The following article presents the findings of a Reverse Mentoring evaluation project conducted at a modern university in northwest England, which has a high proportion of students from non-traditional educational backgrounds. Using a reverse mentoring framework, the traditional mentor-mentee relationship was flipped with students serving as…

This article responds to a trend of people pursuing academic careers after, or alongside, participation in popular music scenes and subcultures, applying scholarly perspectives on how identity can inform teaching and recognising the pedagogical benefits of teachers drawing on their multifaceted lives. The authors reflect critically on their…

This article outlines a workshop orienting sociology graduate students to overcoming challenges in publishing. Although graduate students are increasingly told to publish, little guidance exists on how to best prepare them for this venture; mentorship scholarship typically assumes the professor--student relationship is the best or most appropriate…

This article is based on the journeys of four women who completed their doctorates in the discipline of Sociology. The four former doctoral students studied at the same distance education institution in South Africa, but they hail from Nigeria, Lesotho and Cameroon, respectively. Together with their former supervisor, autoethnography is used to…

The "sociological imagination"--the recognition of the relationship between "private troubles" and "public issues" (Mills [1959] 2000. "The Sociological Imagination". Oxford: Oxford University Press: 8)--is central to the discipline of sociology. This article reports findings of a 2014 study which…

This paper takes up issues raised in two articles by Nick Zepke and portrayed here as "the Zepke thesis". This thesis argues that the literature on, interest in and practices around student engagement in higher education have an elective affinity with neo-liberal ideology. At one level this paper counters many of the assertions that…

Educational research indicates that teachers revealing and utilizing students' prior knowledge supports students' academic learning. Yet, the variation in students' prior knowledge is not fully known. To better understand students' prior knowledge, I drew on sociocultural learning theories to examine racially and ethnically diverse college…

Previous research identifies the importance of feminist knowledge for improving gender equity, economic prosperity and social justice for all. However, there are difficulties in embedding feminist knowledge in higher education curricula. Across England, undergraduate sociology is a key site for acquiring feminist knowledge. In a study of four…

Collaborative learning and critical pedagogy are widely recognized as "empowering" pedagogies for higher education. Yet, the practical implementation of both has a mixed record. The question, then, is: How could collaborative and critical pedagogies be empowered themselves? This paper makes a primarily theoretical case for discourse…

As higher education embraces the ideologies of the market, educators are being asked to teach evermore students with fewer resources. Running counter to the trend of marketization, a decentralized group of educators are taking advantage of Web 2.0 technologies (including Facebook, Twitter, and blogging platforms such as Wordpress, etc.) to…

Little is known about what happens to disciplinary knowledge when it is taught in contemporary UK universities of different status. Here, Basil Bernstein's theories are applied to what sociology lecturers say about teaching, demonstrating that in conditions in which students are less likely to engage with sociological theory, lecturers,…

In Turkey, one of the major challenges that university education faces is the indifference of young people towards social issues. The aim of this article is to contribute to the "practice" of critical pedagogy by proposing that showing movies is an important critical teaching method with the power both to give pleasure to the students…

Reports an action research project at the State College of Education in Vienna, Austria, in which a sociology course for prospective teachers used English as the language of instruction. Evaluation indicates benefits for the students, the institution, and the instructor. Stresses the importance of institutional support for such efforts in…

Undergraduate nursing education in the United Kingdom is now at the university level, either through incorporation into universities or in semiautonomous colleges. This has required considerable cultural adjustment and created challenges, particularly with greater interaction of nursing with psychology, sociology, and biology. Changes are examined…