The focus of this paper is on the contestations and dilemmas emergent in the higher education curriculum in a context of increasing processes of unbundling, digitisation and marketisation. The paper explores the notion of contestation through the theoretical lens of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. It points to illustrative examples of this…

Constructive alignment (CA) has developed into one of the most significant concepts in higher education since its establishment in the late 1990s. CA is a powerful instrument for curriculum design that aligns learning outcomes with teaching and learning activities and assessments to enhance the quality of students' learning. In this conceptual…

What knowledge matters in health professions education is an issue of debate in the literature, foregrounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and informed by calls for students who are not only clinically competent, but also critically conscious of global health inequity. Building on this work, this paper explores what kinds of knowledge are legitimated…

Suellen Shay's research focused extensively on both the challenges of creating socially-just higher education curricula and the knowledge and practices of the field of educational development. Shay's work highlights the important ways in which curricula define what it means to be educated and the importance of socially-just curricula that provide…

Despite the pervasive impact of US imperialism, it is often ignored in US schools and teacher preparation programs. This paper introduces the concept of "imperial evasion," which refers to the process of ignoring and denying imperialism and its effects. The authors argue that it is imperative that educators work to interrogate…

Conceptualizations of time and work in the higher education context are increasingly atomized, as time is seen as measurable, quantifiable, and limited. This growing phenomenon, seen through the lens of projectification, has the power to reconceptualize how university leaders and the academic workforce consider and utilize their time and work,…

In this paper, we as the teachers and researchers of a course titled Global education development informed by theories of decoloniality, report on our analysis of our self-critical and constructive dialogue on the course design, its underlying assumptions, expectations, implementation, success and needs for improvement. We centered decoloniality…

In higher education, despite the emphasis on student-centred pedagogical approaches, undergraduate research methods pedagogy remains surprisingly teacher-directed. Consequently, it may lead to research methods students assuming that becoming a researcher involves gathering information rather than it being a continuous developmental process. To…

This paper uses Bernstein's sociology of knowledge and studies of professional knowledge and expertise to identify how knowledge value is constituted in higher education curricula. It is argued that different knowledge structures and forms of disciplinary community influence how curricula are determined, and lead to distinctive types of knowledge…

The paper argues that powerful regional knowledge is necessary and possible and that there are historical precedents supporting these claims. Regional knowledge is being used in a double sense: the first Bernsteinian, the second in relation to knowledge generated outside the academy. Both are important if the debate is not to be confined solely to…

The idea of threshold concepts (TC) has been well received across the higher education community. However the concept's framework is still evolving and the literature uses the framework in different ways. Just over a decade since the idea first captured interest, it is opportune to explore the nature of that discourse, and the kinds of enquiry…

For postgraduate students and early career academics, the pressure to publish can be acute because gaining, and keeping, an academic job depends on producing publishable writing. As these pressures affect more scholars globally, there is increased demand for innovative pedagogies to support writers' development. In this study, students from a…

This paper argues that curriculum decision-making in the South African University of Technology (UoT) environment is affected not only by industry and disciplinary demands, but also by socio-structural features and ideologies particular to this educational sector. It supports the view that recontextualisation processes are subject to multiple…

Tomorrow's professionals will require an enhanced capacity for collaboration, cooperation and creative thinking. Markauskaite and Goodyear (Markauskaite, L., and P. Goodyear. 2016. "Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education: Innovation, Knowledgeable Action and Actionable Knowledge". Springer) have posited "epistemic…

This study addresses the challenges concerning the internationalisation of higher education, with a particular focus on designing new international programmes. It presents a case study of a novel international study programme: the MA in Media Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of Lapland, Finland. The study looks into its…