Conference Agenda

Engineering teachers are not prepared to be teachers. In fact, most of them never had a formal course in education before teaching (Wankat, 2015). Besides that, there is a wide range of challenges in teaching practice, such as students’ engagement, the complexity of the demands of professional practice, didactic transposition, technological advances, amongst others. Thus, it is not surprising that teachers’ professional development is of growing interest in Higher Education Institutions, by providing initiatives to promote excellence in teaching. According to Kennedy (2014), it is possible to identify different approaches to enhance teachers’ professional development, namely, training, coaching and mentoring, learning communities, action research, and transformative approaches.

This work is part of an ongoing ERASMUS + project entitled ‘Reinforcing Non-University Sector at the Tertiary Level in Engineering and Technology to Support Thailand Sustainable Smart Industry’. This project intends to enhance the capacity and ability of Thailand teachers for the effective delivery of engineering and technology knowledge and skills related to Industry 4.0, to support Thailand’s sustainable smart industry. This implies a training program designed for engineering teachers in Thailand and includes 10 modules organized in two parts: the first part includes five modules related to Industry 4.0 knowledge (e.g. Data Analytics, Digital Manufacturing); the second part includes other five modules related to Teaching Skills to Enhancement Learning Experience-Focused Course Design and Development (e.g. Innovative Teaching and Learning Methods, Problem and Project-Based Learning). The training program demands 15 training hours per module and focuses on the cascade model (Kennedy, 2014). First, a group of twelve engineering teachers from four Thai universities attends the training courses to be trainers. After the training, a total of 30 hours of coaching/mentoring is provided to support the twelve participants in their teaching practice. At the end of this process, it is expected that they deliver these modules to other engineering teachers from all over Thailand.

Considering this context, this work will describe the training experience of “train the trainers” in the “Problem and Project-Based Learning” module, considering its design, development, and final evaluation. The preliminary results will be also presented and discussed.

Neoliberalism is an ideology that, although it was born in the economic sphere and developed in the political field, soon began to permeate different sectors such as health and education (Rodgers, 2018). This ideological trend is characterised by principles such as the free-market economy or the privatisation of public sectors, among other aspects (Olssen and Peterson, 2005). In general terms, we can understand neoliberalism as a doctrine whose main objective is to make agencies and entities much more economically efficient (Dougherty and Natow, 2019). In the case of Higher Education, the effect of neoliberalism has been particularly significant for several reasons. First, because of the long tradition of university-market relations (Brunner, 2008). Secondly, because of the enormous impact that universities have on societies. And thirdly, for conceiving the university itself as an important market good, i.e., understanding higher education as a key element for economic development (Tomicic, 2019).

According to Ball and Youndell (2007), the impact of neoliberalism on Higher Education has materialised in two parallel processes: (1) privatisation processes; and (2) the adoption of private (market) practices by the public education sector. However, in addition to these changes, new forms of accountability that have been justified as an instrument of transparency and democratic legitimacy, as well as a means of controlling the quality, autonomy and performance of universities have also spread (Macheridis and Paulsson, 2021). In this sense, the last decades have witnessed a considerable increase in evaluation processes focusing on different elements of higher education (teaching, curricula, mobility schemes, etc.), on the results of which the development of the institution partly depends (obtaining incentives, increasing social prestige, etc.).

In the specific case of university teaching staff, this governance has materialised in the form of professional performance evaluations characterised by giving priority to the quantification of scientific production over other functions, and on whose results depends the achievement of benefits such as grants, funding, research projects or even salary supplements (San Fabián, 2020). This evaluation system is not a unique phenomenon, but rather a reality that is widespread throughout the world. International examples include: Excellence in Research for Australia (Australia); Research Assessment Exercise (Hong Kong); Research Excellence Framework (UK), Initiatives d'Excellence (France), STAR METRICS (USA), Excellenzinitiative (Germany), Academia and PEP (Spain), etc.

This whole system generates important consequences on academics, not only affecting their professional practices but also their social and family relationships and their health status (Saura and Bolívar, 2019; Shams, 2019; Mula-Falcón et al., 2022; McCune, 2020). But how satisfied are academics in relation to this system? Therefore, the main objective of this study is to analyse the degree of satisfaction of academics with these systems that evaluates their professional activity. Secondary objectives are, on the one hand, to determine the existence of differences in the degree of satisfaction according to different variables and, on the other hand, to investigate the reasons for these differences.

This paper is part of a broader line of research, addressed through two research projects, titled "The influence of neoliberalism on academic identities and the level of professional satisfaction" (PID2019-105631GA-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), and "New teaching staff in Andalusian universities: quantified and digitized academic identities" (B-SEJ-534-UGR20), granted by the State Research Agency of the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Andalusian Agency for Knowledge and Universities of the Andalusian Ministry.

Higher education and the teaching profession have been facing increasing challenges in recent decades. Take, for example, the phenomena associated with the information society and the massification of higher education. At the same time, a convergence of trends regarding policies for higher education have led to the creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), in which 48 countries have been implementing reforms on the basis of common key values intended to make higher education systems more compatible and strengthening their quality assurance mechanisms.

The EHEA officially started in 1999 with the signing of Bologna declaration. Given that political framework, the countries involved started processes of curriculum restructuring in higher education, and changes within academics' professionalism were advocated, with a strong appeal to interrupt the hegemony of the instructional paradigm, emphasizing the need to adopt the learning paradigm. This paradigm transition is particularly underlined in Portugal across the implementation of the Bologna process that started in 2006 (Esteves, 2010).

Within this context, the need to reject the conception of a teacher who holds and transmits knowledge has been emphasised, demanding the reconfiguration of teachers’ ways of being and acting with inevitable implications for pedagogical practices. Such a change is not intended to take place only at the most superficial level with the occasional resource to more active methodologies or with the incorporation of digital technologies in teaching. In fact, a deeper transformation in the core of the professionalism and professionality of the teacher is expected, reaching the level of teachers' beliefs, conceptions and implicit theories.

However, despite the enormous pressure on higher education teachers to change its practices, it has been observed that this type of change does not necessarily follow from political pressure or normative imposition. Instead, it is suggested that pedagogical training might contribute to the reconfiguration of teaching and to improve its quality (Inamorato et all., 2019; Postareff et all, 2007), even if this idea is not fully embedded within higher education institutions, which restricts opportunities for the professional development of academics.

One previous qualitative study with Portuguese higher education teachers suggests, on the one hand, the presence of a dominant professional conception inscribed in the artisanal paradigm and matched with a teaching conception based on the transmission of knowledge, but, on the other hand, indicates that formal pedagogical training might support changes in teachers’ conceptions about the meaning of teaching and learning, with effects on teaching practices and on the quality of student learning (Almeida, Viana, Alves, 2022). This is in line with the assumption that, throughout their professional development process which can be enriched by pedagogical training, teachers structure a personal interpretative framework corresponding to "a set of cognitions, mental representations that work as a lens through which they look at their profession, giving it meaning and acting in it” (Ketchermans, 2009, p.72).

Against this background, the aim of the research reported in the proposed paper is to deepen knowledge about higher education teachers’ personal interpretative frameworks, paying special attention to the dynamic nature of such frameworks when teachers are involved in formal pedagogical training directed to their professional development. Namely, two main questions guide the research: 1) Which are the teachers’ conceptions about ways of being and acting as higher education teacher? 2) Are these conceptions reconfigured across the attendance of a post-graduation degree on pedagogy in higher education that lasts one academic year? The participants are a group of 19 Portuguese academics enrolled on a post-graduation degree on pedagogy in higher education at Instituto de Educação – Universidade de Lisboa in 2022/2023.

Globally, Higher Education has undergone fundamental changes through massification, globalisation and marketization (Hil, 2014), and more recently through the impact of COVID 19. We have also seen an emergence of the discourse of quality teaching through various compliance and monitoring regulations (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, 2015; Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, 2021). Although in spite of these requirements (Bormann et al. 2021), we have seen trust related to quality, accountability and scholarship within higher educational intuitions suffer. For example while promoted in the academy as good practice, opportunities for academics to interrogate, discuss and reflect on praxis (their practices related to teaching and learning and theoretical aspects that inform these) can be problematic for a number of reasons (Mackay & Tymon, 2013).

Along with the aforementioned forces of change and regulation impacting teaching and learning in Higher Education, the perpetual emergence of new, more complex technologies and the disruptive innovation that can result from these technologies has also colonised the field of education and learning (Christensen et al., 2008). Similarly, it is also apparent that teaching academics have diverse levels of skills and familiarities in digital pedagogies creating a digital divide between those who are comfortable or uncomfortable in an online setting (Marioni et al., 2020).

In light of these challenges and shifts, our aim was to explore how learning and teaching approaches are changing in the current higher education climate from the perspective of those who are involved in this work. We engaged with academic staff, who work in a faculty of education in a creative process to explore and share understandings about their prior, current and imagined future approaches to learning and teaching. The following research questions were adopted to guide our project.

• In what ways have academics involved in teaching in a HE setting approached learning and teaching in the past?
• What are the current learning and teaching approaches being enacted in one HE setting?
• What do academics envisage as approaches to teaching and learning that will be practised in three years’ time?
• How do academics’ small narratives, produced and shared via text and image, relate to the meta narratives about pedagogical work in HE?

In addition, we included the following methodological question based on our experimental approach:

• How effective are arts- based and participatory approaches in opening up new possibilities for academics to collaborate and to consider complex notions of identity and collegiality within an academic community?

We draw on Brookfield’s (2017) perspectives and lenses related to critical reflection to interrogate assumptions about our practice, in combination with Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus (the ingrained skills, habits, and dispositions we possess due to our life experiences) and field (arenas of practice that have distinct knowledges and rules) as ‘bundles of relations’ (Bourdieu & Waquant, 1992) to focus on what we can learn about the practices of teaching in higher education. In this presentation, habitus helps us to understand the developments and changes in practice and relationships in teaching through analysing the data and reflections of the participant. Habitus provides a way of understanding how the relationality and understanding of students and teaching context inform teaching through teaching relationships, as well as the course of a teaching career.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is an opportunity for appreciating and using diversity in higher education: The research-based and systematically reflective engagement with one’s own teaching and the students’ learning offers room for dealing with the learning prerequisites and different resources of students as well as colleagues’ perspectives. Since its first naming in the 1990s, SoTL practices evolved and differentiated, making it difficult to define SoTL (Fanghael et al., 2016; Simmons & Marquis, 2017). There are not only diverse practices and focuses, but also different normative demands: While most SoTL work is oriented to students’ understanding within the disciplines, Kreber and Kranton suggest a broader view on SoTL including a critical perspective and transformative learning of both teachers and students (Kreber & Kranton, 2000; Kreber, 2022). The international discussion is very lively, showing a development towards the acknowledgement of teaching and learning’s socio-political purposes (Kreber, 2022).

The SoTL discussion in the German speaking world is not parallel to the English speaking one: while SoTL took off in the United States in the 1990s (Huber & Hutchings, 2005; Kreber, 2022), there was little visible activity in German-speaking countries for some time and basic discussions are still caught up with (Fahr, 2021; Huber, 2018). This raises the question of whether international developments are having an impact in Germany: Do scholars in Germany use SoTL for their transformative learning to support students better or to involve them more? Do they orient their interest towards socio-political purposes or are they striving for discipline-specific knowledge on teaching and learning? Are there even specificities that might be inspiring for other contexts?

To explore German scholars’ aims and place them against the background of the international development, the question guiding our study is: What are the aims that can be identified in current German SoTL publications? We take an empirical approach by conducting a literature review and subsequently discuss our findings against international claims and developments, including developments in other European countries.

