Search

PurposeTo explore the conceptualisation and operationalisation of authentic assessment in work-based learning and research.Design/methodology/approachThe relationship between authentic assessment and work-based learning and research is examined using a postgraduate degree program at a regional university in Australia as a case example to identify unique pedagogical features of work-based learning as they are linked to assessment.FindingsA dynamic is created between formative and summative authentic assessment practices and the cross-current nature of learning in work and research, leading to a range of lifelong learning outcomes. A framework for such a dynamic is presented.Originality/valueThe pedagogy informing work-based learning emphasises developing higher-order thinking through reflective practice, developing competencies and capabilities associated with professional practice and developing academic writing and research skills to enhance professional identity at the postgraduate level for mid- to senior-career professionals. However, the relationship of authentic assessment to work-based learning and research has not been explicated in the literature and its application in post-COVID work environments has yet to be fully examined.

This chapter introduces this edited volume by articulating an agenda for apprehending scholars’ multiple and multifaceted precarious positions that constitute a springboard for the subsequent chapters’ assorted engagements with the proposition of researchers at risk. This agenda is framed in terms of a dual focus on presenting selected conceptualisations of researchers’ risks, and of synthesising particular strategies that researchers have demonstrated to be effective in engaging with those risks. These conceptualisations and strategies constitute in turn empirically grounded manifestations of the precarity, jeopardy and uncertainty that accompany certain aspects of contemporary researchers’ work. The chapter also outlines the clustering of the subsequent chapters into four parts, each directed at a different form of research risk: researchers’ identities; researchers’ professions; subject matter; and conflict-laden locations.

This chapter addresses the increasingly well-documented problem of teacher stress and attrition, focusing upon the need for critical conversations about this problem. Our response to this problem centres on online networks of teachers, which have the potential both to (a) counteract the stress experienced by pre-service and early career teachers and to (b) minimise the attrition of early career teachers. The case in favour of online learning networks of teachers focuses on three features of productive learning networks. The first is criticality, which includes critical thinking and combines it with communicative action as part of critical dialogue. Teachers in online learning networks engage in particular kinds of critical dialogue, and in doing so they display professional identities and exercise professional agency. One of the results of this critical dialogue is the development of shared understanding and a form of social cohesion, which manifest as the other two elements, communality and collegiality. Working in combination, these elements can drive innovative learning opportunities for neophyte teachers, while acknowledging the ongoing deprofessionalisation and politicisation of teachers’ work and identities that render a reimagined and reinvigorated criticality ever more timely and urgent.

This final chapter in the book affords the opportunity to review the preceding chapters against the backdrop of the book’s objectives and foci. This process is facilitated by the selection of three themes that emerged as running across those chapters: the importance of individualised learning, not only for the participating individuals but also for the holistic wellness of society as a whole; the continuing constraints of educational marginalisation and the deleterious effects that these constraints have on the education system itself; and the importance of the contexts of learning not being limited by formalised, tightly controlled philosophies of what it is to be an effective learner. These themes are then aligned with distilled responses to the book’s five organising questions.

Globally, there are multiple individuals and groups whose learning is enacted within the educational margins, and whose status is consequently that of educational fringe dwellers and sometimes border crossers. This status in turn positions them as exhibiting varied forms of otherness in relation to mainstream educational policy-making and provision, and generates both challenges and opportunities for their learning success.

This chapter draws on the first-named author’s doctoral research with a group of female undergraduate students at Dhofar University in Oman, a Muslim Sultanate in the Middle East. The data corpus included responses to a questionnaire, semi-structured interviews with the students, the first-named author’s critically framed observations of the context in her role as the students’ English language teacher and her analysis of the late Sultan’s royal decrees that framed and implemented Omani government policies. The second-named author contributed the chapter’s conceptual framework, which was centred on critical interculturality (Dervin, Interculturality in education: A theoretical and methodological toolkit. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Pivot/Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; Critical interculturality: Lectures and notes. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) as a vehicle for generating new and potentially transformative approaches to researching within the educational margins. These approaches centre on ethical and rigorous contestations of cultural essentialism and hegemony, and on resisting strategies of exclusion and othering.

Practice, policy and management constitute complex and interdependent domains of theory and action in contemporary educational settings. This is certainly the case in schools, which are widely recognised as sites of ongoing change (Connolly, James, & Beales, 2011; Holmes, Clement, & Albright, 2013; Spiro & Crisfield, 2018), and as the intersection of competing priorities and pressures (Hardy, 2013; Petriwskyj, 2013; Pollock & Winton, 2012). Likewise, universities exhibit continuing change (Christensen, Gornitzka, & Ramirez, 2019; Goedegebuure & Schoen, 2014), and operate in environments of uncertainty (Gayle, Tewarie, & White, 2003).

The work of occupational Travellers requires them to cross geographical borders regularly, which in turn generates challenges and opportunities for educating their children. Similarly, education scholars researching with occupational Travellers cross axiological, epistemological and ontological borders in striving to research ethically and reciprocally with the research participants in spaces that mainstream cultures position as being on the margins of educational provision.

