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This paper provides a small-scale exploration of the evolvement of leadership roles in higher education academic units (AUs), namely Departments, Schools & Faculties. A literature review provides theoretical examples of the evolution of professional services (PS) staff. Changes in PS leadership roles are also explored alongside the emergence of 'Third Space' professionals whereby staff from the perceived 'binary' construct of HE (academics and PS staff) work together on shared initiatives outside formal structures. Semi-structured interviews with PS leaders working in AUs across the sector highlight a number of key themes. Findings suggest that documented tensions between academics and PS staff have lessened with the focus shifting to 'local' vs 'central' challenges. With identity emerging as an important consideration for Higher Education Professionals (HEPs), the paper calls for a sector wide review of structures and resource allocation models, the development of a new HEP apprenticeship scheme and a rebuilding of the PS throughout HE.

Foundation Years (FY) have proliferated within UK Higher Education in recent years, and their benefits and successes have been well documented (e.g. the enhancement of opportunities for underrepresented students, second-chance education, skills and confidence enhancement, and a pipeline into STEM. However, when managed centrally, their implementation can be a contentious site of interdisciplinary unease and 'mutual suspicion' and as much as a fruitful avenue for innovative collaboration. One of the key issues is the question of how to embed academic skills/literacies development within a meaningful, 'integrated', interdisciplinary context effectively whilst utilising expertise from both academic departments and learning development/skills teams, and thus navigating disparate disciplinary agendas, communities of practice and strategic priorities. This paper reports on how this complex terrain was navigated at Royal Holloway, University of London, to successfully embed academic skills (using Universal Design for Learning pedagogy) into an academically authentic, inclusive, interdisciplinary 'Global Perspectives and Academic Practice' unit that facilitated student integration into academic departments. Whilst we report on how the programme led to higher than sector average attainment, retention and progression (the EE described it as a 'TEF Gold offering'), we critically analyse the challenges of embedding and aligning such provision within the communities of practice of a research-intensive institution. Throughout, we suggest ways forward at both practical and strategic levels to ensure the immense potential of integrated academic literacies development within FYs can be realised.

Being lectured by a woman physicist can benefit students' performance, motivation, and engagement with physics. However, due to the severe underrepresentation of women physics faculty, these instances may be scarce. Through semistructured interviews with seven women physics lecturers, we used expectancy-value theory to understand the situative nature of gender regarding motivation to lecture. We sought to understand their choices and decisions when selecting their teaching roles, and if lecturing, what draws them toward certain courses. Our study was a staff-student partnership project carried out in a physics department at a UK university. We identified themes of confidence, enjoyment, the importance of lecturing, and the associated workload. The academic women could not relate to the "showperson" persona that they felt their men colleagues displayed. They navigated low levels of confidence by adopting a painstaking approach to lecture preparation, suggesting an inherent, higher workload associated with lecturing, compared with other forms of teaching. However, the women highly valued lecturing, enjoying the excitement and interactions with students, and were drawn toward developing students' knowledge and skills. Being familiar with the content allowed them to feel confident in lecturing. We discuss these findings and recommend areas of support that physics departments should endeavor to offer.

Academic culture now places high expectations on researchers to demonstrate research productivity alongside teaching, leadership and knowledge exchange. In two studies of researchers across career stages in UK higher education institutions (HEIs), we examined workplace climate within academic departments as (1) supportive of researchers' needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, (2) publish-or-perish focused and (3) hyper-competitive. In Study 1 (multiwave from 2018 to 2020), need support predicted researchers' lower turnover intention 2 years later, even when controlling for concurrent need support, and career and economic conditions. In Study 2, need support correlated with academic well-being (lower job strain and turnover intention, greater job satisfaction) in a nationwide sample of 2951 researchers. Study 2 found that need support related to improved, and a hyper-competitive motivational climate related to undermined, well-being. Results were mixed for publish-or-perish climate. Performative demands can have deleterious effects on researcher well-being.