At the conference, we are particularly interested in other European perspectives. The presentation can also encourage an overarching normative discussion on SoTL and its support in universities: Is SoTL supposed to relate to specific aims and values or a process in which each scholar is to set his/her/their own goals and priorities? Can normatively charged academic development programs result in a contradiction to academic freedom?

This paper presents a novel method, known as the "persona vignette" developed during a doctoral hermeneutical phenomenological study of the lived experiences of educators facilitating higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) in Higher Education (Healey-Benson, 2022). The study employed an interpretive phenomenological approach which aims to understand and interpret participants' experiences (Ary et al., 2006). This is an approach characterized by the lack of formal analytical methods, with the context of the phenomenon dictating how data is analyzed (Langdridge, 2007). The primary objective of the study was to gain an in-depth understanding of the experiences of educators engaged in the phenomenon. To operationalize the research, a 5-part "persona vignette" method was developed by the researcher to capture an interpreted mimetic representation of each of the 12 educator study participants drawn from five countries. The final collection of persona vignettes provides readers with imaginative and evocative stimuli that invite reflection on one's own unique representation and experience of the phenomenon and aims to provide guidance to Higher Education educators of all contexts on the challenges of their HOTS development day-to-day practice

The theoretical framework

The paper is informed by the researcher’s doctoral hermeneutical phenomenological investigation of the lived experiences of educators facilitating HOTS in Higher Education. The study included participants from five countries: Australia, Canada, India, the UK, and the USA. The hermeneutic phenomenological methodology provided "direct access to a solid base of pure knowledge" (McIntosh & Wright, 2019, p. 451) by tapping into people's experiences, while an existential lens provided a focus on relationality, intersubjectivity, and otherness.

To protect participant anonymity while still inviting readers into the disclosed world of the research participants, the researcher developed an imaginative persona vignette framework as a form of interpreted mimesis. In this context mimesis is an act of poiesis, a ‘bringing-forth’ (Heidegger, 1971) rather than imitation. The decision to capture in detail the representation of the variation of the educator experiences was made by the researcher as their 'wholeness' was too rich to omit from the summary findings which were primarily focused on the phenomenological (essential) themes. Consequently, the researcher resolved to consider the hermeneutic 'mimetic dimensions' of the individual stories as means to bring a form of "evocation of experience in its reflection of and distinction to reality" (Gosetti-Ferencei, 2014, p. 4). The researcher worked with an illustrator to enhance the evocative quality of the personas, a process fully informed by the ongoing analytic process and refined through a series of conversations and iterations. The resultant persona illustrations help attune to the voice of the participants in the transcripts and to surface details that may otherwise be overlooked or taken for granted.

The persona vignette format is a five-part structure that includes a bespoke imaginative persona label that captures the life-world of the participant HE educator, an opening statement that reflects the overarching ontological experience of the phenomenon, a persona image drawn by a professional illustrator to bring the participant's lifeworld evocatively to life, an anecdote formed by a collection of selected and edited quotes from the original transcript, and a succinct researcher interpretative analysis. The 'persona vignette' format blends anecdote, metaphor, and imagery aiming to bring the wholeness of the lived experience to life, to share the nuances of contextualized experiences to re-presence and provoke further thinking and action. The researcher aims to "illuminate and evoke lived meanings beyond immediate tangible experience" (Nicol, 2008) by drawing on interview transcripts of metaphor descriptions and emotionally expressive language.

This presentation is a comparison between two projects associated with the topics of change and leadership in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. Although the projects focused on different contexts of leadership and were conducted pre-Covid (UK) and during/post-Covid (IE), several key identical questions on stakeholders’ views of change and leadership were used to facilitate comparative analysis. The presentation will use the data from the two countries to draw comparisons on several diversity issues, such as gender, professional status (academic and/or professional services), and a changed higher education environment post-Covid. Both projects focused on the connections between leadership and change in the dynamic, complex and progressively more uncertain context of higher education.

The UK based project titled “Leading Change Together” (Authors, 2018) was a UK-wide exploration of how academic and professional services staff, university leaders and managers viewed and coped with change. The project took place in 2016 when the UK voted to leave the European Union and in the context of major changes determined by the increase in tuition fees, the increased use of accountability and performance regarding teaching, research and enterprise, and the diminishing authority of academic leadership in favour of a managerialist approach (Mansour, et al., 2015; Lumby, 2012, Deem and Brehony, 2007). The project aimed to develop an understanding of the dynamics of formal and informal leadership practices and strategies using change management and shared leadership theory.

The Irish Project is part of a Doctorate in Education (EdD) at Maynooth University and also focused on change and leadership within a similar context of change in the Higher Education (HE) sector, but, more specifically, in the context of the merger of three institutions into a single one to form a new Technological University (TU). Specifically for the Irish context, significant issues currently face Higher Educational Institute’s (HEIs) in Ireland. Similarly, to the UK context, issues include increased workload, reduced staff development opportunities and concerns over investment in information technology, which lead to inefficiencies (QQI 2016). Several key areas for development in Ireland’s HEIs have been identified and include quality culture and systems, resources and leadership development and technology (Higher Education Authority 2017). In the context of most Institutes of Technology (ITs) merging to become Technological Universities (TUs), the focus of this project was the change and leadership perceptions of staff to gain insights into the topics of change, culture, change management and change leadership. The primary research question is “What do stakeholders consider important for change leadership.”

Conceptually, both projects acknowledged that change is complex, and that current leadership research still lacks theorisation and a fuller understanding of the dynamics of leadership in HEIs since there still is a lack of literature, which explores the human and emotional aspects of change, and little on the dynamics of identity development in a workplace under conditions of change (Reissner 2010). As Trowler (1998: 150) argued, ‘a precondition for effective change in universities is to understand the multiple cultures within universities and to ‘conceptualise organisations as open systems and cultural configurations within them as multiple, complex and shifting.’ Complexity Theory was chosen as a suitable theoretical lens. Mason (2008) outlines that complexity theory looks at complex systems as open systems, which survive through evolution and adaptation. He believes that organisations are complex, with many connected elements or agents, which facilitate the sharing of knowledge through formal bureaucratic structures and informal social networks.

It is envisaged that through this comparative study between two countries in Europe, further HEI’s and researchers will engage with similar studies in other countries and provide a deeper insight across European higher educational landscape.

While mergers and acquisitions are commonly thought of as belonging to the business world, they occur in educational contexts as well, and some research has considered the consequences of these mergers (e.g., Kohvakka 2021). Studies point to positive merger outcomes, such as improving teaching efficiency (Agasisti, Egorov, and Maximova 2021), becoming more competitive with other academic institutions, and generating new ideas and concepts (Deiaco, Gren, and Melin 2009). Numerous attempts have been made to merge higher education institutions (e.g., Estermann and Pruvot 2015; Harman and Harman 2003), but most adopt private sector strategies, and these have not been particularly helpful in the educational field (Kezar and Eckel 2002; Ribando and Evans 2015). In addition, little is known about the way merging affects faculty, administrative staff, or students (Ribando and Evans 2014; Slade et al. 2021).

We investigated the merging of academic organizations for two main reasons. First, the research on higher education mergers is limited compared to private sector mergers (Pinheiro, Geschwind, and Aarrevaara 2016), therefore, we sought to shed light on the effects of organizational mergers which are particularly relevant to the academic environment. Second, studies focusing on higher education institutions have consistently ignored the personal and emotional experiences of the staff (both academic and administrative), and students (Wollscheid and Røsdal 2021) and emphasized organizational goals (Johnes and Tsionas 2019). In light of current social and institutional changes, we believe it is critical to understand how merging impacts the people within the institution.

Given these underlying social factors, we chose to focus less on the organization and more on the human side of the merger process. More specifically, we argued that considering a diverse population (faculty, administrative staff, and students) within the academy would provide a new angle in this research field. Studies suggest the uncertainties and ambiguities involved in mergers evoke strong psychological reactions from employees (Bhal, Uday Bhaskar, and Venkata Ratnam 2009), including rising levels of stress (Cartwright and Cooper 1993), identity dissonance (Legendre and Bowen 2020), and fear (Sethi, Mishra, and Dash 2010). Following this line of research, we focused on threat appraisal, the psychological mechanism underlying adverse reactions to change (Arbona and Jimenez 2014). This mechanism is linked to well-being and psychological health (Kaltiainen et al. 2020), absenteeism, and quit intentions (Fugate, Prussia, and Kinicki 2012).

We have extended previous knowledge by examining personal and contextual factors related to an individual's threat appraisal. On the personal level, we explored the potential antecedent of dispositional resistance to change (RTC) (Oreg 2003) on threat appraisal of organizational mergers in the educational context. The dispositional resistance to change represents a meaningful concept for capturing individual differences in the personality-based inclination to resist change (Oreg and Sverdlik 2011). Studies agree that individuals high in RTC are less likely to accept changes and mostly see negative outcomes of the change (Oreg et al. 2009).

We also focused on a mechanism that represents a level of congruence between the attributes faculty, administrative staff, and students possess and those of their academic environment, commonly called the person-organizational fit (P-O fit) (Kristof 1996). P-O fit theory argues that individuals are attracted to and selected by organizations whose work environments reflect the individuals’ values and cultures (Kristof-Brown and Billsberry 2013). Given the controversial impact of the P-O fit during an organizational change (Caldwell 2013), we argued that it would be interesting to see the extent to which P-O fit interferes with the relationships between resistance to change and threat appraisal of organizational mergers.

This paper is part of a Doctorate in Education at Maynooth University in Ireland. The primary research question is “What do stakeholders consider important for change leadership in an emerging Technological University?” The sub-research question that is the focus of this paper is “What are the contextual and cultural factors for change?”

In addition to dramatic disruptions because of Covid 19, major issues exist in the Irish Higher Education, which include increased workload, reduced staff development opportunities and concerns over investment in information technology, which lead to inefficiencies (QQI 2016). A number of key areas for development in Ireland’s Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) have been identified and include quality culture and systems, resources and leadership development and technology (Higher Education Authority 2017). In the context of most Institutes of Technology (ITs) merging to become Technological Universities (TUs), change and leadership have never been so important.

Having carried out a systematic literature review on change and leadership in Higher Education (Author, 2022), the topic of change drivers was identified as a key theme. Change drivers included globalisation and an emerging technological revolution (Geraiden et al. 2018). Managerialism or New Public Management resulting in structural governance and institutional changes is also seen as a change driver where HEIs are becoming more decentralised from government with increased focus on efficiency (Howells et al. 2014). Other drivers are associated with making HEIs more responsive to market needs (Kohtamaki 2019), internationalisation (Said et al. 2015) as well as diversity, climate change and environmental sustainability (Dahlvig 2018). More recently, research is emerging in relation to how HEI’s have coped with the change driver of Covid-19 (Makaram et al, 2021) and how they are addressing gender balance (Gebretsadik 2021)

Contextual factors were identified as another key theme when researching change. One factor is the type of HEI model and its power structures (Tjeldvoll 2011) as well as its developmental stage (Dobi 2012). Cultural influences and traditions are also important for leadership and performance of higher education (Tjeldvoll 2011). Collins (2014) suggests that any effort to encourage or teach leadership will fail unless the distinctive challenges of higher education’s individualistic culture is considered.

Schein & Schein (2016) emphasise that leadership and culture formation are two sides of the same coin, and that the role of leadership changes with the growth and development of an organisation. In relation to assessing organisational culture, Schein and Schein (2016) believe the Cameron and Quinn’s Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) based on a competing values framework, represents an interesting culture model, which they believe makes sense and helps describe the human experience.

Complexity Theory was chosen as a suitable theoretical lens. Mason (2008) outlines that complexity theory looks at complex systems as open systems, which survive through evolution and adaptation. He believes that organisations are complex, with many connected elements or agents, which facilitate the sharing of knowledge through formal bureaucratic structures and informal social networks.

