This paper discusses a two-year study at an Australian university in which 154 undergraduate and 51 postgraduate students reflected on their experiences with flexible and personalised assessment where they could choose assessment tasks, submission dates and weightings of their assignments. Through pre- and post-course surveys and a focus group,…

Graduate students writing on their own often struggle with knowledge production and identity conflicts. Conversely, writing with others presents its own set of challenges, as collaborators struggle to define roles and expectations. To systematically foster and teach collaborative writing practices for graduate students, we performed a self study…

We explore the idea that teaching students as "scholars" can change their education within a values discourse that promotes certain personal attributes, including being engaged members of their university and society. The idea partially opposes the dominant neoliberal framing of higher education but is not foreign to normal academic…

The paper sets out a conceptual argument that the choice of teaching method is part of the freedom to teach in higher education. It enters into a dialogue with the views of Stephen Finn in a paper published in "Teaching in Higher Education" in which he argues that academic freedom should be limited in respect to teaching methods. The…

The practice of student-staff partnerships is fundamentally about relationships. As new partnerships are formed, and existing power relations challenged, people experience a range of emotions. Despite their importance, there are few studies that have systematically researched the emotional challenges of student-staff partnership. Through a…

While the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic upon higher education institutions has been well documented, less is known about how academics themselves responded to these rapid changes. This paper analyses the experiences of teacher education academics from Australia and New Zealand (n = 13) who were interviewed during lengthy pandemic…

Precarity of the Ukrainian professoriate is a lacuna in the higher education literature. There was no research on this subject before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Furthermore, no investigations have been conducted on how university professors handle the hardships of teaching in wartime. This study tries to understand the phenomenon of…

Research on precarity in higher education has focused on how academics themselves experience this, but less is known about how staff precarity affects teaching and learning. This extended literature review explores how precarious working conditions affect practices aimed at supporting students' writing, such as teaching discipline-specific…

This paper analyzes academic identities and academic agency in the context of knowledge management and production that permeate the contemporary university. A practical argumentation on the meaning of teaching activity seeks to propose, in contrast to traditional approaches, that identity and meaning are constitutive dimensions of present…

In honours programmes, teachers face the task of designing courses in which students feel challenged and learn from accomplishing demanding assignments. The aim of this study was to investigate students' and teachers' perceptions of challenge and learning in an honours programme. From 2016 to 2019, students and teachers rated the learning…

The article examines challenges faced by academics in Zimbabwe's universities. With a particular focus on university teaching and research, the article draws upon empirical evidence from a survey study and in-depth semi-structured interviews with academics from four public universities. The survey findings suggest that years of university teaching…

With the growth of online programs in higher education, students are more likely to experience various barriers and challenges while taking online courses, such as social isolation, low motivation, distraction, and mental health issues. Mindfulness-informed pedagogy, such as contemplative pedagogy, showed its promise in decreasing students'…

It has been well established that for all students, but particularly second language (L2) English speaking students, academic English speaking skills are key to developing specialist terminology and disciplinary content in an English as a medium of instruction (EMI) context. However, what is less clear in many contexts is the institutional…

Drawing on data collected from multiple sources, this qualitative case study investigates how seven English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) academics from a university in mainland China perceive and cope with their professional vulnerability within the system of performativity. Three themes were generated from the data: (1) professional vulnerability…

Studio, a breeding ground for curiosity and wonder, has become more of a confined space for innovation lately. Infrastructure shortage also has triggered a somewhat impersonal attitude to studio learning. Can Design-Activism mitigate such stresses on the studio by becoming an alternative mode of driving studio processes? Reflectively, this study…