Teaching as Performance

This chapter takes up the suite of policies that reflect a growing determination of national governments to manage university teaching as a mechanism for building the alignment between higher education and the economy. It examines the policy trajectories of higher education systems in targeting teaching within quality assessment and funding mechanisms. These mechanisms produce what Stronach, Corbin, McNamara and Warne (2002) call an 'economy of performance'. that attends selectively to those aspects most readily made visible and measurable and, at the same time, re-orients the field from 'teaching' to 'learning'

Decolonising the school experience through poetry to foreground truth-telling and cognitive justice

While attempts to decolonise the school curriculum have been ongoing since the 1970s, the recent Black Lives Matter protests around the world have drawn urgent attention to the vast inequities faced by Black and First Nations peoples and people of colour. Decolonising education and other public institutions has become a front-line public concern around the world. In this article, we argue that poetry offers generative possibilities for the decolonisation of Australian high school (and university) curricula. Inspired by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander approaches to knowledge creation as intergenerational, iterative and intercultural, and by postcolonial and decolonial theories, we explore ways in which poetry events can begin decolonising and diversifying the school curriculum. We suggest that poetry creates spaces for deep listening with the heart (dadirri) that can promote truth-telling about colonial histories and the strengths, achievements and contributions of First Nations Australians. These decolonising efforts underpin the Wandiny (Gathering Together) – Listen With the Heart: Uniting Nations Through Poetry research that we discuss in this article. In these ways, we argue that decolonised curricula create the conditions for cognitive justice in schooling that is an important precursor to other forms of social justice, such as equality, diversity and inclusion

Why history? Why now? Multiple accounts of the emergence of academic development

More than 40 years after its beginnings, academic development stands uncertainly on the threshold of becoming a profession or discipline in its own right. While it remains marginal to the dominant stories of the university, it has become central to the institution's contemporary business. This Research Note describes an enquiry that uses a multiple histories approach to explore the emergence of academic development in three national sites. Our intention is to provoke a more critical engagement with academic development's current forms and future possibilities

Development of sodium-ion rechargeable battery using sodium cobalt phosphate cathode

Lithium-ion batteries are the most popular kind of rechargeable batteries accommodate in portable electronic devices up to date. As the Lithium deposits are depleting the cost of Lithium-ion batteries is increasing. Sodium- ion batteries can be introduced as an alternative technology which can replace expensive Lithium-ion batteries. Sodium sources are highly abundant and therefore Sodium-ion batteries could be made cheaper than Lithium-ion batteries. A number of cathode materials which were accommodated in Lithium-ion batteries have also been tested as cathode materials for Sodium-ion batteries. This research was based on a Sodium-ion battery which cathode was prepared using Sodium cobalt phosphate. The cathode material was prepared using a simple solid-state reaction between Cobalt (II) oxide and Sodium phosphate. The prepared material was characterized using powder XRD. Chargedischarge cycles, cyclic voltammetry analyzing, impedance curve matching to obtain equivalent circuit was used in order to analyze the performance of the prepared cathode in the battery. The discharge capacity of the cathode was calculated as 9.58 mA h g-1. The cyclic voltammetry curve has shown that an oxidation and reduction processes involved in the battery cycle but the battery cycle was not completely reversible.KEYWORDS: Rechargeable batteries, Sodium cobalt oxide, cyclic voltammetry, charge-discharge cycles

Institutional pedagogical waypoints : reflections on doctoral journeys between Taiwan and Australia

Spatial, social and academic journeys undertaken between Taiwan and Australia for doctoral education are the focus of reflection here. The discussion centres on the authors’ experiences of, on the one hand, the development of a Faculty of Education’s doctoral pedagogies in the early 2000s to reflect its international PhD candidature profile – especially from Taiwan – and, on the other, of Taiwanese doctoral candidates’ journeys through their PhDs in the Faculty. The authors write from their particular perspectives: Evans as an Australian academic and a manager of doctoral studies, and Liou as a Taiwanese academic pursuing her doctorate in an Australian university. The article considers the Australian and Taiwanese doctoral contexts between which the students transited. The institutional pedagogical strategies, from pre-enrolment to completion, are examined as waypoints on the doctoral journey for both staff and candidates