This paper will examine the contextual factors, including change drivers of an emerging technological university in Ireland that was formed through the merging of three Institutes of Technology. It will also assess the current and preferred culture of this new university, using the organisational leadership dimensions of the OCAI from Cameron and Quinn (2011). This research will build on existing literature and form a strong foundation for the exploration of change leadership, which is an underdeveloped area of research in higher education.

It is hoped that this research will be timely and relevant to other researchers and HEIs across Europe undergoing significant change and provide insights into key cultural and contextual factors that are important for consideration.

Around the end of the 1990’s, Universities of Applied Sciences (UASs) in Europe have seen a shift when the Bologna and Lisbon agreements resulted in different expectations from UASs (De Boer, 2017). To stimulate innovations in professional practice and to create a so-called value-adding ‘knowledge economy’, the European society was said to need more highly educated professionals to contribute to innovations (Griffioen, Ashwin and Scholkmann, 2021), and to deal with a growing and diverse body of complex knowledge (Brew, 2006). This line of reasoning resulted in the integration of research activities into UASs, which transformed these organisations from teaching-only institutions into institutions with two central processes: education and research.

In order to educate highly skilled professionals that are fit for today’s knowledge economy, research activities are being connected with the UASs’ educational processes. Research and education can be connected in a variety of ways, and on different levels throughout higher education organisations: on the level of the student, the employee, the curriculum, the department and at the organisational level (Jenkins and Healey, 2005; Trowler and Wareham, 2008). Previous work shows that UASs at the organisational level have formulated a variety of strategic aims they foresee to achieve through such research-education connections (Daas, Day and Griffioen, in review). However, it is presumed that research and education processes are not easily combined (e.g. Fox, 1992). For example, research and education processes have shown to bring along distinctive structures and systems (Brew, 2006), work patterns (Robertson and Bond, 2005) and require different competencies from employees to practice both activities at a high professional level (Griffioen, 2018). Enacting strategies to connect research and education in practice, and achieving strategic aims through these connections, might therefore not be an easy and straightforward endeavour.

The enactment of organisational strategies is the result of the collective action of an organisation’s employees (Mintzberg, 1990). In the case of research-education connections, employees need to ‘reinvent’ their own practices through adjusted behaviour. Collectively, their behaviour is at the steering wheel of strategy enactment. Considering the different levels throughout higher education organisations at which strategies to connect research and education can be executed, it is expected that a wide range of actors contributes to enacting these strategies, such as lecturers at the level of the curriculum (Van der Rijst, 2009), and managers at the level of the department and organisation (Jenkins and Healey, 2005). While previous studies focused on how research and education are connected at separate levels of higher education organisations, such as the individual level (Magi and Beerkens, 2016) and the department level (Durning and Jenkins, 2005), little is known about how employees within UASs collectively contribute to connecting research and education from an organisational perspective. In this study we focus on the behavioural intentions to connect research and education of actors that are directly involved in the processes of research and education, and the related first management level. The central question is: “What are the behavioural intentions of lecturers, researchers, research-managers and education-managers in connecting research and education and how are these intentions shaped?”

Transversal competences and their fundamental role for a fulfilling life and success in a professional career have been paid greater attention and widely discussed in the context of Higher Education (HE) institutions and the world of work. The HE institutions have been called to respond to the societal and labour market demands, as both employers (Barbosa & Freire, 2019) and graduates (and their families) expect that universities will prepare them for the future of work and question the value of the educational path, its relevance and profitability considering the time and money costs involved (Wolff & Booth, 2017). Following the growing digitalisation of work, the emergence of new technologies, changes in the markets and organizations and new societal interaction patterns, graduates have been requested to have the necessary competences to adapt to a volatile job market, such as being open minded and cultural aware (OECD, 2018). It is now common agreement that technical competences are the basis for the access to the job market, but transversal competences are inevitably a differentiating element between qualified job applicants (Tomlinson, 2008).

In this context, the assessment of HE students’ transversal competences, especially in the case of those which enhance graduates’ employability, is critical. The most commonly used instruments consist of self-report surveys (Pažur Aničić et al., 2022), but some flaws are pointed out as participants tend to over- or underestimate their competences (Fahrenbach, 2022). The use of different assessment methods and instruments to prevent a biased assessment has, therefore, been suggested.

This study derives from a broader project where the Multiple Mini-Interviews (MMI), a method widely used in the Health field (Pau et al., 2013), was adapted to assess transversal competences of HE students from different scientific fields. The objective of this study is, in this context, to compare the analysis of the assessment of transversal competences using two methods, one based on the self-assessment (self-report survey) and the other based on an external evaluation (MMI), to verify whether there is a (mis)match between the two.

The concept of transversal competences refers to a set of skills, attitudes and knowledge, and the ability to apply these appropriately, depending on the context (Clarke, 2017). These competences are considered as necessary in different scientific areas and professional activities (European Commission, 2019) and are frequently organized into three main categories: cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal competences (National Research Council, 2012). The competences analysed in this study derive from the adaptation of this theoretical framework (Santos et al., 2020) resulting in the addition of a fourth category, contextual competences. Cognitive competences include: problem solving and generation of novelty; Intrapersonal competences encompass: open mindset, learning to learn and positive professional attitude; Interpersonal competences comprise teamwork, effective communication and leadership, and; at the Contextual level, market orientation is included.

Students’ self-assessment seems to be influenced by different individual and contextual dimensions such as their gender (Huang, 2013) and study field (Anderman & Young, 1994). Additionally, aspects such as students’ expectations and a social response bias can interfere with the accuracy of the self-ratings, translating into a recognised tendency for students to inflate their own competence assessment (Panadero et al., 2015).

Taking this trend into consideration, this study seeks to contribute to a comparative analysis of students' self-assessment and the external evaluation of their transversal competences, based on gender and study field, and to analyse if there is a match between the assessments with those methods and if it varies according to gender and fields of study.

About 10-15 years ago, broadening access to higher education resulted in debates on what forms of knowledge should be provided in curricula for the diverse student population, especially in Australia and South Africa (e.g., Shay 2014; Wheelahan 2012; Winberg 2006). Diversifying higher education institutions (HEI), some with more research intensive and some more interdisciplinary and professionally oriented, brought along diverse qualities required from the faculty members (Guri-Rosenblit et al 2007). In the context of harmonised degrees in Europe, the question of diversity of the students, teachers, institutions, and degrees, and their relation to curriculum knowledge has not received much attention; instead, the learning outcomes and competencies have become key concepts in curriculum discussions (Petkute 2016). This study contributes the knowledge blindness (Maton 2014) in Europe, by focusing on the knowers. Here knowers refer to students and teachers; how they and their qualities are used as grounds or excuses in curriculum decisions on knowledge.

The interview study takes the perspective of teachers (N=26) who were involved in curriculum reforms in soft and hard sciences, with an aim to create shared curricula between two HEIs of different type; research-intensive and professionally oriented. The research questions are: 1) How the diversity of the knowers and their qualities are depicted in discussions on curriculum? 2) How do these qualities, assumed or real, emerge in decisions on curriculum knowledge?

This study builds on Karl Maton’s (2014; 2010) conceptualisations of knower structures in curriculum. Maton (2014, 66) states that paying attention to knower structures enables to avoid false dichotomies and to achieve greater understanding of how educational practices specialize identity, consciousness, and relations. Maton (2014) depicted an ‘ideal knower’ in traditional humanities and sciences, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, as a person from higher social class, cultivated ‘English gentleman’, who pursue studies ‘for the love of it’. This is very similar to what Newman (1996) already in 1899 depicted as the excellences of a gentleman, “a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom” which is “the special fruit of the education furnished at a University, as contrasted with other places of teaching or modes of teaching.” (p. 77).

Entering the field of humanities in 1950’s and 1960’s was highly selective and hierarchical, whereas entering the field of science was not (Maton, 2014). An ideal scientist had no relation to the social background but more relevant was the ability of actors coming from different trajectories and experiences, forming segmented knowers with specialized modes of thinking, and acting. In 1960s, the reproduction of elite was challenged even more with the democratization and massification of university education, with different kind of knowers (Burman & Landal, 2020).

Today, the formal qualities required from the students follow the qualification frameworks (e.g. EQF 2018); it is all about the agreed levels of knowledge, skills, and responsibility and autonomy, which all the students should reach as learning outcomes, in all the disciplinary fields, in all types of HEIs in Europe. Still, diverse qualities are required from teachers in higher education. Higher education has growing number of regions, ie. interdisciplinary and professionally oriented degree programmes, instead of traditional subjects or disciplines (singulars). The ’habit of mind’ does not emerge in official discussions. When teachers from HEIs of different type create a shared curriculum, the implicit qualities of an ideal knower of today may become explicit. The analysis will focus on the discourses on the qualities of knowers in soft and hard sciences, and how they come visible in curriculum negotiations.

In the national universities of South Africa, various events during the past years indicate that students suffer tremendously under different kinds of oppression. It is widely acknowledged that students from poor, rural geographical areas find the university space as alienating and not speaking to their life worlds. In this qualitative paper, I respond to Fataar’s (2019) idea of the “misrecognised” university student in the South African context. Fataar’s (2019) focus of student agency in the context of Africa is on the students’ movement, space, scale and the body in trying to account for how students transact their educational lives. I attempt to add on the historical, structural, affective and post-human complexity of students in the context of South African universities.

The university sphere is rapidly changing and adapting to the demands and challenges of the current era. At present, while we are gradually moving out of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, students and academics at universities must respond to these rapid changing environments. Fataar & Norodien-Fataar (2021) concurred with the work of Cope and Kalantzis (2017), which provides a productive schema for developing a digital learning ecology in universities. This learning ecosystem refers to a “complex interaction of human, textual, discursive, and spatial dynamics … which take on a coherent, systemic form” (Fataar and Norodien-Fataar, 2021: 162). Academics must rethink pedagogical approaches to accommodate changes in learning spaces and relations, and in how they will engage with learning mediation and assessment practices (Fataar and Norodien-Fataar, 2021) to stimulate knowledge acquisition and critical engagement with the knowledge possessed by students. The concern of this paper is on students who are gaining access to universities after imperatives of democratization in the country.

In post-apartheid South Africa, youth in Black communities were often described in terms of their marginalization and labels of being disadvantaged. Previous research, such as the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 2003), has shown consensus in that student´ socio-economic family background significantly influences academic success. On the contrary, recent post‑structuralist theorists engage in the complex interplay of structure and agency (Kapp et al., 2014) in determining students’ academic success. In this regard, Thomson (2009) claimed that the lives of individuals are both constrained and agentic. In this sense, the concept of agency is comprehended as an individual’s capacity to make conscious choices and to act and improvise in response to particular situations (Holland et al., 1998). Individuals will act and interact within their context to gain the needed resources in their attempts at self-formation.

My focus on students coming from historically disadvantaged communities aims to contribute to ongoing debates about social justice for humans/students in the university sector. I argue that if institutional practices recognize, embrace and align with students´ agency, resilience and adaption, an institutional platform could possibly engage students in their intellectual becoming. In this paper, I am guided by two questions: 1) How can students from historically disadvantaged communities use their critical horizontal knowledges to connect with disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge of the university to enhance critical specialized consciousness in the becoming of ethical humans? and: 2) How can an African theorization of student agency form the basis to consciously reframe the core institutional function of the university? In responding to these questions, I locate my arguments in African-student agency, using literature by African scholars to gain an understanding of the African concept of student agency.

