A Phenomenological Study into How Students Experience and Understand the University Presidency

INTRODUCTION
Universities are made up of people with a purpose. Some are engaged in learning, some in
teaching and research, and yet others in support or leadership. This study focuses in on how the
learners experience and understand the leaders. Regardless of their objectives, all groups in a
university environment are unified through the educational experience. Information, knowledge, and
resources are shared through interactions among these groups. While researchers have investigated
each of the university stakeholders independently, the relationship between certain groups is yet to be
explored. Specifically, previous research does not describe how students experience and understand
the university presidency. My study begins to discover the connection between students and
university presidents by demonstrating perspective through the lived experiences of college students.
The student voices are shared in later Chapters of this dissertation as a way to highlight the evolving
phenomenon.
Higher education continues to evolve. Previously, one could argue society valued universities
expecting “direct satisfactions and enjoyments received by the population from living in a world of
advancing knowledge, technology, ideas, and arts” (Bowen, 1977, p. 58). Today many view higher
education as “vital to maintaining our competitive position in an increasingly knowledge-dependent
world economy” (Bowen, 2010, p. 144), while also adequately preparing individuals for social
mobility. For those who agree with this evolving sentiment, universities are important. To help
establish the boundaries of this study, I start first with a broad perspective portraying higher education
as a pillar to providing information and service to humanity and then narrow the focus in on two
important stakeholders that coexist within this environment: students and university presidents.
Therefore, broadly speaking, our world spins in a state of constant change that begs for innovative
thinking and problem solving. The global community inherits shared predicaments including warring
conflicts, human rights violations, poverty, environmental degradation, overpopulation, implications
with public health, and economic instability. Society is at the mercy of its own intellectual potential
(Brodie & 3 Banner, 1996). Some would suggest that education holds a key to unlock undiscovered
answers plaguing our world. Universities aspire to play a primary role in molding humanity through
cultivating knowledge and preparing individuals for this citizenship (Institute for Higher Education
Policy, 1998). Students are the direct consumers of this educational effort and university presidents
are charged with leading the success. The manner in which students experience and understand the
presidency is yet to be researched and yearns for discovery. University presidents serve at the helm of
these complex organizations where scholarship is assumed to elevate cultural, political, and economic
development. As chief executive of these institutions, presidents are often charged with transforming
universities through leadership strategies. An important component to the success of a
transformational effort is the ability of followers to understand the needs and objectives of their
leaders (Burns, 1978). Students are constituents of presidential leadership and are at the core of a
university’s mission (Flawn, 1990). Discovering how students experience and come to understand the
university presidency helps further develop our knowledge of this evolving interactivity and provide
valuable insight for those who participate in, encourage, and evaluate transformational success in
higher education.

Summary: Students are significant consumers of the educational experience and, as a result of their
affiliation, are members of organizational leadership. The social gap between university presidents
and students continues to narrow. The study explored how students experience and understand the
university presidency. Interactivity between students and presidents promotes students by increasing
their campus involvement, strengthening their connection to the university, and boosting their dreams
for student leadership.
Ethnographic Research Among Drinking Youth Cultures: Reflections From Observing Participants

