Editors’ Choice Award for 2024

Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

The Executive Editorial team is pleased to announce that the Teaching in Higher Education Editors’ Choice Award for 2024 has been awarded to the following paper:

• Ajjawi, R., Gravett, K., & O’Shea, S. (2023). The politics of student belonging: identity and purpose.

This is a new annual award that the Executive Editorial team has recently launched to recognise exceptional research published within the journal during the previous calendar year. Six papers were nominated for this award by the journal’s Executive Editors, with the final selection made by the Editor.

This research by Ajjawi, Gravett and O’Shea offers a way to rethink a significant area of the literature on teaching in higher education. They argue that “the notion of belonging should be handled with criticality and care”. It can be tempting to think that universities and educators should be able to find a way to ensure that all students achieve a sense of belonging at university, but if students have an active role to play establishing and curating belongings, then this is not necessarily something that educators can just arrange for their students.

You will also find fascinating reading if you look at the papers that were nominated for the award:

1. Research by Jiang and Tham offers a post-humanist view of community-engaged pedagogy, demonstrating that it is possible to combine a closely theorised account with a discussion of practical implications.

• Jiang, J., & Tham, J. (2023). Rethinking community-engaged pedagogy through posthumanist theory.

2. Collins-Warfield, Niewoehner-Green, Scheer and Mills propose a pedagogy that places emphasis on institutional responsibility for meeting student needs, highlighting the value of educators reaching out to students as an integral aspect of teaching.

• Collins-Warfield, A. E., Niewoehner-Green, J. E., Scheer, S. D., & Mills, K. J. (2023). Student-ready critical care pedagogy: a student-centred instructional approach for struggling students.

3. This study by Jensen, Bearman and Boud offers a qualitative analysis involving a cross-national digital ethnographic dataset to extend understanding the ways in which feedback. It’s intriguing that significant learning was seen to result if feedback challenges a student’s assumptions about their current work, and a student can accept that challenge.

• Jensen, L. X., Bearman, M., & Boud, D. (2023). Characteristics of productive feedback encounters in online learning.

4. Ferrie and Greenwood consider the role of emotion in preparing postgraduate students to engage in qualitative research. The approach that they bring to introducing the research to the reader itself highlights the value of considering emotion. There is value, indeed, in a criticality that is grounded in a reflexive self-awareness of the positions and processes that shape one’s research and teaching.

• Ferrie, J., & Greenwood, S. (2023). ‘To be honest, it’s complicated’: training postgraduate students to work with emotions in qualitative research.

5. Finally, Hall, Ansley and Connolly draw on a diverse range of epistemologies to expose the limits of current approaches to the decolonisation of universities. It’s not a straightforward matter for institutions to engage in reform in this territory when they are grounded in logics of coloniality.

• Hall, R., Ansley, L., & Connolly, P. (2023). Decolonising or anti-racism? Exploring the limits of possibility in higher education.

Staff precarity and its implications for student writing

Photo by picjumbo.com on Pexels.com

The kind of writing that students are expected to do at university is quite unlike anything most of them have done before. They have to present a coherent argument grounded in the existing literature, yet at the same time must avoid simply reporting or regurgitating what that literature says. A whole new set of academic literacy practices, namely referencing and citation, must be learned. These practices are unfamiliar to many undergraduates, especially those from countries that place less emphasis on such matters, but penalties for getting them wrong can be serious.

Academic writing is, of course, not taught or learned in a vacuum, but shaped by the material conditions in which it occurs, which includes the working conditions of staff charged with teaching and assessing writing. Precarious working conditions means that staff have less time and resources to provide appropriate feedback on writing or to guide students away from inappropriate practices. It is this intersection between precarious working conditions for teaching staff and the way students are supported with academic writing that is the focus of our new article in Teaching in Higher Education.

Changes in the structure and funding of UK higher education have led to larger class sizes, more diverse student needs, and greater reliance on casually employed staff; teaching staff with insecure or contingent contracts that are temporary or hourly-paid. The University and College Union reported in 2020 that 33% of academic staff were employed on fixed-term contracts. Research on precarity in higher education has usually focused on its impact on staff wellbeing, but less is known about the way that staff precarity might affect teaching and learning. In our article, we argue that precarity has serious implications for the support and feedback students get with their writing.