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge in calls to decolonize the university. For a long time, criticism against the university’s epistemic hegemony (cf. Mignolo, 2011) had remained mostly confined to scholarly circles of, for instance, feminist, post/decolonial or social and cultural studies scholars (cf. de Sousa Santos et al., 2008; bell hooks in Media Education Foundation, 2002). Under the influence of the increasing multipolarity and diversity of our contemporary societies and of international decolonization activism, such concerns have now become much more mainstream.

As a result, and in response to criticisms of the epistemological canon that the assumed universality of Western knowledge production has reinforced and the sustained inequalities this produces, universities, scholars and activists across the globe have formulated different proposals to decolonize the university. Depending on the context, these proposals range from: addressing the crisis of representation (Begum & Saini, 2019), diversifying the curriculum, widening participation, changing staff recruitment policies (Abu Moghli & Kadiwal, 2021; Pimblott, 2020), removing physical traces from the university campus (Newsinger, 2016), and so on.

One particular option that has been proposed is to stimulate a pluri-versal understanding of the world (Mignolo, 2011) within the university (Gallien, C., & جاليان, ك, 2020). This option of pluri-versity (Martinez-Vargas, 2020) goes beyond stimulating a more diverse composition of staff, students and curriculum within the university. Rather it proposes an altogether different, pluriversal understanding of the world; an understanding, sensing, and knowing of the world as a world in “which many worlds can co-exist” (Mignolo 2011). Seeking to preserve the heterogeneity of the world and the plurality of worldviews, the option of the pluri-versity seeks to spark “imaginaries beyond the naturalized grammar of modernity”(Andreotti et al, 2015, 22). As such this option goes “beyond reform” (Andreotti et al, 2015, 22) of the university as a modern institute of education and knowledge production.

Many reflections have already been formulated about why a pluri-versal understanding is needed (Boidin et al, 2012) and what it could practically consist of in universities in countries that were formerly colonized (e.g. Stein et al, 2021; Le Grange, 2020). Little has however been written on how spaces of pluri-versality could practically be generated in or at the border of a European university (Gallien, C., & جاليان, ك, 2020). Moreover, several questions regarding the pluriversal spaces, such as ‘how can bridges be built between different worldviews?’ or ‘how do power relations play out in the pluriverse?’( Gallien, C., & جاليان, ك, 2020 ) remain unanswered.

In 2022 we undertook ‘The Conversations’. This public experiment was a practical attempt to create the conditions to make possible a ‘pluri-versity’ (cf. Van Ruyskensvelde & Berghmans, 2022). In this paper we wil present an analysis of this experiment. This analysis will also serve as a stepping stone towards a wider reflection on some of the hitherto undertheorized issues with regards to the creation of pluriversal spaces in Western higher education.

The notion of diversity, which has originally been designated a role of a ‘quality product’ for markets, institutions and even whole nations to lay evidence of their tolerance, has been criticized for implicating some forms of discrimination while offsetting others (Ahmed 2012). In our project, developed two years ago at the Technical University in Darmstadt, Germany, we challenge the classical channels of knowledge production and distribution by inviting external actors to diversify university curricula. In a larger sense, Vielfalt bildet project points to new tendencies that aim at de-polarising the historical and recent notions of diversity.

We start by arguing that diversity as an inherently paradoxical discourse needs to be introduced and discussed from different perspectives, especially standpoints disenfranchised by inequalities confronted with dominant (hegemonic) positions (e.g. the educators and activists who lived through non-normative experiences. In its theoretical part, this paper draws on a discussion about the negativity and positivity in the diversity discourses in the last twenty years. We agree with Sara Ahmed (2012) that positive readings of diversity are as much conducive to good practices as fostering liberal conviviality although we claim that they do not, typically, give in to liberal trends. The problematic notion of integration - used interchangeably with diversity - has in some cases led to less diversity as a result (Badiou 2009). Drawing on recent readings of Balibar’s and Wallerstein’s Race, Nation, and Class (Bojadžijev and Klingnan 2018) and on the practical solutions for more heterogeneous curriculum within German Educational Sciences (Walgenbach 2014; Kasatchenko & Zitzelsberger 2020), we stress the necessity to rethink epistemological ties between learning in a white, Western academia and teaching in a multi-cultural society.

Moving on to praxis, we introduce the work of our project in the third year of its existence, linking the experience with a conception of diversity that opts for a two-way education through a reflexive process and professional praxis. The ViBi Project (2020-2024) is funded by a state organization Living democracy (Demokratie leben). The work of ViBi is based on organizing events (discussions, lectures, workshops, etc.), in which civil society actors, such as activists and leaders of local minority groups, speakers and teachers, exchange their experiences and knowledge with educational science students. The activities of Vielfalt bildet (Diversity educates) project aim at opening the walls of the university towards the external public by including organizations and charities founded by minority groups into the teaching curricula and events proposed to students. The premise is that shaping academic knowledge must be diversified to help young professionals in the field of educational science understand the myriad ways in which human mind shape and is shaped by in multicultural contexts.

Investigating students' learning biographies can help to understand the interdependence of education, learning and biography (Merrill & Alheit, 2004). More attention paid to the study of learning biographies and to understanding human learning is also one of the leading suggestions for the future of education by OECD (2023, p. 11). This paper connects these two issues, learning biographies and a better understanding of the process of learning, as it aims to explore what patterns can be found in how we learn from telling stories about our educational biographies. The paper views the research interview as a storytelling setting and achieves its aim by analysing data from 29 biographical narrative interviews. The participants were recruited as a part of a project on non-traditional students at Czech universities, i.e. students who were at least 26 years old and had a one-year break in their educational trajectory before coming to higher education. Those students were enrolled in education degree programmes, including i.e. teacher education programmes, social pedagogy, special pedagogy, and andragogy.

Those adults are considered non-traditional students in the Czech education system because of their previous educational trajectory that was not direct from upper-secondary to tertiary education (Novotný et al., 2019). However, a non-traditional student is a general term for under-represented groups in higher education. The term can designate diverse groups of individuals who do not fit the traditional student mould. The definitions of non-traditional students vary across educational systems. They may concern students who are older, have a family, work full-time, or have other commitments or backgrounds that prevent them from participating in higher education in the same way as traditional students. The definition can include first-generation students, disadvantaged or international students etc. What connects all the definitions is that this concept was created in connection to the diversification of the student community, which is one of the manifestations of the de-standardisation of life trajectories, in this case, those leading to higher education.

For example, the differences between younger and older students in higher education are caused not so much by their age differences but by their different educational and professional trajectories and the fact that "adults have more experiences, adults have different kinds of experiences, and adult experiences are organised differently" (Kidd, 1973, p. 46). This study, therefore, concentrates on the previous life trajectories to investigate how they learn from the biographical experiences gained during them as they bring this knowledge to their new higher educational experiences. Those individual life trajectories in social space can also be framed as biographies.

To study learning biographies, this paper adopts a biographical learning framework. Alheit (1995) asserted that we learn authentically when we involve our biographies; from this point, scholars refer to this phenomenon as biographical learning. Biographical learning helps understand the processes in which people are involved when forming their lives through storytelling (Alheit & Dausien, 2000). However, it has not yet been clearly stated how exactly this biographical learning takes place, what its parts and outcomes are, and how it can be identified in the narratives. Therefore, the research questions addressed in this study were formulated as follows: 1. How do adults learn when storytelling their educational trajectories? and 2. What do they learn when they are storytelling their educational trajectories?

This paper presents some preliminary results of an exploratory study focused on adult learners conceptions of studying and learning in Higher Education (HE). The study emerges from the author’s experience of teaching and researching in HE, particularly in the field of lifelong education with non-traditional students, usually named adult learners or mature students, according to the current literature.

In a wider context, contemporary changes at societal and educational level have contributed to the emergence of a lifelong learning society, where HE plays a major role. Consequently, there has been a rapid expansion of this sector in Europe over the last decades, following the widening political concern to widen the access of adults to HE, in parallel with the concerns of raising the level of qualifications in different European countries, as several studies have pointed out (Griffits, Kaldi & Pires, 2008; Alves & Pires, 2008; Pires, 2009, 2010, 2016; Schuetze & Sloey, 2000; Joengbloed & Vossenstein, 2016).

In the recent years, several studies have focused the participation of adult learners in HE, from the scope of a diversity of fields and theoretical perspectives (Griffits, Kaldi & Pires, 2008; Pires, 2009, 2010; Pearce, 2017; Stevens, 2014; Venazzi et al, 2018). Some studies have shown that attraction and engagement of the population of adult learners will not go far enough in truly developing the adult learner if doesn’t take into account their needs and desires(Stevens, 2014). For adult learners, studying in HE has different meanings than it does for younger students, but it can still be regarded as a transformational experience (Pearce, 2017). Starting from the ideia that conceptions of learning are related to personal and contextual factors, Venazzi, Vettori and Pinto (2018), have studied how gender, academic area, and level of study can influence university students’ conceptions of learning.

According to Bowden and Marton (2004), there are different students’ approaches to learning — a range that could go from a surface to a deeper approach —, depending on what the learners are focusing on, what they are trying to achieve and how they are going about it” (Bowden & Marton, 2004, p.8). It is crucial to acknowledge the role of students’ expectations towards learning, their individual projects, as well as the meaning they give to the context: “Student approaches to learning are also related to their project at university – on one hand, what kind of meaning studying there carries for them, what there conception of learning is and, on the other hand, their understanding of what the institution wants them to do and what view of learning its way of acting reflects” (ibid).

In order to understand more deeply students conceptions about learning and studying in HE we can use the critical lens of Freire's pedagogy, that affirms the impossibility of studying for the study's sake. According to Freire (1996), it is not possible to understand studying as a neutral activity: no one can be in the world, with the world and with others in a neutral way. Considering that teaching and learning are only moments of a greater process that is knowing, which is a dialectical process, Freire defends a critical understanding of education.

General research questions:

What are adult learners’ conceptions of studying and learning in Higher Education?

What contributions does Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy offer us to (re)think the meanings of studying and learning in higher education?

Carers provide unpaid care or support to a friend or family member who due to illness, disability, a mental health problem or an addiction cannot cope without their support (Carers Trust, 2022). Across Europe, 10%-30% of the population provide informal care, a number which is projected to grow (Zigante, 2018). With the growing emphasis placed on widening participation and equality of access to education, attention to the needs of students with caring responsibilities is intensifying. In the United Kingdom, it is still the case that there are no official statistics on the numbers of higher education students with caring responsibilities (Office for Students, 2020), the National Union of Students (2013) estimate that in the United Kingdom carers make up between three and six per cent of the student population.

There is a growing body of research identifying the difficulties student carers have in managing their commitments to study and caring (Knopf et al., 2022, Runacres et al., 2021). The challenges of combining caring responsibilities with study can adversely affect the social, financial and academic dimensions of university life (Larkin and Kubiak, 2021). The time poverty, fatigue and lack of flexibility typically associated with caring can cause lateness, absence and missed deadlines, for example (Sempik and Becker, 2014, González-Arnal and Kilkey, 2009). Interactions with other students are often comprised (National Union of Students, 2013) and carers in higher education can experience challenges to their mental and physical health (Runacres et al., 2021). Attrition rates for caring-experienced students can be four times higher than for other students (Kettell, 2020).

Despite greater awareness and prioritisation of this group in higher education, widening participation strategies in the United Kingdom’s higher education sector remain somewhat nascent (Office for Students, 2020). Furthermore, there is a dearth of knowledge about carers’ needs and how best to support them (Larkin and Kubiak, 2021, Runacres et al., 2021, Knopf et al., 2022). What does exist tends to focus on young adult carers and students in face-to-face institutions.

