The need to develop 21st-century competencies has received global recognition, but instructional methods have not been reformed to include the teaching of these skills. Multiple frameworks include creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration as the foundational competencies. Complexities of planning curriculum and delivering instruction to develop the foundational competencies requires professional training. However, despite training, instructional practice can be impacted by barriers caused by personal views of teachers, economic constraints, access to resources, social challenges, pandemic, overwhelming pace of global shifts, and other influences. With digitalization entering the field of education, it is unclear if technology has helped in removing or eliminating the barriers or has, itself, become another obstruction in integrating the competencies. Gaining an educator's perspective is essential to understanding the barriers as well as solutions to mitigate the impediments through innovative instructional methods being practiced across the globe via digital or non-digital platforms. The need for original contributions from educators exists in this area of barriers to 21st-century education and the role of digitalization. Barriers for Teaching 21st-Century Competencies and the Impact of Digitalization discusses teaching the 21st-century competencies, namely critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication. This book presents both the problems or gaps causing barriers and brings forth practical solutions, digital and non-digital, to meet the educational shifts. The chapters will determine the specific barriers that exist, whether political, social, economic, or technological, to integrating competencies and the methods or strategies that can eliminate these barriers through compatible instructional approaches. Additionally, the chapters provide knowledge on the impacts of digitalization in general on teaching and learning and how digital innovations are either beneficial to removing impediments for students or rather causing obstructions in integrating the four competencies. This book is ideally intended for educators and administrators working directly with students, educational researchers, educational software developers, policymakers, teachers, practitioners, and students interested in how 21st-century competencies can be taught while facing the impacts of digitalization on education.

As higher education has massified there has been a greater need for higher education research: to better understand and improve practice and provision. The expansion of higher education research has in turn led to systematic reviews and meta-analyses being carried out of areas of the field, so as to synthesise or summarise the qualitative and quantitative findings of this research. These systematic reviews and meta-analyses give an account of where we are now in higher education research. Malcolm Tight takes a global perspective, looking beyond Anglophone originating English Language publishing, particularly Africa, East and South Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, bringing together their findings to provide an accessible and practical overview. Bringing together over 96 systematic reviews and 62 meta-analyses focusing on particular topics in higher education research, Tight explores key topics: teaching and learning, course design, the student experience, quality, system policy, institutional management, academic work, and knowledge and research.

Student retention has become a difficult issue within higher education. As such, it is imperative to examine the causes, as well as provide educators with strategies to implement to improve retention rates. Critical Assessment and Strategies for Increased Student Retention is a pivotal reference source for the latest progressive research on a variety of current student success and attendance perpetuation issues. Featuring a broad range of coverage on a number of perspectives and topics, such as academic performance, counseling, and culture, this publication is geared towards practitioners, academicians, and researchers interested in understanding the difficulties with maintaining student retention.

With the rising occurrence of human caused, natural, and technological crises, Investigating the Design and Implementation of Operational Safety Plans for Crisis at Higher Education Institutions offers guiding principles, implementation factors, and best practices for creating more effective operational safety plans at higher education institutions. In many cases, limited resources prior to a crisis may lead to inadequate planning that hampers implementation. Additionally, operational safety plans typically are created or revised in a reactive manner after the fact. As the result of an exhaustive literature review, the author determined that, unlike other fields, effective best practices for operational safety planning are either unknown to the institutions that need them most or institutional factors and financial constraints prevent them from implementing them in full.

This edited book contains chapters related to the excellent management and leadership practices currently taking place at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the context an economic recession. Each chapter highlights successful operations at HBCUs from management, leadership, and administrative standpoints in a manner that is not comparative of or overly reliant upon dominant literature, standards, or theories. Amongst the deficit-laden literature regarding the fiscal, accreditation, and governance status of HBCUs are few studies highlighting those institutions successfully operating in a difficult economy. This book fills that gap of information by offering chapters on excellent management and leadership practices occurring at a variety of HBCUs today.

Upon completion of a doctoral degree, how does the newly-minted doctoral completer move forward with their career? Without a plan, or even a mentor as a guide, the path forward may be filled with a variety of professional and personal challenges to overcome. Navigating Post-Doctoral Career Placement, Research, and Professionalism is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of navigating the post-doc, professional environment while also handling the personal anxieties that accompany this navigation. While highlighting topics including self-care, graduate education, and professional planning, this book is ideally designed for doctoral candidates, program directors, recruitment officers, and postgraduate retention specialists.

The contributors to Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities: First-Gen PhDs Navigating Institutional Power in Early Careers overcame deeply unequal educational systems to become the first in their families to finish college. Now, they are among the 3% of first-generation undergraduate students to go on to graduate school and then become faculty, in spite of structural barriers that worked against them. These scholars write of socialization to the professoriate through the complex lens of intersectional identities of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability and social class. These first-generation graduate students have crafted critical narratives of the structural obstacles within higher education that stand in the way of brilliant scholars who are poor and working-class, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, immigrant, queer, white, women, or people with disabilities. They write of agency in creating defiant networks of support, of sustaining connections to family and communities, of their activism and advocacy on campus. They refuse to perpetuate the myths of meritocracy that reproduce the inequalities of higher education. In response to a research literature and to campus programming that frames their identities around "need", they write instead of agentive and politicized intersectional identities as first-generation graduate students, committed to institutional change through their research, teaching, and service. Contributors are: Veronica R. Barrios, Candis Bond, Beth Buyserie, Noralis Rodriguez Coss, Charise Paulette DeBerry, Janette Diaz, Alfred P. Flores, Jose Garcia, Cynthia George, Shonda Goward, Luis Javier Penton Herrera, Nataria T. Joseph, Castagna Lacet, Jennifer M. Longley, Catherine Ma, Esther Diaz Martin, Nadia Yolanda Alverez Mexia, T. Mark Montoya, Miranda Mosier, Michelle Parrinello-Cason, J. Michael Ryan, Adrian Arroyo Perez, Will Porter, Jaye Sablan, Theresa Stewart-Ambo, Keisha Thompson, Ethan Trinh, Jane A. Van Galen and Wendy Champagnie Williams.

Scholarly dispositions represent the practices and habits of mind that support consistent success in teaching, learning, and knowledge creation. To be successful in their undergraduate and graduate education, students must develop academic skills that transcend content knowledge, such as receiving and responding to critical feedback and learning how to collaborate, master academic writing, and be mindful of ethical research practices. Much is still unknown about how to teach dispositions, such as how to design a curriculum to best cultivate habits of mind, and this book attempts to address this gap while providing practical methods and strategies that can help higher education practitioners to cultivate and assess the scholarly dispositions of their students effectively. The Handbook of Research on Developing Students' Scholarly Dispositions in Higher Education provides insight on dispositions that students must learn in higher education and how higher education faculty can help students to develop these dispositions, as well as evidence-based methods that help develop scholarly dispositions for undergraduate and graduate education. This book provides a plethora of information on scholarly dispositions and related elements, including teaching time management, collaboration, and research ethics. It is an ideal reference source for teachers, academicians, administrators, researchers, and students aspiring to become researchers and scholars themselves.