Conference Agenda

Contribution

This study examines the complex dynamics between top-down collectivist ideologies and bottom-up student practices within the context of a Chinese middle school. It highlights the processes through which collective identities are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed.

Background

Ethnographies of contemporary Chinese schooling show state schools are central arenas where state projects of subject-making collide with student tactics. Woronov (2016) shows how vocational schools produce particular classed identities and moral economies for students routed into work, while Hansen (2016) shows how rural state boarding schools produce “authoritarian individuals” through encouraging students to become self-reliant neoliberal selves while simultaneously maintaining strict political control under the Chinese state in the context of individualisation.

In recent years the government has strengthened its authority reach over the education sector; policy such as the 2021 “Double Reduction” reform have been interpreted as measures through which the government seeks to reassert centralized authority and reconfigure the governance of schooling (Qian et al., 2024). This study examines a parallel but distinct problem at the classroom scale. My field-site vocally celebrates collectivist values, yet students frequently engage in behaviors that undermine collective life, for example, peer reporting, appropriating classmates’ homework and the widespread use of the term neijuan (a word translated from “involution”, means predatory competition, which is popular in China). Rather than moral decay, I read these acts as the micro-politics by which a strengthened collectivist rhetoric is re-negotiated and a new, fractious collective identity is forged.

Research Questions

How a class community is assembled when top-down collectivist values meet bottom-up student practices?

In what ways do institutional disciplinary and surveillance undermine that community?

How do students seek alternative forms of community to reconstruct a sense of belonging?

Objectives

To theorize the formation of class community through the lens of Anderson’s imagined community theory.

To demonstrate how discipline and surveillance operate in the school and classroom and contribute to the disintegration of the class community.

To explore how students’ cultural production rebuilds alternative forms of solidarity.

Conceptual Framework

This research is grounded in the theoretical frameworks of imagined communities (Anderson, 2006) and disciplinary power (Foucault, 1995), applied to the context of student identity and collective belonging. Anderson’s notion of the imagined community is used to analyze how students form collective identities and belonging through shared symbols, values, and narratives. Foucault’s concept of surveillance and hierarchical observation is used to explore how institutional practices—such as inspection routines, peer reporting, and stratified class systems—reshape student behavior, identity, and social relationships.

International Significance

The international significance of this study lies in its contribution to the global understanding of the dynamics between state power and student subjectivity within educational systems. The study's insights into how students negotiate collective identity in response to top-down ideologies can inform debates on educational governance, the role of surveillance in schools, and the impact of neoliberal policies on student communities. Moreover, the utilisation of fan fiction as a medium for student agency provides a distinctive viewpoint on the manner in which cultural production can function as a mechanism for students to resist and reimagine the educational spaces they inhabit.

Digital technologies have become central to contemporary visions of educational transformation worldwide. Yet such visions are not merely technical projects but deeply social and political imaginaries that encode particular assumptions about ideal learners, citizenship, and future societies (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015). While a growing body of research examines digital education reforms at the level of policy or pedagogy, less attention has been paid to how these imaginaries are constructed and institutionalised at the level of local educational governance, and how globally circulating discourses are assembled with specific local contexts to produce distinctive educational arrangements — particularly in non-Western settings (Boeskens and Meyer, 2025; Wang et al., 2024). Addressing this gap, this study examines what sociotechnical imaginary of future schooling is articulated in the founding documents and public discourse of T-School, Taiwan's first publicly funded digital experimental high school, and how this imaginary is materialised in the school's institutional design. It argues that digital education imaginaries do not simply articulate future-oriented visions, but actively reconfigure institutional arrangements and forms of student agency through specific policy and design choices.

In Taiwan, education follows a centralized governance structure, with the Ministry of Education responsible for national curriculum guidelines, major policy directions, and funding allocation. At the same time, local governments function as key education authorities, exercising substantial responsibility for school administration, policy implementation, and the establishment of experimental schools (Chen et al., 2023). As the capital city, Taipei City has positioned itself as a leader in educational innovation by advancing policies that promote experimental education and digital transformation (Taipei City Government, n.d.). In 2021, the city government announced the establishment of the country's first public digital experimental high school, which officially opened in August 2022 with an inaugural cohort of 48 students (T-School, n.d.).

