Search

Most students acknowledge shared responsibility, with the university, for their employability development. Many academics use assessments as the main driver for motivating students to learn. At the intersection between employability, assessment and learning, the emergent research question is -- what are the mechanisms by which course-based employability is fostered? Prior research reveals that although academics identified course-based assessment as the key employability mechanism, neither students nor employers registered this conceptualisation, and thus purpose of assessment. The aim of this research was to stimulate and communicate the direct connection between assessment and employability to students and interpret their response. Over 100 first-year students, across a metropolitan and regional Australian university, participated. Students were directed to use a simple reflective tool, dubbed iASK by the researchers, that probed employability elements of identity, Attributes, Skills, and Knowledge. The research revealed the resulting student view that regular course-based assessment can develop their employability skills in communication and independence, but not in critical thinking and global citizenship.

The conditions for studentification are changing with increasing numbers of students living in high-rise – and high-quality – micro-apartment-style accommodation provided through purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) blocks. This 'verticalisation' of studentification is a global phenomenon, with Australia representing a frontier with distinctive geographies that result from its rapid ascension to the second-ranked global destination for international students. Yet, despite rising student numbers being recognised as positively impacting national and state economies, little is understood of how student accommodation development fits within the broader scheme of Australian urban revitalisation. To address this, we combine concepts relating to condo-ism and condo-isation to offer an original analytical framework that examines how PBSA has created new conditions through which vertical studentification can be produced in and of cities. We therefore ask how vertical studentification relates to wider Australian housing and urban development trends in ways that differentiate PBSA development and trajectories from other forms of accommodation. We also question how vertical studentification relates to the realities and regulation expressed as intra-urban geographies of Australian university cities and their resident-host communities. We argue that deliberately recognising and dovetailing several self-reinforcing and contradicting urban development dimensions invites a foundation for further interrogating vertical studentification in existing and emerging sites in Australia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous rescaling of metropolitan governance has been a prominent feature of the neoliberal state. Metropolitan coalitions are one variant of governance in which disparate actors are brought together around a common agenda or platform. Drawing upon the example of Australia's Committees for Cities and Regions (CCRs), this article applies urban governance theory to better understand the effectiveness of networked metropolitan governance coalitions. We find that such coalitions derive political legitimacy from the externalities produced by their network relations, which we theorize as a three-dimensional nexus of vertical (between levels of government), horizontal (between local actors), and diagonal (with CCR counterparts) components. Although the CCR model is distinctive to Australia and New Zealand, it reflects similar networked and multiscalar processes at work elsewhere, serving as a template for political landscapes in which in-built legacy political arrangements largely preclude metropolitan-scale issues from being addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]