As graduate labour market conditions have become increasingly challenging, higher education institutions have intensified their focus on ‘employability’ via strategies such as work placements. Focusing on work placements in the media and creative industries, this article identifies and analyses three key discourses that animate the pedagogical literature in these sectors: work placements as facilitating

This study seeks to investigate aspects of the relationship between the core academic activities of teaching and research in higher education, through a theoretically enriched discussion of the design of an innovative popular music module on Adele’s 25 album and its delivery to first-year undergraduates on a general-purpose music degree during the academic years 2015–21. Drawing on autoethnographic

Cognitive literary science has explored the the complex relationship between literary reading and social cognition. However, this insightful work about reading literature is frequently distanced from discussions about teaching literature. This essay discusses the results and ramifications of a pedagogical study conducted in two sections of an introductory literature course that was redesigned around

Reviewed by: Toni Mclaughlan, Lancaster University, UK

Formal music performance studies within university settings strive to prepare the next generation of performers and pedagogues for musical engagement beyond university. Yet literature suggests that these spaces of study do not always lead to a sense of readiness for potential professional worlds, due in part to a lack of opportunities for guided, in-depth, critical reflection that helps students connect

We, now colleagues, look to our “first” collective encounter with Deleuze and Guattari that took place in a university course on poststructuralism, where one of us was the teacher and three were students. This encounter still disturbs us. And new and different encounters happen each time we reread A Thousand Plateaus, revisit our previous conversations, and/or rewrite this manuscript. Each encounter

In recent decades, philosophy has been identified as a general approach to enhance the maturity of higher education as a field of study by enriching theory and method. In this article, I offer a new set of philosophical recommendations to spur the disciplinary development of higher education, departing from previous work in several meaningful ways. Due to their deep and useful connections to higher

Design spaces can be read in two complementary structural and compositional dimensions: the implicit dimension, and the formal dimension. This study aimed to answer the following questions: What are the phases of the original idea transformation in the design process? Does taking advantage of the implicit dimension of others’ interior spaces count as inspiration or plagiarism? Participants comprised

Despite the plethora of research on widening participation in the last 20 years, access to the arts and humanities has remained relatively under-explored, especially in relation to the preparedness of adult learners. This article reports a case study investigating the impact of an arts and languages Access module at the UK Open University. Findings from interviews with 37 Access students were analysed

Music education institutions have played a prominent role in mediating national identity in the Republic of Turkey since its founding in 1923. Initially tasked with suppressing Ottoman heritage, their nature and status changed with the ascendance of political Islam, when interest in Turkey’s Ottoman past grew and the Western aesthetics of the founding elite were increasingly contested. While music

This article brings into relation critical perspectives and practical tactics from a range of different fields—performance studies, visual art practice, pedagogy and educational theory, and activism and community organising—in order to create some space for re-imagining what might be possible within the dynamics of the Higher Education classroom. It proceeds through a series of speculative modes: ‘what

This essay reflects on the role of place for humanities practices and contributes to emerging discussions on infrastructure for the humanities and socio-material conditions of scholarly knowledge production. I provide a theoretical framework for studying venues for humanities work drawing on the phenomenological approach to the concepts of place and space, the pedagogical perspective on learning spaces

This study focuses on the place and role of the humanities, especially the liberal arts in emerging economies which rely vastly on the development of national skills and expertise. It is based on one example of a publicly funded university in Oman where the urgency of creating a skilled workforce has led to an exercise in aligning higher education with the creation of an employable pool of skilled

The raison d’être of the humanities is widely held to reside in its unique ability to generate critical thinking and critical thinkers. But what is “critical thinking?” Is it a generalized mode of reasoning or a form of political critique? How does it relate to discipline-specific practices of scholarly pursuit? How does it relate to discourses of “post-truth” and “alternative facts”? How is it best

Recognising the popularity of partnership models, this article questions the current literature on partnership within the humanities and explores the possibility of effectively implementing partnership within the English discipline, through exploration of the traditional modes of learning associated with specific disciplines and the barriers that exist through the traditional teacher-learner dynamic