T-School represents a significant departure from conventional secondary schooling in Taiwan. It promotes the principles of “broad exploration and talent liberation” and aims to cultivate global citizens with “learning power, influence, and mobility.” The school operates through blended learning arrangements that combine synchronous online, asynchronous, and face-to-face instruction, allowing students to learn flexibly beyond a single physical campus. Traditional core subjects, such as Mandarin, Mathematics, English, Sciences, and Social Studies, are repositioned as electives, while cross-disciplinary, competency-based courses become compulsory. Each student follows an individualized timetable, designed to support personalized learning pathways aligned with individual interests and aspirations (Hsiao, 2025; T-School, n.d.). This institutional experiment provides a distinctive site for examining how visions of digital education are constructed and materialised in institutional design.

The study asks: What sociotechnical imaginary of future schooling is articulated in T-School’s policy documents, and how is this imaginary materialised in its institutional design? To address this question, the analysis focuses on three interrelated dimensions: (1) how T-School constructs the problem of conventional education; (2) what vision of future schooling this problematisation produces; and (3) how T-School’s institutional design performs and inscribes this sociotechnical imaginary.

Theoretically, the study draws on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015), which defines imaginaries as collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, co-produced with material arrangements, institutional designs, and social expectations. Three analytical dimensions are derived from this framework: problematisation (how texts construct conventional schooling as deficient), imaginary of future schooling (what vision of learners and futures this produces), and institutionalisation (how the imaginary is materialised in design choices that enact particular assumptions about learning and futurity). In T-School’s policy discourse, digital technologies are positioned as the primary vehicle for overcoming perceived limitations of conventional schooling and for realising future-oriented educational reform.

Higher education (HE) systems globally are undergoing rapid transformation driven by globalisation, marketisation, digitalisation, and increasing demands for accountability and quality assurance (Marginson, 2022). These interconnected processes have reshaped institutional priorities and governance arrangements, while simultaneously altering expectations of academic work and authority. Within these conditions, academic leadership has become central to how universities respond to reform, manage uncertainty, and sustain trust among academic communities and wider society (Macfarlane, 2011; Macfarlane et al., 2024; Watermeyer et al., 2025).
International scholarship continues to be dominated by studies conducted in Western and Anglophone higher education systems, often assuming the transferability of leadership models and practices across settings. As a result, leadership experiences in post-Soviet higher education systems remain significantly under-represented, limiting understanding of how leadership is shaped by different historical trajectories, governance traditions, and institutional cultures (Azimbayeva, 2017; OECD, 2017).
This study examines the leadership practices and lived experiences of academic middle managers - specifically, deans, deputy deans, and department heads in Kazakhstani universities. Situated between executive priorities, departmental realities, middle managers frequently translate competing demands into workable local practices, yet their day-to-day leadership remains less visible in the literature. Existing research suggests that middle managers play a crucial role in shaping how institutional reforms are interpreted and implemented at the local level, often engaging in complex processes of negotiation, identity work, and sense-making (Floyd, 2012, 2016; Bolden et al., 2025). However, their everyday leadership experiences remain insufficiently explored, particularly in non-Western contexts.
Kazakhstan provides a distinctive and valuable context for examining these issues. Since gaining independence in 1991, the country has implemented extensive reforms in HE, aimed at aligning its system with international standards. These reforms include joining the Bologna Process, the evolution of quality assurance mechanisms, and new governance arrangements (Ahn et al., 2018; OECD, 2017). While such reforms have been widely analysed at policy and system levels, considerably less is known about how academic leaders experience and navigate these changes in their daily work. This gap is especially significant in a post-Soviet and multilingual context marked by historical legacies, linguistic hierarchies, and institutional path dependencies (Mukhatayev et al., 2024).

