Satisfiers and dissatisfiers for international vocational education students: A case study using narrative frames

While the satisfaction of international students is frequently surveyed, much of this research is based on a very limited range of closed-item data collection methods, producing findings that partially reflect the researchers’ assumptions in designing the survey items. Recognizing the potential value in using methods that are more open-ended and qualitative analyses, the present study employed narrative frames and follow-up interviews to explore the satisfiers and dissatisfiers for international vocational education students at one institution in New Zealand. Reporting on perceptions of the class, institution, and community, the findings identify the participants’ top-of-mind (dis)satisfiers and complement the existing literature by identifying seldom-reported themes. Discussion of issues in analyzing narrative frames is also provided

A time for learning: representations of time and the temporal dimensions of learning through the lifecourse

Based on findings from a large-scale longitudinal study into the learning biographies of adults, this paper focuses on the different representations of time in the interview data. The paper discusses three such representations: chronological time, narrative time, and generational time. The authors show how different notions of time operate within the construction of life stories. They also analyse the ways in which different representations of time impact upon and serve as resources for reflection on and learning from life, thus contributing to understanding the complex relationships between biography, life and time. (DIPF/Orig.)

Product dynamics for homoclinic attractors

Copyright © 2004 The Royal Society. NOTICE: This is the author’s version of a work accepted for publication by The Royal Society. The definitive version was subsequently published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Vol 461, Number 2053, online 5 October 2004 and in print 5 January 2005, DOI:10.1098/rspa.2004.1362Heteroclinic cycles may occur as structurally stable asymptotically stable attractors if there are invariant subspaces or symmetries of a dynamical system. Even for cycles between equilibria, it may be difficult to obtain results on the generic behaviour of trajectories converging to the cycle. For more-complicated cycles between chaotic sets, the non-trivial dynamics of the 'nodes' can interact with that of the 'connections'. This paper focuses on some of the simplest problems for such dynamics where there are direct products of an attracting homoclinic cycle with various types of dynamics. Using a precise analytic description of a general planar homoclinic attractor, we are able to obtain a number of results for direct product systems. We show that for flows that are a product of a homoclinic attractor and a periodic orbit or a mixing hyperbolic attractor, the product of the attractors is a minimal Milnor attractor for the product. On the other hand, we present evidence to show that for the product of two homoclinic attractors, typically only a small subset of the product of the attractors is an attractor for the product system