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The objective of this editorial is two-fold. First, to place the importance of clear abstract writing in the context of booming academic submissions. The editorial highlights the huge pressure on systems of review that have had the side effect of strongly positioning the abstract as gatekeeper to publication. Such emphasis on this short, hardworking text means that if the abstract is poorly written or does not effectively articulate its contribution to pedagogy, it falls at the first hurdle. Second, the editorial aims to give practical advice to scholars seeking publication of their learning and teaching research and scholarship by emphasizing the centrality of meaningful contribution at the heart of good research design, which is then further distilled into an articulate abstract. Not what was done, but what was found: the contribution of the contribution. Furthermore, the authors are aware of, and sensitive to, the many voices historically excluded from discussions of higher education and therefore also wish this editorial to act as an enabler for those researchers. As such, the editorial simply offers principles of effective abstract writing to ensure openness to different approaches and styles, resisting an abstract-formula beyond placing the meaningful contribution front-and-centre. On a meta level, this abstract attempts to articulate its meaningful contribution to the debate, by following these principles, while crucially retaining the voice and character of its authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compassion in higher education is viewed in different ways by educators. In recent years a focus on using compassionate pedagogy and being authentic, compassionate educators has arisen. Often associated with 'care', compassion has been labelled at times to be 'soft' or even 'fluffy' and holding emotion. Rather, we argue - through critically exploring discourses of compassion and care - that by acknowledging higher education has a relational element encompassing purposeful and trusting relationships, interactions can hold more meaning and benefit. This Editorial seeks to position the role of compassion in higher education, challenging how compassion focused pedagogy and research can be incorporated and enacted so it can benefit the future of higher education. We consider compassion in learning and teaching practices and in assessment, looking with hope to the future where we may see educational values lived in and through our teaching practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theme of belonging in e-pedagogy gained currency in the 2000s when educational providers hastened to join the online teaching and learning boom and studies of building and maintaining a sense of community (SOC) proved central to this endeavour. Motivated by the pandemic-era necessity to convene teaching and learning online as part of a response to super-complexity as a defining feature of tertiary education in the 21st century, work-integrated learning (WIL) practitioners returned to this scholarship to consider, under pressure, modes of building SOC and belonging in online spaces. Underpinned by a broadly constructivist worldview and informed by the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, our COVID-age study considers what pedagogical strategies are viewed as affording learners this sense of belonging - or not. Using a collaborative enquiry to pool our perceptions and experiences from three WIL contexts, we ask how work-integrated learning (WIL) practitioners build belonging in online spaces and identify strategies learners perceive as valuable. Drawing on the authors' small-scale studies of educator and learner experiences of online WIL (eWIL), our collaborative enquiry uses qualitative descriptive analysis to identify key themes in the voices of students. Advancing the scholarship, our study identifies three threads to the fabric of belonging: humanising online WIL; the importance of mentor presence; and fostering professional belonging. The study suggests that strategies impacting these three areas are at the heart of building belonging in online spaces, broadly envisaged as imagined professional communities of practice. Techniques viewed as successful are advanced as possibilities for enhancing pedagogy in online WIL communities. Practitioner Notes 1. eWIL is important to develop student professional learning, but they should be designed with a focus on sense of belonging. 2. The first meeting with the supervisor was found to be important and should be used to role model expectations, professional behaviours and build meaningful connections between student and supervisor/tutor. 3. Reducing the size of a student cohort is an important consideration as smaller size cohorts are conducive to building a sense of belonging in eWIL experiences, this includes the presence of colleagues in placement contexts. 4. Humanising eWIL can be achieved by teacher and supervisor presence, being responsive with communication, building trust and rapport and role-modelling professional behaviours. 5. Universities will need to consider and recognise the labour involved by staff in delivering quality eWIL and help preparing mentors to build belongingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of belonging has found prominence in higher education learning environments, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have an unprecedented impact on educational provision. In times of disruption, alienation and isolation, the most basic of our psychological and physiological needs have come to be almost universally recognised as critical factors that must be considered and examined. Experiencing belonging is integral to human existence, and knowing where, with whom, and how we belong, is a salient driver for learning and self-actualisation. We recognise there are a number of ways to frame and approach the idea of belonging in the educational experience. We also recognise that there are multiple understandings of what belonging means and therefore how it is enacted within the curricula and the "classroom" in its varying forms - physical, online, digital, work-based. This Editorial takes a critical perspective to our own intellectual standpoint in relation to pedagogies of belonging. As co-editors, we have outlined our respective conceptions and experiences of belonging as a collaborative autoethnography, capturing our individual views of pedagogies of belonging in a collaborative context. Our collaboration has allowed us to situate ourselves both theoretically and practically, as well as ontologically, and advance our understanding of practices that promote student belonging in all its possible forms within the higher education experience. We suggest that the possibilities for belonging offered by interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches are ripe for inquiry, and the place of nontraditional, Indigenous, iterative and emergent methodologies to examine belonging requires further exploration. Practitioner Notes 1. Belonging is a complex, multi-dimensional space that must take into account the ontological, epistemological, spatial, material, social, cultural and affective dimensions of the human experience. 