Key concepts in postgraduate certificates in higher education teaching and learning in Australasia and the United Kingdom

Abstract Since the first postgraduate certificate in higher education teaching and learning was offered in Australia in the late 1970s, similar courses have become a major part of academic development in universities in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. This paper describes the outcomes of a survey designed to determine the key higher education teaching and learning concepts developed in such certificates, the readings recommended, and the challenges participants face in their learning. An email survey consisting of four open-ended questions was emailed to coordinators of certificates in higher education teaching and learning programs in 147 institutions spanning Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Based on responses from 46 programs, this paper reports on the concepts of higher education teaching and learning emerging from the survey results, the scholarly readings associated with each concept as reported by coordinators, as well as the challenges experienced by course participants learning these key concepts

Academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes and politics

The theme of academic life in the measured university has felt especially pressing to us. As co-editors, we have aimed to work together in ways that matter to us while still meeting numerous deadlines along the way. In curating this issue, we have shared and savoured many moments of intellectual pleasure together

On the conduct of concern: exploring how university teachers recognise, engage in, and perform 'identity' practices within academic workgroups

In this chapter, we draw on semi-structured interviews with academics from an interdisciplinary field of social sciences who have completed a GCert and who work together in a research-intensive university. We suggest that their labour together as teachers comprises an academic workgroup. We first provide a rationale for our focus on GCerts as a vehicle for our study; second, we offer a contextual description of the workgroup as well as a brief account of the participants involved in the study; third, we draw on interview data to explore the kinds of teacher identities that are made available (or summoned) through the agendas, structures, and assemblages of activity and interaction that these academics engage in. We are especially interested in how scholarly and institutional knowledge and know-how from the GCert becomes mobilised; that is, how it is put to use by our interviewees as a mechanism for them to (mis)recognise the identity struggles of others, and perform appropriate university teacher identities themselves. Our analysis draws primarily on Bendix Petersen’s (2008) notion of the ‘conduct of concern’ – a reading of Foucault’s notion of governmentality: "Exploring the conduct of concern as a readily available discursive practice is a way of analysing the ‘microphysics’ of power (Foucault, 1980) at play within academic culture; a way of asking how academic cultures are continued or discontinued, and how it comes to be that certain subjects and positionings are recognised as appropriate or inappropriate. It is an entry into trying to understand ‘who makes it’ and who doesn’t; what subjects need to do, think, say and be in order to be recognised, by themselves and others, as relevant and competent in an academic context. (p. 397)

