2015; Wen & Hu, 2019) were carried out with incoming international students. Yet, relatively fewer studies (e.g. Nghia, 2019) used the framework of the push-pull theory to analyze the perceptions of outgoing students. In addition, as stated by Lee and Stewart (2022), studies using push-pull theories were conducted mostly with degree-seeking students performing long-term mobility rather than exchange students’ experience in short-term mobility.

In other words, more studies are needed to be conducted with outgoing and also short-term mobility students. Moreover, there is especially a lack of studies investigating the opinions and perceptions of possible future outgoing students. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the perceptions of first-year bachelor’s degree students about studying abroad and their opinions on participating in international student mobility. The study uses the push-pull theory as a conceptual framework to understand possible push factors related to Türkiye and possible pull factors of other countries.