Definitions and understandings of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), scholarly teaching, and research are multiple and often conflicting. Reflecting on Boyer's intention for academic work to be recognised as overlapping and interconnected, in this paper we examine some of the commonly assumed models of Boyer's scholarship of teaching…

The value of traditional faculty development programmes has been questioned regarding its effectiveness in transforming clinical education. Rather than training faculty separately from their colleagues, the faculty development programme described in this paper presented an opportunity for teams of faculty to improve clinical education by…

The purpose of this article is to challenge the idea of incompatibility between links to research and links to professional practice in engineering education. The concept of 'academic drift' is introduced, both related to drift towards theory and towards research links in the curriculum. Empirical data were collected through a case study conducted…

Within higher education literature, "assessment" and "graduate employability" are linked and co-presented, in that quality student assessment is purported to enhance employability. This research was designed to query the extent to which these same conceptual links are perceived by those actively involved in higher education.…

A body of literature on students as partners (SaP) in higher education has emerged over the last decade that documents, shares, and evaluates SaP approaches. As is typical in emerging fields of inquiry, scholars differ regarding how they see the relationship between the developments in SaP practices and the theoretical explanations that guide,…

The ongoing challenges in equitable research involving Indigenous peoples and their communities and ways to overcome these are discussed in this article. Central to this article is the narrative reflection of a non-Indigenous researcher following research on Indigenous spirituality, well-being and resilience in the Yaegl community of northern New…

This conceptual study argues that the scholarship of teaching is not just an evidence-based but also a virtues-based practice. To this end, it pursues two interrelated objectives. First, it seeks to show that the scholarship of teaching is supported by the "intellectual" virtues of "episteme" (theoretical knowledge),…

Universities are under stress and pressures to critically evaluate and reform curriculum and the way learning and teaching are implemented. Tensions appear to exist among the external pressures, the organisational structure of universities and their daily operations that are often conflicted and appear to work against coherence and depth in…

This paper discusses a cross-cultural pedagogical approach, couched in a theory-practice nexus, used at a Victorian regional university to guide non-Indigenous pre-service teachers' (PSTs) engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives and cultures. We have drawn on qualitative and statistical data, and current issues in…

"Wicked" issues are one-off problems that have no algorithms to follow to solutions. They are ill-understood or understood in multiple, perhaps conflicting, ways and are fundamentally complex in character. This paper argues that the term is an apt one to describe many aspects of the relationship between theory and data in educational research, and…

There is growing interest in the role Communities of Practice (CoPs) play in continuing professional development of academics. However, very little research has explored how CoP theory is applied in practice in academic settings. Using the concepts of resonance and micro-mobilisation from social movement theory, we explore academic engagement (and…

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…

The article begins by examining the variety of meanings that can be given to the word "theory", the different attitudes that may be taken towards theories of these various types and some of the problems associated with them. The second half of the article focuses on one of these types, explanatory theory, and the question of what is required if…

This article considers the value of clarity--of theory, method and purposes--in educational research. It draws upon the work of early critical theorist, Theodor Adorno, and particularly his notion of negative dialectics and his challenge to the traditional dichotomy of theory and practice. Using the notions of virtuous mess and wicked clarity, I…

This paper calls into question the idea that we can simply think about higher education as a research field and explores different meanings of the term field. It asks whether there are related fields: research into higher education, academic development and disciplinary teaching research, rather than one. The approach of the paper is conceptual,…