2. Writing in the spirit of a collaborative autoethnography, we aim to hold space for the multiplicity of interpretations that surround the concept of belonging. 3. Pedagogies of belonging are not universal but unique to people, place, modes of study, and disciplinary and transdisciplinary cultures, among many other factors. 4. Interrogating and critiquing received ways of making sense of belonging is a productive space for educational institutions. 5. The problem with belonging is not merely an institutional problem, but a societal one, and we have a great deal to learn from Indigenous Knowledges and perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One impact of the global pandemic of 2020 was a rapid shift in the delivery of work-integrated learning (WIL) to remote activity among WIL practitioners, students and educators alike. Along with professional practice research in higher degrees, WIL practice, including placements and non-placements, responded actively and sometimes reactively to the challenges of sudden transition to online environments. What strategies - pivots and pirouettes - did WIL practitioners use to weather the storm of Covid-19? What does this tell us about the nature of WIL? This paper captures the seemingly overnight response to shifting work-based learning to online and other spaces. With change came the opportunity to reflect on the varying areas of WIL: from the practical processes of ensuring students are cared for to pivoting to the learning opportunities it presented in building digital literacies and adapting to the global future of work. This study is a Trans-Tasman collaboration of four WIL practitioners exploring their responsiveness to disruption in WIL contexts. We present collective autoethnographic responses to such themes as disruption, becoming resilient, pivoting to change, changing perceptions of WIL and the legacies of the pandemic. These themes apply to learners and educators alike, and our words embody the experiences of both groups. Our responses to phenomena highlighted this need for resilience and agility. Methodologically, the researchers' micro-narrative responses to key themes structure themselves into a macro-narrative that demonstrates the lived experiences of the researchers as educators in the WIL space and explores implications for ongoing and future practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This pilot study investigated the impact of practice integrated, post-laboratory assessment on the scientific education and attitudes of first-year pharmacy students. Median assessment performance, achievement of full marks, and engagement in laboratory classes were evaluated. The pilot randomised cross-over study was conducted at the University of Central Lancashire. Students were randomly assigned to two groups, and after undertaking four identical pharmaceutics laboratory classes, answered two science-based questions that were either integrated with practice using a contextualizing scenario or had no integration. Student performance and engagement were subsequently analysed. Thirty students completed the study. Students performed better in the integrated assessment (median 3.5; interquartile range [IQR] 2.00–4.00) compared to the non-integrated assessment (median 2; IQR 1.75–3.00) (P <.001). Twenty-five students (83%) achieved full marks with the integrated assessment (P =.006). Correlation (R2) for the integrated assessment was 0.90 and for the non-integrated assessment was 0.12. Engagement was positive in both groups but significantly improved in the domains of "instructor contribution" and "value of activity" (P =.01) when receiving the integrated assessment. Integrated and contextualized assessment of science teaching as a lone intervention increased pharmacy students' performance and engagement in laboratory classes without requiring any change to the teaching session itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the impact of an evaluation-focused language teacher education program under Vietnam's National Foreign Languages 2020 project, run at Hanoi University in 2015 and 2017. Funded by The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), this intensive 150-hour university-level program employed international experts to deliver content about evaluation. The pedagogical goal was to enhance the capacity of 'key' teachers by guiding their application of theory-informed strategies to their institution's curricula and teaching materials. The underlying policy-directed goal was alignment with the Circular on Issuance of the 6-level Foreign Language Proficiency Framework of Vietnam (MOET, 2014), the Vietnamese Foreign Language Proficiency Framework (VFLF). This study outlines the needs the course met under national policy, demonstrates how these were achieved and describes the course's impacts and constraints. A naturalistic interpretative enquiry, it draws on questionnaire data from participants to assess how the program met its objectives and the degree to which participating language teachers reported applying its content to their practice. The study points to a gap between the aspirational rhetoric of the 6-level framework and the constraints posed by gatekeepers where the 'key' teachers are supposedly present and future leaders but often lack the autonomy to innovate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when universities internationally participate in continual processes of restructuring, repositioning and reprioritising, calls for ‘voluntary’ redundancy among teaching and learning staff become frequent events. Australian and New Zealand academics, whose stories inform this study, have, particularly, been made subject to severance, voluntary or otherwise, at a time when the modernised university has become the managed, neoliberalised university and, over time, the ‘ruined’ or ‘toxic’ university. This study is a narrative enquiry aiming to capture, re-present and examine the stories of mid- and late-career higher education teaching professionals during this unsettling period of disturbance and flux. In the light of studies on ‘voluntary’ redundancy and scholarship critiquing the mechanisms of power and repression of the corporatised university, this researcher asked 12 mid-career academics why they really took redundancy packages with a view to exposing the experienced truth behind the official institutional story that academic professionals ‘chose’ voluntary redundancy packages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to