Full Description
Working with Underachieving Students in Higher Education: Fostering Inclusion through Narration and Reflexivity presents an international and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the relationships between narrative devices and reflexivity in higher education. Stemming from a collaborative European research project called INSTALL (Innovative Solutions to Acquire Learning to Learn), it focuses on an innovative model aimed at promoting personal resources and reflective competencies in non-traditional, disadvantaged and underachieving students.
The book is divided into three parts, with the first providing an exploration of the key theoretical issues that formed the basis of the theoretical and methodological approaches in the INSTALL Project. The second part presents an innovative narrative methodology and discusses the most significant phases of the training process and of the main products. The third and last part provides a broad discussion of higher education policies and of the need to encourage innovation and reforms to improve the academic inclusion of underachieving students. Chapters in the collection examine interventions in Italy, Romania, Ireland and Spain, using a broad transnational, intercultural and comparative approach, to consider narrative tools using four channels: metaphoric, iconographic, writing, and the body.
This book provides theoretical insights and practical methodologies which can be used to enhance quality teaching and innovation, as well as to help adapt to diversity in higher education. It will, therefore, be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education; sociology of education; education policy and politics; cultural and developmental psychology; and narrative research, as well as to those studying counselling, mentoring and coaching
Contents
Section 1 Theoretical background to reflexivity: Fostering academic inclusion 1 Academic inclusion: A debated and interdisciplinary concept 2 The risks of being "excluded": Non-traditional, disadvantaged, and underachieving students 3 Reflexivity or "Reflexivities" in Higher Education: Conceptualizing unique reflexive processes 4 The role of narrative devices in fostering reflexivity in higher education Section 2 Fostering reflexivity in underachieving students: Experience from the INSTALL Project 5 A novel narrative method to foster reflexivity in higher education: The narrative mediation path 6 INSTALL Project process: Formative experiences in three European countries 7 Underachieving student experiences in the INSTALL programs: The use of student narratives 8 Narrative Mediation Path training in Romania and Italy: An interpretative phenomenological analysis on follow-up interviews 9 Student perspectives on INSTALL training in Spain: Achievements and challenges 10 Reflexivity and improvements in academic performance Section 3 Implications for policy and practice 11 Training in narrative techniques: An interdisciplinary formative method 12 Implications for policies and institutions: how institutions could benefit from INSTALL