The research project addresses three interrelated research questions: (1) how academic middle managers in Kazakhstani universities construct and make sense of their cultural identities within a post-Soviet, multilingual higher education context; (2) in what ways these cultural identities inform, shape, or constrain their leadership practices; (3) how academic middle managers interpret and mediate leadership challenges associated with ongoing higher education reforms in Kazakhstan. Research questions aim to generate a contextualised understanding of academic leadership that foregrounds identity, power, and lived experience.
The study is theoretically grounded in cultural identity theory, which conceptualises identity as dynamic, socially constructed, and shaped by historical, linguistic, and institutional contexts rather than as a fixed attribute (Hall, 2015). In the multilingual and post-Soviet context of Kazakhstan, cultural identity is particularly salient in shaping how leadership is understood, and enacted. Attention to language use, professional positioning, and identity narratives enables deeper insight into how academic leaders make sense of authority, responsibility, and belonging in everyday practice (van Winkel et al., 2018).

The analysis is further informed by Critical Leadership Studies, which challenge individualised accounts of leadership by foregrounding issues of power, voice, inequality, and context (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012; Watermeyer et al., 2022). Thus, leadership is examined as a socially and politically situated phenomenon shaped by institutional structures, reform discourses, and uneven power relations within HE. Bolden’s multi-level model of leadership practice is employed as an analytical lens, enabling examination of leadership experiences at personal, relational, structural, contextual, and developmental levels (Bolden et al., 2008).

Varying school governance models, international comparisons, neoliberal policy reforms, including decentralisation and new public management, have created a complex environment that drive school leaders’ changing roles, responsibilities and newer professional identities (Rinne et al., 2015; Pont, 2020; Apple et al., 2023). Consequently, they face increasing stress and mental health concerns, higher job demands and reduced resources alongside fluctuating decision-making autonomy and thereby, affecting successful schooling processes (Dicke et al., 2018). School leaders acutely experience role ambiguity and overload, as they face uncertainty, complex and unfamiliar tasks (Wang et al., 2021). Moreover, the demands facing school principals are time and work pressures and due to the lack of support on the organizational and supervisory level, they cannot fully focus on educational leadership (Skaalvik, 2023).

Leadership is contextual and culture-specific (Bush and Glover, 2014; Hallinger, 2018). Education policy trends alongside school leadership-related challenges are exposed in their distinct ways in post-Soviet educational systems, such as Estonia and Georgia, the states which underwent transitions in all aspects of their societies over the last three decades. While Estonia has considerable school autonomy (Eisenschmidt et al., 2021), it presents multiple challenges for school leaders to deal with work and be wary of the resources. In the case of Georgia, various educational reforms were launched, the system has been shifting between autonomy and centralization and currently, it retains a centralized school governance model where principal recruitment, teacher selection and professional development are centralized (Gorgodze, 2016).

Longitudinal studies have been conducted in Estonia to explore school leaders’ well-being (see Oppi et al., 2025). In the case of Georgia, TALIS 2018 provides the data: Georgian school principals reported the dominant stressors, like administrative workload, accountability for students’ achievement, and managing discipline (OECD, 2020). Estonian school principals also reported administrative workload and managing the policy changes. Our previous work on Estonian and Georgian school leaders (Khurtsidze et al., 2025) revealed similarities and differences on how they perceived main tasks, challenges, and resources. From both countries, they were spending considerable time on administrative work and curriculum development. The similar challenges included relations at work, teacher development, and administrative tasks. They also leveraged their own competences as personal resources, although their external resources differed, since Estonian leaders reported more diverse support compared to Georgians.

Job resources, such as support from colleagues, constructive feedback, functional relations at workplace, and clear roles, are positively related to fulfillment of basic psychological needs, and job resources motivate people extrinsically and intrinsically (Schaufeli & Taris, 2014; Van den Broeck et al., 2016; Bakker et al., 2023) Therefore, we integrate the job demands-resources model (JD-R, Bakker & Demerouti, 2017) and basic psychological needs theory (BPNT) within SDT (Ryan & Deci, 2000), as these theories have been attested among various cultures and unify the understanding of the work conditions which affect leaders’ motivation, stress, and wellbeing.