Almost all academics these days have heavy workloads and feel short of time, but those on precarious contracts are at particular risk of being short-changed in terms of time allocation for their duties. They are often given their teaching schedules at short notice, and paid minimal amounts for the numerous other duties around actual contact time such as reading formative drafts of work and holding student tutorials that can be so crucial in supporting students with writing. Providing meaningful formative feedback on writing is one of the most valuable means of helping students to develop their work and obtain higher grades, but it is time-consuming and staff on precarious contracts may be unwilling or unable to devote time to it when they are not being paid to do so.

It has also been shown that the sense of not having enough time impacts the support relationships staff can develop with their students (Leathwood and Read, 2022), yet these relationships are one of the factors with the greatest positive impact on student learning (Hattie, 2009). If students feel that their teachers hardly know them or are not invested in the relationship, it may be harder to seek help with writing and easier to succumb to malpractice.

If students do plagiarise or commit other forms of malpractice, precariously employed staff may be poorly positioned to adequately deal with it. First, such staff may not be paid or even invited to attend meetings or training sessions where information about academic integrity and plagiarism policies is shared, so they may feel unsure how to respond to such cases. Second, even if they know what they should do, they may lack the motivation or time to do it. Checking written work for plagiarism or inappropriate use of AI significantly extends the time needed for marking. Most universities have a policy for dealing with suspected malpractice that involves several emails, communications with an academic integrity team, at least one meeting, and then opportunities for the student to resubmit work.

Part of what motivated us to write this article and draw attention to these issues was the experience of watching an hourly-paid lecturer at our own institution spend hours checking academic essays for plagiarism and communicating about this to the relevant team, only to be told that she would not be paid for the many extra hours it had entailed. Such experiences make it more likely that tutors have no choice but to turn a blind eye to academic malpractice.

Our article highlights how precarious working conditions hamper teaching staff’s ability to provide high quality feedback on writing and build the kind of trusting relationships that would encourage students to seek help with writing rather than resort to malpractice. The cumulative effect of lack of time, support and training for precariously employed staff may contribute to a climate in which malpractice becomes more likely to happen and less likely to be detected.

Sharon McCulloch and Josie Leonard (both University of Central Lancashire)

What forms of resistance did higher education academics undertake during the Covid-19 pandemic?

Photo by Tim Gouw on Pexels.com

While the Covid-19 pandemic brought rapid and considerable change to higher education institutions, we heard remarkably little from affected academics as they sought to respond to these changes. In our new paper in Teaching in Higher Education we argue that this precarious moment provided a vital chance to see forms of academic resistance. During some of the longest lockdowns and border closures in the world, teacher educator academics (n=13) from Australia and New Zealand revealed multiple ways they navigated these seemingly totalising forces of neoliberalism through working to maintain quality education, collegiality, criticality and care – strategies we began to analyse as forms of resistance.

Resistance is a word that is frequently thrown around in education circles. Recognised to be much more than ‘fighting’, academic resistance conveys a sense of opposition. However, when we looked at research around the world, we found it was poorly theorised and defined. In addition, it was largely focused on public forms of resistance (such as public protest) that we felt overlooked many quieter strategies we found in our study. Informed by critical, feminist and post-structural theory we identified three broad forms of resistance:

• Public opposition as resistance: While resistance is most commonly understood as an oppositional public act, only two academics referred to such examples in the Covid years. Caleb (from NZ) talked about how he and academic colleagues ‘launched a bit of a coup’ to push back against a new software system that threatened to undermine the role of teachers. One other academic (Gidgit, Australia) also talked about the need to ‘fight City Hall’ as face to face teaching was replaced with online learning. However, such examples were rare.

• Education as resistance: Using education as a form of resistance in itself was the most common form of resistance proposed and enacted by our participants. This was perhaps a logical extension of their role as teacher educators, but we suggest that many higher education academics also employ similar approaches which included the strategic selection of critical knowledge in their courses in order to ‘disrupt some the systemic structures that disable generative thinking’ (Salesi, NZ), and encourage students to develop critical thinking. Encouraging students to take social action and act for social justice was an extension of this:
  

  I don’t think it’s enough to just stuff young people’s heads full of what it might mean to be an active citizen: it’s got to be something that they do, and they’ve got to do it while they’re at university. Otherwise, it’s never gonna be done.