Extension learning is a particular form of continuing professional development enacted in agriculture, engineering and science, whereby already qualified and experienced practitioners engage in periods of formalised training in specific, currently topical areas of study, whether “in the field” or “off base” at a university or other training provider. This kind of learning by extension inevitably bears the traces of the historically constructed and the geopolitically mediated regional, national and provincial contexts in which it is experienced. This is certainly the situation with the exploratory, dual site case study presented in this chapter of the provision of postgraduate engineering education with a sustainability focus by the relevant school of engineering in an Australian university, and also of the provision of extension learning by a specialised section in the faculty of engineering in a Venezuelan university.

This chapter reports selected elements of a broader collaborative autoethnography and an exploratory case study involving a Doctor of Philosophy candidate and her three doctoral supervisors who, as participant–researchers, examined the commonalities and differences in the meanings that we assigned to the idea(l) of “supervision”. Guided by our defined boundaries for a collaborative autoethnographic case study, we examined our respective conceptions of supervision through phenomenographic means, utilising data from interviews conducted with each of the authors individually to explicate our varied understandings of supervision. The analysis elicited three distinct categories of description—doctoral supervision as a relational endeavour, as a pedagogical commitment, and as reciprocal growth—and an outcome space centred on the holistic development and self-actualisation of doctoral students and their supervisors alike.

This paper investigates the complex factors that lead to early career teachers (ECTs) deciding to leave the profession. It extends prior studies to show the associations that different elements of preservice education (PSE), early career support, and on-the-job satisfaction have with the intention to leave the profession. The study uses data from 2,144 Australian ECTs to explore these relationships. Results highlight the importance of teachers’ collegial relationships with their peers, and replicate prior findings showing the significance of mentoring and induction programs. Results show that elements of job satisfaction are strongly associated with intention to leave the profession, leading to a number of implications for achieving the twin goals of higher teacher retention and job satisfaction. This research was partly supported by the Australian Government’s Collaborative Research Network (CRN) program, by the Queensland College of Teachers, and by the OLT project ‘Step Up’ MS13-3184.

The scholarship attending doctoral study and supervision is growing rapidly, yet in many ways successful approaches to traversing the doctorate remain idiosyncratic, even mysterious. Accordingly, it is timely to situate the terrain occupied by that scholarship, and to identify the accompanying issues and proposed strategies for engaging with those issues. This situating and identification draw on literature about doctoral study and supervision distilled from the sometimes divergent perspectives of students, supervisors and administrators. The chapter also outlines the book’s structure and organising questions, and explains the techniques for maximising its rigour. From that perspective, traversing the doctorate emerges as a fundamentally worthwhile, yet complex and multifaceted, enterprise that warrants ongoing evaluation and continuing professionalisation.

This paper explores the possibility that virtual communities of teachers with large numbers of members (referred to as massive communities of teachers) can offer support to novice teachers by means of collaborative reflection. The paper examines and conceptualises some problems found in professional massive communities and proposes that massification can dilute what some authors have called social presence or engagement. It is argued that this dilution, among other problems, very much hinders collaborative reflection among members of the community. Collaborative reflection is argued to be a crucial part of the support that novice teachers need in their first years in the profession. Therefore, a challenge is envisioned for massive communities of teachers to avoid the dilution of social presence or engagement. The authors argue that this dilution can be overcome by the use of multiple layers within a platform, referred to as fractal design.

This handbook brings together contributors from the United States, Australasia and Europe who use theoretical insights and empirical data to examine current practices as well as possible future directions of postgraduate education. A full range of postgraduate study options are explored, including PhD and professional doctorates, masters awards, and taught coursework programs. The contributions of key stakeholders to the delivery of postgraduate education are addressed, including students, supervisors and university administrators. From this collection, university managers, higher education scholars, and anyone interested in establishing a centre for higher education are given comprehensive overviews of academic leadership, doctoral education, and supervisory relationships. Topics examined in detail in this collection are little discussed in the available literature, including supervisory relationships between colleagues, the emergence of the “second-career academic”, and academic blogging and social networking. The external pressures that universities around the world are experiencing, including neoliberalism, the massification of student numbers, disruptive innovations, and external quality benchmarking, are considered in terms of the ways that they are prompting change in how postgraduate study is administered and delivered. Many chapters contain specific recommendations to meet organisational and student needs, including for specific demographics such as international students or specific programs. The professional, employment, and information literacy needs of students and the professional development of supervisors and processes for examination are also considered.

