Black women have engaged through social media platforms, as a mechanism to uplift their embodiment, despite being relegated to the margins. The hashtag #BlackGirlMagic (BGM) is linked to narratives of Black women in higher education that are empowering and problematic. The development of the popular social media movement during a time when Black…

This study dives deep into the evolution of research on teacher emotions (TE), teacher agency (TA) and their role within higher education institutions (HEIs) from 1975 to the present. Combining a meticulous bibliometric and content analysis, the paper has painted a detailed picture of how the academic conversation has developed over nearly half a…

Writing conferences are rich pedagogical settings to explore explanations. In contrast to teachers, writing consultants are usually peer tutors, straddling the roles of instructor and fellow student (North, 1984). This creates a unique situation where consultant-writer dyads must interactionally manage questions of expertise and authority (Carino,…

This paper reconceptualises academic writing in HE in order to explore how the symbolic significance and practical importance of academic writing in higher education is a constant presence, despite remaining elusive and difficult to define and/or execute in practice. I apply Bourdieu's (1985) concept of 'habitus' and 'doxa' to take an 'otherwise…

Academic writing is rested on a view of academic negotiation between writers and readers in which writers ultimately aim to gain credibility in their academic discipline. In doing so, they utilize a wide range of linguistic devices based on cultural and disciplinary norms to communicate with readers and convince the readers about the truth of…

By sharing an honest, thoughtful dialogue about how their different identities affect their experience of feminism and feminist spaces, Z Nicolazzo and Crystal Harris model duoethnographic dialogue--a type of dialogue across difference that has the potential to be a catalyst for transformative student learning.

We consider the emergence of "notables" within the disciplines of the modern university, the foremost among whom may be selected to appear on postage stamps. Noting that disciplinary culture is as important as content in university education, we suggest that some knowledge of the identity of these notables, passed on by encultured tutors, should…

Student engagement and making community happen is a policy manoeuvre that shapes the political subjectivity of the undergraduate student In Australia, making community happen as a practice of student engagement is described as one of the major challenges for policy and practice in research-led universities (Krause, 2005). Current efforts to meet…

Supervising masters and doctoral dissertations is a key function of teaching in higher education and giving written feedback on draft sections is an essential component of this function. However, the specific types of response that supervisors give to their dissertation students' written work have received limited research interest to date. The…

As practices and expectations around doctoral writing continue to change, so too do the demands on academic developers and learning advisors. Social media is increasingly playing a role in doctoral education, just as it is in higher education more generally. This paper explores a blog initiated in 2012 to inform and support doctoral writing; since…

Education policy in Australia has accelerated its aim to increase participation of under-represented groups in tertiary education including students who are culturally and linguistically diverse and have low socio-economic status. These students generally have not had prior access to privileged academic discourse, which can further disadvantage…

I see a parallel between the illiteracy I witnessed while working in the court system and the challenges facing first-year writers at the university. In both cases, problems arise due to unfamiliarity with the discourse community into which one enters. In response, because much of the language governing composition and rhetoric is rife with place…

This paper aims to examine the value of communication skills learning process through various assessments in Information Systems (IS) postgraduate units in Australia and Portugal. Currently, communication skills are indispensable to students in expanding their social networks and their knowledge at university and in the future workplace, since…

The idea of transformative and troublesome "threshold concepts" has been popular and influential in higher education. This article reports how teachers with different disciplinary affiliations responded to the "concept of thresholds" in the course of a cross-disciplinary research project. It describes how the idea was territorialised and enacted…

The paper suggests that the idea of quality in higher education is ideologically constructed and conducted. In a spiral of mutual reinforcements, quality regimes naturalise experience, while the theories of that practice legitimise the naturalness of "quality". I shall suggest that quality regimes provide too narrow readings of higher education.…