In this paper, the challenges and support needs of carers in higher education distance learning are framed by the Longitudinal Model of Student Integration (Tinto, 1994). This framework presents the likelihood of student drop out in terms of the fit between the student and the institution in three domains: study goals, academic activities and social engagements. This paper reports on the following project aims:

1. To conduct an in-depth exploration of student carers’ experiences and views of good support for their study.
2. To build an understanding of the strategies used by student-carers to manage study while caring.

In Finland, structural, ideological and functional changes in universities have often been linked to the change in the University Act 2010. In line with the Modernisation Agenda, several New Public Management approaches have been applied to the activities of Finnish universities (de Boer & Enders 2017). Furthermore, international attractiveness has increasingly motivated university reforms, and the demand for internationalisation has challenged the national role of universities (Saarinen & Talas 2017).

This presentation is based on a research project Changing University and Equalities in Academic Work (Haapakorpi, Plamper, Tapanila, Jauhiainen, Laiho, Leinonen, Ylijoki & Jauhiainen 2023), which examined the tasks of university researchers and teachers in various positions, the conditions and possibilities of doing the work, and related changes. There is no established and shared definition of the concept of equality, it receives its content within a given time and context. Different actors – political and administrative actors or employees, for example – pay attention to the different meanings of equality and there is ongoing debate on the concept. (Kantola, Koskinen Sandberg & Ylöstalo, 2020) Equalities in academic work are intertwined not only with gender equality but also with age, social background, position, discipline, the possibility of attaching themselves to the university community and time resources.

The equality and non-discrimination work of universities is linked to national policies, legislation and international commitments. The promotion of equality at the university has traditionally meant actions aimed at individuals, especially women, but the individual perspective has shifted to structural and cultural factors. In international comparisons, progress on equality has been observed to slow down or halt (Tanhua 2020, 4). The Ministry of Education and Culture's report on the state of equality and diversity in Finnish higher education institutions noted, among other things, that women working in universities experience discrimination slightly more often than men, and ethnic minorities experience discrimination twice as often as ethnic Finns (Jousilahti, Tanhua, Paavola, Alanko, Kinnunen, Louvrier, Husu, Levola & Kilpi 2022).

In this presentation, we are interested in how representatives of the middle management of three case universities approach equality and non-discrimination in academic work and what challenges they talk about in terms of equality and non-discrimination. We also highlight the experience of international researchers and teachers in the field of equalities of academic work.

Current literature relating to academic employment suggests the academy is approaching a crossroads. There is evidence that the academy is reaching a period where a significant portion of staff intend to leave the profession within the next five years, which would seem to make way for new entrants into the workforce. However, casualisation of the academic workforce has steadily increased over the last two decades, resulting in fewer permanent academic staff positions. Sparked in part by long-term funding cuts occurring, despite student numbers increasing, and then the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Heffernan, 2022); a scenario has formed where a growth in casual labour practices is the norm (Crimmins, 2017). These academics are widely known as being precariously employed and may be known as ‘sessionals/teaching assistants’ (for teaching-related work) or ‘research assistants/fellows’ (for research-related work) and can be employed on contracts, sometimes ranging from hours through to fixed-term contracts that can extend from months to years. For the purposes of this paper, the term ‘precarious’ is used to include all academics employed on short-term and casual contracts (Mula et al., 2022). Similar to ‘tenured academics’ in the United States, some Australian academics have ‘continuing’ employment, while academics in Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdome have ‘permanent’ roles which denotes a degree of security and permanency to their positions. For the purposes of this paper, the term ‘permanent’ is used for academics in these roles.

Varying rates of casualisation exist with reports of between 16 to over 70 per cent of the academic workforce now engaged in casual employment or short-term contracts (Byers & Tani, 2014; Crimmins, 2017). While countries such as Canada and Finland have had a less pronounced oversupply of qualified candidates, the massification of doctoral programs means that the number of PhD holders seeking academic employment now outstrips available academic jobs in many countries (Heffernan, 2022). While figures differ between countries, institutional type (research vs teaching focused), and disciplinary areas, but in a majority of cases, the trend is that casual employment has increased at a time when the market continues to be flooded with graduates seeking academic employment (Heffernan, 2019).

One might have expected that academics leaving the profession due to retirement or other professional opportunities would have made way for sessional employees to gain permanent positions; but this has not proven to be the case. Instead, staff with permanent positions leaving the academy have been replaced by cheaper-to-employ workers on contract (Heffernan, 2020; Ryan et al., 2013). The COVID-19 pandemic has had further repercussions for the higher education sector. Although COVID’s impact differs between countries, institutions, and faculties, overall, the pandemic has driven universities into times of austerity. Blackmore (2020) highlights that though these levels of austerity are institution dependent, any form of financial downturn is often met with hiring practices that shift resources to cheaper forms of employment such as casual and contract staff. It has also been noted that COVID has not significantly altered the higher education employment landscape; but has exacerbated already existing trends for replacing continuing staff members with casual/contract workers; diminishing permanent positions, and increasing competition for permanent employment (Doidige & Doyle, 2020).

Although persons with graduate degrees increasingly occupy leadership positions, certain minoritised ethnicities remain underrepresented in these degrees, particularly at the doctoral level (Mateos‑González & Wakeling, 2021; Williams et al., 2019).

Evidence from a recent survey hints at possible challenges within candidate selection processes. In the 2021 UK Council of Graduate Education survey of doctoral research supervisors, only 38% of 3,435 of respondents had supervised a UK-domiciled ethnic minority candidate in recent years (UKCGE, 2021). Although 75% of respondents agreed that increasing candidate diversity would enhance their workplace research culture, only 11% included improving access to underrepresented candidates amongst their top three selection factors. On the one hand, this contention may highlight supervisors’ concerns around merit. On the other, it may indicate that supervisors lack knowledge about how to integrate equity and diversity considerations into selection practices or, as the survey itself suggests, institutional processes may not be conducive to doing so.

Potential modalities of integrating equity and diversity considerations are alluded to in the survey due to some supervisors’ identification of other, primarily non-cognitive, selection attributes, e.g., enthusiasm, motivation, etc. Evidence from the US which highlights equity issues with cognitive selection criteria such as the Graduate Record Examination imply the equity quotient of non-cognitive attributes (Michel et al., 2019; Miller et al., 2019). There is therefore greater scope to understand the range of attributes which contribute to doctoral success and how they do, particularly in the UK context and particularly from the perspectives of academics with substantive supervision experience. While much evidence around doctoral experiences focuses on the student-supervisor relationship or students’ perceptions of the factors contributing to their individual success (or lack thereof), relatively limited evidence exists specifically on the perspectives of academics who typically select and supervise students.

Among the few studies is that of Kyvik & Olsen (2014) from the Norwegian context (where doctoral candidates are considered staff) which suggests that doctoral success factors include the doctoral training system; programme and research environment; student characteristics; cultural and social context such as institutional prestige and norms and expectations; as well as the differences between diverse fields. From the Finnish context, supervisors’ views of factors contributing to the doctoral success included the social dimensions of the process and the student-supervisor relationship (Cornér et al. 2019). Offering a Europe-level view, Mantai & Marrone (2022) analyse over 13,000 cross-disciplinary PhD advertisements across different European countries to examine the desired skills, attributes and qualifications of doctoral students. The most desired criteria were degree and achievements (81% of adverts); communication (52%); research, i.e., research experience (45%); interpersonal (43%); and personal attributes (39%). In the UK, interpersonal and personal attributes ranked lowest (17% each).

As seen, the literature suggests two categories of influences: student characteristics and institutional factors. As such, our study adopts Lovitts’ (2005) ecosystem model which conceptualises three broad factors, i.e., macroenvironment, microenvironment and individual resources (or individual students characteristics, consisting of cognitive and non-cognitive attributes) that influence PhD degree completion and dissertation quality. Though individual resources appear most prominent in the model, they interact with and are influenced by the micro- and macroenvironments. In this paper, the model is used to explore the following research questions:

• What [valued] attributes do supervisors believe contribute to doctoral success, defined as completion?
• How do supervisors perceive that these contribute to doctoral success?

In addition to the importance of the perspectives of experienced academics in understanding doctoral success factors (Manathunga & Lant, 2006), the answers to these questions potentiate possibilities for equity in supervisors’ doctoral selection processes and practices.

This research project explores teaching and learning cultures in transnational higher education by examining three pedagogical development programmes organised by a Finnish university in universities in Palestine, Brazil, and Thailand. As a part of transnational cooperation of these institutions between 2016 and 2019, three programmes were organised as pedagogical development training for university teachers. The research datasets were compiled from texts produced by the participants during the three case-study programmes and analysed using poststructuralist discourse analysis.

Aiming to understand the cultural change processes engendered by the transnational cooperation, the research is led by two main research questions: (1) What are the features of teaching and learning cultures in higher education institutions (HEIs) located in three national contexts (Palestine, Brazil, and Thailand)? (2) What kinds of change processes are introduced by the transnational pedagogical development programmes and how are those manifested in the (institutional) teaching and learning cultures?

Theoretical and methodological framework of this qualitative inquiry draws on conceptualisations outlined in the previous research into international/transnational education, institutional cultures, and poststructuralist discourse analysis.

Transnational education (TNE) – also called cross-border education or internationalisation abroad – refers to movement of people, programmes, policies, or other educational activities across national or regional borders (Knight, 2012). Finnish HEIs have recently increased their TNE activities mostly by offering commissioned programmes and training packages to partners globally. Generally seen as beneficial for HEIs, TNE may widen the opportunities for intercultural exchange, economic development, and modernisation of higher education systems (Korhonen & Alenius, 2018). However, TNE programs have been criticised as profit-seeking endeavours of HEIs in developed countries providing education in developing countries (Djerasimovic, 2014). The economic rationale of TNE raises concerns about equal opportunities and access to education resulting with unequal power distribution between the “producers” and “consumers” of TNE (Pyvis, 2011). Previous studies question transferability of pedagogical ideas in different national contexts and call for greater cultural contextualisation to make learning relevant for the learners (Allen, 2014; Bovill et al., 2015; Jordan et al., 2014; Leask, 2008). More research is needed to better understand the dynamics behind this process of cultural contextualisation in TNE.

Our three case studies have been implemented as inter-institutional transnational cooperation; therefore, we focus on teaching and learning as one analytical aspect of institutional cultures in higher education. Our approach draws on the fragmentation perspective (Martin, 1992) and anthropological approaches (Alvesson, 2002; Trowler, 2008) to institutional culture. Characterised by ambiguity, pluralism, and contradictions, culture is constructed and enacted through community’s meaning-making processes. Following the poststructuralist perspective, we see institutional cultures as discursively constructed (Berti, 2017; Foucault, 2002). Thus, we define teaching and learning cultures as discursive meaning-making processes that guide the ways in which educational processes are understood and organised at an institution.

The presentation will give an overview of this ongoing research project and discuss the findings of two case studies: Finnish–Palestinian & Finnish–Brazilian cooperation. The role of diversity (in sense of increasing variety) is particularly visible in discursive construction of institutional teaching and learning cultures during a transnational collaboration. The findings of the two case-studies show that teaching and learning cultures are fragmented and constructed by diverse and often contrasting discourses in and around HEIs. As it introduces additional alternative discourses into the institutional meaning-making, transnational collaboration diversifies the ways in which educational processes are understood and practiced at a HEI. In other words, diversification of (pedagogical) perspectives in TNE enables discursive transformation and pedagogical development not only on the level of individual university teachers but also on the level of community and institution.

