By Violaine Appel and Julien Falgas. Née en 2012 de la fusion de quatre établissements, l’Université de Lorraine est une jeune institution qui a construit une politique visant à faire émerger une identité et culture largement partagées tout en s’interrogeant sur sa place dans la société en tant qu’établissement d’enseignement supérieur et de recherche. L’analyse de cette démarche éclaire à quel point l’ouverture d’une plateforme française de The Conversation arrive à point nommé pour le monde universitaire. Cette analyse est corroborée par les témoignages des premiers chercheurs lorrains à avoir signé des articles sur The Conversation. Voir l'article...

By Nicolas CHARLES. Le rapport StraNes – « Pour une société apprenante : propositions pour une stratégie nationale de l'enseignement supérieur » – publié en septembre 2015 propose à horizon 2025 d’atteindre 60 % de diplômés du supérieur dans une classe d’âge, objectif que François Hollande a fait sien en le transformant en promesse de campagne. Voir l'article...

By Bernard Bobe. Le 15 décembre 2015, Jean-Yves Le Drian, ministre de la Défense, accompagné d’Emmanuel Macron, ministre de l’Économie et des Finances et de Thierry Mandon, Secrétaire d’État chargé de l’Enseignement supérieur, s’est rendu à l’École Polytechnique, à Palaiseau (Essonne) « dans le cadre de la refonte de l’X annoncée en juin dernier ». Voir l'article...

By Richard-Emmanuel Eastes. En Suisse, après une formation universitaire disciplinaire, les étudiants (1) qui souhaiteraient embrasser une carrière enseignante entrent dans des Hautes Écoles Pédagogiques pour y suivre des cursus de un à trois ans selon le niveau visé. Ils apprennent alors leur futur métier au travers de stages accompagnés, d’échanges de pratiques, de cours magistraux et de diverses activités en sciences de l’éducation et en didactiques des disciplines. Voir l'article...

By Tony Thorne. If you struggle to understand the teenagers and young people around you when they call their schoolfriend a durkboi and try to cadge some peas, you are not alone. The idea that they are communicating in a different language from their parents has been the subject of excited chatter on parenting websites and among some researchers.
A defining characteristic of youth slang is thought to be its faddishness – the fact that terms have a rapid turnover, quickly coming in and out of fashion and then disappearing before parents and teachers have time to decode them. The reality is more complicated: novelty is all-important but for each generation the expressions they encounter will be new to them. So although each age group and almost every local clique do invent their own words, there is a common core of slang that persists for years: such as cool, wicked, solid and sick for good, and chilling for relaxing.
The new language used by the young is not one unified dialect but an intersection of styles, with vocabulary drawn from a number of sources. There is the edgy street language of gangs which has given us shank and jook for stab; and merk to hurt or humiliate. There is also boyed for shamed, durkboi and wallad for fool, dozens of terms for drugs and money and the greeting braap! picked up and used by innocent teens who may not have realised that it imitates the sound of an automatic firearm.
Many other words belong to MLE – multi-ethnic or multicultural London English – sometimes derided as jafaican, the speech variety strongly influenced by Caribbean usages and non-European accents and parodied by Ali G and TV comedy Phoneshop. Among the most pervasive are bruv, mate, bare, fam, gwop or peas (money), and chirpsin', linkin' and lipsin' – flirting, dating and kissing respectively. More...

By Nadia Edmond. There has been a transformation in English education in the last decade – the academies programme has brought private trusts and corporate sponsors into the schools system. These have included a steady trickle of the country’s universities as they seek a business advantage, a better corporate image, and perhaps even a revenue stream. More...

By Dagmara Dimitriou. A new study that my colleagues and I have worked on illustrated how an optimal quantity of sleep leads to more effective learning in terms of knowledge acquisition and memory consolidation. Poor quality of sleep – caused by lots of waking up during the night – has also been reported to be a strong predictor of lower academic performance, reduced capacity for attention, poor executive function and challenging behaviours during the day. More...

By Iro Konstantinou. Students are facing a lot of pressure at school to get into top universities. Exam stress and the pressures of social media, for example, have led to high levels of self-harm, depression and eating disorders at private schools. More...

By Joanna Williams. The desire to censor spreads beyond the contemporary, too. Oxford University’s Rhodes Must Fall campaign demonstrates the desire of some of the most privileged students in England to see themselves as victims of history and oppressed by its inanimate representation in the present. More...

By Kate Purcell and Peter Elias. But is there an over-supply of graduates in the UK? In a new report on supply and demand for higher-level skills, Universities UK (UUK) concluded that there is little evidence of “graduate oversupply”. Instead, its authors argued that the economy requires “an even greater number of higher qualified workers”, and that they may actually be underestimating future demand for graduate talent. More...