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While much work has focused on pedagogical innovation processes within universities, less has been said of the processes and cultures which foster and give rise to creativity within higher education and the ways in which faculty members are encouraged to develop their pedagogy across disciplines and within their departments. This paper examines the ways campus spaces at a UK university are utilised by staff for peer learning and the barriers and affordances for innovation and creativity in educational practice. Utilising an interdisciplinary design, this paper suggests that the various spaces available to university teaching staff are able to be further utilised to support creative practice and peer learning, presented as four design principles: innovation happens in everyday spaces, communal spaces need social functions, forums have different scales, and collaborative spaces require a collective culture. The normalising of a culture of innovation requires both physical and behavioural adjustments to the use of space, suggesting that both faculty and institutions need to work together to reimagine spaces for faculty peer learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Progress files, involving personal development planning (PDP), are becoming a feature of many higher education systems internationally. In the UK they will become mandatory for all undergraduate students from 2005. This presents a major implementation challenge, because while reflection has been a cornerstone of practice in some areas of higher education for a considerable time, its generalisation as national policy changes its discursive location. The paper presents findings from a case study of the implementation of PF in one UK Higher Education Institution (HEI). It reports on how staff in one institution understand PF in the context of national policy, and on how they interpret the challenges they face in facilitating reflection for all students. The paper argues that pedagogical innovations take on a different meaning when applied to the system as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networking and collaboration in educational settings have become increasingly important in terms of supporting innovation and policy developments in many educational systems. However, to date, the role and action of the middle tier remains an under-researched area, especially in the United Kingdom. This paper draws on findings from a study of district level (local authorities (LAs)) capacity to broker and facilitate school-based networks within a context of complex multiple agendas. The study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) Innovations Unit and the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) involved 19 LAs over a two-year period. The authors worked as second order action researchers supporting local authority staff develop a range of strategies to broker and facilitate school-to-school networks. This paper draws on Habermassian notions of a critical theorem to describe the construction and use of a new theoretical framework outlining the strategies adopted by the middle tier officers within the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Interdisciplinary collaboration and communication during dental training has become an increasingly influential idea within dental schools, both in the United Kingdom and European contexts. Research into this curriculum innovation has provided evidence to argue that benefits accrue both in terms of professional understanding and the development of dental professional learning dispositions.Objective This study investigates the interactions within a trainee dental team. In particular, the paper reports the professional experiences and development of trainee dental technicians and undergraduate dental students during a prolonged shared learning exercise in a combined UK university dental school and hospital.Methods Using a qualitative approach with a phenomenological framework, data sources included reflective diaries, focus group interviews and participant feedback.Results Eleven major domains were identified that accurately characterised the participants' beliefs, thoughts and practices. The results indicate that both trainee dental technicians and undergraduate dental students were pragmatic but positive in terms of their expectations of shared learning. In particular, they regarded the exercise as useful in terms of communication and understanding each other's role. Evidence also indicated the presence of original elements such as crisis of confidence and feelings of awkwardness that do not arise in other studies.Conclusions The implications for dental education are that for effective professional collaboration during training to take place a merger of interests among educators and policy developers in dental education must occur, and the challenges encountered within practice cultures must somehow be overcome. Therefore, more investment in evaluating research into interprofessional learning in dentistry would contribute to our knowledge about the place and role of interprofessional education in the professional dental curriculum and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the issues of trust, control, professional autonomy and accountability in higher education quality assurance in the UK. The main part of this article is conceptual, but it includes results from semi-structured interviews with academic staff that were conducted at two “new university” business schools. Both institutions are broadly similar in their key characteristics and have experienced a transformation to university status in the early 1990s. The article argues that there has been a change from informal “light-touch” quality control systems based on local practices and a significant amount of trust and professional autonomy in the early 1990s to a highly prescribed process of audit-based quality control today. The article argues that accountability and transparency are important principles that academics should wholeheartedly embrace, but that the audit format adopted in the UK introduces a one-way accountability and provides “rituals of verification” (Power 1997) instead of fostering trust, has high opportunity costs and may well be detrimental to innovative teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]