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Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) is a variety of learning opportunities that can extend beyond the application of theory to practice, to include complex situational, personal, material, and organisational factors. Central to forming successful WIL experiences is the partnership, support, and collaboration extended by all key stakeholders. The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted WIL experiences, with many developed partnerships and sustained practices being abruptly impacted. In 2020, a multidisciplinary group of Australasian WIL academics, administrators and students joined in weekly virtual coffee chats to share concerns and experiences during this rapidly changing educational landscape. These conversations led to establishing a Small Significant Online Network Group (SSONG) and became the basis for this article. We explored the lessons learned from WIL practitioners to be better informed of the practice of WIL and, generally, to examine the role of collaborations in higher education. Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, this study incorporated written reflections on WIL experiences during COVID-19 lockdowns, followed by Zoom conversations to gain deeper insights. All data was aggregated and analysed thematically, both inductively and deductively, to interpret the practice experiences of individuals in their socio-cultural contexts. This article intends to demonstrate how creative solutions, such as adopting a HUMANE framework, become valuable paradigms. These enhance and nurture relationships between all WIL stakeholders, to enrich and sustain WIL experiences for all.

PurposeIt is difficult for corporate sustainability reporting (CSR) to provide accountability to stakeholders. This paper assesses whether accountability-based CSR systems can be created through the application of Spotlight Accounting and WikiRate as a hybrid forum.Design/methodology/approachThe current paper explores the utility of Spotlight Accounting for CSR through assessing its application to a hybrid forum, WikiRate. This process involved engaging student researchers to collect CSR data from the United Nations Global Compact's (UNGC) corporate action group (CAG) and recording this information into the WikiRate platform. Aggregate analysis was conducted to assess the limitations and challenges of the data to inform decision-making.FindingsSpotlight Accounting exposes challenges within traditional applications of CSR. These challenges impact comparability, decision usefulness and accountability of CSR data for stakeholders.Practical implicationsThis paper provides recommendations to enhance the accessibility and relevance of company information to assist in the provision of Spotlight Accounting. In doing so, it highlights the usefulness of CSR to leverage greater accountability between corporations and society.Originality/valueThis paper applies the emerging practices of Spotlight Accounting and presents it as an alternative way to research and conceptualise external accounts, reporting and accountability. This form of accounting has the potential to enhance communications and partnerships between companies and society as well as challenge dominate power dynamics held by corporations.

To support the development of a society that is attuned to the challenges presented by sustainable development, it is vital that higher education business students understand the value of sustainability, and act in a way that is consistent with these values. This paper explores a sustainability-focused experiential learning activity through investigating the utility of an emerging form of service learning in the digital space for developing global citizens. The paper presents an international case study of educators who employed digital service learning in various business education contexts. The research reports on the perceptions of higher education students in relation to their awareness, critical thinking and action for sustainability. The paper has practical contributions in identifying an opportunity for implementing sustainability curriculum into higher education for business.

Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) is an important pedagogical strategy for developing employability skills by immersing students in real-world understandings, applications and practices. Increasingly, universities are focusing on how WIL can be scaffolded across a degree, to involve students in a variety of WIL activities in order to apply disciplinary knowledge and skills. While placement models appear to be the dominant mode of WIL that are easily recognised within a degree structure, non-placement forms of WIL while emerging, remain less visible. This conceptual paper presents an institutional framework that accounts for a range of placement and non-placement WIL activities, to make WIL practices overt across a degree. It introduces the Work-Integrated Learning Curriculum Classification (WILCC) Framework that supports a university-wide approach for developing, mapping and reporting WIL. The WILCC Framework promotes the visibility of WIL across the institution, offers a common language for WIL across disciplines, and provides a tool to scaffold WIL experiences throughout degree programs.