This paper posits that the foundations of the teaching of political theory at Makerere University College obtain from British and American hegemony. The hegemonic tendencies are exemplified by the content of what was taught as political theory, the nature of the teaching staff in the Department of Political Science -- the country of origin, the institution where they trained, and their research focus. It concludes that streamlining the teaching of political theory at Makerere University will require an understanding of its hegemonic past and its present context to which it is supposed to be aligned.

Through an evaluation of an institution-wide curriculum change process, this paper analyses how strategic policy is variously enacted in departmental communities. Linguistic ethnography of public, institutional and internal policy documents illuminates departments' engagement with the change process. With curriculum change positioned as a disorienting dilemma, transformational learning theory provides a lens to analyse the departments' alignment with the intention of the curriculum change policy. The paper explores the extent to which departments transformed from a disciplinary content-based and high-stakes examination approach to the curriculum to incorporating broader institutional aims and active learning theories into disciplinary language, pedagogy and practices. Three stages of engagement are identified through an evaluation rubric, offering a framework to assess curriculum change initiatives. Implications for educational leaders include the need to integrate institutional strategy with disciplinary experts and expertise and the importance of language adoption as a precursor to implementation.

In this paper we explore collaboration in the context of the educational services industry (ESI). We look to literature from the communication field to consider ethical strategies and methods for ensuring the validity of the outcomes of collaborative working. Drawing on Collaborative Product Development and conversation theory we devise four principles that can guide the collaborative process within an education-based partnership project. We then use a case study to consider how these principles supported the outcomes of a cross-national partnership project. Finally, we draw on these principles to consider the lessons for project management in education public private partnerships.

In this article, Theo Woods shares the experience of one history department as they embarked on a substantial process of curriculum review and development. The department sought to address concerns that the range of history taught in their school, across the full seven years of students' secondary experience, was too 'traditional, White and Eurocentric'. Woods outlines the range of arguments that prompted her team to take action and the principles that they developed to underpin the construction of a geographically broad, culturally diverse and academically challenging curriculum. She also explains how they tackled the various challenges that they encountered, not least the development of their own subject knowledge. While the article includes an outline of their current curriculum structure, its essential value lies in the insights that it offers into collaborative processes of curriculum renewal and the range of resources that can support such an approach.

There is a dissonance between the formal role of head of academic department represented in institutional discourses and the reality of heads' working practices. This paper provides insight, from the perspective of heads, about how the role is experienced and enacted in one institution. Data are derived from 20 semi-structured interviews with heads of department in a teaching-focussed university in the UK. The findings show that there is autonomy in how individual heads structure, manage and lead their departments, and so the role is performed in significantly different ways. Nevertheless, for all heads, the development of a clearer institutional mission, vision and strategy had meant that the scope for strategic initiatives at departmental level was more circumscribed, and there was a significant issue for many heads about how to make the time and space available for this aspect of the role, given the competing operational demands. Derived from these findings, the paper informs practice by making recommendations about how heads of department may operate more effectively. We suggest that a mesopolitical lens, exploring how social practices are shaped by specific disciplinary and departmental contexts and cultures, may provide a productive perspective on the role of middle leaders and managers.

This study investigates the perceived benefits to academics who assess HEA Fellowship applications in one institution. Results show that the assessors experience similar benefits from engaging with the continuing professional development (CPD) scheme as those reported by applicants. The data also indicate that the scheme nurtures a teaching-focused community of practice. By examining and discussing authentic practice from diverse subject areas, assessors contribute to the development of a cross-disciplinary consensus on teaching standards. Academic developers broker these community-based interactions, which go on to inform individual and departmental practice. Recommendations are presented to help academic developers nurture such communities in their institutions.

This paper seeks to analyse lecturers' views on how they understand academic development in order to elucidate current arguments around how knowledge is codified in higher education, and to what end. Whilst work of this nature has been carried out in a number of national and institutional contexts, much attention has been given to research embedded in particular subject areas or within academic development departments. By utilising Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, a series of super- and sub-ordinate themes that represent the ways in which each lecturer describes academic development have been mapped across the existing literature in a form that has not been done to date. The results of this analysis highlight the need to think beyond the binaries subsumed within learner-/discipline-focussed or institutionally-/epistemologically- constrained barriers to academic development.