The increased demand for independent researchers, coupled with high attrition rates on doctoral programmes, have focused attention on the support provided to aid doctoral researchers become ‘active relational agents’ in research communities (Pyhältö and Keskinen 2012). In this paper we explore how an analysis of doctoral researchers’ experiences as they negotiate community participation and engagement can further our understanding of the support needed to facilitate a move towards more participative culture for those at the early stages of their doctorates. The university research environment is often seen as key to supporting the development of creative, collaborative and autonomous researchers, with its significance noted in high-stakes assessments. Despite the attention on this, doctoral researchers in the UK consistently report lower levels of satisfaction with research culture than with other aspects of their experience (Neves 2022). The focus on improving the support provided to doctoral researchers has frequently been focussed on supervisors. These issues are also of concern elsewhere in Europe, for example through recent calls to develop research cultures where doctoral researchers have opportunities to engage with research communities from the start of their programmes (Corcelles-Seuba, Suñe-Soler, Sala-Bubaré & Castelló 2022).

Drawing on a communities of practice theorisation, we map the communities that doctoral researchers participate in, situating these in relation to the wider research environment, and the access to resources this affords. Then, using agency theories, we frame doctoral researchers’ relationships within and across communities and networks. We explore how these relationships vary, considering spatiotemporal dimensions (Aarnikoivu 2021), and ‘embodied, material or imaginary mediators of experience’ (Hopwood 2010, p109). The concept of professional agency, utilised in studies of teacher professional learning (Eteläpelto et al., 2013 p.61) frames an understanding of how experienced professionals engage in the early stages of researcher development. Previous studies of doctoral researchers’ engagement and participation in research communities have identified relational agency (Edwards 2005) and the development of relational expertise (Douglas 2020) as offering productive ways of thinking about support for doctoral researchers. In this paper we consider how relational pedagogical practices may be made more explicit, developing a research culture that offers both support and challenge to doctoral candidates in their journeying to become researchers.

We focus on the following research question:

• How do doctoral researchers in the first year of a professional doctorate navigate research communities?

The challenge of engagement with and participation in research communities for those at the start of their doctoral programmes has increasingly been the focus of research. Candidates on professional doctorates, typically experienced professionals with successful careers, may bring networking skills from practice that can be utilised to aid research networking. At the same time, they are aware of being ‘novices’ in research, facing the challenge of making sense of identity shifts as they begin the process of socialisation into research communities. In this paper, we consider the opportunities that professional doctorates provide and how the pedagogical affordances such programmes offer might be exploited for other forms of doctorate.

The aim of this paper is to analyze transformative learning in Higher Education spaces. Thousands of students from universities in the “Global North” engage with communities in the “Global South” while conducting fieldwork and mobility programs. However, there are not many courses offered to provide students with a transformative learning approach. “Transformative learning can be described as a process of changing deeply held assumptions (i.e., frames of reference or meaning perspectives) about the world and oneself, thereby strengthening one’s capacity to contribute to social change processes” (Singer-Brodowski, 2023 p.2).

One of the objectives of this paper is to study how courses at universities deal with how different power structures - based on colonial, racial, gender, wealth and knowledge inequalities - benefit the Global North, and what this implies from a personal and academic perspective. Taking an anti-oppressive approach (Stein, 2015) entails identifying power structures and transformations regarding social and cognitive justice, which requires taking into consideration different epistemologies (Escobar, 2006). These diverse epistemologies refer to processes of producing and valuing different forms of knowledge based on the practices of social groups that have been historically discriminated against, especially in the Global South.

Developing competences on transformative learning to overcome disciplinary boundaries, encompassing elements that are essential for researchers such as grant writing and participation in cooperative and international teams. These competences are essential for educators and researchers who aspire to be “transformative intellectuals” who combine mutually interdependent roles as critical educators and active citizens (Giroux, 2013). At the same time, it is possible for academic institutions to alienate potential 'organic intellectuals' from communities (Mayo, 2015). This can occur through the use of a type of language or behaviour that creates a gap between the researcher and the community. Consequently, this hinders the development of organic intellectuals with respect to the struggles that communities are engaged in (Mayo, 2019).

Although there is a growing interest in more critical and decolonial methods in the field of higher education, the number of publications analysing empirical cases of learning environments at universities using such methods are still very limited (Hayes et al 2021). There is still a lack of opportunities to engage with these critical competences inside university curricula and practice (Sklad et al., 2016).

In order to fill this gap, this paper proposes Theatre of the Oppressed as a methodology that fosters critical thinking, teamwork, dialoguing among different epistemologies and proposing ideas of critical sustainability based on more equitable participation in decision-making and, more importantly, the ability to identify power dynamics, co-production of knowledge and transdisciplinary work. Such competencies are crucial for developing international research projects that take into account power inequalities and aim to contribute to the scientific debate.

Developed by Boal (1985), Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is a method, inspired by Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1971), which is particularly interesting as it approaches reality in a more complex way. In order to take into account, during fieldwork, the intersections of different variables with the object of study, TO can help embracing how we relate with reality through our emotions (Méndez de la Brena, 2021). In this regard, it is fair to claim that disembodied academic research can lead to unconscious auto-ethnographic processes (García-Santesmases Fernández, 2019). In this regard, TO proves to be a useful participatory methodology to challenge the "common sense" of the student body.

Whilst the path traversed by those seeking research leadership within higher education are well-defined and recognised, the journey to leadership in learning and teaching (L&T) is often not widely discussed and/or recognised. Much of the literature around leadership in academia focusses on those who have accessed leadership positions owing to their research excellence (see for e.g. Bryman, 2007; Dopson et al.,2016) and less so due to their learning and teaching leadership (Hofmeyer et al. 2015; Shaked, 2021). This might be owing to the position learning and teaching occupies in comparison to research ( see for e.g. Chen, 2015). Therefore, the indicators of what might count as L&T leadership and how might individuals get to these places of leadership are often ill defined.

With the increased emphasis on L&T leadership in higher education globally, and considering its significance for the student learning experience, a focus on understanding the challenges of L&T leadership is therefore timely and appropriate. We draw on 21 personal narratives and 8 case studies of L&T leaders from nine countries including those from Europe in this study. Using a motivational framework of push and pull factors, we analysed 21 personal narratives and 8 case studies of L&T leaders from nine countries including those from Europe to:

1. Contribute to our collective understanding of the diverse forms of learning and teaching leadership which currently exists within Higher Education

2. Explore the particular motivations and challenges faced and opportunities available to those seeking to establish themselves as L&T leaders within academia.

In this article I explore the university discussion about the language use in teaching, which is balancing between the arguments of internationalization and language protection.

Among the language dimensions in current higher education, the use of English is the most researched aspect. For instance, Philipson (1992) discusses power and ideology contributions to the linguistic imperialism of English and presents this as a feature characteristic to English language. From the perspective of Crystal (1997), it stems that this kind of power could be brought up within any language, and that research should consider historical, political and cultural context. Therefore, while both authors explore the expansion of English and its hegemonic power, they differ in drawing political implications from this state of the art. However, the interpretation of practices concerning language(s) and their balance in different parts of the world could not be derived from these studies. As Pennycook (2000) and Chorpita (2005) argue, the large-scale theories are too general to embrace the shifting landscape of languages in the political, cultural and social context.

Meanwhile, Pennycook (2000) suggests the distinction between the general discussion on English and its political power, and ideological impact of English on other languages and cultures. He fully acknowledges the first one, which in his interpretation unites the polarized positions of Philipson (1992) and Crystal (1997). However, he argues for a more nuanced approach with the analysis of the second one. In his view, this analysis of the ‘discursive effects’ of English could have divergent analytical frameworks, including colonial celebration, laissez-faire liberalism, language ecology, linguistic imperialism and language rights. Finally, he also elaborates on the postcolonial performativity approach, which “seeks to understand through contextualized sociologies of local language acts how English is constantly implicated in moments of hegemony, resistance and appropriation” (2000, p.108). This position seems to be most fruitful in analyzing the situation with several languages in the academia, because it reflects on language rights and ecology, along with linguistic imperialism, while trying to maintain a fluid and functional perspective on language. Yet, it also gives analytical perspective in approaching practices.

In analyzing practices, positions vary as well. For instance, Julianne House relies on the idea of De Swaan that in the sphere of science an argument about the most effective communication might hold equally strong power, and this rationale might prompt the choice of language (De Swaan, 2001, p.52 c.f. House, 2013). Further analyses of the practices feature a variety of aspects that English as a lingua franca brings into different disciplines and planning of teaching. Due to the changing picture of languages and perspectives on them, there a rethinking of professional fields, which have not been fully explored.

According to Warriner (2016), institutional arrangements have been transformed in such a way that language is conceptualized in a reduced form, merely as a tool of communication without a larger context of history and culture. As a result, it is no longer placed within humanities, its instruction has been reduced and less languages are being learned in tertiary studies. This inability to upkeep multilingualism is also a result of the macro conditions of strategizing of few stronger languages. This explains emergence of discussion around language preservation, which is focused on the national languages. This becomes a topic for discussion in the language policy, which I am focusing on in this article. In particular, I am addressing two questions:

(1). What kind of ethical claims are communicated by different respondents?

(2). What kind of practices are considered as the most valuable or problematic by different participants?

This presentation gives a snapshot of my new book, The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela, Stanford University Press 2023.

The decline of the public university has dramatically increased under intensified commercialization and privatization, with market-driven restructurings leading to the deterioration of working and learning conditions. A growing reserve army of scholars and students, who enter precarious learning, teaching, and research arrangements, have joined recent waves of public unrest in both developed and developing countries to advocate for reforms to higher education. Yet even the most visible campaigns have rarely put forward any proposals for an alternative institutional organization. Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, The Alternative University outlines the origins and day-to-day functioning of the colossal effort of late President Hugo Chávez's government to create a university that challenged national and global higher education norms.

The book addresses the questions: What are the opportunities for and limitations to an alternative higher education project within the contradictions and confines of advanced capitalism? How are these reflected within a socialist state project in a semi-peripheral petrol state in the Global South and in which the government holds control neither of the balance of power in the bourgeois state subservient to market logic nor of the broader transnational processes of commercialization and stratification they reinforce? How do hierarchies typical of the higher education field and accelerated by processes of globalization manifest within an uneven national university field confronted with its internal gendered and racialized class dynamic? What are the ways in which such a process is experienced, negotiated, or challenged from within by academics and experts seen as proponents and class enemy of alternative education; and then by the poor, who are subject of its empowerment project?

To answer these questions, I examine the tension between enlightened and egalitarian tendencies in higher education, detailing processes that challenge or reinforce old and produce new inequalities. Instead of focusing on just one group, to depict the process in its full complex texture, I map the trajectories over time of the whole field with its various actors: experts, academics, staff, students, and community activists. I explore how existent and novel structural and symbolic hierarchies condition the relation of these different groups to each other and to the nation-state through its higher education policy. I show how the structural and agentive opportunities the new regime offers are limited by asymmetries of economic and symbolic power: ultimately, beyond certain redistributive initiatives, the class power of old educated elites stays strong while the success of the socialist project rests on its ability to produce affective reality and mobilize the social reproduction labor of women in poor communities. The global field of higher education (Marginson 2008) and the labor market of a semi-peripheral petrol state, with their own logic, hierarchies, and norms, also limit Bolivarian higher education policies. The resistance of traditional academics to both the massification of elite public universities and the accreditation of the new programs of UBV also sabotages the alternative university project. However, in the book I also show some aspects that are less dependent on global and systemic constraints and more on path dependencies of the political culture of petrol states and past socialist experiments. Political opportunities are missed, and responsibility is diffused by tendencies to start from scratch and build new parallel institutions every time resistance appears, to treat expertise as contingent and replaceable, and to circumvent critical feedback from sympathizers. Together with the objective structural constraints, these tendencies have reinforced the precariousness of Bolivarian institutions and frustrated higher education’s opportunity to serve as a key tool for national and global social change.