• Everyday activisms as resistance: The final category of resistance was more difficult to see as it occurred beyond the public radar and occurred in everyday, domestic spaces – and through daily interactions. In these ‘uncaring’ institutions of higher education, participants described acts of resistance that were marked by forms of collegiality, care and a desire to promote ‘collective orientations’ (Colin, Australia) through teaching and daily interactions. Informed by feminist and post-structural theories, care and relationality can be seen as forms of resistance that defy the individualism promoted through neoliberal and competitive forces in higher education and instead build collective solidarities and inclusion. At times this included refusing to accept the ways things were, as Caleb (NZ) put it:
  

  …we’ve all constructed this thing called education. And so we can keep refining and redefining it, and we don’t have to accept it.

As our study shows, the heightened precarity that higher education institutions experienced during the Covid pandemic certainly led to forms of resistance by academics – but these were also at times difficult to see. We found that using a suite of theoretical tools helped to open up broader definitions of what resistance could look like – we outline these in Table 1.

Table 1: Theoretical origins and typology of resistances in education

We view this table as the start of generative conversation about forms of resistance in higher education institutions and the potential for ‘conditions of possibility’ that still exist for critical resistance, care, connection and hope in the contemporary neoliberal university.

Bronwyn E. Wood (Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington), Rosalyn Black (Deakin University) and Kerri Garrard (Deakin University)

…You wouldn’t start from here: pandemic and post-pandemic teaching in higher education

Photo by Katerina Holmes on Pexels.com

In the dark days of the pandemic, we got together online as little huddles of colleagues to share concerns about our families, our friends, our jobs, and our futures. Higher education was no different to other industries. During our online meetings set up to discuss remote teaching and learning we found ourselves sharing all our personal worries as well. We all wondered how we would get through the fog of the pandemic, only latterly speculating what it would look like when we did.

Our mutual support networks were a way to get through this. We punctuated our days around shared experiences; queuing two metres apart in supermarket car parks wearing masks while rumours about hand sanitiser stocks flew round, alongside banging pans with neighbours and baking banana bread.

Back in the virtual workplace, often a back bedroom or kitchen table alongside the kids and their homework, much of our time and focus was spent supporting tutors and their students. Whilst the majority of universities were trying to pivot online, we saw that even our experienced distance-learning tutors were caught up in immediate confusion and lack of direction in teaching, assessment, and student support. We saw waves of emotional impact in even what would previously have been straightforward interactions, as we all struggled to cope with the absoluteness of lockdown life.

Chaos brought opportunity. We knew this was a unique moment in time, and understanding its impact would be important for the future. We wanted to understand how people were being affected, and so we undertook a parallel study to those from face-to-face universities experiencing a full pivot.

We noted hitherto separate work and home spheres were being thrust together. Some people survived, others thrived. Whilst many tutors worried about their futures, others embraced lockdown as an opportunity for growth and development. Some today are still feeling the residue of isolation as an impact on their professional and personal lives.

Our new paper in Teaching in Higher Education uses real-time photographs and texts to capture that jumble of emotional responses, stresses, and managing the practicalities of the situation. Going forward, we highlight concerns that higher education and higher education management will need to address. Full face-to-face tuition models are diminished, and hybrid and online options feel here to stay. Students’ aspirations have changed; online equivalent teaching appears no longer a gift, but an expectation. In terms of faculty management, it’s time to engage with prevailing shifts to teaching and learning landscapes. The pandemic accelerated trends already in motion, and although our starting points for hybrid models have been hatched from necessity and trauma, are we now heading towards a brighter future?

