In response to challenges emerging in society, universities are searching for ways to innovate their courses through novel institutional educational policies and practices. Those efforts, however, are often not informed by knowledge about course innovation characteristics university-wide, and are often not supported by processes of reflection…

This paper focuses on the experiences of four facilitators of a group mentoring programme for doctoral students aspiring to become academics. The methodology utilised collective sensemaking in a collaborative autoethnography. Aided by agreed reflective prompts, we initially analysed our own and each other's written accounts. This illuminated the…

Critical-thinking skills are a desired higher education outcome and a primary goal in education. This research focuses on fostering college students' critical thinking through reflective writing. During an 18-week study, a total of 60 English majors were recruited. Both quantitative and qualitative data was collected, including 1) the pre- and…

This paper argues that public accountability discourse and research quality processes designed to support it are associated with the validation of methodological approaches in social research which claim to capture the real condition of the social world and to remedy its ailments, supporting an expansion of representative modes of scholarship, and…

Students develop diversity-relevant graduate attributes over time. First steps to cross-cultural competency include learning to recognise and respectfully engage with competing interpretations of history and disparate positionalities, including Indigenous diversity. To learn such skills, students need multiple non-threatening opportunities to…

This article presents an original engagement with research into emotions in the PhD to ask 'Where's the validation?' by using emotion work as a theoretical foundation. We develop a focus on emotional dissonance in the PhD journey to explore challenges around managing emotion. We explore how PhD students manage emotions around their projects and…

As an experienced participant in academic writing retreats, I became aware of conflicting feelings during retreats between ideas of restorative practice and the pressure to produce outputs. Through autoethnographic inquiry, I examined this conflict. I wrote a reflective journal to describe my lived experience of a recent retreat and analysed the…

The University of Sydney has introduced a program of engaging engineering students throughout their degree program in diverse forms of exposure to, and engagement with, professional practice. As part of this program students are required to write detailed reflections on each activity. These reflections provide a rich source of information…

This article presents an ethnographic case study of pre-service teachers' transformative learning in a Culture-Writing course at a Chinese university. In recounting three stories with fieldwork data gleaned from moments of students' pre-class discussions, reflective writings, and reports on term-paper projects, this study showcases how a group of…

The professional development of doctoral supervisors is a relatively new area of academic development that is still non-existent in many higher education institutions worldwide. This is particularly relevant to explore as several other studies indicate that the quality of doctoral supervision has a direct impact on the doctoral student progression…

Pedagogical partnerships are rarely used to explore how students develop agency through Work Integrated Learning (WIL). This study contributes to this gap by exploring how pedagogical partnerships between students, industry experts and subject leaders in a postgraduate online WIL capstone assisted students to gain clarity about their professional…

Against the backdrop of prevalent student attrition in engineering education, this study draws upon Margaret Archer's social realistic theory and offers a close-up analysis of how structural and cultural factors interplay to affect Chinese university engineering faculty members' perceptions of and agency in practicing 'scholarly teaching'.…

While previous studies have explored many aspects of teacher educators' identities, limited attention has been paid to how teacher educators understand the process of their academic identity construction in higher education. To address this issue, we draw on interviews and other supplementary data collected from 19 teacher education academics in…

With society increasingly valuing soft skills and competencies, reflective practices are more commonly adopted in higher education, particularly for experiential learning. As reflective writing is becoming a part of official assessments in many courses, an overarching question arises as to how teachers are currently assessing reflections. This…