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Belonging & Learning: How important is belonging to our students?
The Work, Live, Play, Learn (WLPL) project uses academic literature and qualitative research with university students to analyse student belonging on a theoretical and applied level. Using data from the University of Sydney Business School the blog explores two learning modes and discusses them in relation to belonging.
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Developing Online Teaching in Higher Education – Book Review
Supporting educators to develop skills in online teaching, to use a planning term, is a wicked problem. Academics and educational developers alike know that the solution is not to put on a generic workshop and hope for the best. Newly released Developing Online Teaching in Higher Education (Forbes & Walker, 2022) gathers together tested ideas…
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Cultivating entrepreneurs and innovators through connected learning
Connected learning is an approach that seeks to combine personal interests, supportive relationships, and opportunities (Ito et al., 2013). It emphasizes that learning should be an integrated experience situated within a matrix of contexts including formal and informal, local and global, embodied and virtual, as well as distributed and integrated (Brown & Renshaw, 2006). Prior…
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Making space for connected learning: an ecosystem approach to designing teaching spaces in higher education part 2
The first part of this blog post interrogated the structural rigidity that emerges from physical classroom design and made the case that connected learning requires a different design and emotional response from teaching spaces to be successful. This final part looks at how teaching space needs to shift the dynamics, functions, and relationships within the…
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Making education better is not a nice to have: Why Business Schools need to engage in and value pedagogical research part 2
In part 1 of this blog, I made the case that pedagogical research is a third space for academic activity, one that enhances the quality of education and generates rhizomatic connections between faculty, institutions, and critical forms of scholarship in Business Schools. In this second and final part, I will explore the benefits that Business…
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Making education better is not a nice to have: Why Business Schools need to engage in and value pedagogical research part 1
Pedagogical research has a challenged and often undervalued place in Business Schools, with its worth to the mission of the School and the individual academic diminished by perceptions that it lacks academic rigour (Norton, 2021), focuses on arcane or abstract theorisation of practical actions (McDonald et al., 2012) or is a form of scholarship for…
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Entangled pedagogy, design and the messiness of education
In a recently published open access paper on “entangled pedagogy” (Fawns, 2022), I presented a diagram of a few views of the relationship between technology and pedagogy. This was an attempt to show some problems with emphasising one over the other (e.g. putting technology or pedagogy first or last). I sympathise with the desire of…
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Can poster assignments improve the student learning experience? Benefits for students and educators
Recent years have seen increased emphasis on developing the student learning experience in business school education. In addition to understanding how students engage with learning materials in their respective units of study, attention has turned to how students develop insights about themselves and their own personal development in the learning process (Dixon, 2022; Bovil, 2020).…
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Making space for connected learning: an ecosystem approach to designing teaching spaces in higher education part 1
This two-part blog post explores the complexities and affordances of using space to make connections. The first part interrogates the structural rigidity that emerges from physical classroom design and argues that connected learning requires a different design and emotional response from teaching spaces to be successful. Studies of teaching and learning spaces and their relationship…
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Promoting Connectedness through Peer Mentor Support
During the lockdown of 2020, promoting connections and a sense of belonging became challenging. Leading in a Post-Covid World (LPC) was an intracurricular initiative run fully online in Semester 2, 2020, at the University of Sydney Business School. The program provided opportunities for students to develop their leadership and team skills during the COVID-19 lockdown…