A phenomenographic approach to the effect of emotions on the information behaviour of doctoral students: A narrative inquiry

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. This article is to examine how emotions affect the doctoral student’s journey by analyzing diverse aspects of the information behaviour that emerged from their narratives through a phenomenographic perspective. Narratives are a rational way of communication that focuses on how people perceive different phenomena regarding themselves, their inner thoughts, their states of mind, and how it affects their lifeworld’s. This phenomenographic study employs interview data from 36 doctoral students. The data collected from the narratives were studied drawing from the variation theory and iterative data analysis resulted in categories of doctoral student experiences and their emotional journey. The holistic phase of the thematic analysis revealed a relatively balanced interplay of positive and negative emotions. The rich data obtained in the phenomenographic approach exposed significant links between participants’ heightened emotions in five common themes during looking for information, their interactions with key individuals (supervisors and peer) and situations in their doctoral lives. Whilst this paper focuses on the approach taken to explore the narratives, recommendations are made based on the findings and to further explore the information-seeking behaviour patterns of doctoral students

Building the capacity to solve complex health challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa : CARTA’s multidisciplinary PhD training

Objectives: To develop a curriculum (Joint Advanced Seminars- JAS) that produced PhD fellows who understood that health is an outcome of multiple determinants within complex environments and that approaches from a range of disciplines is required to address health and development within the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa. We sought to attract PhD fellows, supervisors and teaching faculty from a range of disciplines into the program. Methods: Multidisciplinary teams developed the JAS curriculum. CARTA PhD fellowships were open to academics in consortium member institutions, irrespective of primary discipline, interested in doing a PhD in public and population health. Supervisors and JAS faculty were recruited from CARTA institutions. We use routine JAS evaluation data (closed and open ended questions) collected from PhD fellows at every JAS, a survey of one CARTA cohort and an external evaluation of CARTA to assess the impact of the JAS curriculum on learning. Results: We describe our pedagogic approach arguing its centrality to an appreciation of multiple disciplines and illustrate how it promotes working in multidisciplinary ways. CARTA has attracted PhD fellows, supervisors and JAS teaching faculty from across a range of disciplines. Evaluations indicate PhD fellows have a greater appreciation of how disciplines other than their own are important to understand health and its determinants and an appreciation and capacity to employ mixed methods research. Conclusions: In the short-term, we have been effective in promoting an understanding of multidisciplinarity resulting in fellows using methods from beyond their discipline of origin. This curriculum has international application

Blogging as community of practice: lessons for academic development?

As practices and expectations around doctoral writing continue to change, so too do the demands on academic developers and learning advisors. Social media is increasingly playing a role in doctoral education, just as it is in higher education more generally. This paper explores a blog initiated in 2012 to inform and support doctoral writing; since its inception, it has grown to include diverse and overlapping communities of academic developers, language and literacy specialists, supervisors, and students with shared interests in doctoral writing. This case study reflects on our experiences of entering the online environment through the lens of connectivist learning, noting the practices and communities that have been established, and the blog’s positioning in relation to our formal roles within universities. We consider how blogging relates to our work as academic developers. Details of our experiences, with our analysis and reflection of them, can inform other academic developers seeking to engage in social media networks as part of their working lives

What supervisors and universities can do to enhance doctoral student experience (and how they can help themselves)

Over the past two decades, there has been a flurry of government papers and policy reports worldwide calling for increased number and diversity of doctoral researchers and a broadening of the curriculum to meet the developing needs of respective national 'knowledge-driven' economies. This has been followed by position papers and best practice examples of employability skills development in boundary-crossing doctoral programmes, especially in response to these initiatives. However, there is a disassociation between this ample literature expounding the new doctorate with its broader remit, inclusivity and production of 'industry-ready' graduates, and the comparatively sparse literature on the doctoral candidates' experiences of their programmes and career readiness. Within this review, we briefly outline international government initiatives and examples of the responses by Life Science and Biomedical doctoral programmes to address these various challenges. Further, we explore the recent literature on the lived experience of doctoral researchers by examining their perception of the recent changes to the research context to make recommendations for universities and supervisors on how to better support an ever more diverse doctoral population for a wide range of career opportunities. Examples of how doctoral researchers themselves can make the best of currently available opportunities are also provided