Fran Myers (Open University), Hilary Collins (University of the West of Scotland) and Hayley Glover (Open University)

Special Issue: ‘Precarity and illusions of certainty in higher education teaching’

Photo by Sebastian Arie Voortman on Pexels.com

The term ‘precarity’ has been used for many years in theorising insecure employment relations. There has been a longstanding trend in many countries, indeed, towards ever higher levels of casualised working conditions for those who teach in higher education. This new special issue of Teaching in Higher Education seeks to expand the boundaries around precarity in higher education teaching, in the hope of opening up new ways forward.

Precarious working conditions affect teaching in higher education

Research has already identified ways in which employing teaching staff on precarious contracts affects their teaching. It is not that such staff are poor quality teachers as such, but that the conditions under which they are employed pose challenges. How do you get to know your students without a suitable space in which to see them or without adequate time? How do you integrate into an academic community if you are not present at departmental meetings and not paid to engage in relevant professional development? In addition, it is well established that casualised working conditions affect some individuals more than others. Simon Marginson argued some 30 years ago that female academics were being disproportionately affected by employment on casual contracts.

Expanding the boundaries around precarity in teaching

Ongoing increases in the use of temporary contracts despite such research findings would suggest, though, that further insight would be valuable. We still find O’Keefe and Courtois recently arguing that women are particularly likely to work on casualised contracts, and thereby to experience gender inequality. It is one thing to be aware that discrepancies in working conditions between different members of staff promote inequities and constrain teaching quality, but something quite different for this to translate into revised policy and practice in the face of a global trend such as marketisation.

For change to happen, there is a need to develop further understanding of what is at stake for teaching in higher education where staff are employed on precarious contracts. In this, it is helpful to distinguish an overall condition of vulnerability from the precarity that represents a key feature of a labour regime. Such a perspective, indeed, helps to ensure that one does not simply concentrate on the stable forms of employment that particularly characterise economic activity in the Global North. The studies in this special issue would suggest that a response that targets the contractual terms of staff is far from the only way forward.

Inter-locking challenges

It must be recognised in introducing each of the papers, though, that the range of challenges faced by staff on precarious contracts is wide-ranging and substantive. The range of issues identified in the studies helps in filling out the scale of the challenge in addressing precarity in teaching.

For instance, Crutchley, Nahaboo and Rao investigated the experiences of 14 early-career teachers who had moved away from the national settings of their upbringings to work in higher education elsewhere.  Their study revealed how the academic citizenship of internationally-mobile early-career teachers is influenced by multiple expressions of precarity, taking in issues that relate to migration, identity, economic standing and ideology.

McCulloch and Leonard, meanwhile, reviewed literature on the implications of precarious working conditions for university teaching, before going on to consider staff who support students’ capacity for academic writing. They identified challenges for the provision of academic writing support, from the way that knowledge is esteemed and communicated, and from the limitations of roles that involve partial sets of responsibilities.

The centrality of collegiality to teaching 

Even still, a key thread across the studies in the special issue concerns the way in which collegiality in teaching represents an essential feature of an academic culture that responds to the challenges that precarity poses.

Oleksiyenko and Terepyshchyi undertook a qualitative study of the lived experience of 39 Ukrainian academics as they responded to the hardships of teaching in the midst of a war. The study highlights the value of academics in such an environment making contributions to university governance and taking a shared responsibility for academic life.

Collective organising offers realistic possibilities for staff to challenge normative discourses, as Wood et al. considered in their study of 13 teacher educators in Australia and New Zealand during the Covid-19 pandemic. They found that work to uphold teaching quality, collegiality, critical perspectives and care for others can constitute resistance that offers reasons for hope in the face of extreme forms of precarity.

Given the centrality of academic judgment in teaching, Glover, Myers and Collins were also clear that scope is present for teachers, in dialogue with others, to find their voice even in an extreme setting such as a pandemic. They explored the experience of twelve tutors from business and law in the UK during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

New perspectives on taking responsibility 

Misiaszek completed an experimental autoethnographic account of a range of precarities experienced as a lecturer working within China. Her work highlights the personal responsibility that comes from engaging with students, and that “every teaching moment holds the potential to be a new point of departure”.

Jimenez, meanwhile, offers an essay that draws together a body of theory and practice on the precarious expressions of identity that teaching staff experience in the face of functional university environments. He argues that one’s role as a teacher should be open both to encounters with students and to knowledge – and that only in this way can all teachers respond adequately to the pressures that they face.

