Vol. 16 No. 2 (2019)
Published:
1 July 2019
Articles
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Making the case for oracy skills in higher education: practices and opportunities
In this paper I make the case for embedding oracy practices in the HE curriculum through explicit teaching of oracy skills and a shared common language to describe these skills. Active learning and teaching approaches as well as growing
In this paper I make the case for embedding oracy practices in the HE curriculum through explicit teaching of oracy skills and a shared common language to describe these skills. Active learning and teaching approaches as well as growing expectations of graduate employability skills have resulted in greater demands on students in UK higher education in terms of their oracy (speaking and listening) skills. Whilst oracy skills have long been the focus of studies in compulsory educational contexts, there is little transfer of research findings to a higher education context. With the aim of opening up the discussion on oracy skills in HE, this paper reports on an exploratory study carried out to investigate how teachers on two undergraduate business modules incorporated oral communication skills in their content, pedagogy and assessment. Data were gathered from observations of lectures and seminars, course documents, and semi-structured interviews with tutors. With reference to an Oracy Skills Framework the paper concludes with suggestions for how oracy skills may be more explicitly embedded into the undergraduate curriculum.
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Assessing written communication skills using a Continua Model of a Guide to Making Judgments (GTMJ)
Written communication skills are one of the most assessed criteria in higher education contexts, especially in humanities disciplines, including teacher education. There is a need to research and develop an assessment grading tool (i.e
Written communication skills are one of the most assessed criteria in higher education contexts, especially in humanities disciplines, including teacher education. There is a need to research and develop an assessment grading tool (i.e. criteria sheet or rubric) that would assist students in pre-service teacher education programs to better understand and practice written communication and to assist markers when grading academic essays that include this criterion. When rubrics are used the criterion that covers the written communication skills part of the task is often too general to truly assist students to know what they must do in order to obtain the grade to which they aspire. Using substantive conversation in focus group discussions, we defined written communication and designed a criteria sheet using a model known as the Continua model of a Guide to Making Judgments (GTMJ). We found that this tool not only had the potential to help students to better understand key features of good written communication in an academic context, but also to assist assessors to focus on standards descriptors or ‘threshold’ qualities of written communication when grading students’ academic essays.
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Practices to improve collaboration by reconfiguring boundaries in transnational education
This paper investigates quality assurance as boundary-making practices that establish and re-establish boundaries of a transnational education (TNE) partnership between an Australian and a Malaysian higher education institution. Drawing on
This paper investigates quality assurance as boundary-making practices that establish and re-establish boundaries of a transnational education (TNE) partnership between an Australian and a Malaysian higher education institution. Drawing on practice theory we offer a conception of boundaries as enacted, shifting and performed by the multiple actors involved in the partnership. We employ a relational, practice-based approach and a participatory action research methodology to investigate how quality assurance could be re-configured to enhance relationships and collaboration, and support on-going dialogue, co-developed curriculum and context–sensitive quality measures. This paper re-casts boundaries and borders as collective performances, offering an expanded conception of boundaries from the dualistic home-host, pre-given conceptions common in the TNE literature. Our case study demonstrates how participatory action learning (PAL) is useful for expanding and re-shaping the boundaries in TNE in ways that support the creation of transnational teaching teams and intercultural communities of practice. We show how stretching the boundaries from a dyadic relationship between quality assuror and subject coordinator to include sessional academics and enacting PAL projects using communal media generates the conditions of possibility for developing teaching teams that are transnational in practice as well as in name. The move towards joint responsibility for the development of curriculum, teaching and learning contributes to more equitable partnership approaches and creates possibilities for intercultural engagement between academics and students in different geographical and cultural contexts.
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A Practice-based Study of Chinese Students’ Learning - Putting Things Together
This paper investigates Chinese students’ learning experience in the business Faculty of an Australian university. Chinese students are often characterized as “rote learners” or stereotyped as “reduced Other”. Areas of concern are limited
This paper investigates Chinese students’ learning experience in the business Faculty of an Australian university. Chinese students are often characterized as “rote learners” or stereotyped as “reduced Other”. Areas of concern are limited to addressing the differences in learning styles, language, and sociocultural barriers. However, learning occurs in many forms. There is an absence of discussion about what practices Chinese students use in order to learn. Based on practice-based theory, a longitudinal ethnographic study of the journeys of five students was traced and investigates what practices Chinese students use in the learning and how these students “put things together” in the journey. This paper reports on two of the five students from the larger study. In particular, this article brings attention to the students’ everyday life and insights into their doings, sayings, and relatings between people, other beings and material artefacts. Chinese students’ learning involves foreground entanglements, co-construction, and relationality of practices from both educational and sociocultural perspectives. This paper provides new insights about Chinese students’ learning and encourages academics and institutions to be aware of the impact of their practices and to deepen their understanding of the complexities of Chinese students’ learning.
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Supporting Scholarly Thinking in a Nordic Teacher Education Webinar Practice
With this study we have a twofold aim. Firstly, to develop a model for identifying and analyzing the status of students' scholarly thinking, and secondly to design and evaluate an educational practice with the aim of supporting these
With this study we have a twofold aim. Firstly, to develop a model for identifying and analyzing the status of students' scholarly thinking, and secondly to design and evaluate an educational practice with the aim of supporting these skills. A series of webinars connected researchers and students from Finland, Norway and Sweden and gave the students access to an authentic Network of researchers, otherwise not accessible to them. The webinars were recorded and an analysis, inspired by variation theory, were conducted in order to identify signs of scholarly thinking in student reasoning when discussing students' final thesis. Findings were then used to construct a model for identifying variations of scholarly thinking as qualities of scholarly discernment, identified in students’ communicative actions. Two critical aspects for stimulating scholarly thinking during webinars emerged from data. First the diversity of language and knowledge and secondly, a more informal framing. A carefully staged webinar using these two critical aspects, offers a socialization of students in professional training, to an academic discourse where the production and evaluation of knowledge is part of students’ identity and constantly debated.
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Individual Networks of Practice for PhD Research Socialisation
A PhD combines experiential learning of the research process with socialisation into the research community. Studying a PhD is a highly individual experience with each student seeking and receiving different types of support from different
A PhD combines experiential learning of the research process with socialisation into the research community. Studying a PhD is a highly individual experience with each student seeking and receiving different types of support from different agents. In this paper we investigate the experiences of four PhD students at a Humanities faculty at a Thai university through a series of interviews. To account for the unique nature of each student’s experience, we use Individual Networks of Practice (INoPs) as the main method of analysis. The interviews were first analysed by adapting Sala-Bubaré and Castelló's (2016) model of socialisation, identifying the social agents and the content of the experience shared with each agent, and then constructing an INoP (Zappa-Hollman and Duff 2015) map to visually represent each student's social network. These INoPs served to guide a qualitative analysis of the salient issues in the interviews. The INoPs highlight the unique nature of each student's set of agents and experiences, but there are also commonalities across students showing that peers and faculty staff serve as key social agents.