Researching Higher Education in Asia History, Development and Future

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academic programmes in the field have only one or two faculty, means that higher
education as a field of scholarship in Malaysia still lacks the critical mass necessary
to make great improvements for advancing the field.
Furthermore, what is seriously lacking is the knowledge, expertise and skills
needed for building policy, for developing leadership and management capacity in
higher education at all relevant levels and for developing the capacity to study
higher education. In North America, Europe, Japan and China, a number of higher
education graduate programmes and research centres established over the last 30 to
40 years (Kehm 2015 ; Tight 2004 ; Kaneko 2000 ; Zhou and Cheng 1997 ) have laid
the foundation for the professionalization of institutional management and leader-
ship, and the steady development of the field of higher education studies. In con-
trast, Malaysia’s efforts to professionally develop policy, leadership and management
capacity are, at best, fragmented if not largely absent. This also applies to academic
interest in higher education as a field of study. Clearly, the barriers to further devel-
opment of the field are the lack of a critical mass of core faculty in higher education
programmes.
Evidently, the subspecialization of knowledge in higher education is also a cur-
rent reality. It now seems difficult to accept proficiency in higher education in gen-
eral without specifying a particular theme-focused area of research. Malaysian
higher education researchers need to identify themselves with focus research areas
or subfields of higher education so as to legitimize research theories, methods and
field knowledge in the claimed subfields in order to become genuine experts.


Academic Community and Internationalization

With the internationalization of higher education as a field of scholarship, higher
education scholars should be prioritized for funding and encouraged to access new,
international research networks of scholars working in related subspecializations
within the field. Scholars also need new opportunities to participate in scholarly
conferences and learn about research advances in other countries, and to be given
opportunities to engage in international/comparative scholarship. Malaysian higher
education researchers need to be associated with transnational scientific networks or
epistemic communities which normally comprise those engaged in interpreting,
legitimating and advocating shared and often specialized forms of knowledge and
expertise. Besides, the creation and active engagement in knowledge networks and
means of sharing information are central to the establishment of any scientific field
(Altbach 2014 ).
Recently, there have been strict budgetary regulations that effectively limit the
ability of higher education researchers to travel outside Malaysia. Thus, it is
expected that even fewer higher education researchers would be able to attend inter-
national higher education research conferences and meetings.
Important adjuncts in the field of higher education are centres and institutes for
the study of higher education, of which there are still too few in Malaysia. These


N. Azman and M. Sirat
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