Conclusions

The value of relationality and care-centric academic cultures is in view across the special issue. There is a need for permanent members of staff to sidestep aspects of performativity. The sector would benefit from new practices and forms of collective organising that give voice to staff in precarious contexts. If transformation of the conditions of vulnerability of those who teach in higher education is to occur, it will be critical to explore such avenues.

Peter Kahn (University of Manchester), Marie-Pierre Moreau (Anglia-Ruskin University) and Jess Gagnon (University of Manchester)

Special issue: call for papers

Getting critical about critique in higher education

Special issue editors: Kathy Luckett and Ibrar Bhatt

Why get critical about critique?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com

In the 21^st century, we believe we are living through an epochal shift or what, in a different historical context, Gramsci called an ‘interregnum’, as we witness its ‘morbid symptoms’ (in which the old is dying but the new cannot yet be born) (Achcar, 2022).

Environmentally, we are witnessing a catastrophe, geo-politically, we are living through a series of new wars across the globe, leading to severe instability, suffering of civilians, displacement, migration and grinding poverty. The combination of new wars, climate change and the greed of global transnational corporations serve to compound the unconscionable disparities between peoples of the global North and South. In this context, the humanist, Eurocentric ideal of Man uniquely endowed with rational, moral and self-regulating powers and linked to a teleology of scientific and cultural progress, exemplified by European history, is no longer tolerated; it has been contradicted time and again by the realities of domination, violence and terror. In this context, Luckett and Bhatt (2024) propose the need for a multipolar worldview to enhance critical engagements about critique in higher education.

The need for a special issue

It is in this context that in 2025, Teaching in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives will celebrate its 30th anniversary. To mark the occasion, we intend to publish a special issue to scrutinise and interrogate the definitions and import of terms such as ‘critical’, ‘critique’, and ‘criticality’, particularly in the context of research and praxis of teaching in higher education. In addition to its sub-title, Critical Perspectives (added in 2017), these terms are peppered across the Aims and Scope of the journal and its guidelines for authors. However, despite its pervasiveness in higher education discourse, the meanings of the concept remain vague and implicit and often decontextualized (see Luckett and Bhatt 2024). Of greater concern is recognition of the fact that haziness around the meaning of such a key concept in higher education can function as a mechanism of exclusion and domination (Bozalek & Romano 2023, Stables 2003, Taylor et al. 2023).

It is therefore urgent for a journal such as Teaching in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives to host a debate around the concept of critical, criticality or critique; to learn what this might mean for sober self-critique and for what and how we publish going forward. We therefore ask contributors to engage with approaches that aim to foster active, ethically conscious, and socially aware critical engagements for and on teaching in higher education. These approaches should transcend the academic paradigms traditionally prevalent in our journal. This includes addressing the provocations in Luckett and Bhatt’s (2024) Point of Departure article, ‘Getting Critical about Critique’, which accompanies this Call for Papers. This article includes a range of provocations from scholars working in higher education and beyond and is intended to elicit further debate around this question.

In this special issue, we feel it imperative to draw from a wide palette of epistemic systems and perspectives. We therefore encourage submissions written from positions other than those usually published in the journal – including from different socio-political, cultural, epistemological or ontological positions or loci of enunciation. We hope that contributions to the special issue will challenge how we frame and manage the journal and thus open up, enrich and diversify what we read, teach and publish. A key question we hope will be addressed in this special issue is:

How might the current planetary context, a multipolar worldview and/or associated epistemic shifts, change the meanings and import of the concept of critique for teaching and scholarly work in higher education?

Further questions or themes that could be addressed include:

• How might a particular conceptual framework, social theory or radical epistemology shift the meaning of critique, and what might be the practical implications for teaching in higher education?
• What might be alternative ways of re-imagining the idea of critique – and what could this mean for practices of teaching and learning?
• What is the role of ethics, normative theories, religion, spirituality and/or values in rethinking prevailing notions and practices of teaching critical thinking?
• How might we critically re-think and re-fashion well-used teaching practices to address a contemporary challenge or crisis (e.g. techno-cultural change, environmental crises, socio-political and epistemological challenges and refusals)?
• What are the cognitive blocks, self-affirming discourses and ideologies, and structural and institutional constraints that might limit a journal such as Teaching in Higher Education’s capacity for self-critique and transformative action? And how could these be addressed?

