EDU015000 Archives

Critical Perspectives on Academic Writing

Critical Perspectives on Academic Writing offers a timely, theoretically grounded examination of the often marginalised yet foundational role of academic writing in UK higher education. Based on the UCL Institute of Education’s Academic Writing Seminar Series, the volume brings together leading researchers and practitioners to interrogate the contested politics, practices, and pedagogies of academic writing development. Against the backdrop of internationalisation, widening participation, neoliberalisation, and the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence in higher education, the contributors consider how we value academic writing and how we support student writing development.

The first part of the book frames the choices we make when working with writing or with developing writers as inherently political rather than neutral. The second focuses on the implications of generative AI for student academic writing; and the third situates research on academic writing and literacies in the practices of learning and teaching. By examining the roles of writing specialists, subject lecturers, and institutional policy, the book highlights both challenges and possibilities for change. It combines critical insights with practical approaches to writing pedagogy, offering an essential resource for educators, researchers and policymakers seeking to rethink the place of writing in the modern university.

Creating a Framework for Developing Sessional Teachers in Higher Education

Across higher education, a significant proportion of teaching is carried out by non-permanent staff, be they Graduate Teaching Assistants, Associate Lecturers, Visiting Lecturers, Postdoctoral Researchers or hourly paid staff. Their work is invaluable to the sector, yet they frequently lack access to structured professional development and institutional support.

Creating a Framework for Developing Sessional Teachers in Higher Education aims to address this problem with guidance for the HE leaders who support and manage sessional teachers. It offers a comprehensive framework that will enable education leaders to improve the experience and effectiveness of sessional staff through practical guidance, evidence-informed recommendations, best practice case studies, sector-wide research and the lived experience of academic leaders. The book explores key areas including induction, teaching, learning and assessment practices, mentoring, reward and recognition, community building and ongoing professional development. It presents strategies for embedding consistency and quality across departments and disciplines while recognising the individuality and diverse contributions of sessional teachers. With clear, actionable guidance and insights from across the HE sector, this book is an essential resource for education leaders such as programme directors, department heads, faculty managers and anyone involved in academic staffing and teaching development. It champions an inclusive, sustainable approach to education leadership – one that values and rewards all contributors to student learning.

Transdisciplinary Experiments

Transdisciplinary Experiments: Research, teaching and institutionalisation explores how experimental approaches can reshape research, education, and institutions in higher education to better respond to today’s complex and interconnected challenges. The book is grounded in the idea of ‘the experiment’ as a way to open up new possibilities, whether in knowledge-creation, teaching and learning, or institutional structures and initiatives. It examines how these experiments can inspire meaningful change across disciplines, sectors and cultures.

International contributors – scholars, artists, scientists, teachers, curators, community and academic leaders – offer diverse perspectives blending practical strategies with theoretical insights. These contributions advance the framing of transdisciplinarity and its implications for practice. The book engages with project-based teaching, flexible course and programme designs, and new forms of organisation. In doing so, it converges on a common goal of rethinking how we create and share knowledge in ways that are more collaborative and adaptive, and aligned with the needs of a rapidly changing world. A section titled ‘Provocations’ offers further reflections from four contributors on leadership challenges, failures and possibilities for creative interventions.

By connecting curiosity with action and experimentation with institutionalisation, Transdisciplinary Experiments offers a vision of what higher education research, teaching, learning and leadership can look like when driven by creativity, openness and a commitment to building more resilient futures.

Universities and Climate Action

Universities have a pivotal role to play in addressing the climate crisis, not only educating an increasingly large proportion of the global population, but also through scientific breakthroughs, technological innovation and raising public awareness. Higher education is particularly important given the roots of ecological and social breakdown in our models of civilisation, culture and knowledge. Yet its potential has not always been realised, and universities have historically been implicated in the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment and human communities. A transformation is thus needed in higher education, with institutions reorienting their activities towards positive engagement with climate.

Universities and Climate Action presents an original framework for understanding the impact of universities on climate change. It explores the interactions of education, research, services, public debate and campus operations on society and the ecosphere, and the complex interplay of influences on local, national and global levels. It provides in-depth discussions of ways of engaging with climate in teaching and learning and the curriculum, in research agendas, in governance and management of estates, and in engaging with external communities. The theoretical models are contextualised with examples of climate action in universities around the world. This book provides vital tools for analysis and action for researchers and practitioners working with and within the higher education sector.

Myanmar’s Spring Revolution

On 1 February 2021 Myanmar’s military conducted a coup putting an end to a decade of reforms. Although it was the third coup in Myanmar’s history, it was received as a moral shock by a large part of the population, and the response was an unprecedented resistance movement branded as the Spring Revolution by the young people who are leading it.

