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The cumulative tale ‘the house that Jack built’ is used as an analogy for flawed theories. This paper considers how the marketisation of higher education in neoliberal countries like England is affecting teaching and learning in Higher Education Institutions. Neoliberal policy approaches resulting in the marketisation of higher education may also be considered as a ‘house that Jack built’. The policies are cumulative and they can be interpreted as being flawed due to their contradictory nature. The paper presents research findings revealing the impact of neoliberal agendas on teaching and learning in higher education in the UK. The content of the paper is relevant to other neoliberal contexts including the USA and Australia. The commodification of higher education has implications for the teaching relationship between academics and students as ‘student satisfaction’, ‘value for money’ and ‘critical pedagogy’ form part of the interplaying discourse in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To date, learning spaces in higher education have been designed with little engagement on the part of their most important users: students and teachers. In this paper, we present the results of research carried out in a UK university. The research aimed to understand how students and teachers conceptualise learning spaces when they are given the opportunity to do so in a workshop environment. Over a number of workshops, participants were encouraged to critique a space prototype and to re-design it according to their own views and vision of learning spaces to optimise pedagogical encounters. The findings suggest that the active involvement of students and teachers in space design endows participants with the power of reflection on the pedagogical process, which can be harnessed for the actual creation and innovation of learning spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its beginnings in the late 1970s, punk culture has been associated with counter-mainstream ideology and anti- institutional antagonism. In particular, formal education has been criticised in punk for sustaining oppressive social and conceptual orders and associated behavioural norms. Drawing on literature and interviews, this paper focuses on the experiences of higher education teachers who self-identify as punks, and considers how they negotiate and reconcile their subcultural and academic identities in their academic practice. The findings reveal that participants' affiliations with punk subculture give rise to counter-cultural pedagogies in which both the ethics and aesthetics of punk are applied in classroom contexts. Furthermore, the participants draw upon subcultural ethical and epistemological narratives to formulate and rationalise their responses to the state of contemporary UK higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) have often been characterised as lacking training, skills, English language proficiency and knowledge of the 'host' education system. In this study, a group of 18 GTAs from postcolonial countries were interviewed, to explore their perceptions of transitioning into UK higher education teaching at one institution. I use the Contact Zone as a framework to understand these GTAs' experiences. The Contact Zone lens shows that GTAs are actively bringing resources and experiences to teaching, rather than 'lacking'. By focusing on a sub-group of GTAs from postcolonial countries, this research challenges the notion that international GTAs constitute a homogenous category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]