Timelines and details for submission

Given the distinctive focus of this special issue, we are particularly interested in contributions (3,000-4,000 words) to our Points of Departure section of the journal (see here for information). In addition to this, we welcome submissions across various genres, including regular research articles, autoethnographic pieces, or dialogical accounts. These submissions should offer valuable insights or commentary on contemporary issues requiring further investigation, reflection, or debate. They may also challenge, critique, or provoke new thinking on established ideas, norms, or methodologies.

• Abstracts of no more than 750 words should be submitted here by 31st May 2024.
• Decisions on abstracts will be communicated to authors by 21st June 2024.
• Draft full papers must be submitted through the journal’s website by 15th October 2024.

For advice on submitting a paper, please also see: https://teachinginhighereducation.wordpress.com/seven-questions-for-potential-authors-how-to-get-published-in-teaching-in-higher-education

You may also wish to read our earlier blog post about criticality: https://teachinginhighereducation.wordpress.com/exploring-what-it-means-for-teaching-in-higher-education-to-have-critical-perspectives/

Critical scholarship on teaching and learning in Latin America

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Learning and teaching is always situated and negotiated in socio-political contexts in which people and institutions reside. We are therefore starting a series of online collections with a critical regional focus, to consolidate scholarship on teaching and learning that emerges from people’s subjectivities and responses to these contexts. We hope these collections will become critical sites for understanding pedagogy and learning and their connections to and situatedness in ‘societal challenges’.

We begin with the focus on Latin America. The collection includes existing articles in Teaching in Higher Education about research conducted in Latin American countries. Collectively, the articles foreground the chorus of voices that offer contextualised insights on education, emerging from complex historical realities and structural conditions; they point to the strong ethical-political influence on universities and the practice and theory of teaching and learning being connected to the social issues affecting the region. The authors highlight the influence of these issues on teaching and learning in higher education and critically evaluate the need for teaching and learning to be emotional, reflexive and re-humanising; and that it is about resistance and justice, which can be fostered through dialogic pedagogical approaches. These approaches engage students and staff in a critique of performativity, predictability and standardisation of neoliberal higher education.

The articles in the collection educate readers about their limitations in the context of Latin American universities, and instead offer the theory and examples of pedagogical practice that enable readers to encounter new voices and viewpoints, and possibilities for education:

• Disrupting curricula and pedagogies in Latin American universities: six criteria for decolonising the university – Carolina Guzmán Valenzuela
• Reflexivity and agency in university-based teacher educators: a critical realist analysis – Yenny Hinostroza-Paredes
• The direction of reforms and job satisfaction among teaching staff in higher education in Mexico – Jon Olaskoaga-Larrauri, Carmen E. Rodríguez-Armenta & Elia Marúm-Espinosa
• Pedagogical practice as ‘feeling-thinking’ praxis in higher education: a case study in Colombia – Doris Santos & Sandra Soler
• Teacher change: ideas emerging from a project for the teaching of university mathematics – Maria Trigueros & Maria-Dolores Lozano
• An interrogation of the role of critical thinking in English language pedagogy in Chile – Leonardo Veliz & Mauricio Veliz-Campos
• Dialogic approaches to writing: student perspectives on two Argentinian doctoral initiatives – Guadalupe Álvarez & Laura Colombo
• Understanding the cultural construction of wealth and power differentials through ethnographic narrative analysis in Colombia – Carlos R. Ruano
• Indigenous students’ agency vis-à-vis the practices of recognition and invisibilization in a multilingual university – José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia & Norbella Miranda

Aneta Hayes, Executive Editor

Teaching just-based environmental sustainability in higher education: generative dialogues

In July 2023, we published our special issue entitled, “Higher Education Teaching of Environmentally Just Sustainability”.  Edited by Greg William Misiaszek and Cae Rodrigues, this brought together twelve papers from noted and newer scholars drawn from across the globe.  As part of this project, we have also collated video contributions from several of the authors, with framing comments from the editors:

