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Quality teaching in higher education (HE) is gaining increasing international attention and pedagogical innovation is seen as an important construct of quality teaching. The drivers for pedagogical innovation include the need for 21st century skills and understandings, student demographics and empowerment, technological advances, and a turn to teaching in HE. Defining innovative pedagogies is a recurring challenge in the literature and a key focus of this article. Using an investigation into innovative approaches to teaching and learning at one New Zealand university, prevailing themes of newness, benefit, and student outcomes are discussed to develop a working definition. What is missing from the discourses and definitions is specific consideration of the influence of context on what counts as pedagogical innovation. In light of this, the authors offer an emergent definition of pedagogical innovation in higher education.

ABSTRACTAcademic transcripts record students’ learning, providing a grade which indicates the student has achieved a certified level of disciplinary knowledge and skill. However, recognising what a graduate has accomplished during a course, or over a programme is much more involved: it includes not only disciplinary awareness but students’ learning processes (e.g., autonomous learning), social aptitude (e.g., diversity awareness and collaborative skills), and even their professional readiness (e.g., time-management and resilience). Such learning is often invisible on university academic rubrics and transcripts, and may be difficult for students to articulate and evidence to others. In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘invisible’ graduate attributes at the tertiary level, distinguishing such unassessed/unassessable attributes from more visible graduate attributes. We then introduce our conceptual framework, SEEN, for articulating, evidencing and actively developing ‘invisible’ attributes. We argue that the SEEN framework provides the basis for a toolkit for students, lecturers and employers.

Graduate capabilities are an essential aspect of undergraduate development in higher education. Accordingly, La Trobe University's Design for learninghas identified particular university-wide graduate capabilities and required all faculties to explicitly embed these in their curricula. The Faculty of Law and Management developed an approach to map the teaching and assessment of eight graduate capabilities across the first year of the faculty's degree programmes, allowing staff to evaluate the embedding of graduate capabilities and identifying where they might further develop their curricula. This article describes a process designed to collect, analyse and present data on current teaching and assessment of graduate capabilities. The discursive approach supports reflective practice in curriculum design while the resulting heat maps provide diagrammatic accounts of current practices and indicators of where redesign of curriculum should centre.

Despite considerable research on teaching and learning in higher education, the relationship between university teachers' and students' understandings of the same teaching-learning events has not been a focus. This exploratory qualitative study used individual interviews to investigate the role of conceptions of teaching, learning and knowledge in a lecturer's and three first-year students' understandings of a lecture on Hamlet and to compare the meaning intended by the lecturer with that perceived by his students. A video-taped lecture was used as a focus for discussion in interviews and individual case studies were developed. Case studies were compared to explore whether lecturer and student conceptions could explain their relative lecture descriptions. The concept of 'communicative alignment' was adopted to describe this teaching-learning relationship.