The magic of partnering with students to create transdisciplinary STEM curricula

CONTEXT: Co-creation of curriculum with a range of different partners is an increasing practice of learning and teaching in the higher education sector. In research, partnership models for collaboration with a range of stakeholders, notably industry, are well established and practiced, but fewer models exist that show how to partner in teaching. The growing success stories of curriculum co-creation with student partners show that partnering with students is a practical and a sustainable way to create engaging curricula. A benefit is that student outcomes and desires often align with institutional aims such as producing capable and confident graduates that can work in any industry beyond geographical and disciplinary constraints. This contrasts with industry partners who are often interested in job ready graduates for the specific industry or sector. In this study we are presenting our learnings from partnering with students in designing transdisciplinary curricula. PURPOSE: The aim was to design minors that attract and encourage students from non-STEM backgrounds to use their elective space to study curriculum that helps them to develop STEM capabilities. This aim is in line with training job ready graduates and strategies to address National Priorities and Industry Linkage Fund (NPILF). The minors were designed in consultation and collaboration with industry partners and academics from different disciplines. APPROACH: Two minors were designed by choosing subjects from four different disciplines and a capstone project was added to create a hands-on learning opportunity for students. Subjects were chosen from four different schools to ensure the trans-disciplinarity aspect of the design. The most important criterion for subjects included in a minor was the lack of restrictive prerequisites to ensure that all students could enrol. OUTCOMES: Collaboration with Industry allowed us to implement development of STEM skills or capabilities as the learning outcome, but collaboration with students was instrumental in designing curricula that was attractive to students and relevant to the future generation of graduates. Therefore, students were embedded in the process of design of these minors all the way from ideation to marketing the curricula. Minors were built around two topics of health and sustainability that a) students found interesting and b) where industry indicated there were current and future job opportunities. The curriculum design was fine-tuned following several discussions with student partners and surveying a larger group of students. In consultation with subject coordinators the student partners critically evaluated the assessments in each of the subjects to ensure that students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds would be able to complete the subject. The minors were presented to a larger group of students before presenting them to various academic committees for approval. In addition to developing traditional resources such as the handbook entry, marketing videos were produced by student partners to communicate the new curricula to incoming students. “Innovating For Humans“ and “Eco-Socially Conscious Design & Manufacturing” were offered in the first academic session of 2022. CONCLUSIONS: Designing trans- multi or interdisciplinary, curricula is not just bringing subjects with no prerequisites from different disciplines around a core topic. It is vital to ensure that the subjects are indeed linked by a common theme, but that learning outcomes are scaffolded and achievable and that the subjects can be completed successfully by students from all disciplines. We soon discovered that learning guides were not the most reliable source of information and going through the learning activities and assessments with student partners and unit coordinators was essential to identify the hidden assumed knowledge and disciplinary focused skills. Subsequently, learning activities and assessment of some subjects were revised and the unit coordinators designed extra resources and supports to assist students from other disciplines. This process also benefits students from within the discipline. As STEM educators we did not anticipate that the biggest challenge of designing transdisciplinary curricula in STEM was to get the right level of STEM content to achieve the intended learning outcomes while keeping them attractive to students from other disciplines that were raised in an education system that presented STEM as a “difficult subject”. The outcome and process of this curriculum development work would have been very different without collaboration with student partners from different disciplines. Working with students was a great learning experience that can be described as designing a product for the end users with them and eliminating assumptions and predictions. Although this work was on designing interdisciplinary curricula, we believe this model is an efficient strategy that can be applied in designing of engaging discipline focused curriculum

On being and becoming the monstrous subject of measurement

This chapter explores the mechanisms by which academic subjects willingly make themselves amenable to measurement. It explores how measurement is deployed via practices that commodify academic labour and promote an individualising and competitive milieu that is simultaneously experienced as repellent and desirable. In particular, it examines the complicity of the academic subject, who becomes increasingly willing to be formed and to form herself into a fi gure that might be described as the measured monster of the contemporary university. Exhibits from job and promotion applications, software programs and citation collation websites are explored for traces of this monstrous subject. Monstrous, in this sense, is less like the monstrous creature of great leathery wings and a horny head, or the misshapen freak, than the neat clean numerical subject delineated by measurements

Borders, paths and orientations: assembling the higher education research field as doctoral students and supervisors

While higher education (HE) is entrenched as a context for scholarly inquiry in Australian universities, there remains contest about it as a research field. Unlike other forms of ‘Education’, in Australia there is no undergraduate programme inducting students into HE’s key questions, scholars, and inquiry modes. For new doctoral students, learning to make an original contribution to a field described as a practice, a discipline, and context is a persistent challenge. In this paper, we ‘think with’ the concepts of borders, paths and orientations to interrogate our practices as doctoral students and supervisors in the field of HE research, under the formation #thesisthinkers. We offer multiple accounts of how #thesisthinkers invites us to confront HE as a field, and in particular, how #thesisthinkers has invigorated us to build a useable landscape of the HE research field that sustains multiple pathways for doctoral researchers, leaving behind traces for others to tread

Reflection on ICTs in education

Although most teacher educators come to work in this field with some sort of experience of ICTs—as a user, a researcher, a teacher, or an administrator—anyone working in the field of ICTs is well aware that there are no established patterns and pathways in this field. As a consequence, teaching ICTs requires teacher educators in the area to learn on-the-job: we have to learn the new concepts, knowledge, and skills of how to use them and how to teach them “on-the-job”, as the ICTs are changing very fast and new technologies emerge every day. This ongoing dilemma, from a practice-theory view, includes designing a relevant curriculum and preparing preservice teachers to be “ICTs ready” from both technical knowledge and pedagogical knowledge perspectives. In this chapter, I first introduce the chapters written by the pre-service teachers in this section, and then by reflecting on using ICTs in education and teaching, I weave the students’ chapters into self-reflection on my own teaching and learning experience