INTRODUCTION
Ethnographic research with different youth drinking cultures and in environments heavily
associated with excessive drinking – such as those with which we have worked – immediately puts
the researcher in situations of choice with regard to the ongoing consumption of alcohol and how to
situate themselves with their participants. It is our deep belief that there are no universal guidelines on
how a researcher should behave in these situations when his or her participants are engaged in regular,
heavy alcohol consumption. We assume that each scholar makes their own decisions on the questions
raised by such challenges. However, methodological and epistemological questions of a study among
such drinking cultures transcend the subjectivity of individual choice. How a scholar deals with the
challenges posed by an extreme research environment can be justifiably argued on the basis of the
author’s unquestionable assumptions such as the belief that drinking is a sinful practice. However, the
knowledge produced in such studies, as long as it is intended to fall within the scope of academic
work, means that the validity of its conclusions should satisfy the demand of critical assessment. In
this article, we intend to present critical reflections of our ethnographic actions in the field with youth
drinking cultures. We do this in the context of Russian, British and German youth. We do not adopt
any theoretical position because our reflections are methodological and are attributable to thick
descriptions (Van Maanen 1988), our goal being to “uncover the conceptual structures that inform our
subjects’ acts, the ‘said’ of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what
is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out
against the other determinates of human behaviour” (Geertz 1973: 27). We firstly set some context by
discussing ethnographic research in the context of youth cultures before outlining the aims we had and
methods we used with our respective participants. In the main body of our article we concede that,
although our work is situated among different cultures in different social occasions, they share some
similarity with regard to the way in which we had to engage with young people and this prompts us to
recognize the importance they attribute to their drinking practices and ‘drinking stories’. Because of
this, we argue that to glean more subjective experiences associated with youth drinking cultures, we
too must engage with them in such practices. In the following thematic reflections, which use
observations and verbatim quotes based on three research projects with youth drinking cultures
conducted in Russia, UK, and Germany, we show the challenges ethnographers face while interacting
within youth drinking cultures (Fetterman 1989). As Patton (1990: 474) notes, ethnographic
researchers “should strive neither to overestimate nor to underestimate their effect [on the research
study] but to take seriously their responsibility to describe and study what those effects are”. Such a
discussion should assist other scholars to make informed methodological and ethical choices on their
strategies (Vanderstaay 2005) when working with similar groups and in environments where regular,
heavy alcohol consumption is the norm (Palmer & Thomson 2010).

Summary: In this article, when it comes to engaging with youth drinking cultures it is important to
accept drinking as a social practice. It is also important to remain neutral but participatory in reactions
to drinking stories of participants. In this article, it shows how the particular presence of researchers in
the field and their interactions with participants affect actual practices of heavy alcohol abuse, the
reality they observe, and the identity of the observed.
Being There: A Grounded-Theory Study of Student Perceptions of Instructor Presence in Online Classes

INTRODUCTION
Reupert, Maybery, Patrick, and Chittleborough (2009) quoted a student whose comment
indicated an issue that lies at the core of the emerging era of online education— the role of the
instructor in the virtual classroom. The student said: I am not really into computers, but I do want a
connection with the person who is teaching me. To me, it doesn’t really matter if it is distance or not,
or what materials are used. I need to see that the other person is a person, and is someone I can relate
to, on both the subject material as well as on a personal level. (p. 153) This student spoke for a sizable
portion of the millions of students who are taking a college class online right now—or will be
someday. There are students in Korea and Indonesia and England and Serbia and all over this country
who are taking classes at a college or university in America, including many who are taking class at
more than one higher education institution. They are taking classes that only the few would have
imagined a generation ago—classes in the sciences with simulated online labs, Music Appreciation,
Spanish, Literature, History, Speech. Some are sitting at a desktop accessing a course website on the
internet. Others are navigating the same course on an IPhone or IPad using wireless or satellite
service. Some have downloaded parts of the course to access on a kindle or to listen to on a CD player
or MP3 player. And there are other students doing a chore while waiting for a 20-year-old computer
to boot up and access the internet through a dialup service. Any attempt to describe the totalities of
possibility will be futile. Clearly, online education is no passing phenomenon. At this point, there is
no reason to think it might replace actual physical classroom instruction, but online education has
shown staying power, and educators must adjust to the new electronic environment. There has been,
in fact, a large shift to online instruction in the 21st century; it can be seen in the phenomenal growth
of online education in the last 15 years.