The aim of the study is to explore school leaders’ perceptions of their job demands and resources, and their relations to basic psychological needs in Estonian and Georgian educational contexts. We pose the following research questions:

1. How do Estonian and Georgian school leaders perceive their job demands and resources?

2. How do Estonian and Georgian school leaders report their basic psychological needs?

3. What are the relations between job demands and resources and basic psychological needs across Estonian and Georgian samples?

Linguistic diversity has become a defining feature of contemporary educational contexts because of intensified mobility, migration, and sociocultural transformation. Classrooms increasingly bring together students with diverse linguistic repertoires making multilingualism a normalised condition of schooling rather than an exception associated with specific programmes or groups (Bermingham & O’Rourke, 2018). Importantly, this diversification of students’ linguistic profiles means that multilingual education unfolds within multilingual classrooms, where teaching and learning take place in contexts shaped by learners’ heterogeneous linguistic resources beyond the language(s) of instruction (Duarte & Günther-van Der Meij, 2022). As a result, linguistic diversity raises fundamental questions about how languages are conceptualised, valued, and addressed within educational practice.

Traditionally, linguistic diversity in education has often been framed as a challenge, particularly in relation to academic achievement and classroom communication (Reese et al., 2021; Sáenz-Hernández et al., 2023). From this perspective, multilingual students’ linguistic repertoires have frequently been constructed through deficit-oriented discourses that position linguistic difference as a problem to be remedied. However, an expanding body of research has challenged this view, arguing that linguistic diversity and students’ full linguistic repertoires may also constitute a resource for learning and foster more inclusive educational environments (Nap et al., 2024; Sierens et al., 2018). One of the most widely recognized alternatives is the critical language awareness approach, which promotes positive attitudes towards linguistic diversity, legitimizes multilingual identities, and interrogates dominant language ideologies, exposing and challenging linguistic hierarchies (Hedman & Fisher, 2025; Hélot et al., 2018). Accordingly, implementing a project grounded in this perspective through a collaborative and dialogic methodological approach appears especially appropriate, as it supports critical engagement, mutual learning and the recognition of students’ linguistic repertoires (Bransford et al., 2000).

In this regard, decisions concerning which languages are legitimised in schools, and how they are used (including the aforementioned approach), are not neutral or purely linguistic or pedagogical. Rather, they are embedded in language policy orientations that reflect dominant language ideologies and sociolinguistic hierarchies (Menken, 2008; Shohamy, 2006). Nevertheless, language policy cannot be understood solely as a set of top-down regulations. Recent scholarship conceptualises language policy as a multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon that operates across multiple dimensions and levels. From this perspective, language policy encompasses also practices at both school and classroom levels, as schools and classrooms can thus be understood as ideological and implementational spaces (Hornberger, 2005), where policy orientations are translated into practice, negotiated, and sometimes reconfigured through daily educational activity. Therefore, classrooms are not neutral arenas of implementation; rather, they are sites in which language-related meanings are continuously constructed and contested.

This theoretical framework is particularly relevant in the context of the Basque Country, where classrooms are characterized by a complex linguistic ecology that goes beyond the three curricular languages (Basque language, Spanish and English). Alongside these languages, a growing number of students bring diverse linguistic repertoires linked to migration. In this poster, we examine the linguistic attitudes of a group of students who participated in a project aimed at critically engaging with language hierarchies in the classroom. The project specifically addressed the power relations that continue to shape the minoritisation of Basque language, while at the same time conceptualising it as a language of social cohesion and intercultural communication. In addition, the project sought to make visible, acknowledge and value the linguistic diversity present in the local community. By opening up implementational space for these reflections and practices, the study explores how students’ engagement with multilingualism and language ideologies may reshape their attitudes towards Basque, other languages, and linguistic diversity in education.

Our research focuses on how first-year students experience English-medium instruction (EMI) in a Kazakhstani university and what these experiences reveal about the policy–practice gap in EMI-driven internationalisation compared to wider European and global trends (Goodman et al., 2025; Hwami, 2024). More specifically, it investigates how linguistic, pedagogical, socio‑affective, and equity-related factors shape students’ learning trajectories in EMI programmes and how these dynamics mirror or diverge from patterns reported in other non‑Anglophone higher education systems, particularly in Europe (Unangst et al., 2022).