Despite nearly ubiquitous general education requirements for students to take courses across disciplines, disciplinarity itself is often invisible to students and taken for granted by professors. We argue that surfacing these divisions and demystifying academic structures is, paradoxically, a key step in educating students toward the crossing of intellectual borders. In this article, we engage current

Clapp J, DeCoursey M, Lee SWS, et al. (2020) “Something fruitful for all of us”: Social annotation as a signature pedagogy for literature education. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education. DOI: 10.1177/1474022220915128

This paper investigates how eight academic research supervisors working in a Faculty of Arts at a research-intensive Australian university understand the notion of creativity in doctoral writing; both in relation to what it is and where it is found. This question was investigated qualitatively through interviews focusing on reader reception to three, short doctoral texts. A framework of indexicality

Attempting to teach theater in an English Literature course is a daunting prospect. A far cry from the highly individual experience of reading a novel or poem, theater is both a visual and communal kind of engagement. It is a challenge to capture this medium in a traditional lecture-based classroom and harder still to convey its three-dimensionality to undergraduate students. In this paper, we argue

In this article, we present a new perspective on how to combine inquiry-based, problem-oriented learning with practices in the Humanities. Our particular interest is how the initial phase of finding “the problem” can be undertaken in a conjoint way with students, that is in the form of inquiry-based learning where there are no pre-defined questions set by the teacher. Inspired by C. Wright Mills, we

The heart of design studio teaching is traditionally linked to one-on-one teaching activities and to the exchange of feedback prompting many design educators to think it does not lend itself to online delivery. This study explored how design educators can translate the essence of design studio pedagogy into a blended learning environment. The four-year study involving 119 first-year undergraduate design

Whilst the faculties of literacy and numeracy are rightly recognised as worthy of pedagogical nurturing, this article champions a more venerable articulacy – visualcy – crucial to a healthy culture, arguing that the one domain of human inquiry which distinguishes the visual arts from other disciplines is surely that surrounding the faculty of vision. The ascendency within the contemporary artworld

What does it mean to teach intercultural competence? Do we need to travel to “other” places? In what way does content need to reflect the traditions of “other” cultures? How can popular musics inform our teaching of these skills? Drawing on the guidelines in the AAC&U Intercultural Knowledge and Competence VALUE Rubric, I argue heavy metal music can serve as a model for using music to increase students’

A longstanding assumption within higher education is that there is a clear link between argumentative writing and critical thinking. In this paper, I challenge this assumption. I argue that argumentative writing genres of persuasion, inquiry, and consensus fail to target students’ open-mindedness, which is an important aspect of critical thinking. In particular, argumentative writing genres do not

Engagement with primary sources is a key feature of arts and humanities subjects, particularly classics and ancient history. Recent instructional trends emphasise integrating skills with content, particularly in the first year of higher education. We investigate how successfully first-year university students used a variety of sources in an integrated skills and content course, through analysis of

This essay offers a broad look at the way critique as a mode, method, and attitude in post-war art history research and teaching intersects with occurrences of critique in humanities scholarship and teaching generally, but also how distorted forms of critique occur in contexts outside the academic field. The essay outlines concerns raised by humanities scholars with what they consider to be an over-reliance

Ensemble practices have been essential to the performing and visual fine arts over centuries. The skills of working in ensembles, including team work and collaborative learning, are increasingly understood to be critical and transferable professional attributes. However, much teaching of ensembles is practical and embodied, relying on tacit knowledge within a focused specialism. This kind of approach

This article shows the educational strategies developed by faculty members that their students with disabilities considered as excellent for carrying out an inclusive pedagogy in Higher Education. ...

Rising worldwide scrutiny of the PhD has focused on issues such as return on investment and career outcomes. This article investigates PhD graduate careers and knowledge transfer looking at the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS). Firstly, our extensive literature review of PhD graduate outcomes reveals limited knowledge of HASS careers and a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

Architecture students have been reported to experience significant stress, yet little has been researched. This study aims to examine how architecture students experience and cope with stress. Twel...

