Understanding unintentional plagiarism and international students’ approaches to academic reading: a participatory approach to researching the international student experience

This project aimed to investigate international student approaches to reading and source-use in preparation for a written assignment as part of a commitment to identifying the learning needs of students undertaking independent learning tasks outside of the university classroom. To date, student literacies and plagiarism avoidance support have focused almost exclusively on writing practices and authorial identity. This study, therefore, sought to explore student approaches to reading as the basis for developing recommendations for the better support of all students engaging in researching and reading for assessment. The project also sought to pilot a collaborative approach to the scholarship of learning and teaching by engaging students as co-researchers in the data collection, analysis and dissemination of the project outcomes

What Does “Peer” Mean in Teaching Observation for the Professional Development of Higher Education Lecturers?

The observation of teaching remains an integral process for the enhancement of practice as part of academic continuing professional development in higher education in the UK. This paper argues that failure to recognise the potential for peer-orientated development to reinforce restrictive norms of practice will be detrimental to the project of continuing professional development for learning and teaching. It is suggested that teaching observation schemes grounded in a peer model of observation within a reflective practitioner paradigm are potentially reinforcing parochial and performative constructions of teacher professionalism that ultimately enable resistance to changes to practice. It argues that for teaching observation to contribute to legitimate enhancement of teaching practice, such processes must be underpinned by pluralistic models of professional development that tolerate,and indeed require, critical differences of perspective that challenge rather than affirm the existing professional “self-concept” of experienced practitioners as it is enacted within current peer models of development in higher education

Academic Practice: Developing as a Professional in Higher Education

Taking a broad contemporary view of higher education, this book explores key topics that all academics will need to engage with in order to survive and flourish in today’s increasingly complex higher education environment. Key topics include: · connecting research and teaching in practice · promoting critical approaches to the curriculum · teaching for employability and understanding graduate identity · responding to the internationalisation agenda · engaging with the demands of the digital university · enacting interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and scholarship · enabling inclusive approaches to student engagement and student voice Policy and practice debates informing these different areas are explored alongside practical guidance on how to implement and integrate key priorities into the different dimensions of their professional practice

Researcher-led teaching:embodiment of academic practice

This paper explores the embodied practices of leading researchers(and/or leading scholars/practitioners), suggesting that distinctive‘researcher-led teaching’ depends on educators who are willing and able to be their research in the teaching setting. We advocate an approach to the development of higher education pedagogy which makes lead-researchers the objects of inquiry and we summarise case study analyses (in neuroscience and humanities) where the knowledge-making‘signatures’ of academic leaders are used to exhibit the otherwise hidden identities of research. We distinguish between learning readymade knowledge and the process of knowledge in the making and point towards the importance of inquiry in the flesh. We develop a view of higher education teaching that depends upon academic status a priori, but we argue that this stance is inclusive because it has the propensity to locate students as participants in academic culture

Defining pedagogic expertise: Students and new lecturers as co-developers in learning and teaching

This study evaluated a model of student-engaged educational development. Despite widespread commitment to student engagement across many institutional activities, student participation as partners with faculty in teaching and learning enhancement has been identified as a threshold concept for educational development. This study sought not only to establish a student-engaged model of teaching observation in a United Kingdom context, but also to critically examine the ways in which student, faculty, and developer participants conceptualise student expertise in relation to learning and teaching. Concept-map mediated interviews with students and faculty in humanities and healthcare subjects elicited conceptions and comparative knowledge structures of pedagogical intelligence for the purposes of enhancing teaching practice. The outcomes of the study are considered in relation to the theorisation of student engagement with particular focus on perspectives of expertise and power relations

Student-faculty Co-inquiry Into Student Reading: Recognising SoTL as Pedagogic Practice

This paper reports the evaluation of a student-faculty collaborative study investigating international students’ perceptions of the role of reading in higher education. The study examined the academic reading and source-use practices of ten undergraduate students in a range of disciplines in one UK university. In previous research on student literacy practices, students are often positioned as research “objects” rather than as active participants with an investment in enhancing the student experience through engagement in pedagogic research. In this paper we present a case study of student faculty collaboration in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Drawing on the analysis of student and lecturer accounts of the collaborative research experience, we identify the benefits and challenges of student-faculty partnership approaches. We conclude by arguing that conceptualising SOTL as pedagogy may facilitate the engagement of students as co-researchers and expose to scrutiny a “hidden curriculum” of current approaches to SoTL

'Written with a Mrs Stowe's feeling' : Uncle Tom's cabin and the paradigms of Southern authorship in the anti-Tom tradition, 1852-1902

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the representation of authorship, readership and intertextuality in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the southern anti-Tom tradition from 1852 to 1902. The principal claim of the thesis is that Stowe's novel provides nineteenth-century southern readers with a series of aesthetic paradigms that enable these readers to construct and reconstruct the role of artist in the South as this intersects with the construction of gender identity in nineteenth-century America. In Chapter 1, Uncle Tom's Cabin is interpreted through Julia Kristeva's theory of intertextuality, whereby 'the one who writes is the same as the one who reads', to argue that Stowe's text promotes acts of active rather than passive readership. The reading of Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride in Chapter 2 interrogates the ways in which the female writer locates herself within a female literary tradition by subverting the Bloomian model of literary paternity to create the gothic mother author. Chapter 3 demonstrates how William Gilmore Simms appropriates Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy in the 'sensible man'. Barthes's recapitulation of the writer and reader as 'producer' and 'consumer' is mapped onto Simms's aesthetic terminology of 'utility' and 'extravagance' to reconcile Stowe's antithesis of marketplace and sentiment within the southern home. In Chapter 4, James Lane Allen's paired stories 'Mrs Stowe's "Uncle Tom" at Home in Kentucky' and 'Two Gentlemen of Kentucky' are read in the context of the literary debates between realism and romance in the late nineteenth-century. In doing so, Allen attempts to reconfigure these gendered aesthetic paradigms and so legitimise southern cultural elegy as a southern form but effectively begins the process of dismantling Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy. Chapter 5 discusses the ways in which Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots dramatises the failure of Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy in the context of the southern rape complex

A call for expanding inclusive student engagement in SoTL

Scholars in higher education increasingly recognize the transformative potential of student-facultypartnerships focused on inquiry into teaching and learning. However, some students tend to be privileged in SoTL initiatives while others are discouraged, implicitly or explicitly, from engaging in this work. In this paper, we consider why certain students tend to be excluded from SoTL, summarize the possible developmental gains made by students and faculty when diverse student voices are included, and highlight strategies for generating a more inclusive SoTL. We call for expanding student engagement in SoTL by encouraging a diversity of student voices to engage in co-inquiry with faculty. Inclusive engagement has tremendous potential to enhance student and faculty learning, to deepen SoTL initiatives, and to help redress the exclusionary practices that too often occur in higher education