Summary: This study shows online education continues to grow and as colleges draw increasingly
from those who are more innovative technically, for instance, or seek to hire those proficient in online
education. This research began with a broad definition of online instructor presence, which was
defined as anything an online instructor says, does, or presents that leads students to perceive the
instructor as an active participant in the course.
Advancing the K-12 Reform from the Ground: A Case Study in the Philippines
I. INTRODUCTION: THE PHILIPPINE CONTEXT
Various assessments of Philippine education, beginning with the Monroe Survey of 1925,
have brought to the fore recurring wicked problems in basic education in the country. Regrettably, the
implementation of one reform after another, geared toward addressing the lingering problems
identified in these assessments, has not succeeded to improve the quality of education in terms of
sustainable outcomes on a national scale. Curriculum changes and innovations in teaching practices
have come and gone but “at the start of every school year, print and broadcast media project without
fail, a perpetual education crisis that the mainstreaming of successful reform initiatives could have
addressed” (Bautista, Bernardo, Ocampo 2008, p. 5). The critical and urgent need to improve the state
of basic education prompted the Philippine government to launch in 2012 what many refer to as the
most major and comprehensive education reform in the history of the Philippine education system.
The Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013 (Republic Act No. 10533), also known as the K–12
Reform, was envisioned by the government as a key solution to the long-standing crisis faced by basic
education in the country. Prior to the K–12 Reform, the number of years of formal schooling in basic
education in the country was one of the shortest in the world. The K–12 Reform seeks to establish an
inclusive and high-performing education system by lengthening the compulsory basic education cycle
to 13 years, covering kindergarten until Grade 12, as well as decongesting and enhancing the basic
education curriculum to enable learners to master basic competencies. With great determination to
implement the reform as immediately as possible, the government broadcast to the entire nation the
intended benefits of the K–12 Reform to Filipino learners and their families, the anticipated
contributions of the reform to the progress of society and the country’s economic growth, as well as
the projected improvements in regional and international recognition and competitiveness (SEAMEO
INNOTECH 2012). While there was no disagreement on the goals, there was much opposition to the
initiative, centered on whether the country’s teachers, schools, and administration were in a position
to implement the reform (Oxford Business Group 2017). In general, reforms are aimed at changing
what teachers do in order to improve what students learn. The repeated cycle of failed reforms point
to the need to pay equal and simultaneous attention to all the different factors involved in making
structural reforms work. Cuban (2013, p. 114) asserted that one fundamental error of policymakers is
the thinking that “redesigning, replacing, or renovating key structures—school governance,
organization, and curriculum—will dramatically change teacher instruction and student learning.”

Summary: The K–12 Reform lead to transformative effects in the quality of basic education in the
Philippines, the aspiration and intention to pursue quality at this juncture in the history of education in
the country must be operationalized and implemented resolutely. This study uses existing mechanisms
and structures, as well as upscaling relevant and effective professional development programs, to
assist school leaders with the challenging work of supporting and promoting the K–12 Reform.
Linguistic Analysis of Social Relation in a Political and Religious Discourse
INTRODUCTION
‘Life is in many ways a series of conversations’, and that ‘talking is something we tend to
take for granted’. When linguists and other social scientists analyse spoken discourse, their aim is to
show what talking accomplishes in people’s lives and in society at large. It is an interdisciplinary
enterprise (Cameron, 2001) of which students of education belong. Discourse can be used for
assertion of power and knowledge, and they can be used for purposes of resistance and critique.
( Wodak, 2007) Discourse Analysis is not exclusively concerned with spoken discourse: in principle it
can deal with sociallysituated language-use in any channel or medium . Discourse analysts may work
well with written data.(Kresss and van Leeuwen, 1996, cited in Cameron, 2001) Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power ,
abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, (Van Dijk, 1985) a contemporary approach to the study
of language and discourses in social institutions. Drawing on poststructuralist discourse theory and
critical linguistics, it focuses on how social relations, identity, knowledge and power are constructed
through the written and spoken texts in communities, schools and classrooms and employs
interdisciplinary techniques of text analysis to look at how texts construct representations of the
world, social identities, and social relationships. (Luke, 1995) The principal unit of analysis for
critical discourse analysis is the text. Texts are taken to be social actions, meaningful and coherent
instances of spoken and written language use, yet their shape and form is not random or arbitrary.
Critical discourse analysis focuses on sentence and word-level analysis, drawing analytic methods
from systemic functional linguistics. Halliday (1985) argues that lexical and grammatical features of
texts have identifiable functions: (a) they represent and portray the social and natural world ("field");
(b) they construct and effect social relations ("tenor"); and, (c) they develop conventions as coherent,
identifiable texts in particular media ("mode"). (Luke, 1995) It is a natural phenomenon and a normal
activity for a president to deliver a message on all important occasions and historical events in a
nation. More often, occasions and turn of events are avenues for political discourses. It is but on rare
occasions that a president delivers a message different from everyday contexts.

Summary: The speaker's language reflects his personality and the relationship he wishes to establish
with the audience. He has complete control over the language he wants to use. The meaning of the
language builds the social relationship between speaker and audience and unfolds the personal
attribute of the speaker as well. This study reveals that the language used to fulfil the interpersonal
function of the Systemic Functional Grammar created a distinct characteristic of the social
relationship and the personal attributes of the speaker.