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Doctoral students' understandings of collegiality and their collegial practices warrant specific attention, yet are often addressed as implicit to peer learning and research communities, and ensconced in transferable skills as 'teamwork'. This article reports on research involving 43 doctoral students at one New Zealand university. Using a hybrid methodology that synergised social practice theory and phenomenography, the students participated in focus groups and paired hierarchical card sorting activities. The resultant conversations indicated that collegiality among doctoral students can manifest as four types of collegial practices: professional, intellectual, social, and emotional collegiality. Collegial practices offer doctoral students purposeful interaction, professional relationships, and respite from some of the emotional challenges of the doctorate. Accordingly, I argue that students, academics, and academic developers could adopt a more comprehensive approach than present to cultivate an environment of collegiality among doctoral students, and that collegial practices should be considered integral to doctoral professional development.

This article describes one aspect of a research project that sought to describe and interpret the perspectives of university colleagues who are community-engaged, about their community-engagement, within one research-intensive university in New Zealand. We explored the communication devices and processes used during community engagement, with a focus on social media, and in the context of identifying the professional development needs of colleagues within our institution. Our research involved an inductive analysis of 25 interviews with community-engaged university people, supported by context-generating discussions and workshops. Our data reveals reoccurring themes involving varying degrees of successful targeted use of social media, disappointment in the performance of social media, and confidence in traditional communication approaches. Overall we identified rational decision-making to find workable approaches, in an academic environment supported by skill transfer from private life to work life. We discuss the implications of our research to the roles and practices of academic development.

We explored how academic departments, university teachers and students in one research-led university in New Zealand identified and addressed challenges in achieving three particular graduate attributes. These attributes (global perspective, environmental literacy and those aspect of ethics that involve personal social responsibility) are distinctive in that they may encompass values, attitudes and future behaviours, in addition to knowledge and skills. We documented formal processes in each participating department; interviewed university teachers to understand how they conceptualised these attributes and the processes of teaching them; explored student perspectives via individual and group interviews and written responses to verbal questions in groups; held project-based and departmental discussions to help us understand how the diversity of perspectives and processes extant in this institution were understood; and developed resources to explore and support future academic engagement with the issues that have arisen in this research. We discuss a potential mismatch between what this institution's strategic documentation aspires to and how departments and their teachers are managing these expectations, and we link this concern to the academic discourse on roles, responsibilities and capabilities of higher education. Our research has implications for all higher education institutions that express their aspirations or intentions for the values that their students will learn and we propose a research agenda to address our concerns.

This article examines the nature of, and need for, evaluation of community-engaged university teaching and research. The research was conducted as part of a larger project aimed at improving institutional understanding of how to best support community-engaged university people. We interviewed 25 community-engaged colleagues, and used a general inductive approach to identify four recurring themes relating to evaluation within interview transcripts. The themes emphasised diverse conceptualisations of the nature of evaluation in this context, and concomitant concerns about where their community engagement fits within our higher education institution. Our research may help our institution, and others, to decide how best to provide institutional support to university people who choose to become community-engaged.

We explored opportunities, advantages and barriers to enabling students to establish student-led learning events at a New Zealand university. We used an action-research approach to explore if students felt empowered to use the infrastructure of this university to realise something that they themselves set out to achieve. We discovered that, in achieving a series of open discussions about sustainability, students adopted a democratic, distributed form of decision-making, not unlike a typical academic model, with leaders taking temporary roles that included passing on responsibility to those who followed. Students were proud of the events they created and identified the discussion format as something different from their experience as undergraduate students in our institution. This article, co-authored by staff and students, considers whether higher education processes that do empower students do so adequately and the extent to which students are prepared by higher education to take on powerful roles after they graduate.

Higher education institutions are seeking greater community engagement through academic, social and civic activity. In response, researcher attention has turned to impacts on students' education, and benefits to both university and community partners. This phenomenographic study examines how a diverse group of teachers, researchers and administrators at one New Zealand university conceptualised their involvement in community-engaged learning and teaching. We identified an outcome space where university people conceived their community engagement in three ways: within an expert/novice discourse, as advocacy, and in the most complex conception, as reciprocal learning. When working with and within communities, we suggest that university people should be supported to approach community engagement as reciprocal learning rather than adopting approaches that render community partners in passive roles.

Peer learning models in pre-service teacher education are in the early stages of implementation. In this article, we evaluated a pilot Peer-Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) program that supplemented a course for pre-service teachers at one New Zealand university. PASS participants discussed experiences of the program, revealing tensions between what students and facilitators felt should happen in PASS, and how they acted differently. We explained these tensions by considering how social and cognitive congruence operated between students and facilitators. The majority of our peer facilitators were pre-service teachers, suggesting these intersecting roles offered important considerations for reciprocity in near-peer relationships, and joint negotiations of roles and responsibilities. We conclude this article with implications for future training of PASS facilitators, including those training as teachers.

Looks at subject-specific issues in mentoring from the perspective of newly qualified modern language teachers in their first year of teaching. Suggests that conventional conceptions of mentoring may only be a marginal factor in survival of these teachers in their first year. Discusses implications of findings. (BT)