 

1. Contemplative, holistic eco-justice pedagogies in higher education: from anthropocentrism to fostering deep love and respect for nature

Jing Lin, Amanda Fiore, Erin Sorensen, Virginia Gomes, Joey Haavik, Maha Malik, Shue-kei Joanna Mok, Jordan Scanlon, Emmanuel Wanjala & Anna Grigoryeva

 

2. Indigenizing environmental sustainability curriculum and pedagogy: confronting our global ecological crisis via Indigenous sustainabilities

Jeremy Jimenez & Peter Kabachnik

 

3. A slippery cousin to ‘development’? The concept of ‘impact’ in teaching sustainability in design education

Deanna Meth, Claire Brophy & Sheona Thomson

 

4. The climate crisis as a driver for pedagogical renewal in higher education

Tristan McCowan

 

5. Environmental sustainability and social justice in higher education: a critical (eco)feminist service-learning approach in sports sciences

Nuria Cuenca-Soto, Luis Fernando Martínez-Muñoz, Oscar Chiva-Bartoll & María Luisa Santos-Pastor

 

6. Co-operatives for learning in higher education: experiences of undergraduate students from environmental sciences

Mariona Espinet, German Llerena, Laísa M. Freire dos Santos, S. Lizette Ramos de Robles & Mariona Massip

 

7. Teaching just-based environmental sustainability in higher education: generative dialogues

Greg William Misiaszek & Cae Rodrigues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond reading list reform: how are people of colour represented in lecture slide images?

Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com

Around the world – and particularly in the UK right now – scholars are rethinking their curricula with attention to racial and cultural inclusivity, sometimes described as decolonising or diversifying the curricula or making it more culturally sensitive, responsive, or affirming. We were selected by TASO to participate in an evaluation of the impact of the Diversity Mark project at the University of Kent, a project intended to create more culturally sensitive curricula.

The full evaluation sought to address whether and how culturally sensitive curricula might reduce race awarding gaps, which is the gap between the percentage of white students who are awarded “good” degrees (first or 2.1 degree classifications) and racially minoritised students who are awarded good degrees. Universities are being held accountable by the Office for Students for eliminating gaps between different student groups by 2030. One approach being pursued is reforming curricula to make them more culturally sensitive.

How do we know whether a curriculum is culturally sensitive?

Before one can evaluate the impact of a curricular reform, one needs to characterise whether an intervention was successful in changing curricula. The Diversity Mark pilot began in 2018 with a focus on reading lists (Adewumi & Mitton, 2022; Adewumi et al, 2022), showing that most core reading lists in the social sciences, where the pilot took place, were dominated by white, male authors from Europe and the US. The Diversity Mark pilot raised academics’ awareness of the need to diversify their reading lists so that they include perspectives from global South scholars on the social sciences.

For the TASO evaluation, we repeated analysis of reading lists, but we wanted to use the funding to extend evaluation to other aspects of the curriculum that hadn’t been investigated previously, developing new methods for interrogating the cultural sensitivity of curricula. We considered Thomas and Quinlan (2023) and Quinlan et al. (2022)’s definition of culturally sensitive curriculum, which details six aspects of curriculum, leading us to a visual content analysis of lecture slides.

Our new article

In our recent article in Teaching in Higher Education entitled ‘Diversifying curricula: how are people of colour represented in lecture slide images?’ we focused specifically on the extent to which people of colour were represented in lecture slide images and the extent to which those were positive depictions or negative portrayals. Although some studies of American textbooks have focused on visual analysis of images, with attention to gender and racial representations, we found no such studies in the UK, nor did any focus on racial representation in lecture slides. As textbooks are used less frequently in the UK, lecturer-produced slides become important curricular materials summarising key course content.

We suspected that academics may not be very intentional in considering issues of racial representation when selecting images to illustrate their slides. Therefore, they may present stereotypical and negative representations or reproduce current social and economic disparities. In either case, racially minoritised students may not see people who look like them in the kinds of positions to which they might aspire as higher education graduates.

How do you analyse the cultural sensitivity of lecture slides?