A key feature of late capitalism continues to be a complex reworking of previous approaches to the relationship between the state and business. This significant shift in the interplay between the public and private sectors has generated such developments as the privatisation of many services formerly provided by government and the growth of not-for-profit organisations seeking to fill gaps in service provision. These changes are highly significant for every citizen and community member and for all stakeholders. This first chapter in this book encapsulates these complex developments in terms of debates about the enabling imperatives of the contemporary state, the character of the intersection between capital and enterprise, and a timely confrontation of what is understood by “the social” in current discourses, policies and strategies. In presenting this distillation, the authors introduce the subsequent chapters in the book in terms of how each chapter, including this one, contributes new insights to the broader project of eliciting the issues and implications attendant on researching contemporary social capital and social enterprise. This project is crucial if we are to understand the ways in which social capital and social enterprise can work sustainably and transformatively with variously marginalised and vulnerable groups in our societies. It is vital also for understanding the ways that such work is constrained and limited in its effectiveness.

Whilst educational managers and entrepreneurs are expanding online education opportunities, at least some academics are becoming less enthusiastic about the initiative. As a result, a complex and in many ways contested working environment for academics is emerging in tertiary institutions. Some academics are showing dissatisfaction with their workload. Scholars argue that academics’ job satisfaction is highly correlated with students’ learning outcomes. While economists advocate the expansion of online education in the context of rising costs of university education in economics literature, the psychological states of teaching academics are overlooked in economics literature. Attitudes to academic (over-)workload are a psychological issue in tertiary education, particularly in universities globally where online education has a strong presence. This paper deals with teachers’ attitude at an Australia university. This study explains the variations in academics’ attitudes to (over-)workload at an Australian university. For this study we have used primary data collected from a single Australian university - University of Southern Queensland (USQ) - during the period of February-March 2014. The total population size for this study is approximately 400 (four hundred), who are distributed across the then five faculties of the university. The data are collected online. In response to our online survey invitation, 83 (eighty-three) participating academics has taken part in the survey. We have used Likert-type data, where the scale of measurement is represented by ordinal numbers. Research methods used in this study are descriptive analysis of data and inferential statistics based on probit regression. The estimated coefficients of the regression analysis show that three variables are statistically significant at the 5 per cent level. These variables are: the use of the Internet per week, the native language (English) status and the academic qualification status. However, the estimates of the marginal effect show that because of a change of native English status from zero to one, an academic is 23 per cent more likely to be strongly agreed with the statement – online teaching increases academic workload. This implies that attitudes to academic (over-)workload vary among the academics. The policy implication is that education administrators will have to give attention to the working conditions of the academics in order to expand online education successfully.

This paper distils lessons for conceptualising capacity-building from two locations of professional learning: for western expatriate nurses in the Middle East; and Australian early career researchers. The paper presents a comparative, exploratory case study, with the two sites of professional development as contextualised cases. One major finding was the diversity, complexity and politicised character of the professional development opportunities and experiences provided for the two groups of participants. The other finding was the dynamism and fluidity of the capacity-building approaches and outcomes demonstrated by both groups of professional learners. Furthermore, capacity-building emerges as a potential lynchpin for integrating formal and informal learning in professional workplaces, thereby rendering such learning more effective and sustainable.

Universities are fascinating places to work. A “provocative social cocktail” (Symes, 2004, p. 395) is one particularly apt description, although for some, the fascination could be ironically expressed as a reaction to the giddying changes and restructures and revisionings that define the contemporary university.

Contemporary scholarship is replete with accounts and analyses of the challenges and complexities of current academic life. Much of this scholarship sounds alarm bells – even clarion calls – with regard to the sustainability and value of academics’ work. For example, Olson (2013) lamented that “Academe is often plagued by inexcusably rude and uncollegial behaviour” (p. 1) and that “This culture of incivility is becoming ubiquitous” (p. 1).

This chapter focuses on teacher-student interactions in the context of the use of digital technologies for online teaching and learning in an Australian university using thematic analysis and focus group discussion data. Cotemporary scholars agree that the factors influencing teacher–student interactions in online environments are diverse and multiple and are framed by a complex set of historically grounded and socially mediated forces. One potentially fruitful way to interrogate these factors and forces is to draw on aspects of affordance theory, by examining the kinds of relationships that are (and are not) afforded by particular digital technologies in those online environments. More broadly, affordance theory emerges as a useful conceptual lens for understanding the influences on and the impacts of teacher–student interactions using digital technologies in online environments. Those influences and impacts in turn are crucial to (re-)visioning digital futures in the context of students' learning outcomes in tertiary education, and to advancing critical thinking in higher education.

This paper situates the articles in this special theme issue of the International Journal of Educational Research within the broader global literature regarding the educational experiences and opportunities of mobile communities. The paper distils those articles’ contributions to extending current understandings about the specific itineraries of Indigenous pupils in northern Australia, the underlying issues of Indigeneity and school achievement, and the consequent implications for international and comparative educational research. In so doing, the paper links the particular analyses outlined in the articles and the associated sites of their research with wider debates in contemporary scholarship pertaining to education and mobilities,including the complexity and contentiousness of evidentiary data sets and of accompanying schooling policy and provision frameworks.