Enabling Pedagogies

This cutting-edge Research Handbook presents a comprehensive overview of key developments in the field of student engagement, with particular reference to equity and diversity issues. Promoting a more holistic and inclusive understanding of engagement, it highlights key empirical findings alongside practical case studies, presenting valuable recommendations for the field. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

An introduction to critical pedagogy for all those working within higher education. Critical Pedagogy is an approach that is fundamentally democratic, informal, non-hierarchical, determined by participants, privileges the oppressed and their perspectives and is committed to action. Higher education (HE), conversely, is often un-democratic, formal, hierarchical, determined by tutors and national bodies, re-inscribes existing privileges and is distant from lived experience. The book starts from the premise that critical pedagogies are possible in HE, while recognising the tensions to be ameliorated in trying to enact them. It re-examines the concept and explores its practical application at an institutional level, within the curriculum, within assessment, through learning and teaching and in the spaces in-between. The Critical Practice in Higher Education series provides a scholarly and practical entry point for academics into key areas of higher education practice. Each book in the series explores an individual topic in depth, providing an overview in relation to current thinking and practice, informed by recent research. The series will be of interest to those engaged in the study of higher education, those involved in leading learning and teaching or working in academic development, and individuals seeking to explore particular topics of professional interest. Through critical engagement, this series aims to promote an expanded notion of being an academic – connecting research, teaching, scholarship, community engagement and leadership – while developing confidence and authority.

Transitioning Students in Higher Education focuses on the relationship between philosophy, pedagogy and practice when designing programs, units or courses for transitioning students to new educational spaces in the university environment. The term ‘transition’ is used to describe the academic as well as social movement and acculturation of students into new higher educational spaces. This book offers both theoretical perspectives and real-world practical examples that reveal the successes and challenges of implementing philosophically driven pedagogies with diverse transitioning cohorts. Drawing on examples from Australia, New Zealand, US and Canada, it writes through the relationship between philosophy, pedagogy and how it can effectively shape the practice of transition and develop the flourishing student. This book is split into three main sub-themes: Flourishing in Transition, Engaging Diverse Cohorts and Challenges for Educators, and sits at the intersections between philosophy and pedagogy in the practice of effectively engaging and transitioning different enabling groups. This book will be of great interest to postgraduate students, researchers and educators working in the areas of enabling or bridging education, higher/tertiary education, distance learning, and indigenous as well as culturally diverse cohorts.

Affirming the professional knowledge, practice, and engagement of teachers in the face of recurring media attacks on their profession, this examination of the role of writing in various teaching and learning contexts by English teachers provides richly reflective perspectives on the relationship between the writing and learning of both students and professionals.

How can teachers ensure a pedagogy of possibility underpinned by social justice, and what has literacy got to do with this? This book explores the positive synergies between critical literacy and place-conscious pedagogy. Through rich classroom research it introduces and demonstrates how a synthesis of insights from theories of space and place and literacy studies can underpin the design and enactment of culturally inclusive curriculum for diverse student communities, and illustrates how making place and space the objects of study provide productive resources for teachers to design enabling pedagogical practices that extend students’ literate repertoires. The argument is that systematic study of and engagement with specific elements of place can enable students’ academic learning and literacy. Literacy, Place, and Pedagogies of Possibility is informed by critical literacy, place-conscious pedagogy and spatial theory is richly illustrated with examples from classroom research, including teacher and student artifacts provides new directions for classroom practice in critical literacy This novel combination of multidisciplinary theory and classroom research extends previous work in critical literacy pedagogy, drawing on two decades of ethnographic and collaborative inquiry in classrooms situated in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms.

In a range of professions, professional practice today is under threat. It is endangered, for example, by pressures of bureaucratic control, commodification, marketization, and the standardisation of practice in some professions. In these times, there is a need for deeper understandings of professional practice and how it develops through professional careers. Enabling Praxis: Challenges for education explores these questions in the context of initial and continuing professional education of teachers.

This book explores the idea that teaching and learning – pedagogy – at universities is a crucial space for students’ formation as ethical graduates, equipped with knowledge, skills and values to contribute to more equal societies. We know that universities across the globe do not stand apart from social and educational inequalities at multiple levels; they have the potential to reproduce or reduce social inequalities and therefore towards transformative ends. This book suggests how this could be achieved both via policy and practice around the globe

"Exploring the myriad issues regarding web accessibility, this book specifically focuses on the design and implementation of web-enabled teaching tools. Educators from across the United States and Canada present their ideas on such topics as legal implications, overcoming organizational barriers, and course designs for the electronic classroom. Also discussed are special opportunities provided by web accessibility in education, such as web-based distance learning and teaching technology for blind or visually impaired faculty."