The study is guided by a combined theoretical framework drawing on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and Sociocultural Theory (SCT). CLIL, which emerged from European bilingual and multilingual education debates, conceptualises EMI as a dual‑focus enterprise in which students learn disciplinary content and an additional language simultaneously (Coyle, 2018). From this perspective, the study interprets students’ reports of dense academic vocabulary, rapid lecture pace, and limited modelling of academic writing as manifestations of excessive language and cognitive load in the absence of systematic CLIL‑informed scaffolding such as pre‑teaching key terminology, multimodal explanations, and explicit support for academic literacies (Yessenbekova, 2023; Tulepova et al., 2026). This places the Kazakhstani case in dialogue with European CLIL/EMI research that similarly highlights the risks of treating EMI as a simple language switch rather than as a comprehensive pedagogical redesign.

Sociocultural Theory complements CLIL by foregrounding learning as a socially mediated process that unfolds within the Zone of Proximal Development through interaction with more knowledgeable others, tools, and institutional structures (Vygotsky, 1978). SCT concepts such as mediation, scaffolding, affect, and learner agency illuminate how students rely on peers, tutors, digital resources (e.g., YouTube, translation tools), and supportive teachers to cope with EMI challenges, and how anxiety, fear of mistakes, and evolving confidence shape their participation in classroom communities (Tajik et al., 2025; Amanzhol et al., 2024). This lens also helps unpack equity issues: students’ differing school backgrounds and English preparation mean they enter EMI with unequal resources for participating in these mediational networks, echoing concerns in Kazakhstani and European scholarship that EMI can reproduce or exacerbate social stratification in access and outcomes.

By integrating CLIL and SCT, the framework captures both structural and interactional dimensions of EMI. CLIL explains the design‑level tensions between Kazakhstan’s internationalisation ambitions, rooted in the trilingual policy and Bologna‑aligned reforms, and the limited pedagogical adaptation of programmes to students’ linguistic realities (Manan & Hajar, 2024). SCT, in turn, reveals how students actively negotiate, resist, and re‑mediate these conditions through social relations and strategic use of cultural tools, thereby partially compensating for institutional gaps (Tulepova et al., 2024). Positioning Kazakhstan’s post‑Soviet, multilingual context alongside European EMI developments thus allows the study to contribute to international debates on how Englishisation interacts with equity, quality, and multilingualism in higher education, rather than treating Kazakhstan as an isolated case.

This study examines student motivation for civic engagement in higher education, focusing on the reasons, barriers, and forms of support that influence students’ willingness to participate in civic and community activities. In recent years, civic engagement has increasingly been recognised as an essential outcome of higher education van den (Wijngaard et al., 2024), contributing to democratic participation, social responsibility, and the development of active citizenship. However, student participation in civic engagement activities varies considerably (Valdmane, 2025), suggesting the presence of both motivating and inhibiting factors that require systematic investigation.

The central research question guiding the study is: What motivates students to engage in civic engagement activities? Furthermore, the study examines the barriers to their participation. Additionally, the study identifies the forms of support they perceive as necessary to enhance their civic engagement. The aim of the research is to analyse students’ motivation for civic engagement in higher education by identifying key motivational drivers, perceived barriers, and expected support mechanisms, and to provide empirical evidence on how higher education institutions and academic staff can more effectively support student participation in civic and community-related activities.

The theoretical framework is grounded in research on civic engagement and self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2008), with a focus on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Motivation is understood as a dynamic process influenced by personal values, perceived relevance, social context, and institutional support (Trautner et al., 2025; Urhahne & Wijnia, 2023). From a social constructivist perspective (Zhang, 2019), students’ motivation and engagement are shaped through interactions with academic staff, peers, and the learning environment, in which meanings and values related to civic participation are co-constructed.

Although the study is situated within the Latvian higher education context, the issues addressed are common across European higher education systems. Student motivation and barriers to supporting civic engagement are shared challenges across Europe, making the findings relevant to broader European discussions on the civic mission of higher education.