New Directions in Educational Research

Self-promotion is a ubiquitous institutional practice for universities engaged in the ever intensifying competitions worldwide. It serves a variety of institutional purposes in relation to student and academic recruitment, governmental and private funding, and university-business cooperation opportunities. Central to self-promotion is the role that discourse plays in branding universities. This study aimed to investigate how Chinese and American universities promote themselves through evaluative language in their “About Us” texts on their institutional webpages. Drawing on Appraisal framework developed by Martin and White (2005), it examined the projection of institutional attitude and the adjustment of evaluative force in the construction of institutional identities for self-promotion. The dataset consisted of 160 “About Us” texts of American and Chinese universities that occupy different echelons of the university league tables. Subcategories of evaluative resources in the texts were identified and analyzed through UAM CorpusTool. Quantitative and textual analyses revealed marked cross country differences in the types of attitude projected and the scaling manipulations of the evaluations. These differences are attributable to cross-linguistic differences in persuasive rhetoric, culturally based educational philosophy, and institutional practices shaped by higher education policies. The legitimacy of institutional discourse constituted by and constitutive of the encroaching promotionalism in higher education will be discussed.

The aim of this study is to illuminate the development of teachers’ theory of action in school reform, based on case study of school as learning community in Japan. This study theoretically examines practical and actual school reform that focuses on curriculum development. This theoretical consideration provides suggestion for further school reform. Donald A. Schön and Joseph P. McDonald explored theory of action in school reform (Schön and McDonald, 1998). The theory of action is not a theory that directly leads school reform initiative. They defined theory of action as an analytical tool that aims to help practitioners reflect upon and make explicit the knowledge that shapes what they do. Schön and McDonald emphasized that the theory-of-action approach was a tool that helped them inquire into and learn from their own practice. School-as-learning-community is one of the theoretical strategy of school reform in Japan (Sato, 2008). The approach prioritize lesson study that reflected students’ actual learning in lesson for curriculum development. This style of lesson study was founded on Japanese educational tradition. Japanese teachers and educational administrators have made efforts to construct school as a learning community through trial and error for 20 years (Sato & Sato, 2003). This study examines teachers’ theory of action in school reform, tracing a development of teachers’ journals that led the school as learning community in Japan. Publication of teachers’ journal is one of the unique professional culture in Japan: the journal is an arena where they discuss problems of school reform. This study is based on the journals, various observational data and relevant school and classroom documents that was obtained through our intensive fieldwork to the school site. Suggestions to deepen our understandings of teachers’ theory of action in school reform and to support the school reform will be presented.