This paper will present the work of the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) at University College London (UCL) and explore the theoretical and practical tensions of reckoning with problematic legacies in higher education contexts. In 2018, UCL's then President & Provost, Professor Michael Arthur, commissioned an inquiry to look at UCL’s historical role in and the current status of the teaching and study of the history of eugenics. On 7 January 2021, UCL issued a formal public apology for its history and legacy of eugenics and a response group of people with diverse lived experience and professional expertise examined the inquiry recommendations. This group presented their proposals for how these recommendations could be best be enacted in July 2021. The Eugenics Inquiry Response Report acknowledged the complexity of developing teaching and learning activities that might redress problematic legacies in educational settings. Preparing staff and students to work with this complex focus provides a range of challenges and barriers to educational development, as well as opportunities for innovation and the potential for meaningful cross disciplinary collaboration between departments and faculties. Between 2022-2025 ELEP aims to:

• Develop a set of guidelines, staff resources, and learning opportunities that embed visibility and awareness of UCL’s history of eugenics in teaching and learning activities across the organisation.
• Support the ability of students, staff, and the wider community to engage with UCL’s eugenics legacy in educational activities.

• Investigate sustainable and inclusive teaching and learning approaches that continues to develop capacities of the UCL community to understand and address the legacies and ongoing consequences of eugenics thinking today.

The project is theoretically anchored within the field of Difficult Knowledge studies. Britzman (1998) developed the concept of ‘difficult knowledge’ in education contexts to investigate the ways that experiences of education and learning can be problematic, traumatic, uncomfortable, and even harmful when encountering controversial or complex curriculum areas. While there is more thinking to be done around this aspect of the project, the concept of ‘difficult knowledge’ offers a productive starting point for thinking together about aspects of our education work that are vital for our education community as part of UCL’s mission around disruptive and radical thinking. This theorisation of the eugenics legacy also offers space for reflection around ideas about implication and accountability, necessary for addressing the harms caused by eugenics in the past

Teachers are a key component of the university community when it comes to creating an inclusive culture through their research, and especially through their teaching and the use of inclusive pedagogies (Stentiford & Koutsouris, 2021). In these professional practices, it is likely that the relevant competencies are not only those specific to their teaching and research functions, but also those related to the personal sphere (Moral-Mora et al., 2021). Thus, the beliefs, attitudes, personality, and life experience of university teachers would be associated with inclusive professional performance, which would require a theoretical exploration of the profile of competencies that is not limited to technical-professional dimensions. This is the thesis that the paper presented here sets out to confirm through a model that considers a set of personal variables, predictive of the teachers' inclusive actions in teaching and other areas of practice.

The Dual-Process Motivational Model developed by John Duckitt (2001; Duckitt & Sibley, 2017), which explains attitudes of prejudice, may be suited to understanding the inclusive beliefs, attitudes, and practices of teachers insofar as prejudice negatively predicts inclusive judgements and behaviours (Kende et al., 2021), as well as attitudes towards immigrant students (Pace et al., 2022). Specifically, Duckitt's model states that openness is a personality trait that negatively anticipates the ideological attitude of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) which, in turn, would have a relevant explanatory effect on prejudice toward groups perceived as threatening. Agreeableness would be the trait that predicts, at low levels, social dominance orientation (SDO), which, in turn, would anticipate prejudice towards groups who are devalued in terms of status and power. In both pathways, the direct influence of personality on prejudice is weak, but has a more important indirect effect through attitudes (Duckitt & Sibley, 2017). What differentiates these two paths is the perception of the group, which has been found to be associated with certain covariables of prejudice (Bergh & Brandt, 2022). Within higher education, greater attention is paid to women, persons with disabilities, those belonging to ethnic minority groups, and to students from a low socio-economic background (Alvarez-Castillo et al., 2021), groups considered to be disadvantaged or vulnerable. This perception of vulnerability reinforces the path of agreeableness and SDO as part of the cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioural process of university teachers with respect to social minorities.

Along with personality and ideological attitudes, another personal characteristic that might be related to inclusive practices is the perception of discrimination that many teachers themselves may experience. In certain minority groups that perceive a conflict between their identity and that of the majority group, perceived discrimination is positively associated with the intent to avoid contact or to act aggressively against the outgroup. However, university teachers in Spain, although they may feel discriminated against in one of their identities, enjoy a good level of autonomy in the exercise of their profession and a prestigious social status, in addition to a normative environment favourable to inclusion, which could reverse the sense of negative reactivity in the case of perceived discrimination. Results from the study by Chung et al. (2017), who took Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour (1991) and used a sample of professionals from the general population, supported a certain positive association between perceived discrimination and attitudes towards diversity.

According to the aforementioned evidence and theoretical models, the current study hypothesised that the path of agreeableness and SDO, as well as perceived discrimination, will predominantly anticipate the beliefs, attitudes, and practices with which teachers address diversity.

General description

The diversity among students in HE generally is high regarding social background, ethnicity, age, gender, educational and experiential background. Further, research shows that the number of students in Higher Education (HE) who suffer from stress and anxiety is increasing in Denmark (Uddannelses- og forskningsministeriet, 2019), which is equivalent to the development worldwide. In the Nordic countries, well-being problems have become the most important health problem for young people (Kolouh-Söderlund et al. 2016). Empirical research shows that university students are a 'high-risk population' for psychological disorders and mental health problems, with up to 1/3 of all HE students suffering from these kinds of problems, (e.g. Baik, Larcombe & Brooker, 2019)

Mental health/well-being problems may interfere with student life in various ways, and not least students’ ability to and experience of belonging to their education (Wulff-Andersen et al. 2023). According to Tinto (2015), it is important for students to feel belonging to their education as valued members of their study group. In HE institutions, teachers meet the students in teaching and supervision and are in principle those in the educational system, who might be able to discover, if students are not feeling well and therefore be in a position to support students in handling some of their difficulties. Teachers may also be able to organize teaching in ways that makes it easier for them to see and acknowledge the individual students and perhaps facilitate experiences of community among students.

However, Danish HE institutions are changing these years. Many national reforms and changing economic frameworks have been implemented during the last decades (Wulff-Andersen et al., 2023; Sarauw & Madsen, 2017) and teachers themselves are being pressurized from requirements regarding performance and teaching (less resources generally, more and diverse students), research being measured and requirements to bring in more external funding. Therefore, many teachers are also suffering from stress (Arbejdsmiljø og Helbred, 2018; Caddell & Wilder, 2018, Krogh, Jensen et al). Because of this, it may be difficult for teachers to overcome to accommodate and make the extra effort both in general regarding teaching and organizing safe learning communities and specifically in relation to the students who may need some extra support. For instance, teachers may feel, that it is not their job to detect and help students with problems that are not directly academically related. The problem is that HE risks losing engaged, bright and resourceful students if they do not receive the support they need when their study life becomes difficult for different reasons (Wulff-Andersen 2023, op. cit.).

Theoretical framework

During our data analyses several thematic topics emerged, and among these the question of the role of the teacher in relation to the student with well-being or other kinds of problems. Selected data was analyzed in particular drawing on the categories of self-efficacy and sense of belonging as areas where teachers and supervisors could make a difference regarding the organization of teaching and the creation of supportive study environments. In elaborating on this we are drawing on Danish and international research on the student perspective: students’ encounters with educational institutions, teachers, supervisors, fellow students and counsellors (Ulriksen, 2009; Lowe & Cook, 2003), students’ failure to thrive (Hermann, Jensen & Lassesen, 2012; Thomas, 2012; Qvortrup, Smith, Lykkegaard, & Rasmussen, 2018; Ulriksen, Holmegaard, & Madsen, 2011), student engagement (Wimpenny & Savin-Baden, 2013), and research on the teacher’s role in supporting students in general (Ramsden, 2003), in student directed, collaboratory study environments, students as partners (Bovill, Cook-Sather, Felten, Millard & Moore-Cherry,2016, Jensen & Krogh, 2017), and university teachers’ work conditions (Caddell & Wilder, 2018; Pedersen, 2016; Sarauw & Madsen,2017)

There are several different descriptions of academic dishonesty. Yet, they can all be summarized as any unethical means to achieve better results in learning assessments (Miller et al., 2017). The prevalence of academic dishonesty in higher education institutions is supported by research worldwide (Murdock et al., 2006). When cheating becomes common, it results in consequences for students and higher education institutions. The so-called victimless crime prevents students from attaining the necessary knowledge and capabilities that are being transferred by their programs and disturbs the equity of assessment (Miller et al., 2017). In addition, when students observe their peers cheating and not getting punished, they cheat to level the playing field, creating a campus culture that involves cheating (McCabe et al., 1993). Higher education institutions are also damaged by cheating scandals, which reduces the public’s confidence in every qualification (Harding et al., 2004). It is evident that academic dishonesty has victims; therefore, building an understanding is crucial in developing prevention strategies.

Extensive research has been done to find out why students cheat. Brimble et al. (2005) discovered that students might have different perceptions of which behaviors are considered academic cheating than university staff. To prevent cheating and to reduce incidences where cheating occurs because of confusion, academic dishonesty regulations are put in motion. Even so, research suggests that students’ understanding of academic dishonesty policies is low (Bretag et al., 2014). Furthermore, studies reveal that university staff tends to ignore student cheating (Coren, 2011). Students give various reasons for why they cheat. Among these reasons believing that others are cheating gains prevalence (Awdry et al., 2021). Relation between assessment type and cheating has limited research, yet Harper et al. (2019) found that it is a contributing factor. Moreover, the use of the internet gave another channel for students to cheat. For instance, whereas buying essays is not new, the internet is a very convenient medium for such behavior.

The current study investigated cheating among undergraduate students to describe their points of view. Also, as this study took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, and as emerging studies pointed out an increase in the prevalence of academic dishonesty during the lockdown period (Comas-Forgas et al., 2021), student opinions related to cheating trends during the Covid-19 pandemic emergency remote teaching (ERT) were gathered (Comas-Forgas et al., 2021). Furthermore, students’ observations about contract cheating were examined. More specifically, the research questions were: What are undergraduate students’ perceptions and opinions on academic dishonesty? What are undergraduate students’ beliefs on dishonesty frequency during emergency remote education compared to in-person education, and how do students explain the reasons for this difference? What are undergraduate students’ observations of contract cheating?

This study is framed in a research project that analyses how higher education students deploy self-assessment (SA) strategies and considers different factors affecting it. With the term SA we refer to “a wide variety of mechanisms and techniques through which students describe (i.e., assess) and possibly assign merit or worth to (i.e., evaluate) the qualities of their own learning processes and products” (Panadero et al., 2016, p. 804). Research in the area of formative assessment has shown that SA is a strategy that can positively affect self-regulation (Yan, 2019) and achievement (Brown & Harris, 2013).

In this communication we present part of the results of a randomized experiment carried out in higher education. Specifically, we analyze how different types of feedback affect the strategies and criteria deployed by higher education students during a SA task.

We selected the type of feedback as a key component of the experiment because it is a powerful instructional practice that intertwines with self-regulation (Butler & Winne, 2016) and it has an important effect on academic achievement (Wisniewski et al., 2020). Understanding the effects of external feedback on students’ SA could help us understand how to better integrate both for instructional purposes. For this reason, we compared how higher education students self-assessed before and after receiving different types of feedback (rubric vs. instructor’s feedback vs. combination of rubric and instructor’s feedback), and we analysed how these two manipulations (moment and types of feedback) could affect the quality and quantity of the strategies and criteria used by students while they self-assessed their work.

Regarding feedback, the different conditions included two types. While the use of instructor’s feedback is very common, rubrics have gained a prominent role as feedback tools in the last years due to its positive effects for students, teachers, and programs (Dawson, 2017). Although the use of rubrics seems to be more effective without combining it with exemplars (Lipnevich et al., 2014), we do not know how the combination of instructors’ feedback with rubric can affect SA.

