Becoming a teacher educator : guidelines for induction : 2nd edition

The first edition of these guidelines was published in 2007. Since that date it has been used to support the induction of new teacher educators in the UK and beyond. The guidelines and the research which underpinned them also won the Sage BERA Practitioner Research Prize in 2009. But change in the higher education sector and in the field of teacher education mean that the time is now right for a second edition. This new edition has been revised in four main ways. Firstly, a considerable body of published international research focused on teacher educators has been produced since 2007 and the revised guidelines are informed by this work. Secondly, the new guidelines include the ‘voices’ of new teacher educators themselves gathered during our regular workshops for new teacher educators and our research projects. Thirdly, the revised edition aims to be more inclusive of all teacher educators, including those in further education. In terms of this latter group, it is informed by the limited literature available and our own research into the experiences of those teaching higher education programmes in further education colleges. Finally, the new guidelines seek to respond in a measured way to changing policy and contextual frameworks. These include the continued intensification and increasing fragmentation of academic work and identity in the higher education sector; and the wider questioning of the contribution of higher education to professional education for teachers

Continuing professional development in higher education: tensions and debates in a changing environment

This chapter examines new and developing policies relating to continued professional development [CPD] in higher education institutions. Drawing on practices, policies and the development of CPD in higher education, the chapter is informed by a qualitative research study in one university. The author sets out the changing context before exploring some of the key tensions and debates related to the concept of CPD and its implementation higher education. The discussion highlights three interconnected areas of debate; issues related to the definition, content and focus of CPD; differences in the form and approach to what constitutes CPD activity; and the relationship between policy, implementation, and institutional and individual interests. The chapter concludes by examining the impact of these tensions and their implications for processes to embed the National Professional Standards for Teaching in Higher Education in the UK, this being of particular relevance to University staff studying the PGCert HE or equivalent

Accented Body and Beyond: a Model for Practice-Led Research with Multiple Theory/Practice Outcomes

Dance has always been a collaborative or interdisciplinary practice normally associated with music or sound and visual arts/design. Recent developments with technology have introduced additional layers of interdisciplinary work to include live and virtual forms in the expansion of what Fraleigh (1999:11) terms ‘the dancer oriented in time/space, somatically alive to the experience of moving’. This already multi-sensory experience and knowledge of the dancer is now layered with other kinds of space/time and kinetic awarenesses, both present and distant, through telematic presence, generative systems and/or sensors. In this world of altered perceptions and ways of being, the field of dance research is further opened up to alternative processes of inquiry, both theoretically and in practice, and importantly in the spaces between the two

Horizon Report 2009

El informe anual Horizon investiga, identifica y clasifica las tecnologías emergentes que los expertos que lo elaboran prevén tendrán un impacto en la enseñanza aprendizaje, la investigación y la producción creativa en el contexto educativo de la enseñanza superior. También estudia las tendencias clave que permiten prever el uso que se hará de las mismas y los retos que ellos suponen para las aulas. Cada edición identifica seis tecnologías o prácticas. Dos cuyo uso se prevé emergerá en un futuro inmediato (un año o menos) dos que emergerán a medio plazo (en dos o tres años) y dos previstas a más largo plazo (5 años)

Supporting STEM students into STEM careers: A practical introduction for academics

Graduate employability is increasingly becoming a selection criteria used by students in their choice of university and discipline. It is also used as a metric for the quality assessment of institutions and the construction of the various league tables produced by newspapers and other media outlets. In addition to identifying levels of employment, further study and unemployment, graduates’ employment destinations are classified as “graduate” or “non-graduate” jobs. The distinction between “graduate” and “non-graduate” is also important for the various metrics that are produced from the destinations data.6 To evidence that a particular course or discipline supports graduate employability it is therefore important not only that graduates are able to find work, but also that they can find work of an appropriate level. A STEM degree should be a clear asset in achieving this aim of finding graduate level employment.National HE Stemm Programm

Enhancing Departments and Graduate Education in Geography

This paper describes the development, implementation, and preliminary outcomes of Enhancing Departments and Graduate Education (EDGE) in Geography, a multi-year project begun in 2005 to study the process of professional development in graduate geography in the U.S and sponsored by the National Science Foundation. As a research and action project responding to the needs of graduate geography programs, EDGE seeks to provide academic geographers with an empirical perspective of disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary and generic skills that M.A./M.S. and Ph.D. students develop as a result of graduate education. Related objectives are to understand how disciplinary skills are applied by geography graduates once they enter the professional workforce in both academic and non-academic professional settings, and to gauge the extent graduate programs are sufficiently preparing geography graduates for those careers. We begin by summarizing the research goals and design of EDGE, highlighting the roles and contributions of geographers and educational researchers, and noting the interplay and synergy between disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies and practices. To date, research has focused on: 1) assessing contemporary workforce competencies in professional geography and 2) examining the role of department climate and culture on student experience and faculty development within masters and doctoral programs. Although the EDGE research efforts are still underway, we present some preliminary research findings and discuss the implications of those outcomes for professional development in geography and related social and environmental sciences. Also discussed is the complementary nature of discipline-based and interdisciplinary professional development efforts

Analysis of Neighbourhoods in Multi-layered Dynamic Social Networks

Social networks existing among employees, customers or users of various IT systems have become one of the research areas of growing importance. A social network consists of nodes - social entities and edges linking pairs of nodes. In regular, one-layered social networks, two nodes - i.e. people are connected with a single edge whereas in the multi-layered social networks, there may be many links of different types for a pair of nodes. Nowadays data about people and their interactions, which exists in all social media, provides information about many different types of relationships within one network. Analysing this data one can obtain knowledge not only about the structure and characteristics of the network but also gain understanding about semantic of human relations. Are they direct or not? Do people tend to sustain single or multiple relations with a given person? What types of communication is the most important for them? Answers to these and more questions enable us to draw conclusions about semantic of human interactions. Unfortunately, most of the methods used for social network analysis (SNA) may be applied only to one-layered social networks. Thus, some new structural measures for multi-layered social networks are proposed in the paper, in particular: cross-layer clustering coefficient, cross-layer degree centrality and various versions of multi-layered degree centralities. Authors also investigated the dynamics of multi-layered neighbourhood for five different layers within the social network. The evaluation of the presented concepts on the real-world dataset is presented. The measures proposed in the paper may directly be used to various methods for collective classification, in which nodes are assigned to labels according to their structural input features.Comment: 16 pages, International Journal of Computational Intelligence System