Myanmar’s Spring Revolution is about the students and academics who played a key part in the post-coup protests and who are still fighting the Myanmar military, both by taking up arms and by creating their own higher education institutions. It aims to give Myanmar students a place to offer their views on their revolution and the future they are fighting for. In light of wars in Ukraine and Gaza the conflict in Myanmar has largely been forgotten and the youth-led resistance that is fighting the Myanmar military seems to have no witnesses. This book is a way of giving voice to those most affected by the coup, and those who are giving their lives for the future of their country. The protagonists here explain why the resistance is different this time, and how this revolution goes well beyond the protests against a military regime.

ABC Learning Design

ABC Learning Design is a popular and effective rapid design method for developing educational programmes, modules and short courses. Created at UCL in 2015, ABC enables academic teams to collaborate in short, focused workshops to co-create visual storyboards of students’ learning journeys. Its ease of use, adaptability, and open licence have led to widespread adoption across the UK, Europe and beyond.

ABC Learning Design: Active, blended, connected and beyond introduces ABC to a new audience, adding insights from institutions that have localised and implemented the method in diverse contexts. ABC provides practical, ready-to-use tools, but it is often reframed as more than a set of resources. Its built-in flexibility not only allows for transferability but actively encourages creative modifications that respond to institutional needs. The core ABC workshop remains the heart of the method and is central to all implementations. Around this, institutions have built locally relevant adaptations that retain the method’s participatory ethos. This shared structure creates a design lingua franca that supports collaboration within and across institutions. Drawing on facilitator and participant experiences, the book reviews ABC’s key strengths and explains why it continues to inspire innovation. It invites a global conversation on enriching learning design for students, faculty, and institutions alike.

Shaping Higher Education with Students

Forging closer links between university research and teaching has become an important way to enhance the quality of higher education across the world. As student engagement takes centre stage in academic life, how can academics and university leaders engage with their students to connect research and teaching more effectively? In this highly accessible book, the contributors show how students and academics can work in partnership to shape research-based education.

Featuring student perspectives, it offers academics and university leaders practical suggestions and inspiring ideas on higher education pedagogy, including principles of working with students as partners in higher education, connecting students with real-world outputs, transcending disciplinary boundaries in student research activities, connecting students with the workplace, and innovative assessment and teaching practices. Written and edited in full collaboration with students and leading educator-researchers from a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, this book poses fundamental questions about learning and learning communities in contemporary higher education.

Belonging and Identity in STEM Higher Education

In Belonging and Identity in STEM Higher Education, leading scholars, teachers, practitioners and students explore belonging and identity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields, and how this is impacted by disciplinary changes and the post-pandemic higher education context. In STEM fields, positivist approaches and a focus on numerical data can lead to assumptions that they are unemotional, impersonal disciplines. The need for mathematical competency, logical thinking and disciplinary contexts can be barriers to engagement, belonging and success in STEM.

STEM ways of thinking, such as those underpinning abstract and complex mathematics, can form the basis for new ways of conceptualising belonging for both staff and students, going beyond socio-demographic and cultural differences. In this book, chapters and case study contributions analyse what is unique about STEM educational environments for staff and students in the UK, Ireland, Europe, Scandinavia and Asia. The authors examine the role of STEM pedagogies in facilitating belonging, variable impacts across student characteristics and the experiences STEM students face in their higher education experiences. It provides a valuable resource for those working in equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), STEM educational researchers and practitioners, as well as offering insights for academics and teachers in STEM higher education.

Becoming a Scholar

Becoming a Scholar provides a window into the lives of nine non-traditional doctoral students. As mature, part-time, international students enrolled in a professional doctorate programme, they reflect on the transformation process of becoming scholars, and their narratives provide breadth and depth to themes that represent a diverse cross-section of cultures, identities and communities.

Recognising that the process of becoming a scholar is as much internal as it is external, the book provides an opportunity to engage with authentic personal stories that remain firmly rooted in academic literature. By bringing the ‘human face’ behind the doctoral journey to the forefront, the narratives draw much-needed attention to the personal journey that inevitably parallels and intersects with the academic journey. Although the narratives are drawn from a professional Doctor in Education (EdD) programme based in the UK, the struggles are sure to resonate with a much wider range of doctoral students and academics, sparking lively discussion, debate and reflection. A must-read for students preparing to embark on the doctoral journey, and essential reading for doctoral programmes that wish to equip students with important knowledge about the challenges ahead.