Institutional schemes that offer financial and other support to carry out Scholarship of Teaching and Learning projects have a valuable part to play in the personal and professional development of academic staff. We investigated the experiences of 12 recipients of the University of Edinburgh Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Scheme awards, drawing on a poetic inquiry approach in order to

This article discusses how doctoral candidates identify and navigate personal learning challenges on their journey to becoming researchers. Our study asked creative arts and humanities candidates to think beyond the research project itself and reflect on emotional hurdles they were facing or had overcome. The findings point to a great deal of ‘invisible’ work that underpins doctoral study, and show

This article is a critical reflection on a creative practice course module that runs each year in the city of Coventry. The module aims to develop student skills appropriate to the creative and cultural industries, while maintaining an emphatic radical dimension in raising the students’ social consciousness on the urban context of their skills development. Between 2016 and 2018 the module attracted

This article examines the nature and role of courses designed to train creative workers, policy-makers and related actors, in the skills necessary for cultural management, enterprise or intermediation and their relationship in apprehending the sector. The article takes a case study approach, engaging with university policy, student research, reflections from graduates and staff who have participated

The purpose of this interview is to discuss the aims, objectives and achievements of a pioneering European masters degree – in the context of the politics of higher education and the economics of the creative industries.

This paper explains the emergence of an MA in Culture and Creative Enterprise at a Scottish University by locating it within a policy context characterised by the attempt of the Scottish Government to establish ‘temporal sovereignty’ through ‘fast policy’. The argument of the paper is that the MA is an outcome of the Scottish Government’s attempt to establish the sovereignty of a ‘future present’ over

Universities in Australia – as in many other Anglophone countries – have benefited from an influx of full fee paying international students. Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) as an increasingly desirable career for these students and associated with rising state investment has given Anglophone universities the privilege in this international educational market. The disembeddedness of these students

This paper discusses the pedagogical responses of the Wits University Cultural Policy and Management Department to the needs of our students in the postcolonial context of South Africa. It reviews the challenges experienced by our postgraduate students and the resultant innovations in both curriculum design and learning and teaching practice. While in many respects the drivers for this programme are

The first objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the curricula offered by Polish higher education institutions aimed at future workers in the culture and creative sectors. Desk research is supplemented by a qualitative analysis of students’ needs on professional education and the perception of cultural labour in Poland, and concluding remarks attempt to provide a preliminary response

If today the departments of “cultural management” (in its broadest term) have been in existence for almost four decades, it is in part because of the existence of the “cultural industries”. If this concept’s founder and critical theorist, Theodore Adorno, indeed stigmatised cultural industries as “predominance of profit … over culture”, how can the rise and importance of this academic field be accounted

Dedicated to the memory our late colleagues, Dr Anna Upchurch (1957–2016) and Dr Lorraine Lim (1980–2017), both of whom attended the symposium from which this Special Issue emerged (Prato, September 2016), and both of whom were to make valuable contributions.

In Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz describes ‘elite’ higher education as one in which students perform excellently, but only in a spirit of compliance with assigned tasks. The depth of this problem – which has a long pedigree in philosophy – is such that an advantage might be found in non-‘elite’ and even manifestly lame education. This advantage is illustrated through the story of a low point

Fashion has a varied and explosive history. Our responsibility as educators preparing students and therefore careers for this context places us in a very difficult and complex position. Do we prepare students to be successful or do we prepare them to ‘invest’ in their industry? In this paper, we construct our story of developing an ethical, sustainable international master’s degree in Fashion Management

The design studio and the associated design review can be regarded as the signature pedagogy of architectural education, where students garner the essence of what it means to be an architect. Here, novices are transformed into architects through the acquisition of architectural cultural capital. This paper investigates the design review in East African schools of architecture from a student’s perspective

It is widely accepted that the academic job market is very limited and unlikely to expand any time soon, yet enrolments in PhDs continue to rise. If the PhD is no longer preparation for academia, where do these graduates go on completing their degrees? This study of Australian PhD graduates in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) explores motivations to undertake a research degree, their experiences

Abstract This article discusses authentic inquiry-based learning in a hybrid graduate course, Teaching Hidden History, taught in 2015 and 2016. Students in this course created online history learning modules based on their own scholarly research. They defined their intended audience and crafted modules tailored specifically for those learners. The authors draw on course assignments, student modules

