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A major dilemma facing higher educational institutions around the world is how to achieve quality outcomes for students in an increasingly internationalised and competitive environment. To effect change in teaching and learning, we advocate a teacher-as-learner approach to the implementation of teaching and learning policy. Our approach has been influenced by approaches to change management as well as contemporary educational theories, such as constructive alignment and deep and surface approaches to learning. In this paper we use these approaches to evaluate the success of a policy initiative designed to encourage subject coordinators to use a faculty-endorsed template to embed graduate attributes into their subject outlines. The difficulties experienced by teachers at the disciplinary level in using the subject outline template illustrate how a seemingly positive and well-intentioned initiative can have a potentially minimal effect on teaching and learning practice and, as a consequence, student learning. We suggest that the Course Experience Questionnaire provides a useful model for evaluating not only teaching but also the management of teaching. As teachers responsible for the implementation of teaching and learning policies, we hope our views will provide a more integrated approach to teaching and learning changes in the higher educational context.

This paper explores degrees of equivalence constructed in English technical definitions. From an ergative perspective, the degree of equivalence depends upon the effectiveness of the clause (i.e. effective vs middle). Effective clauses tend to be encoding in orientation (i.e. the direction of the coding in the clause is from the gloss to the term) whereas middle clauses tend to be decoding (from term to gloss) (Halliday 1967/8, 1994; Davidse 1992a, 1996). In technical definitions, ideational meaning (expressed in relational clauses) is typically metafunctionally dominant and lexicogrammatically "deautomatized" (Mukarovsky 1977), while interpersonal meanings (expressed in mood and modality) are less dominant and "automatized". In technical definitions, the source of knowledge is either absent but probeable or absent and non-probeable. It is argued here that, despite the general automatization of interpersonal meaning in definitional clauses, a residue of interpersonality is in fact critical to the degree of equivalence constructed in the clause.