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New Zealand's Education and Training Act (Education and Training Act 2020 establishment of institutions, https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2020/0038/latest/LMS202213.html, 2020) confirms that the principal aim of universities is to develop intellectual independence. The act does not stipulate what intellectual independence is or how universities are to develop it. This article explores what intellectual independence might mean in the context of student learning in New Zealand, and what is known about how it could be developed and about how university teachers might confirm that they are developing it. The article provides a conceptual commentary and a model of intellectual independence, designed to encourage debate on this important and pressing higher-education policy issue. The model proposes that intellectual independence is the consequence of students learning the skills and dispositions to think critically, as an independent guide to their own beliefs and actions, and that the Education Act provides a challenge to higher education to contribute positively to the further development of an intellectually-independent critical citizenry.

Purpose: Higher education is uncertain which sustainability-related education targets should be sought and monitored. Accepting that something needs to be measurable to be systematically improved, the authors explored how measures relate to potential targets. This paper aims to focus on dispositions to think critically (active open-minded thinking and fair-minded thinking in appraising reasoning) as measures and explored how they related to sustainability concern as an indicative educational target. Design/methodology/approach: This research included the development and testing of research instruments (scales) that explored dispositions to critical thinking and sustainability concern. Authors researched these instruments within their own correspondence groups and tested them with university students and staff in Pakistan, the USA, Austria, India and New Zealand. The authors also asked a range of contextualising questions. Findings: Respondents' disposition to aspects of active, open-minded thinking and fair-minded thinking do predict their concern about facets of sustainability but their strength of religious belief was an important factor in these relationships and in their measurement. Practical implications: This research demonstrates the complexity of monitoring dispositions to think critically and sustainability concern in educational systems, particularly in circumstances where the roles of religious beliefs are of interest; and suggests ways to address this complexity. Originality/value: This research integrates and expands discourses on ESD and on critical thinking in diverse disciplines and cultures. It investigates measurement approaches and targets that could help higher education institutions to educate for sustainable development and to monitor their progress, in ways that are compatible with their culture and values.

This article examines the experiences of final year undergraduate sociology students enrolled in an internship course where they researched a local community project, mostly in small groups, for a client. A sociology lecturer supervised their projects. Course-related outcomes were assessed using conventional university procedures but a research process was used to evaluate the extent to which the cohort developed characteristics, or identities, of qualitative researchers. The research demonstrates that the students made many false starts but through processes of trial and error, and with effective support, they considered that they had increased their confidence and became capable of planning and carrying out research. For the students, this internship was not just another class. Their stories reflect on their abilities as researchers and adoption of attitudes towards appropriate research approaches, processes and outputs typical of professional qualitative researchers.

We interviewed 13 university teachers who research their teaching practices or their students' learning to identify how they understood their development as teachers. We interpreted recurring themes within the data as three ways of conceptualising university teachers' development as teachers. We use a theoretical model to arrange these conceptualisations in a hierarchy based on levels of engagement in teaching development. The most complex conceptualisation sees this development as high-level engagement involving personal research into practice, with much in common with discipline-based research. We discuss our results in relation to potential and substantial changes in the roles and evaluation of academic developers.

This paper describes some of the drivers for "education for sustainability" that exist in universities and also explores some of the rationales that underpin higher education's reluctance to engage more formally in education for sustainability. It attempts to provide a balanced commentary on the role and capability of higher education in promoting environmental sustainability to students. Because the paper is grounded in higher education learning and teaching discourse it starts by interpreting the term "education for sustainability" for a broad higher education audience and situates concepts of sustainability within domains of higher education learning and teaching. The paper focuses on Australian and New Zealand universities but introduces developments from around the world for comparative purposes.

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.

Education for sustainable development (ESD) and higher education for sustainable development (HESD) are complex, multidisciplinary fields of enquiry, drawing on concepts and terms from different disciplines and languages. Although the fields are advancing in their acceptability within educational systems worldwide, they are currently struggling to achieve sought-after graduate and societal outcomes such as environmentally-responsible or sustainability-focussed-citizenship. The research described in this article explores the possibility that miscommunication or misunderstanding of basic concepts within these fields is contributing to slow progress towards their objectives. We used a philosophical hermeneutic analysis to explore how the terms 'competence' and 'capability' are used within selected ESD/HESD papers. We identify substantial internal contradictions and inconsistencies with respect to differences between learners' abilities and their willingness to perform these abilities, and to the educational context in which these outcomes are sought. We emphasise the importance of linking educational objectives with pedagogical approaches to teaching and assessment.

This paper offers an insight into the development, use and governance of e-repositories for learning and teaching, illustrated by Eric Raymond's bazaar and cathedral analogies and by a comparison of collection strategies that focus on content coverage or on the needs of users. It addresses in particular the processes that encourage and achieve community engagement. This insight is illustrated by one particular e-repository, the Education Media On-Line (EMOL) service. This paper draws analogies between the bazaar approach for open source software development and its possibilities for developing e-repositories for learning and teaching. It suggests in particular that the development, use and evaluation of online moving pictures and sound objects for learning and teaching can benefit greatly from the community engagement lessons provided by the development, use and evaluation of open source software. Such lessons can be underpinned by experience in the area of learning resource collections, where repositories have been classified as "collections-based" or "user-based". Lessons from the open source movement may inform the development of e-repositories such as EMOL in the future. (Contains 1 figure.)

There is increasing interest in how academic development of various kinds influences university teaching and student learning. To date the focus has been on formal, expert-led opportunities to learn how to teach. Our institution has developed a less formal, participant-led forum for teaching staff that was initially established to share ideas on teaching techniques and skills. We report here on participant-led research that explores if and how this model of group learning works, and how it might relate to other models that have been applied to tertiary teaching development. Authors adopted a self-study research framework incorporating a collaborative autoethnography. The data emphasises how participants use this forum as a community of practice, as a means for deep engagement with learning about teaching, and as a means to rationally manage their learning against a backdrop of challenges associated with learning to teach in research-led higher education.