We analysed 250 images from four different first year social science modules. To do so, we developed new approaches and measures, blending qualitative and quantitative analyses to characterise individual images, the ‘actors’ (individuals portrayed) in those images, and the corpus.

We hope you’ll read the whole article, but we will say that our hunches were confirmed. Black and Asian people were under-represented in the slide images and much less likely to be in positions of power or in roles that racially minoritised students might find inspiring.  These absences help to concretely illustrate why racially minoritised students in the UK have rated their curriculum as less culturally sensitive than their white peers, as we have found in other studies (Thomas and Quinlan, 2023; Quinlan et al., 2022) and in our own survey results as part of this evaluation.

In addition to continued absences of people of colour on reading lists, as we’ve documented elsewhere (Adewumi & Mitton, 2022; Adewumi et al. 2022), this study shows that people of colour are also often absent generally in lecture slides images. They are specifically missing in positions of power. These findings were true even among slide sets generated by academics with commitments to the Diversity Mark programme.

We hope this study will generate awareness and change in lecture slide imagery as one part of the much wider effort to create culturally sensitive curricula in higher education.

Kathleen M Quinlan (University of Kent), Barbara Adewumi (University of Kent) and Mi Young Ahn (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Inclusion of higher education disabled students: a Q-methodology study of lecturers’ attitudes

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

The origins for the inclusion of disabled students in higher education lie in primary and secondary education: in the UK, the Warnock Report and the subsequent 1981 Education Act sought to transform the educational provision of ‘handicapped’ children by introducing the term ‘special educational needs’ (SEN) and advocating the integration of children with SEN in mainstream schools as opposed to segregation in special schools.

My interest in inclusion stems from being an undergraduate on a BEd Primary and Special Education course during this significant period in the history of special education. I undertook a teaching practice in a special school for ‘educationally subnormal’ (the derogatory term used at the time) children. I therefore recall being excited by what I considered to be the revolutionary ideas in the Warnock Report about ‘integration’ (in later years ‘inclusion’) and the new terminology. Since qualifying and before teaching in further and higher education sectors, I worked as a primary school teacher and SEN coordinator, experiencing a further 40 years of evolving inclusion policy. Whilst there has been progress relating to the inclusion of disabled children in primary schools and widening participation for disabled higher education students there remain major challenges and barriers to address.

In my current role as a university lecturer, I am mindful of the statistics that show disabled students are among those likelier to withdraw from university and have lower degree outcomes (Office for Students, 2022). I am also aware of the barriers faced by disabled students, particularly concerning stigma, disclosure, and social inclusion, rooted in historical misrepresentations of disability remaining intact in contemporary society (Shaw, 2021). I believe it is critical to identify and dismantle the ableist barriers faced by disabled higher education students still denied the socially just opportunity to achieve their potential and make a positive contribution to society.

My new article in Teaching in Higher Education further investigates one such potential barrier impacting disabled students’ higher education experiences: lecturers’ attitudes toward disability and inclusion of disabled higher education students. Evaluating lecturers’ attitudes is essential to inform higher educationpolicy and practice and subsequently improve the satisfaction, retention, and outcomes of disabled students. My article uses Q-methodology which combines quantitative and qualitative techniques thus bringing methodological novelty to disability research and higher education. Ableism provides a relevant theoretical framework to theorise and make sense of the attitudes of lecturers.

I chose to publish in Teaching in Higher Education as opposed to a journal appealing to those specifically interested in disability inclusion because the inclusion of disabled students is the responsibility of all those involved in higher education teaching. As they read the article, I hope readers reflect on their attitudes and approach to disability inclusion. Certainly, researching attitudes towards disability and inclusion I have come to reflect on my practice as a teacher at primary, further and higher education levels and somewhat uncomfortably realised that, unintentionally, in fact often with the best of intentions, my practice has not always been as inclusive as I thought it was or could have been.

For me, honest reflection is key to improving higher education policy and practice. I believe the article’s recommendations for research aligned with disabled students’ lived experience and for staff training on disability awareness and anti-ableist pedagogies plus the allocation of time and resources will positively impact disabled higher education students.

Anne Shaw (University of Bolton)