The contrast of how students perform self-assessment before and after receiving feedback could inform us on the time we should provide feedback in relation to SA.

Therefore, this communication aims to explore 2 research questions:

- RQ1: What are the self-assessment strategies and criteria that higher education students implement before and after feedback?

H1: Self-assessment strategies and criteria will decrease when feedback is provided.

- RQ2. What are the effects of feedback type and feedback occasion on self-assessment behaviors (i.e., number and type of strategy and criteria)?

H2: Rubric feedback will provide better self-assessment practices than other feedback types.

Topic, objective and analytical framework

This study follows the trajectories of student evaluations in a research university in the Netherlands. It analyses how they are adjusted and used at different instances by different actors involved, how they relate with understandings of higher education quality, and which values, purposes and social consequences are thereby taken into account.

Higher education quality is a multiple, elusive not always clearly articulated concept. Student evaluations of education and teaching are related to different purposes of higher education quality and the assessment of aspects like student learning, program quality, teacher effectiveness and faculty performance (Harvey & Green, 1993; Tam, 2001; Weenink et al., 2022). While they are used to improve teaching and learning, they have also become a disciplinary device to shape academic conduct (Barrow & Grant, 2016; Hornstein, 2017). It is not clear when, where and what student evaluations are formally and informally used for by different academic actors and how quality is thereby measured and understood.

(Esarey & Valdes, 2020) note that the scholarly debate on student evaluations focused on teacher effectiveness and aspects like reliability, validity and bias. They identify mixed perspectives concerning the reliability and validity of measuring teaching effectiveness and argue that student evaluations are at best moderately correlated with student learning and/or instructional best practices. Recent studies shift attention to issues concerning fairness and social effects in using them. (Heffernan, 2022) draws attention to the negative consequences of bias for specific groups such as women and minority groups, which are increasingly subject to abusive comments. Focus groups with academics suggest furthermore that student evaluations are most critical for early career scholars’ careers [authors, under review]. Unbiased, reliable and valid evaluations can be unfair and fail to identify the best teacher (Esarey & Valdes, 2020).

Several studies argue for combining student evaluations with other dissimilar measurements of teaching like self-assessment and peer review of courses in personnel decisions, and for statistical adjustments before using them for any purpose (Esarey & Valdes, 2020; Hornstein, 2017). This ‘broad quality perspective’ can include more than student attainment and also assess the role and performance of lecturers in the educational process (Onderwijsraad, 2016; Tam, 2001; Weenink et al., 2022). One could even include the social consequences of the uses of student evaluations. It is however not known which values are brought forward in using and constructing student evaluations within academia. While the student evaluations are critiqued, there is actually a lack of knowledge on what they are used for and how they relate with quality understandings, and there are different degrees of freedom to adjust them to situated practices and purposes.

This study analyses the trajectories of student evaluations for different social sciences in a Dutch university. Various academic actors like institutional- and faculty management, educational committees, directors, course coordinators, lecturers and students can engage with them for different purposes and adjust them, for example by adding questions. These actors thereby articulate what they find valuable. (Heuts & Mol, 2013) conducted such an analysis of values for tomatoes from an Actor-Network Theory perspective, and followed them from developers and growers to so-called consumers. They identified different registers of worth which are draw upon and sometimes clash when making a ‘good tomato’. We add Norbert Elias’ notion of human figurations (Elias, 1968, 1978) to this perspective to further assess how they engage with their environment in using and adjusting student evaluations.

Research question

What are the trajectories of student evaluations in a Dutch research university, and how are different notions of quality taken into account in its uses and adaptations?

Agency can be generally defined as an individual’s capacity to “act purposefully and reflectively on their world” (Rogers & Wetzel, 2013, p. 63). Higher education students’ agency has been studied from various perspectives, such as students’ self-efficacy and competence beliefs or participatory structures (e.g., Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011; Schunk & Zimmerman, 2012;). However, studies that combine different dimensions of agency and use multimodal methods for studying agency are rare (but see Jääskelä et al., 2017; 2020). In this study agency is approached from the perspective of students’ perceptions of their personal, relational and participatory resources for agency (Jääskelä et al., 2020). This perspective can be seen to represent a subject-centered approach (e.g., Eteläpelto et al., 2013; Su, 2013) to agency as it acknowledges the meaning of a person’s own experience and sense-making “of having (and using of) personal, relational and context-specific participatory resources to engage in intentional and meaningful action and learning” (Jääskelä et al., 2021, p. 793). However, this view also acknowledges that agency is situational, connected to contextual conditions and constructed in interaction between the person and the socio-cultural context (Eteläpelto et al., 2013; Kayi-Aydar, 2015; Lasky, 2005). Therefore, as Priestley and colleagues (Priestley, Edwards, Priestley & Miller, 2012) argue, agency is not merely a capacity of the individual.

The focus in this study is to explore university students’ perceived agency resources (personal, relational, and participatory, Jääskelä et al., 2020) from the perspective of positioning (Arvaja, 2016; Harrè & van Langenhove, 1999; Kayi-Adar, 2015, York & Kirshner, 2015; Wortham, 2001). Positioning helps to understand the interactional nature of agency as positioning takes place in relation to others (others broadly speaking; e.g., other people, material and socio-cultural learning context) (Wortham, 2001). Agency, thus, is dynamic and shaped by social interaction and context (Kayi-Aydar, 2015; Priestley et al., 2012). Consequently, the same student may take a more agentic position in one context and less in another. Kayi-Aydar (2015) suggests that agency is possible to achieve when students are enabled to take agentic positions in their (learning) context. When students take agentic positions, it implies their capacity and willingness to act. Therefore, it is important to study students’ perceived agency in relation to possibilities available and created through the pedagogical arrangements. As York and Kirshner (2015) argue, teachers’ (discursive) activity and learning environment for their part enables or constrains agency. However, even though the learning environment may enable agentic positions through the pedagogical means students may resist the positions available and supported (Kayi-Aydar, 2015). Therefore, the interest in this study also lies in studying agency as a personalized construct (e.g., Su, 2011) focusing on different meanings the students negotiate for agency while participating in the same course. This necessitates also considering students’ life and study histories in manifestation of agency (e.g., Arvaja, Sarja & Rönnberg, 2022; Wortham, 2001).

The aim of this study is to explore 1) what kinds of agency positions the students - who are participating in two university courses (teacher education and information technology) - take in relation to their experienced personal, relational and participatory resources for agency and 2) what kinds of similarities and/or differences there are between positionings within the students participating in the same course or between the students in different courses.

Project-based approaches to learning is becoming increasingly common in higher education (Nerland & Prøitz, 2018).The assumption is that student-centric, collaborative learning activities provide students with both academic, professional skills and social skills, such as learning to work in and as a team. It is also argued that pedagogical approaches whereby students work on projects with real-world problems provide authentic educational experiences that can bridge the gap between education and work life. Empirical research has shown that project-based learning has a positive effect on student achievement (Chen & Yang, 2019), and also on students’ motivation, experience of relevance, and creativity (Damşa, 2018). The large part of this research, including systematic reviews and meta-analysis, has been conducted in K-12 education (Chen & Yang, 2019), but in recent years it has been rapidly increasing also within higher education.

A claim that is often made is that there is a lack of process-oriented studies on student collaboration in higher education. It is argued that the literature is dominated by ‘effect-oriented’ research that focuses on the benefits of pedagogical approaches on a range of individual variables, such as academic achievement, student satisfaction or skill development (e.g. Janssen et al., 2010; Sjølie et al., 2021). The problem with this line of research is that it employs a ‘black box’ approach with which it is difficult to understand and explain the variability in the research findings (Janssen et al., 2010). Consequently, we seem to know little about why some student teams function well and foster the learning process, and how factors, such as diversity or complexity of the problem to be solved influence the process, project outcome and student learning.

This claim is, however, not sufficiently substantiated. The research literature on student teams or group work in higher education makes up a diverse, fragmented, complex body of research that is inherently heterogenic and multidisciplinary. Research is often contained within specific educational programs (e.g. teacher education, engineering, or health education), with limited references across the educational settings and with discipline specific terms. The different educational settings often focus on various pedagogical methods, using different terms for the same approach or the same terms in different ways. So far, there exist no reviews on student project collaboration that take into account the diversity in research in higher education. Reviews have either been conducted within a specific discipline (e.g. Matturro et al., 2019; Pow-Sang et al., 2017) or for a specific method (e.g. Guo et al., 2020; Knutas & J., 2015; Reimschisel et al., 2017). In Guo et al.’s (2020) review, for example, the authors include only studies that use the term “project-based learning” in the title. This excludes many studies that use other terms for project-based approaches (or not use it at all in the title).

This paper presents the result of a large systematic mapping study on the empirical research that has been conducted on students’ project collaboration in higher education. The study used a wide search to include the diversity of terms, methods and approaches used across higher education. The research question is: What characterizes the empirical process-oriented research that has been undertaken on students' project collaboration in higher education? The map can be used to identify research gaps and suggest a research agenda for project-based approaches to learning in higher education. The map also provides an opportunity to identify patterns and thus investigate how the different educational contexts might influence the way we research and conceptualize project collaboration in different disciplines.

The past two decades have witnessed substantial growth and development of further education in Ireland at unprecedented rates since the economic downturn following the Celtic Tiger (1994–2007), which included substantial changes from the government to the grassroots level in how further education is funded, administered, and experienced on the ground level by students and teachers alike. The sector has seen a massive revitalization in the last 24 months, with the establishment of the new Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation, and Science (DFHERIS) in 2020 and the release of the National Further Education and Training (FET) strategy (Government of Ireland, 2020).While the strategy acknowledges the sector as being "at the heart of communities" across Ireland and recognises the "critical" (Government of Ireland, 2020, p. 4) role it will play in supporting and developing the Irish economy in post-Covid times, the fact remains that there is a clear dearth of high-quality research in the FE sector in Ireland. Indeed, McGuinness and colleagues (2014, p. 6) have acknowledged that there currently exists a "lack of appropriate data or a developed academic literature on Irish FET." This is particularly true in relation to research with teachers and practitioners in the field. This lack of research forms the rationale for the present study, which is a joint project between the Marino Institute and the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG).

The overarching research question is:

How do student-teachers in the further education sector conceptualise and develop their professional teaching identity?

This project's objective is to gain a more in-depth comprehension of the motivations, experiences, and points of view of ITE entrants and student teachers who are preparing for careers in the further education industry. In particular, the project will investigate the factors that influenced these individuals' choice to work in the field of higher education teaching and will look into the reasons why these people decided to pursue teaching as a profession in the first place. In addition, the nature and quality of the interactions that student-teachers have with students and staff during their teaching placements or in their respective FE centers will be investigated as part of this project. In the context of the Further Education sector, this examination will allow the project to investigate how these individuals conceptualize their professional identity as "teachers." In addition to this, the project will investigate the factors that play a role in the formation of their teaching identity as well as their future plans for continuing education and professional development.

We propose a case-study methodology situated at the Marino Institute of Education (MIE) and the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). All students enrolled at the respective higher education institutions will be invited to participate in this study. Participants will be asked to complete 1 semi-structured interview of approximately 45 to 60 minutes in length and 1 short demographic online questionnaire, which should take no more than 5 minutes to complete.

The semi-structured interview will explore topical areas such as: motivations for pursuing a teaching career in the Further Education sector, experiences on educational placements, conceptualisation of what it means to be a teacher in the Further Education sector, the factors that shape their "teaching" identity, and plans for future professional development. All interviews will be conducted and recorded using Zoom to ensure accurate transcription and data collection for both participants and researchers.