Little is known about how researchers in higher education institutions (HEIs) experience and respond to support received from their departments. The present study investigated how support for researchers' autonomy (choice and self-expression), relatedness (through connections with colleagues) and competence (feeling effective in one's work) influenced their attitudes towards an external assessment of research. To do so, we surveyed 598 academics from four HEIs in the UK about their attitudes towards one such external assessment: the Research Excellence Framework (REF), a nationwide assessment of research quality and the subject of debate about research evaluation. Our findings, drawing on self-determination theory, show that departments can shape responses to the REF: individuals whose psychological needs were supported by their academic departments held more positive, and less negative, attitudes towards the REF. This occurred both directly and indirectly through researchers' recognition that the REF had a more positive influence on their research activities and outputs.

While the effects of outreach with secondary school pupils has been researched the reasons teachers engage or the impacts on the teachers engaging in long-term relationships with a university department have not. Detailed interviews with chemistry teachers associated with outreach at Bristol ChemLabS have revealed many reasons for prolonged partnership both for their students and themselves. Perceived impacts on students include; inspiration, enjoyment, reward, motivation, experience of a university chemistry department, raising aspirations, curriculum support, extension, enrichment, stretch and challenge and each are discussed. Impacts on the teachers from repeated visits over time including those on subsequent teaching are explored. The language of links and partnerships and the power dynamics of relationships are also considered.

This paper is a response to Cotton, Miller and Kneale's 2017 paper on the current state of higher education research within UK universities. It seeks to contribute to the debate surrounding the inclusion of pedagogic research (PedR) via SoTL in the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the context of researchers who reside within a disciplinary context. The inclusion of PedR in the REF continues to be contentious, despite recommendations in the Stern Report which could make its inclusion more feasible. This paper focuses on PedR which is conducted, published and disseminated by academics situated within Life Science departments, rather than Schools of Education. The twenty-one teaching-focused academics in this study discussed their commitment to PedR integral to their academic identity, the challenges they faced in carrying out PedR, and their thoughts on REF 2014. Their opinions and conclusions give food for thought on decisions regarding inclusion of PedR in REF 2021.

The Department of Military Studies at the University of Sydney ran courses from 1907 to 1915. The manner in which it functioned and the role it played is not widely understood, in particular how it was integrated with the Commonwealth Military Forces. Within the history of the development of the Australian military it is usually treated as a footnote before the arrival of Royal Military College Duntroon, and discarded as having limited impact. This article challenges that assumption, demonstrating how significant the Department's influence was within the Commonwealth Military Forces as an early example of integration between tertiary education and professional military education, while also situating the Department within the context of wider British Empire officer education.

Within the UK, traditional subject-specific areas are increasingly being complemented by the provision of opportunities to foster students' personal development planning as an aide to support their future employment and lifelong learning. This paper describes an action research project which examined employability skills within a psychology department's curriculum. The first cycle involved conducting a curriculum audit, focus groups and a survey of psychology undergraduates' views on employability. Analysis of the findings suggested a strong focus on development of generic graduate skills, such as communication, IT and working with others, whilst students had difficulty in recognising the applicability of these skills beyond an educational context. Furthermore, examples of explicit career development planning were minimal in both module information documentation and undergraduates' accounts. After a process of evaluation and reflection, the second cycle involved embedding employability skills into the psychology curriculum. The process is described along with discussion on methodological issues and the benefits and challenges of embedding employability in a curriculum. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

