As part of a larger study, professional staff from two universities, Australian and British, were asked how they entered into a higher education career and what factors kept them in that career. Many participants reported that they found themselves in professional services almost by accident, or by a fortunate combination of circumstances.…

This article explores the social and historical formation of 'successful' refugee students' learning practices utilising in-depth, critical incident interviews with primary school aged, refugee-background students in Australia. Employing a practice lens, this article firstly explores the informal learning practices the students identify from their…

Little is known about the leadership educators who work in more than 2,000 leadership programs worldwide. This phenomenological study of 13 experienced leadership educators from four states and 11 universities explored the lived experiences of becoming and being a leadership educator in higher education. Four sub themes emerged from participants'…

This interview with Elizabeth Flynn began over lunch at the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication. Bourelle and Flynn originally met to talk about a collaborative research project, but the conversation shifted to their personal lives. Bourelle and Flynn talked about how their lives and their research were intertwined, and…

Biochemistry is about structure and function, but it is also about data and this is where computers come in. From my time as a graduate student and post doc, whenever I encountered data I thought, "I can work this up by hand, but I think a computer could do a better job." Since that time, I have been working at the interface of…

Little work on the significance and implications of decision-making has been undertaken since that led by Hodkinson in the 1990s, and the experiences of young people on vocational programmes and their reasons for undertaking them remain under-theorised and poorly understood. Drawing on two narratives from a study exploring young people's…

Online discussion forums are common features of learning management systems; they allow teachers to engage students in topical discussions in environments beyond physical spaces. This study presents a novel approach to operationalizing the connections between social interaction and contextual topics by visualizing posts in an online discussion…

In the contemporary world, career counseling professionals need to focus on skills that help people bring benefit from positive chances and minimize the damage of negative events. The Planned Happenstance Career Inventory (PHCI) was created to measure these skills. The main aim of the present study was to test the dimensionality and concurrent…

Teachable moments are often thought of as serendipitous moments when children's ideas become visible and a teacher is able to take advantage of a specific idea to teach content (e.g., Glasswell and Parr 2009; Hyun and Marshall 2003; Virtue 2007). However, teachers cannot always wait for serendipity to create moments of authentic learning, which…

Interdisciplinary research can be defined as the practice of discovering new objects of knowledge beyond disciplinary borders. It often operates through the cross-fertilization and hybridization of concepts, theoretical frameworks, and methodological tools to enable the description, analysis, and understanding of the complexity of objects of study…

Issues of positionality of Black African researchers researching African issues is seldom discussed in methodological literature. In this article, I reflect from an African perspective on issues of insider/outsider positionalities and of serendipity and unexpectedness during my fieldwork which are areas often dominated by writing from the global…

The authors wrote this article to share a message of hope to change agents working in higher education. Even if change cannot happen right away, assembling a foundation of interested collaborators, waiting for the right time to act, and thinking of past failures as opportunities to build the groundwork can result in productive changes. Acting once…

Tracey Derwing and Ron Thomson reflect on the growth of Canadian L2 pronunciation research from the early 1990s onward. Although many phoneticians and language educators called for pronunciation instruction (PI) for decades, in the early 1980s little empirical research existed to inform pronunciation pedagogy, despite an influx of Vietnamese…

The article is concerned with teaching language by utilizing social media from a social justice perspective. It makes an argument for taking a dialogic approach to pedagogy based on serendipity and contingent scaffolding. The article is inspired by a small but growing body of literature known as Critical Computer-Assisted Language Learning. First,…

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), cross-campus collaborations are strongly encouraged; however, due to the vast size of the university, opportunities for student collaboration commonly rely on serendipitous events--being at the right place at the right time. On a cold day in February 2017, the required serendipity befell…