TESOL curriculum studies by suggesting applied action research is appropriate and valuable as a pedagogical and curricular component of a Master of Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) in a Vietnamese-Australian transnational programme. The study backgrounds the need for such a practice-based TESOL programme in Vietnam and shows how service teachers studying in this vocational programme apply the principles of action research over the period of a year, during which three research-led units are taught. Drawing on reflective memoranda from their final assignments, the project identifies reported benefits from a curriculum focusing on action research for professional and curricular development. This report applies the method of qualitative descriptive analysis to offer detailed insights into the action research journeys of four teacher/student/researchers. The study argues that real-world interventions such as those enacted during action research investigations are more impactful and meaningful in developing the capabilities TESOL-teaching professionals need in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century: willingness to innovate, freedom to evaluate reflectively, ability to act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents "portraits" of learners who desire to be proficient in both Indonesian and English languages and explores these portraits for patterns related to learners' aspirations and desires. Through this exploration, the study contributes to theory about connections between motivation and identity. This study explores synergies between notions of motivation and "future selves" (Dörnyei, 2009) and interculturality (Kramsch, 2002), and draws on the methodology of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) to emphasise and embody our subjects' contexts and voices. Primary data were gathered through observations and semi-structured interviews from three key participants relating to their contextual backgrounds and efforts to become bilingual. These portraits suggest that learners' aspirations of future imagined identities and their desires to belong to local and global communities influence their learning of an additional language. Because of the small scale of the study and the specificity of the sample, the findings cannot necessarily be generalised to a broader population. They are, nevertheless, valuable as portraits of learners becoming bilingual in Indonesia and open the doorway for future studies of Indonesian bilingual language learner identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the value of community experience for mediating linguistic practice and cultural learning. Learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL), both immigrants and international students, frequently report difficulties in practicing English outside the classroom (Wright, 2006). Grounded in poststructuralist social identity theory (Norton, 2000, 2009), social constructivism (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) and imbued by insights into language socialization (Duff, 2007; Duff & Hornberger, 2008), this project identifies what students gain linguistically, culturally, and ontologically from prolonged interaction within a nursing home (known as a 'rest home' in New Zealand). Four Chinese women who had undertaken a 10-hour community placement as part of a B.A. program in Auckland were asked to live on-site as caregivers. This project uses students' reflective diaries and transcripts of a focus group interview to address key questions about how the context of the rest home and the experience of volunteering impact actuating communicative practice into social learning. I conclude that authentic practice allowed the four women to apply linguistic strategies taught in the classroom, observe aspects of culture firsthand, report on language used in the homes and for what purposes, and realise they could "make a difference." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In 2004, the authors began a qualitative study into the value of community placements as sites of sociocultural and sociolinguistic learning among English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners studying a Bachelor of Arts degree. Students undertook community placements often hours, and wrote reflective journals detailing their observations of and participation in social, cultural and linguistic interactions. This paper reports on the keyfindings of the project over the past three years. It also applies the notion of "community of practice" (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to community placement within a framework that accommodates constructivist, sociocultural, poststructuralist and new literacy understandings of situated learning. This report discusses participant commentaries in terms of the ten most recurrent themes emerging from open-coded analyses of the data. The findings suggest that community placement has the capacity to provide significant experiences for students, and to impact on participants" evolving identities as bi- or multiculturals. Community placements also provide opportunities for acquiring procedural, pragmatic and linguistic knowledge. The paper concludes that community placements can serve as communities of practice for the majority of language and cultural learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The tracking, or logging, of food intake and physical activity is increasing among people, and as a result there is increasing evidence of a link to improvement in health and well-being. Crucial to the effective and safe use of logging is a user's information literacy.Objective: The aim of this study was to analyze food and activity tracking from an information literacy perspective.Methods: An online survey was distributed to three communities via parkrun, diabetes.co.uk and the Irritable Bowel Syndrome Network.Results: The data showed that there were clear differences in the logging practices of the members of the three different communities, as well as differences in motivations for tracking and the extent of sharing of said tracked data. Respondents showed a good understanding of the importance of information accuracy and were confident in their ability to understand tracked data, however, there were differences in the extent to which food and activity data were shared and also a lack of understanding of the potential reuse and sharing of data by third parties.Conclusions: Information literacy in this context involves developing awareness of the issues of accurate information recording, and how tracked information can be applied to support specific health goals. Developing awareness of how and when to share data, as well as of data ownership and privacy, are also important aspects of information literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]