Considerable research has been undertaken involving the student experience and depicting undergraduate students as consumers of education. This construction of the relationship between students and universities is based primarily on notions of economic exchange. In this paper, using the construct of the psychological contract, we show that social…

Reflection is not a new concept in the teaching of higher education and is often an important component of many disciplinary courses. Despite this, past research shows that while there are examples of rich reflective strategies used in some areas of higher education, most approaches to, and conceptualisations of, reflective learning and assessment…

The achievement of gender equity in universities continues to warrant attention. Globally, universities have much work ahead of them if they are to redress the gender imbalance in senior positions and remuneration rates. To examine this issue, multiple sources of evidence were used to observe teaching and research workload of academic staff…

Curriculum reform at institutional level is a challenging endeavour. Those charged with leading this process will encounter both enthusiasm and multiple obstacles to teacher engagement including the particularly complex issue of confronting existing teacher identities. At Unitec Institute of Technology (Unitec), the "Living Curriculum"…

Public relations educators are frequently challenged by students' flawed perceptions of public relations. Two contrasting case studies are presented in this paper to illustrate how socially-oriented paradigms may be applied to a real-client project to deliver a transformative learning experience. A discourse-analytic approach is applied…

This paper describes the development and validation of an item bank designed for students to assess their own achievements across an undergraduate-degree programme in seven generic competences (i.e., problem-solving skills, critical-thinking skills, creative-thinking skills, ethical decision-making skills, effective communication skills, social…

This case study profiles eight international PhD students and describes the process of the construction and negotiation of their social and institutional identities in an Australian university. Audio-recorded informal conversations of the students highlight the role of social membership, staffroom interactions and language in the construction of…

Current literature about interdisciplinary education research is focused on three points: conceptual definitions of interdisciplinarity, the need for interdisciplinary research to tackle the advent of problem-based research and the positive curriculum outcomes to be gained from interdisciplinary research. While this research is important, it does…

This paper explores the growth of corporate branding in higher education (HE) and its use by academic and professional managers as a mechanism for not only enhancing institutional reputation but also for facilitating internal culture change. It uses Bourdieu's framework of field, capital and habitus to analyse case studies of branding in two…

This article addresses the question: To what extent do tertiary teachers and students have similar understandings of what engages students in classroom settings? It employs data from a funded research project in Aotearoa New Zealand that draws on selected questions from two surveys. One survey asked students how important nine selected teacher…

The twenty-first century has seen the rapid emergence of wireless broadband and mobile communications devices which are inexorably changing the way people communicate, collaborate, create and transfer knowledge. Yet many higher education campus learning environments were designed and built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prior to…

Workplaces abound with knowledge that is different from the knowledge students gain at universities. Crossing the boundary from a university to a workplace can, therefore, be difficult for students. To compensate for the dearth of knowledge on how these issues play out in an African context, this study investigates how knowledge and experiences…

Learning about teaching through inquiry is a sound practice for professional development and the university teacher-as-researcher is now commonplace. With the proliferation of inquiry-based postgraduate programmes in university teaching, more academics from across the disciplines are learning new ways of doing research. In this paper, I draw on 10…

The objective of this study is to add to the extant literature on graduate attributes by examining the mediating role of global/moral citizenship and lifelong learning attributes in the relation between students' scholarship attributes and their academic self-directedness in a higher-education open distance learning (ODL) environment. The…

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has yet to fully enter the mainstream of life in higher education. In this case study, we consider a specific network focused on the reform of engineering education. The network involves global collaboration within the discipline of Engineering and is based around curricular activity that affects…