This paper offers a new perspective on exploring peer observation (PO) as an event or system, and contributes to the discussion on what happens "after" the PO cycle in terms of opportunities for dissemination. Data were gathered from semi-structured interviews with members of academic staff in a UK higher education institution about their managerial roles in the PO scheme. An analysis of the interview transcripts revealed a dominant regulative discourse around PO as an event with corresponding instructional discourse focused on the procedures and administration of the scheme. We argue that middle managers are in a unique position to determine how PO can be shared in the learning and teaching community. This requires a considerable shift in the prevailing discourse around the purposes and potential of PO as part of a wider professional development system and we make suggestions for how this might be promoted.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of organisational and individual factors on the knowledge sharing behaviour of UK academics. Although there a few articles that explore knowledge sharing between academics in an Asian context, there is currently only one article that explores this topic in a UK context. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 academics to gather insights into their views on the factors that affect knowledge sharing. Findings demonstrated that academics are prepared to share different types of knowledge; a range of factors affecting this process were highlighted by interviewees. Trust was discussed more than other individual factors and was often associated with social exchange. Culture was described by most interviewees as collaborative and leaders were generally considered to have integrity, but often did not themselves share knowledge. Regular face-to-face contact was emphasised as being critical for knowledge sharing. This study demonstrates there is a culture of trust in most departments and academics are willing to share knowledge with their colleagues. They do, however, believe that the matrix structure, that is typical of academic departments, has resulted in unclear roles and responsibilities, which could hinder the design of structures to promote collaboration and sharing.

Many university departments provide public engagement activities, often referred to as "outreach" to school students, their teachers and other members of the public. It is less common for University Departments to run activities for their employees let alone the children of these employees. This paper looks at the value put on an engagement activity both by participating students and their parents who are employees of the host university. Analysis shows that the students welcome the opportunity to experience aspects of their parents' workplace and those parents are extremely supportive of such initiatives.

The introduction of modular schemes and a semesterised academic year are amongst the most fundamental changes ever to occur in UK higher education. There is, however, a notable lack of pedagogic research evidence on the effects upon student learning of course frameworks and the temporal structure of large-scale learning units. In the absence of other evidence, decisions to adopt semesterisation and modular schemes seem to have been made to save money, to increase university income, or simply to follow a management trend. A small study of attitudes to semesterisation across psychology departments is reported that raises questions about the pedagogic benefits of shifts to semesterisation. A larger-scale study carried out within a well-established modular course suggests that some aspects of freedom of choice, such as choice over the number of modules studied concurrently, can have negative effects upon student achievement. It is suggested that these effects of high and fluctuating workload should be controlled through course design and through advice given to students when they are constructing programmes. Attention is drawn to the need for psychologists to contribute to the pedagogic research knowledge base in this domain. (Contains 6 tables and 4 figures.)

From the 1990s onwards, economics departments in Europe have changed toward a culture of "excellence." Strong academic hierarchies and new forms of academic organization replace "institutes" and "colleges" by fully equipped "economics departments." This article seeks to demonstrate how and why hierarchization, discourses of excellence and organizational change takes place in European economics departments. The concept of "elitism dispositif" will be developed in order to understand these changes as a discursive as well as power-related phenomenon based on rankings, on the formation of new academic classes as well as on the construction of an elite myth. An elitism dispositif is defined as a discursive power apparatus that transforms symbolic differences among researchers, constructed by rankings, into material inequalities, based on an unequal distribution of academic capital between departments and researchers. Based on an empirical study, the article will focus on a selection of economics departments in Germany and in the UK, in order to study the emergence of an "elite class" as well as the functioning of an "excellence culture" that is based on discourses of power and inequality.

Purpose: This paper aims to examine the everyday practices of academic work in social science to understand better academics' learning. It also asks how academic work is enacted in relation to the discipline, department and university, taking temporality as its starting point. Design/methodology/approach: The study sought to trace academic activities in practice. Within three universities, 14 academics were work-shadowed; social, material, technological, pedagogic and symbolic actors were observed and where possible connections and interactions were traced (including beyond the institution). This paper reports on a subset of the study: the academic practices of four early-career academics in one discipline are analysed. Findings: Email emerges as a core academic practice and an important pedagogic actor for early career academics in relation to the department and university. Much academic work is "work about the work", both in and outside official work time. Other pedagogic actors include conferences, networks and external Web identities. Disciplinary work happens outside official work time for the most part and requires time to be available. Disciplinary learning is therefore only afforded to some, resulting in structural disadvantage. Originality/value: By tracing non-human and human actors, it has emerged that the department and university, rather than the discipline, are most important in composing everyday work practices. A sociomaterial approach enables researchers to better understand the "black box" of everyday academic practice. Such an approach holds the promise of better support for academics in negotiating the demands of discipline, department and university without overwork and systemic exploitation.