This study identified a range of pedagogies developed to promote global citizenship within a university Latin American dance unit. It implemented changes to teaching and learning approaches in the unit using the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) 5E Instructional Model, supporting learning that privileges transcultural connections to Latin America. The action research used a range of dance

First-year students’ literacy deficits are not the problem. They are emblematic of an overall skill set which can be scaffolded from the first year of university study. If we treat literacy deficits as contingent upon other items of motivation, and as an element of Academic Motivational Literacy, we can usually also see these deficits as ‘rich points’ (Agar (2000) Border lessons: linguistic “rich points”

Postcolonial pedagogy invites academic teaching staff to create situations, in which hegemonic modes of knowledge production can be critically reflected and one’s own entanglement as disciplinary socialised member of (western) academia experienced. Such a postcolonial approach has been applied to a seminar in the context of cultural musicology and its impact on teaching and learning analysed. In this

This article notes that while there is a large literature lamenting increasing assaults on academic freedom, there is little literature to address ways in which it might be preserved. Sampling that writing, it finds some concern with protecting academic freedom in extreme scenarios, via discrete programmes, and generalised dissidence, but no discussion of determinate action applicable to all Arts and

With STEM education garnering an increasing share of educational budgets and press, humanities teachers should consider how to respond to the growing power of math and science. Should humanists read the writing on the wall and tether themselves to the economic engine of STEM? Or should humanists separate themselves, retreating securely into their own disciplinary homes? Middle ground options, including

Studio teaching is a long standing tradition and a signature pedagogy across a broad range of art and creative disciplines, from arts to architecture and design. However, the practice of studio teaching varies across disciplines and practitioners. Do these variances indicate different signature pedagogies in the creative disciplines? An exploratory study was conducted to examine how studio teaching

Changing environment requires not just creativity, but disruptive creativity. The traditional planning paradigm within business organizations heavily relies on long- and short-term forecasting in order to predict the future and plan accordingly. However, a large share of business development is now characterized by rapid changes, inconsistency and unpredictability. Taking that into account a key task

Pedagogic criticism, Ben Knights argues in this wide-ranging and thoughtful book, is an attempt to “bring into focus the transactions between the study and interpretation of texts and the social forms and rituals of pedagogy” (1). Knights draws together a historiography of the rise of English Studies in the UK, literary criticism, close readings of writers from Henry James to Annie Proulx, as well

Arts-based research offers a potentially valuable approach for students trained in the positivist tradition of environmental issues to expand their repertoire. This article traces the experience of students in an undergraduate course that examines the US food system through immersive photography, using arts-based research as the core methodological theme of exploration and inquiry. The research approach

With an emphasis on self-study and the connections between the personal and the professional domain, the authors reflect upon their teaching practice on a postgraduate theatre-based course using the research methodology of a/r/tography. The aim was to develop understanding of teacher/student roles and how these can affect learning. Through researcher reflexivity, focus groups and questionnaires, data

In this interview Craig Calhoun talks about universities, the Humanities and his own research. Universities reinvent themselves in the face of societal and technological change. In the midst of this change, however, universities are charged with maintaining old ideals, with informing the public and creating opportunities for human development. The Humanities often bemoan these changes but they are

Wiljan van den Akker is a university professor, a respected academic administrator, and a published poet and writer. From a base at the Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, his three-decade long career spans three continents and includes one-on-one associations with Berkeley, UCLA and Oxford. Currently, he is the Vice-Rector for Research at Utrecht but retains the title he was awarded in 2003, Distinguished

At its heart, design is a studio-based discipline, which makes it difficult for design educators to adopt technology-driven changes into an online teaching and learning environment. Globally, few universities offer online undergraduate degree design courses, despite an overall growth in online higher degree curricula. Anecdotal evidence and limited research studies exploring the design educators’ view

Reading is an activity in which both researchers and students invest immense time and energy. However, reading is disregarded as a research method and generally assigned a marginal position as a mere supplement to empirical hands-on methods. In this article we argue that reading should be recognized as a method of inquiry. Based on qualitative interviews with 20 researchers from a humanities department