In considering ‘Planning education: Exchanging approaches to teaching practice-based skills’, Heather Ritchie Adam Sheppard, Nick Croft, Deborah Peel Ulster University, Belfast, UK; University of the West of England, University of Dundee, look at the need to address perceived inadequacies in graduate town planners’ practical skills, such as decision-making; leadership; and communication, and suggestions that planning schools share innovative practice to improve student learning. Using Case studies drawn from each institution to illustrate practice-orientated planning education approaches in the classroom to better equip students for the workplace.
Rupert Waldron London College of Fashion, London, UK looks at ‘Positionality and reflexive interaction: A critical internationalist cultural Studies approach to intercultural collaboration’ with fashion media students exploring the place of formal curriculum in structuring interaction in collaborative group work, and offering possibilities for mediative intervention as curriculum internationalisation. Students identified both intellectual stimulation and intercultural communicative development from engaging in the joint project and Intercultural competences for a critical, globally oriented citizenship were found to be best approached as concretely contextualised, discipline-specific and position-dependent.
Antoinette Smith-Tolken & Eli Bitzer of Stellenbosch University, South Africa consider ‘Reciprocal and scholarly service learning: Emergent theoretical understandings of the university-community interface in South Africa’ addressing underlying principles to interpret scholarly based service-related teaching and learning. Their work includes concerns of communities, transforming theoretical knowledge into lived experiences for students, making the knowledge generated within communities meaningful and forging constant growth and learning gain for both students and community members. One finding is new student attributes including scholarliness and reciprocity, opening up fresh meanings and theory for community engagement and university curricula – particularly in the context of a developing country.
Also from South Africa, A.M. Wium, H. Pitout and A. Human, P.H. du Toit Universut, Medunsa and University of Pretoria South Africa consider ‘An analysis of thinking preferences across three health care disciplines’. Three lecturers in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy at a public Higher Education Institution in South Africa collaborated to determine thinking preferences using the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument with second year students and colleagues in the three disciplines. Better understanding of students’ thinking behaviours resulted as students showed a trend towards left brain dominance with a primary preference for the B-quadrant mode of thinking which did not necessarily correlate with those of the lecturers or their colleagues. They argue that less preferred ways of thinking need to be challenged with a view to promoting ‘whole brain’ thinking.
In the essay ‘Perceptions and career prospects of the distance doctor of education degree: Voices from the mid-career ELT tertiary practitioners’, Fan-Wei Kung, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, considers the perceptions and career prospects of online distance doctoral degrees, based on the experiences of 12 mid-career ELT tertiary instructors from China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Qualitative data indicated that mid-career ELT instructors generally perceived the doctoral distance learning model positively for convenience, accessibility and multiculturalism However, the limitations of time and distance were identified influencing their learning process adversely. It was also revealed that the career prospects of obtaining a distance doctorate in ELT might not be as promising as they previously anticipated.
‘Using regulation activities to improve undergraduate collaborative writing on Wikis’ by Moon-Heum Cho and Seong-Mi Lim, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, S. Korea and Kent State University, USA notes that although wikis have been widely adopted to support collaborative writing in undergraduate classrooms, educators remain concerned about levels of student participation analysing student log files about progress they found with their interventions undergraduate confidence in using writing strategies significantly increased and anxiety about writing significantly decreased.
Looking at ‘Satisfaction with online teaching videos: A quantitative approach’, Angel Meseguer-Martinez and colleagues from UCAM San Antonio de Murcia, Spain, analyse factors determining the number of clicks on the ‘Like’ button in online teaching videos, with a sample of teaching videos in Microeconomics across Spanish-speaking countries. Their results show that users prefer short online teaching videos, with teachers particularly female, or presented by entities other than Universities, they like and online slides and/or graphics tablets.
In ‘“Ignoring me is part of learning”: Supervisory feedback on doctoral writing’, Susan Carter and Vijay Kumar, University of Auckland, and University of Otago, New Zealand, suggest that doctoral supervisors aim for two goals: a strong timely thesis, and the fully fledged independent researcher indicating that feedback and feedforward on writing should address both goals. But where supervisors are under pressure for timely completion this can over-ride the full development of a researcher. They suggest ways that supervisory discussion might accomplish the two goals of timely output and independent research writer.
Another essay focusing on doctoral learning is ‘Digital doctorates? An exploratory study of PhD candidates’ use of online tools’ by Robyn Dowling & Michael Wilson, Macquarie University, Australia. They suggest that online environments are transforming learning, including doctoral education. They explore PhD students’ perceptions and use of digital tools, arguing that PhD candidates’ appropriation and use of online resources and tools is growing but remains overlain by traditional concerns of time and convenience, technological expertise, established channels of communication and preferred services. They conclude that PhD candidates’ use of online tools is about the tools’ immediate utility in relation to candidates’ time-pressured and habitual ways of researching.
In their essay ‘Teachers’ conceptions of student creativity in higher education ‘
Isa Jahnke, Tobias Haertel & Johannes Wildt, Umea University, Sweden, and TU Dortmund University, Germany are that creativity is one of the important skills of the twenty-first century and central to higher education and argue that from the teacher perspective, student creativity is categorised into a 6-Facet-Model, in which teachers ‘see’ student creativity expressed through (1) student self-reflections, (2) independent decisions, (3) through curiosity and motivation, (4) producing something, (5) multi-perspectives and (6) when students develop original new ideas. The results provide a new understanding of student creativity from university teachers’ perspective, useful for reorganising course designs.
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