The changes in government funding alongside external pressures of increased international and national competition have meant that higher education institutions need to excel in a turbulent environment. The leadership, governance and management (LGM) of academic departments are key concerns. This study investigates the correlation between behaviours, attitudes and competencies at a department level and overall departmental performance in terms of hard data measures. The research question this paper seeks to address is: what are the LGM behaviours that are associated with high-performance in academic departments? More than 600 people across 50 academic departments in 5 UK universities were surveyed through the use of three research phases consisting of open-ended questionnaires, critical case sampled semi-structured interviews and a fixed-response survey. Synthesising the data and findings of the study revealed a thematic framework of eight broad themes that contribute to excellence in academic departments. These were in the areas of change management, research and teaching, communication, strategy and shared values, leadership, departmental culture, rewards and staffing. The behaviours associated with each of these themes were used to construct the Underpinning Excellence model.

Far from allowing a governance of universities by the invisible hand of market forces, research performance assessments do not just measure differences in research quality, but yield themselves visible symptoms in terms of a stratification and standardization of disciplines. The article illustrates this with a case study of UK history departments and their assessment by the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and the Research Excellence Framework (REF), drawing on data from the three most recent assessments (RAE 2001, 2008, REF 2014). Symptoms of stratification are documented by the distribution of memberships in assessment panels, of research active staff, and of external research grants. Symptoms of a standardization are documented by the publications submitted to the assessments. The main finding is that the RAEs/REF and the selective allocation of funds they inform consecrate and reproduce a disciplinary center that, in contrast to the periphery, is well-endowed with grants and research staff, decides in panels over the quality standards of the field, and publishes a high number of articles in high-impact journals. This selectivity is oriented toward previous distributions of resources and a standardized notion of "excellence" rather than research performance.

This research tests whether Holderness Jr., D. K., Myers, N., Summers, S. L., & Wood, D. A. [(2014). "Accounting education research: Ranking institutions and individual scholars." "Issues in Accounting Education," 29(1), 87-115] accounting-education rankings are sensitive to a change in the set of journals used. It provides updated rankings for accounting-education authors from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States using a sample that included the publications in 13 accounting-education journals. Our analysis indicated that Holderness et al.'s rankings of authors and departments were significantly different from our rankings. This research provides rankings of the top 50 authors and departments for three periods: from 2010 to 2015, from 2004 to 2015, and from 1992 to 2015. We provide data indicating the distribution of authors for these periods to assist authors not listed in the most prolific lists in determining their relative ranking. Finally, we provide data on the distribution of journal choices for accounting-education publications for the authors from each country.

In a series of Teaching Exchange (TE) staff development workshops aimed at exploring prospective, bottom-up quality assurance in media studies in the United Kingdom, interdisciplinarity arose as a key topic. This article reflects on teaching staff's views expressed in the TE workshops around interdisciplinarity in relation to their experiences in designing and reaching courses, as well as in the classroom. To contextualize these arguments, the article introduces media studies' interdisciplinarity in reference to other fields, then summarizes the methods used to gain insight into the views of higher education practitioners in media studies in the United Kingdom. It then critically discusses the accounts given by workshop participants of three aspects of the role that interdisciplinarity plays in their pedagogy: at the levels of colleagues' profiles, course design, and student bodies. The article concludes by noting that tensions exist between top-down pressures "disciplinizing" media studies and its interdisciplinarity characteristics and argues that the field is best conceptualized as an (inter)discipline that, as such, faces distinctive pedagogical challenges and opportunities. The U.K. case study is posited as a possible counterpoint for other higher education contexts internationally.

