Postgraduate research students

My study foci are to investigate accountability and student voice in higher education, alongside discussions within the broader concept—accountability. The current quality discourse is shaped by prevailing political and economic backdrops, including New Public Management, Marketisation, and Neoliberalism, etc. With these external motives, quality assurance in HE is blamed for insufficient caring for quality improvements, but only of tokenism, characterising pre-determined objectives, foreseeable outputs, and given results decided in advance. Accordingly, student voice in such a scenario has been strongly critiqued as only an instrumentalist technique. Although considerable studies have been conducted to seek approaches for promoting quality assurance mechanisms and facilitating student engagement in quality assurance activities, the reaches and limits of student voice and to what extent are HEIs accountable to students remain under-explored.

Moreover, many relevant research nowadays end up with implications that could bring about increasing bureaucratic procedures at institutional levels, unconsciously. Also, democratic values embedded in students voice remain insufficient consideration in literature. These are apparent neglections of the overall picture—accountability and its two key components—democracy and bureaucracy.

Based on the aforementioned research gaps, my study will attempt to explore student voice against the backdrop of accountability and students’ perceptions of HE accountability, to hear from students and to hear their real voice about this tangled picture which “fraught with paradoxes” (Morley, 2003, p.48).

• Dr Mark Murphy
• Dr Stephen Parker

Jiang, Q. (2023). Higher Education Accountability to Student Voice in the UK: Student Representatives’ Perceptions. In European Conference on Educational Research-ERC, 2023, Scotland, UK, 20-25 August 2023

Graduate Teaching Assistant: 2022/23 in Education and Public Policy

Graduate Teaching Assistant: 2023/24 in Higher Education as a Field of Research, Policy and Practice

I am a Community Co-lead for the University’s Research Culture Commons. Join the network here. Find out more about how the University is working towards our five Research Culture Priorities. Tell us what makes a thriving research culture via this anonymous comment form.

I work closely with Student Experience Team, helping organise events for undergraduate and postagraduate students in School of Education. 

Jiang, Q. & Zhou, J. (April, 2022). PhD Student 'Peer Support Group': More Than You Think. THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM IN DOCTORAL EDUCATION https://drhiddencurriculum.wordpress.com/2022/04/11/phd-student-peer-support-group-more-than-you-think/