To cite this article: Paterson, R. (2017). 'Because sometimes your failures can also teach you certain skills': Lecturer and student perceptions of employability skills at a transnational university.
This article reports on a research project that uses two innovative heuristics to examine the changes that texts – produced to disseminate new scientific knowledge – undergo when they travel across space and time. A critical analysis of such transformations would enhance our understanding of the processes involved in knowledge dissemination and inform the practice of communicating scientific knowledge to a variety of audiences. Based on our study of 520 closely linked science and science-related sources collected over 12 months in 2016, we argue that when scientific knowledge is re-contextualized to be disseminated to different audiences, it is not simply rephrased or simplified to make it more accessible. Rather, it also undergoes transformational processes that involve issues of social power, authority and access that require new analytical tools to surface more clearly. We report on the methodology of the study with a particular focus on its heuristics, and the transformations that result from a critical analysis of the data collected. We finally discuss a number of theoretical and practical implications in relation to contemporary practices for re-entextualizing scientific knowledge.
This article outlines the origins of employability as a concept related to higher education, and its impact on Uzbek higher education policy. By arguing that the recognition of employability arose out of changes in global employment demands, and is aligned to global theories of human capital, it can be asserted that the topdown Uzbek government driven changes in higher education policy have reinforced the employability agenda. Although it is debatable whether a top-down enforced employability agenda is beneficial in terms of pedagogy, many universities are incorporating pedagogy to develop employability in their programmes. It is argued that ideas of pedagogy for employability can be best exploited if linked to the ideas of pre-professional and graduate identity, and even more so if both lecturers and students understand how learning environments can be used to best effect. Also highlighted is the fact that debates surrounding employability have taken place over recent years in primarily Anglo-Saxon contexts, and that there is a need for research in a more diverse range of higher education institutions, particularly in Central Asia.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.