Initiatives, like the UK ESRC's RDI/CI programmes and the Q-Step Centres, have a long-term aim of addressing the well-documented decline in the pool of academics able and willing to teach quantitative methods (QM). However, these initiatives will take time to make an impact; therefore, the upskilling of current staff is a vital strategy if we want to maintain QM in curricula. This paper draws on findings from the ESRC RDI project, 'No More Pointy Clicky, numbers stuff; building staff quantitative skills'. This project focussed on upskilling staff in a large Sociology department. The project was committed to delivering training to develop staff competence in QM; however, it became clear that this alone would not be sufficient to build staff confidence. Therefore, the project rolled-out a more complex strategy that addressed a range of central issues, including, pedagogy, infrastructure, Departmental resourcing and strategy, and staff worldviews, which this article explores.

Changes to the mathematics and science curriculums are designed to increase rigour in mathematics, and place greater emphasis on mathematical content in science subjects at key stages 3, 4 and 5 (ages 11-18). One way to meet the growing challenge of providing increased emphasis on mathematics in the science curriculum is greater collaboration between mathematics and science departments. This article explores possible ways in which this collaboration might take place, by looking at five case studies from schools who have implemented cross-curricular projects between mathematics and science departments.

The paper adds to extant professional education literature by reflecting on apparent differences in pedagogy of similar professional programmes of study, allowing deeper insight into the unique strand of higher education influenced by the professions. A comparative international case study approach is adopted of an interpretive qualitative nature regarding curricular, teaching and learning and assessment strategies of an accounting department in South Africa (SA) and one in the UK. Findings point to significant differences in curriculum and assessment but less so in teaching and learning approaches. One department endeavoured to find a balance between vocational and academic activities, whilst the other favoured the former being inconsistent with both its governmental and institutional governing bodies. Explanations offered include differing strengths of coercive, competitive, mimetic and normative influence.

This essay explores the problematic nature of an enforced monolingual culture promoted by the current Conservative-led UK government. It comments upon the paradoxical nature of the 2014 curriculum that promotes heritage texts and "proper" English, when such poets embraced a Bakhtinian tolerance of languages. It focuses primarily upon the social relationships fostered with a Year 10 class by a new teacher within the English department in North London school. It questions the rejection of the Bullock Report and explores the importance of culture and linguistic interjections in pupils' negotiation of meaning in and outside the classroom.

This article reports research into undergraduate design learning through an off-campus partnership. The Sorrell Foundation's Joinedupdesign for Academies programme involved partnerships between university design departments, "failing" 11-18 schools and professional designers, in the context of a funding commitment to rebuild/renew school buildings in the UK, and an ideological commitment to remodel schools as "Academies". We investigated the impact on 12 undergraduate Design students' learning as they partnered pupils at two secondary schools in a live regeneration project, following both schools' redesign/relaunch as "Academies". Using a mixed methods case study approach, we report the acquisition of a wide range of employability skills, vital for professional designers, through an innovative learning model in which pupils act as clients. In terms of design education, these partnerships provided a rare and authentic exposure to the complex demands of publicly-funded work for undergraduate design students, and as such offer a new and potentially interesting model for experiential design education, which bridges campus and off-campus learning.

Planning to deliver the new GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education] specifications presents a challenge and an opportunity to any history department, whatever their previous specification. The sweep of history that students will now study at GCSE is much broader than "Modern World" departments are used to; including a medieval or early modern depth study as well as the thematic overview unit stretching back to the medieval period, it is arguably broader than many departments who previously followed SHP [Schools History Project] specifications are used to dealing with. As a result, GCSE history students across the country will be revisiting periods they are likely previously to have encountered, in some form, at Key Stage 3 or earlier. The following is one department's attempt to seize the opportunity for creative long-term curriculum planning, strengthening students' performance at Key Stage 4, and making our own lives easier, by planning for students to build up a useful "residue" of knowledge over the course of our three-year Key Stage 3 curriculum, and to retain this from Key Stage 3 to Key Stage 4.

