ANEJO ANEJO 2: ESTUDIO
TABLERO CON VIGAS EN DOBLE T
4.6.6 ELECCIÓN DE LA SOLUCIÓN FINAL
At the time of this study, degree ceremonies held at Rose University’s dual partner institution in Malaysia were well established, and had the benefit of having an
experienced robemaker in country. In contrast, Rose University was still in the throes
of stabilising degree ceremonies with their new franchise partner in India and this
created opportunities to capture interview data from senior officers and organisers to
provide a rare insight into how they went about assembling new ceremonies:
When we were faced with a blank sheet of paper three and a half years ago
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obviously my starting point was the Rose ceremony. How do we do it at
Rose, but I also started to think yes but if I was starting again with a blank
sheet of paper - is that how I would do it? And actually I made some changes
on that basis. So one of the things is that in India we present the students by
their programme of study and not just by their type of award so that puts us
more in line with what other universities do, and I think in terms of the student
experience of graduation it probably makes more sense...and actually we had
to do quite a lot of work on the ceremonies database to enable us to run the
ceremonies in India in terms of accessing the dataand then using it. As part of
that development work I built in the capability to organise the students in the
ceremony in a different way because before we could only organise it by type
of award or faculty or college whereas now we can organise it any way we
like really - so we can organise it by programme of study, or by type of award,
or by college, or institution.
Organiser, Rose University, 8.3.14
Establishing new degree ceremonies overseas provided Rose organisers with an
opportunity to make some changes. Presenting students differently in India resulted
in the Rose University database being adapted, making it more flexible and able to
accommodate variations in how students are presented at different institutions in the
context of different conditions of growth.
Further changes and adaptations were made, which included adapting the ceremonial
script:
the ceremony script that we use in India is very different because when I came
to it I realised that nobody with a role in the India ceremony will actually
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different document and I think it’s probably more accessible and I was going
to bring a copy on Monday to ask what do you think if we adapted and used
something like this instead of the one we're currently using?
Organiser, Rose University, 8.3.14
The changes made to the ceremony script for India were presentational rather than
procedural, making the document more accessible than the script that had been used at
Rose for many years. Improving the accessibility of this document made it easier for
new preparation and maintenance workers with no experience of degree ceremonies
to understand the procedural order of the ceremonies. The new layout for the
ceremonial script was adopted later at ceremonies held on Rose’s campus after
controversy caused by the introduction of particular changes, and this is discussed
further in Chapter Seven.
One further change was introduced when ceremonies were being established in India.
This included a local innovation:
…the other thing that’s been interesting as well are the adaptations we made
to the ceremony overall so for example introducing an Indian invocation of
knowledge, a traditional poem used at ceremonies set to music, so you can
either speak the words over the music, but it’s always the same music or you
can actually sing it, so that was one of the adaptations we made to the
ceremony in India
Organiser, Rose University, 8.3.14
Just as Colossus University allowed for local adaptations to be incorporated across
multiple sites (see 6.2.1.), the ceremonies Rose established in India resulted in similar
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education institutions providing degree ceremonies for students across multiple sites
seek to stabilise and generate a consistent institutional image whilst still allowing for
local adaptation and innovation.
6.3.1. Culturally Situated Nature of Preparation and Maintenance Work
This section focuses on preparation processes and maintenance work that went on
behind the scenes in relation to early ceremonies organised by Rose University
through their franchise partnership in India. The analysis demonstrates how the
absence of established robemakers in the country impacted on this work.
One example related to the wearing of academic hoods to ceremonies at Lotus
Institute in India:
I said to one of the members of [Lotus] staff – your hoods are all wrong, you
can’t go on like that and they were suddenly like, ‘well how should they be?’ – so I pinned one of them and I said I haven’t got time to do you all so I’m going to do one and you just need to sort yourselves out and they did – every
single one of them changed their hoods so it was really important to them that
their hoods were on correctly, but what really struck me was that they were
supposed to be helping us do the student robes but actually they all decided
collectively it was much more important that as faculty their robes were
correct before they bothered about the students hoods.
Organiser, Rose University, 8.3.14
Until the Rose organiser pointed out that hoods were positioned ‘incorrectly’ the Lotus staff were unaware that anything was amiss, thereby highlighting that
knowledge and practices associated with wearing academic hoods are culturally
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have their hoods pinned ‘correctly’ in front of students, and their supporters. They
were happy to follow the lead of their more established institutional partner. This
example demonstrated how knowledge and practices associated with the customary
wear of academical dress in the West were shared transculturally.
Relations of power were also evident in the observation that while Lotus staff had a
choice about whether to change their hoods around, Lotus students did not:
We were up to the wire because no one had any experience of how to correctly
put a hood on and they were all walking around with their hoods upside down
and the wrong way round and it looked terrible. They were perfectly pinned
but wrong so we just did a complete sweep of the students and just turned as
many round as possible so they looked correct ready for going up on stage so I
was really pleased with that.
Organiser, Rose University, 8.3.14.
These two examples at Lotus Institute ceremonies highlight how material ordering
and maintenance work were culturally situated, although how order was achieved in
each case was different. Lotus staff were given more discretion to change their hoods
than students. The overall aim of the organiser from Rose University was to reflect
and enact consistency between ceremonies held at Rose University in the UK with
those held at Lotus Institute in India.
It would be easy to assume this was an example of western cultural values being
exerted over another institution in a different part of the world, but the evidence
collected in this study mentioned above and earlier in Chapter Five suggests that these
interactions were influenced by the type of relationship that existed between
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same influence over ceremonies held at Hibiscus University in Malaysia as they did at
Lotus Institute in India. Evidence does indicate though that there are still power
relations being enacted over who is defining the standard and deferral to this. With
limited access to local staff at the overseas sites it is difficult to tell if power relations
between Rose staff and Lotus staff and students were ever overtly or implicitly
challenged. Neither is it possible to describe the unevenness of power relations
between these parties including those between Lotus staff and students. What the
evidence does point to though is the order of priorities for Rose staff which seemed to
point to students experiences as being key.
The evidence in this sample also points to overseas institutions wanting to have
degree ceremonies of a similar standard to those enacted in more established
institutions in Europe and the USA and that, like institutions in the UK and USA, they
find ways to reflect and enact their local identity and cultures through degree
ceremonies.