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is on the rise as many universities adopt strategic targets for student workplace preparation as an element of their tertiary studies. Through WIL, students gain real world experiences, transferable skills and build professional networks. WIL is often understood as a placement activity, whereby students spend extended periods of time in industry, typically at the end or near end of their degree. These placements are designed to encapsulate the theoretical learning of a degree through the opportunity to apply knowledge and practise skills in a physical workplace. While there is much evidence in the higher education teaching and learning scholarship that attests to the benefits of placement-based WIL for all stakeholders, innovation in WIL that integrates work practices with learning is also occurring without time on placement or within a workplace. In recent years, WIL activity has extended beyond limited conceptions as describing only placements, to include a range of simulated, virtual, authentic and industry-based activities. The uptake of non-placement learning activities presents as opportunity to investigate the benefits, utility and innovation of this growing pedagogy to contribute meaningful insights to higher education scholarship and practice. This special issue is being published during the trials of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) emergency. This global pandemic has shattered economies, touching every domain of life, including completely disrupting higher education. The call for papers for this special issue was conceived and advertised well before the universal lock down. There was evidence to suggest universities were exploring and experimenting with new ways of engaging with industry partners and that these models were offering extraordinary benefits to student learning and application of knowledge. The COVID-19 situation escalated these experiments, determining virtual WIL and projects or activities leveraged through technological platforms, as the fortuitous survivors. There is no doubt that WIL pedagogies and programs have been hit hard, however, this hardship for some has been described as cause for a learning revolution. For WIL research, this could be the impetus for questioning dominant modes of WIL and extending our understandings and knowledge of the impact of alternative WIL models.

Examining learning in work-integrated learning (WIL) courses is complex. WIL traverses work and university spaces, which can be challenging for the way student learning is conceived, planned, supported, assessed and reported. This study strengthens our understanding of how students learn on placement by going directly to the source and observing learning unfold, in situ. Using an ethnographic methodology, this study adopts Schatzki’s (1996, 2010) practice-based lens to illuminate how students learn to embody and accomplish their assigned tasks on WIL placement. Findings suggest that students initially learn through performing an intermediary cluster of practices that enable them to orient, adapt and conform to new configurations of people, things, spaces, tools, bodies and technologies. These temporary transitioning placement practices are distinctive to WIL and take their shape within social practice arrangements. The study offers empirical evidence to ground and theorize learning for WIL curricula and support an emerging, materially-significant and entangled conception of learning on placement.

PurposeSustainability is one of the leading challenges of our age, and higher education plays a vital role in supporting the implementation of sustainability initiatives. There has been substantial progress in business schools introducing sustainability into courses with extant literature detailing case studies of sustainability education and student perceptions of their learning. The purpose of this paper is to address the gap in literature from educators' perspectives on their experiences of introducing sustainability teaching using specific teaching tools for sustainability.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents a case study on a sustainability teaching tool, WikiRate, that was embedded into business and management courses at seven higher education institutions from across the globe. Interviews were conducted after course delivery to gain insights into the practical challenges of designing and implementing a sustainability education activity.FindingsThe findings show that educators perceive sustainability as a complex issue, presenting a challenge to teaching in university systems whose normative curricula are rooted in instrumental problem-solving. Furthermore, educators described challenges to their own learning in order to implement sustainability into curricula including the need for compromises and adaptions.Originality/valueThis empirical study reports on educators' experiences embedding sustainability into their courses through an innovative teaching tool, WikiRate. This paper has implications for reframing how we can approach sustainability education and presents discussion ways to teach complexity without reduction or simplification.

Significant global events in recent years have had a substantial impact on the nursing profession. The COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and systemic racism are a few of the many complex issues that create a landscape of disruption and uncertainty in healthcare. With the aims of protecting both people and the planet, the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals offer a road map to combat these global concerns, yet require more widespread consideration as a way forward. Education on the Sustainable Development Goals is recognised as a key aspect for healthcare professionals to take action towards achieving the targets of the goals. For student nurses, the undergraduate curriculum offers an opportunity to enculturate future nurses on the important role they play in the global agenda to transform our world. Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire's theoretical approach to education, critical pedagogy, espouses transformation with conscientization, dialogue and liberation, which may create a paradigm shift toward global action. This discussion paper seeks to provide an argument for embedding the Sustainable Development Goals into nursing curricula using the philosophies of Freire's critical pedagogy. It will argue that a critical approach to education is required to create the transformation needed for student nurses to be educated on the Sustainable Development Goals.

