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Vol. 10 No. 1 (2013)

Published: 1 January 2013

Articles

  • Editorial 10.1

    Geraldine E. Lefoe

    Welcome to the first issue of Volume 10 of Journal of University Teaching and Learning (JUTLP) in 2013. This year also marks the tenth year of the journal and we have seen it grow incredibly in that time. As an open access journal we struggled initially for acceptance. However last year there were 32000 downloads from the site, an indication of improved access as well as more interest in improving teaching practice. This increased recognition for research related to higher education teaching practice is also reflected in opportunities for grants. In Australia this year the federal government has recently announced that Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) grants and fellowships are included in the Competitive Grants Register for the first time providing further avenues for our scholars to support their research.

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  • Widening Participation in University Learning

    Barbara Rissman, Suzanne Carrington, Derek Bland

    This paper reports how one Australian university and the Queensland Department of Education and Training (DET) are working together to increase the number of school students from low socio-economic backgrounds enrolling in undergraduate university degrees. This innovative program involves university lecturers and school teachers working together in the delivery and assessment of four Bachelor of Education units (or subjects) to a cohort of Year eleven and twelve students at a secondary school. Focus group interviews collected data from 26 students, 7 parents, 4 school and 3 university staff to assess the effectiveness of the program. All stakeholders viewed the program as a highly valuable opportunity to experience university learning with 31 high school graduating students being made offers to enter full-time university in the 2010 and 2011. This positive result has particular significance in the current drive in Australia and elsewhere to increase the participation in higher education of young people from under-represented groups.

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  • Indigenous Studies and the Politics of Language

    Colleen McGloin, Bronwyn L Carlson

    Language use changes over time. In Indigenous contexts, language alters to suit the shifting nature of cultural expression as this might fit with Indigenous peoples’ preference or as a consequence of changes to outdated and colonial modes of expression. For students studying in the discipline of Indigenous Studies, learning to use appropriate terminology in written and oral expression can be a source of anxiety. In this paper, we consider how providing insight into the political nature of language can help students to be mindful and to understand that systems of naming have a political impact on those being named and those doing the naming. This paper reflects the views and experiences of teaching staff at the Indigenous Studies Unit (ISU) in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong. It comes from our teaching experience, and from discussions with staff and students over the past few years that have conveyed to us a continuing anxiety about language use.

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  • Academic Writing at the Graduate Level: Improving the Curriculum through Faculty Collaboration

    Mary A. Bair, Cynthia E. Mader

    This article describes a collaborative self-study undertaken to identify the source of academic writing difficulties among graduate students and find ways to address them. Ten faculty members in a college of education came together to define the problem and to analyze data gleaned from faculty and student surveys, course documents, course assignments, and course assessments. We found discrepancies between faculty and student perceptions about graduate preparation for academic writing and between the espoused and enacted curriculum. Both faculty and students identified problems associated with synthesizing theory and research. We discuss the need for teacher-scholars in today's educational environment, the challenges facing curriculum improvement, and several program-specific measures being undertaken to address identified gaps in academic writing and critical thinking.

    Read article: Academic Writing at the Graduate Level: Improving the Curriculum through Faculty Collaboration

  • Conceptions of Good Teaching by Good Teachers: Case Studies from an Australian University

    Fernanda P Duarte

    This paper contributes to the debate on what constitutes good teaching in early 21st Century higher education, through an examination of the experience of five outstanding lecturers from a business school in an Australian university. It is based on a qualitative study that explored their perceptions on what constitutes ‘good teaching’. Resonating with existing research on good teaching practice, the findings suggest that good teachers tend to embrace constructivist principles, and are committed to facilitating learning that is deep, engaged, experientially-based, empowering, reflective, and life-long. The real-life examples of good teaching practice provided by the participants are a valuable resource to higher education teachers, in particular those beginning their careers.

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  • Face to Facebook: Social media and the learning and teaching potential of symmetrical, sychronous communication

    George VanDoorn, Antoinette A Eklund

    Social networking offers teachers and learners exciting opportunities to communicate. Web 2.0 and its synchronous communications platforms provide new avenues for teachers to deliver curriculum and facilitate learning. Further, they provide new avenues for students to engage and intensify their own learning. Being able to chat in real-time with a teacher, usually via face-to-face discussions, is something that many students studying in on-campus (or day) mode take for granted, and is something that distance or off-campus students are generally unable to experience. In the evolving, flexible-learning tertiary environment, viable and effective computer mediated communication (CMC) alternatives to face-to-face teaching need to be explored. These alternatives will only work if they prove useful to students. This article considers student reactions to social media as a teaching tool, probing its benefits and limitations. Over the course of a semester, third year on- and off-campus students communicated with an academic, outside lecture times, via the social networking site facebook®. Students were allowed to ask any questions they had that related to the unit. At the end of the semester students were provided with a 10-item questionnaire asking them to evaluate their experience. This study looked at a specific aspect of social networking — synchronous text-based chat — and the students’ perceptions of its usefulness for their learning.

    Read article: Face to Facebook: Social media and the learning and teaching potential of symmetrical, sychronous communication

  • Encouraging and Evaluating Class Participation

    Kathleen E Czekanski, Zane Robinson Wolf

    Many faculty interpret student responses to faculty questions as evidence of an actively engaged classroom. Because of this conviction, class participation, whether graded or ungraded, appears in many course syllabi in colleges and universities and is often promoted as the responsibility of students to contribute to the learning environment. Class participation provides faculty with some confidence that learning is taking place during a course and that students are reading assignments. While faculty may debate that attendance should not be used as a stand-in for class participation, this may not be a universally held belief or practice. Some faculty create rubrics which structure student participation and often delineate the tasks students should perform. Rubrics often list points, percents, and scales indicating levels of performance. This scoping review of the literature identifies themes encouraging and grading class participation and provides examples to increase class participation.

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