There is an uncomfortable moment in the podcast, "The Ballad of Billy Balls," that prompted me to think about a podcasting course I teach, and my approach to the emotional aspects of some of my students' own non-fiction stories. This article reflects on the course's first iteration from the perspective of Boler's pedagogies of discomfort…

The COVID-19 pandemic has had broad ranging impacts on the delivery of education at universities. In this context, hybrid-flexible teaching, or HyFlex (HF), has been offered at my university as a mode of delivery ostensibly suitable to what is ultimately a disrupted teaching environment. HF involves the delivery of a subject simultaneously in…

The present study seeks to revisit the concept of intertextuality as integrated into a sociocognitive discourse-analytical perspective, whereby intertextual meanings can be explicated via semantic macropropositions, mental representations, event models, and pragmatic context models. The study's significance derives from its scholarly endeavour to…

The 1988 Dawkins reforms were designed, at least in part, to encourage public universities to organize themselves as if they were corporate enterprises, in order to create a more efficient and competitive sector that was less reliant on government funding. This paper assesses whether successive policy changes since the 1988 Dawkins reforms have…

The Dawkins white paper of 1988 was introduced by the Australian government to reshape the Higher Education (HE) landscape. Dawkins' discussion paper of 1990, Nelson's policy document of 2003, the Bradley Review of 2008 and the Lomax-Smith Review of 2011 built on and extended Dawkins' white paper. Such policy reforms have transformed the culture…

This study was conducted to examine the preparation of school librarians around intellectual freedom issues. The pilot study was conducted with school librarian students at three universities. A gap analysis was used by the researchers to measure the gap between prior knowledge about intellectual freedom that students believed they possessed upon…

I am a lecturer with professional marketing experience, and this study was motivated by my dismay at university about what I have perceived as oversights in colleagues' typical use of mass email (emailing a single message to a large group of subscribers) for content delivery, in comparison to the communication strategies of major industries (for…

This article offers the construct "unitizing predicates" to name mental actions important for students' reasoning about logic. To unitize a predicate is to conceptualize (possibly complex or multipart) conditions as a single property that every example has or does not have, thereby partitioning a universal set into examples and…

The value of some university mathematics courses gets characterized within a liberal arts course of study in terms of supporting "critical thinking skills" or some other phrase for generally improved reasoning. This can be seen as an application of the millennia old "Theory of Formal Discipline" that claims that mathematics…

Response to Intervention/Instruction (RtI) has been implemented in schools for several years. The framework varies slightly from state to state and district to district. It also varies from school to school within school districts. Teachers are charged with implementing this tiered instructional approach. According to Ajzen's (1991) Theory of…

This paper sets forth a construct that describes how many undergraduate students understand mathematical terms to refer to mathematical objects, namely that they only refer to those objects that satisfy the term. I call this students' pronominal sense of reference (PSR) because it means they treat terms as pronouns that point to objects, like…

Libraries still stand as a source of knowledge that can guide us to make informed decisions through the use of credible sources. A balanced collection that provides access to all points of view empowers a community to use information responsibly and make decisions independently. Intellectual freedom and equity of access are still important issues…

This article documents differences between novice and experienced undergraduate students' processes of reading mathematical proofs as revealed by moment-by-moment, think-aloud protocols. We found three key reading behaviors that describe how novices' reading differed from that of their experienced peers: alternative task models, accrual of…

This theoretical paper sets forth two "aspects of predication," which describe how students perceive the relationship between a property and an object. We argue these are consequential for how students make sense of discrete mathematics proofs related to the properties and how they construct a logical structure. These aspects of…

This study investigates students' development of metamathematical understanding of axioms. Based on four semesters of experiments teaching neutral, axiomatic geometry, often through guided reinvention, I identify five categories of student interpretations of their axiomatizing activity. Similar to previously observed patterns in student…