The first year of university, also known as the first year experience (FYE), is a crucial time for students as they learn a range of new practices that enable them to study and pursue a discipline or profession of interest. The function of this transitionary time however in relation to providing both a successful transition into university as well as an orientation to the profession is under-developed. Work-integrated learning is a leading pedagogy in tertiary institutions to build student’s career-readiness by applying theory within work experiences. However, despite the growth of WIL across discipline contexts, little is known about the prevalence and impact of WIL practices within the first year of tertiary study. The purpose of this study was to explore the perspectives of those who design and facilitate first year subjects on the value of embedding WIL and other transitionary supports into the first year curriculum. A qualitative case study was employed, with interviews from ten first-year subject coordinators within a single degree and institution. The findings reveal three crucial areas of transition in the first year: Transition into learning, Transition into being a student, and Transition into becoming a professional. Recommendations centre on benefits of a whole-of-course approach to transition and WIL for developing students with the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed both at university and into the workplace.

Higher education is fundamental to the accounting profession. However, increased competition, the need to shape responsible global citizens and global influences impacting the profession have highlighted weaknesses in existing accounting curricula with regard to non‐technical skills, professional values and ethics. This paper reports on an approach to improve student learning in a first‐year undergraduate accounting subject through scholarship of teaching and learning and critical participatory action research. The paper highlights the importance of embedding opportunities for integrative learning in accounting curricula to enable students’ developing professional competencies and lifelong learning. It also provides a model for accounting educators to enhance integrative capabilities in their courses through engagement with scholarly research on teaching.

Aim/Purpose: In the time that we study for our dissertation, our learning takes many turns. Sometimes we feel excited, motivated and accomplished, while other times frustrated, tired or unsure. This paper presents a poem to illustrate one student’s PhD journey through reflection on those fluctuations, milestones and learning moments experienced along the way. Background: Central to the journey presented here is learning about the interpretivist paradigm, its approaches, methods and critics. Interpretivism is a qualitative research approach which, in many disciplines, continues to be the positivist’s poor cousin. Methodology: This original paper takes an autoethnographic approach, expressed through poetry. Autoethnography uses self-reflection to connect personal experience to wider social and cultural understandings and has been seldom applied to investigate and uncover the contested and emergent doctoral experience. Contribution: Little opportunities arise during doctoral studies for the student to pause, reflect and communicate new learnings or knowledge without the boundaries of academic discursive conventions. In this way, the poetic medium of expression offers an original contribution to the field. The poem also illuminates the struggles with finding voice, an ontology that resonates, and the place that marks independence from others in becoming a researcher. Findings: Poetry affords ideas and feelings intensity through a distinctive style and rhythm of literature. This original poem offers a creative artefact that can be useful for supervisors and students at any stage of their dissertation, to ignite conversation on the challenges of higher education study. Recommendations for Practitioners: This paper invites others to consider their learning journey and discovery of self, to reflect on and record the milestones, tensions and catalysts of learning. Recommendation for Researchers: It opens doors particularly for those exploring, or wanting to explore, qualitative research through an interpretivist paradigm where knowledge is socially or experientially co-constructed and the researcher is inseparable to the research. Impact on Society: Becoming a researcher as synonymous with being a learner is a crucial discovery that widely connects to being a practitioner in any field. Learning to love the red pen is a metaphor of doctoral studies used to denote acceptance of feedback on written work as well as acceptance more broadly that there is always more to learn. Future Research: What if we encouraged doctoral students and academics to challenge convention and write/produce/create authentic expressions of learning? Encouragement should be afforded to doctoral students and academics to reflect during and beyond their research journeys, in a medium that personally resonates to empower deeper insights and understandings.

At a political level, the fact that Indigenous Australia has not yet experienced any constitutional or treaty recognition makes it difficult to imagine how reconciliation between the cultural realities of its Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples may be achieved. And while it has been recognized that Australia’s educational system plays a critical role in this process, attempts to reconcile the curriculum within academic institutions continue to pose complex challenges. From an Aboriginal perspective, the Australian higher education curriculum is steeped in British colonialism – dominated by Anglo-perspectives and Western academic values. This is despite the fact that the curriculum is located on Aboriginal Country and a continent with the longest surviving sustainable human history. Commonly, approaches to embedding Indigenous Knowledges and perspectives into curricula tend to be achieved through prescribed cultural competency frameworks or predefined modules of content embedded in subjects. The problem with these kinds of approaches, however, is that it represents Indigenous Knowledges and perspectives as disconnected from people and place. This entry describes how Academic Developers from the University of Wollongong, in New South Wales, Australia, and local Aboriginal community members co-created an institution-wide educational grants program called Jindaola, which follows an Aboriginal way towards reconciling Indigenous and non-Indigenous Knowledges in the Australian higher education curriculum.