This article examines the student experience for a particular cohort, namely the joint honours students, at a post-1992 university in the United Kingdom. These students are enrolled in degree courses that combine two subjects at one university. Little attention has so far been given to such students whose experience is decidedly different from that of single honours students. By using a mixed methodology including quantitative and qualitative questionnaires, focus groups, individual interview and ethnography, the article attempts to highlight elements of the student experience that are unique to the joint provision. It will draw on the concept of "institutional habitus" to argue that joint honours students experience their time at university often in isolation and as excluded from the institutional norm.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the difference in the process of higher education (HE) internationalization across faculties in a post-1992 university and to identify faculty-specific factors through evaluating the four faculties in the case study. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative research is conducted in a post-1992 UK university. Four faculties are involved and a total of 20 interviewees from three key departments participate in this project. Content analysis, critical discourse analysis and categorization of meaning are adopted as data analysis strategies. Findings: This study explains the reasons why the level of internationalization across faculties is different. Research limitations/implications: This research helps gain rich understanding of faculty-specific factors in terms of the degree of internationalization. Further research in this area is encouraged to test these faculty-specific factors through quantitative population studies in other institutions. Practical implications: Most faculty-specific factors are management matters which can be improved by internal adjustment. HE internationalization cannot be conducted the same way in each faculty, but should be considered a part of faculties' particular focus. These factors highlight the areas where the faculties need to improve, in order to better accommodate HE internationalization. Originality/value: This research evaluates and identifies the faculty-specific factors in relation to the level of internationalization from a faculty's standpoint. These critical factors are unique to HE internationalization and transferrable to other similar institutions. (Contains 1 table and 1 note.)

This paper illustrates how critical use of Basil Bernstein's theory illuminates the mechanisms by which university knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy both reproduce and interrupt social inequalities. To this end, empirical examples are selected from the findings of the ESRC-funded project "Pedagogic Quality and Inequality in University First Degrees" (RES-062-23-1438, November 2008-January 2012). The project investigated sociology-related social science degrees in four social science departments in universities in different positions in influential UK higher education league tables. A Bernsteinian lens throws fresh light on how university education might contribute to a more egalitarian society. (Contains 1 table and 5 notes.)

Bringing about change in teaching and learning in higher education is a core aspect of the work of academic developers. This paper is novel in analysing the experience of a year-long initiative to support curriculum changes in departments in related disciplines in different universities. It applies some of the processes developed by Change Academy -- an initiative sponsored by the UK Higher Education Academy and the Leadership Foundation -- to the design of a three-day programme. Underpinned by consideration of models of institutional and curriculum change, the research draws on interviews to identify the features of the programme that appear to have been effective at supporting departmental teams to clarify, design and plan significant curriculum-related initiatives. Emphasis is placed on designing and supporting collaborative curriculum change. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for academic developers wanting to support department-based curriculum changes in their countries. (Contains 1 table.)

The evidence about the relationship between research and teaching at the level of doctoral education is far from conclusive. The focus of this study is to examine how teaching and research are related at doctoral level, especially when students' voices are heard, in two contrasting higher education systems--France and the UK. Models from Schimank and Winnes, and Clark were used to analyse the contrasting research and teaching configurations at institutional level in France and the UK. France has a Pre-Humboltian system of research and teaching, whilst the UK has a Post-Humboltian one. Two empirical studies were then drawn on: to measure teaching, a questionnaire composed of two major dimensions of research training experiences, supervision and research environment, was distributed to full-time doctoral students in Economics & Management and Chemistry in France and was compared to a survey carried out earlier in Education and Chemistry in the UK. To measure research, the result of the CNRS (National Centre of Scientific Research) research classification in France was used. In the UK, the corresponding measurement, RAE score (Research Assessment Exercise) was adopted. Strikingly similar findings were found in the two countries. First, there is little relationship between the departmental research performance and the quality of doctoral education as experienced by PhD students in either country. Next, this lack of significant relationship is found across all three disciplines. Thirdly, more consistent results were observed in France than in the UK. There is in-depth discussion with regard to these findings.