Research in Australian business education continues to emphasise the importance of students learning teamwork as an integral part of the undergraduate curriculum. However, entrenched conceptual and practical confusion as to what the term ‘teamwork’ means and how it ought to be enacted remains a vexed issue capable of distorting and diminishing teamwork, learning and related pedagogy. In this paper, we critically re-examine the view that developing teamwork in an undergraduate business degree equips students for work in the real world. By focusing on the ‘real world’ metaphor-in-use in a cross-disciplinary business capstone subject, we interrogate the spatio-temporal dimensions of teamwork and its realist conceptions and performance. The research draws upon the perceptions of interviewed academics conducting teamwork activities in undergraduate business courses and the lived experiences of the authors. The findings highlight how the use of multiple models of teamwork, constructed by competing discourses an...

Daniel Blackshields, James Cronin, Bettie Higgs, Shane Kilcommins, Marian McCarthy and Anthony Ryan (eds.) (2015) How can we make higher-education curriculum relevant for diverse learners? Such a question lies at the heart of the conceptualisation of “integrative learning”. Building on work developed in America in the late 1990s and continued through research including Huber and Hutchings’s (2004) seminal Integrative Learning: Mapping the Terrain, Klein’s (2005) Integrative learning and interdisciplinary studies and Higgs, Kilcommins and Ryan’s (2010) Making Connections: Intentional Teaching for Integrative Learning, this edited book, Integrative Learning: International research and practice, perpetuates the development of a shared language around understanding integrative learning.

In the Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) curriculum, reflection on workplace activities is widely used to support student learning. Recent critiques have demonstrated the limitations of current approaches to support students' reflective learning of workplace practices. By employing a practice-based approach, we seek to refocus WIL reflection on workplace practices, emphasising the ‘embedded (social), engaged (practice) and embodied (material) aspects' of students' reflective practices in the workplace. We argue that reflection-in-the-midst-of-action includes an often-overlooked phenomenological contribution that shifts attention from cognition to action. This study uses a case study of one typical WIL student to illustrate the importance of reflection-in-the-midst-of-action and the limitations of pedagogical structure using an e-log and reflective journal to capture reflection-in-the-midst-of-action. We argue that the move to consider reflection as a practice, and the move to refocus reflection to reflection...

The higher education (HE) sector in Australia is in a state of flux due to a range of social, political and economic factors. Increased competition, greater student diversity, tautening of industry exigencies, reduced funding, and rapid technological advances are key drivers of change in this environment. Within this period of transformation, HE institutions remain steadfast in maintaining quality teaching and learning practices. Challenges are therefore presented on the traditional role and function of the teaching academic, creating opportunities to explore how staff can be better prepared to teach into the new era of HE. Professional development for learning and teaching is one approach that can support staff to enhance teaching practice. Professional development programs however that fail to meet the contemporary needs of HE or consider the academic’s professional requirements, may be at risk of becoming extraneous. A move towards a more flexible approach to professional development may be necessary to meet these requirements to provide appropriate, timely support for teachers. This paper problematises approaches to professional development which adopt a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model and introduces a new, innovative program Continuing Professional Development (Learning & Teaching) (CPD [L&T]) at the University of Wollongong . The CPD (L&T) model supports the professional development of all teaching staff – from casual teacher to professor level, academic and professional staff. The model is externally referenced and features self-nominated activities for accreditation. CPD (L&T) enables multiple, ongoing methods of engagement across a professional’s teaching career, supporting a new, You-topic vision of professional development in learning and teaching. This journal article is available in Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice: http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol13/iss4/5 A vision of You-topia: Personalising professional development of teaching in a diverse academic workforce