This paper makes the claim that student teachers' learning depends a great deal on the individual school department where they are working, its social practices and the relationships of the teachers involved in initial teacher education (ITE). The paper considers how using a Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) lens to view data generated on school ITE activity helps to focus vital social, cultural and historical dimensions of practice. The research uses an activity system as a descriptive heuristic to explore whether understandings of the object and tools of school-based ITE activity systems are shared. The findings illustrate differences in the kinds of teacher learning possible, afforded in relation to the ways in which the object of the ITE activity system was constructed, and the tensions that emerged in interaction with other related activity systems. The necessity of negotiating and renegotiating the system's object regularly is emphasised in order for collaborative work in ITE to be successful in helping create opportunities that develop teachers through expansive learning. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

This study focuses on aspects of the Changing Academic Profession survey of 2007-08 that describe the place of faculty in their institutions. The authors examine the following aspects of institutional life: (1) the faculty role in institutional governance; (2) who evaluates their teaching and research; (3) the locus of their loyalties as between their academic departments and their institutions; and (4) career and job satisfaction. Before proceeding to the several dimensions of governance, the authors first provide an overview of how the composition of the American professorate resembles or differs from that in other nations in terms of institutional affiliation, disciplinary distribution, gender composition, family status (spouse's employment), age, and academic rank. This provides the context within which to interpret the differences and similarities between the US professoriate and those across the globe. (Contains 7 figures.)

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore a department in a UK higher education (HE) institute based on Senge's five characteristics of learning organizations. Design/methodology/approach: In this study, a case study method was utilized. The case study entailed two lines of enquiry: a questionnaire, which was distributed to a UK HE-institution department followed by semi-structured interviews. Findings: The findings show that learning-organization characteristics were present to a limited extent. Within the department, the results showed a variation in the impact level of the five characteristics between administrative and academic groups, as well as between the new and old members of staff. Originality/value: Recently, the learning-organization concept has been of interest to companies operating in both the private and public sectors; however, its implementation in a higher education setting remained limited to holistic studies assessing higher education institutes in general, rather than in studies analyzing its impact at the micro-level. Hence, this research agenda contributes at two levels of enquiry: the departmental level of learning-organization adaptation, and the level of the individuals' experiences in the workplace.

Research on women in leadership has received growing attention in recent years. But not enough studies have investigated the way women construct leadership and management of the academic department. This article reports on the findings of an inquiry into the experiences of women heads of academic departments (HoDs) at universities in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Data were collected by means of a survey questionnaire, and statistical analyses were conducted to determine frequency distributions and mean values on the perceptions of the women on leadership and management issues. Findings indicate that female leadership is characterized by strong communication and interpersonal skills; information and power-sharing; professionalism and integrity; servant leadership; participatory, collaborative, androgynous and transformational leadership styles. These findings illuminate in particular, women's ways of leading, and provide a basis for further research into how these ways can be optimally used for the benefit of academic departments.

This paper provides a review of the practices and tensions informing approaches to professional development for early career academic geographers who are teaching in higher education. We offer examples from Britain, Canada, Nigeria and the USA. The tensions include: institutional and departmental cultures; models that offer generic and discipline-specific approaches; the credibility of alternative settings for professional development in teaching and learning; the valuing of professional development and of teaching in academic systems of reward and recognition; and the challenges of balancing professional and personal life. We summarize concepts of good practice and suggest opportunities for future research. (Contains 5 notes.)

Fieldwork is widely reported to be an effective learning and teaching tool. The authors report here how international fieldwork has enabled successful cross-phase collaboration to the benefit of both school and university geography departments. Eleven years' experience of joint A-level and university geography fieldwork in the French Alps and Romania is evaluated and the benefits and challenges for both school and universities are explored. Overwhelmingly evaluations have been positive from all perspectives, and collaborative school-university fieldwork is seen as important in demystifying the university experience for school students. The outcomes of this collaboration are discussed here in the context of transition from school to university studies. (Contains 4 tables and 1 note.)

The objectives of this article are, first, to describe a collaborative project between teacher educators and a foreign languages (FL) department in a specialist language college and, second, to evaluate its success. The project focuses on Year 9 pupils across the ability range (in four groups) and involves staff in both institutions working together to plan and produce stimulating homework tasks in French, integrated into the spring term scheme of work. Pupils' work and progress were evaluated and their views sought as well as those of participating staff. A classroom-based action research approach was adopted for the project. The article concludes with outcomes, which include recommendations and ideas to increase the effectiveness of FL homework.