Universities have increasingly adopted "first-generation status" as a new category for addressing equity in higher education, especially in the UK and Australia. This category targets students whose parents do not have a university degree and therefore are "newcomers" to higher education. While the category is well-intentioned,…

Research into how to support student teachers to work with diverse school students frequently uses a narrow, Anglocentric lens based on binary language speaker labels. This lens limits understandings of the complex factors impacting any individual's ability to teach inclusively. Given the increases in diversity in the tertiary sector, we therefore…

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…

A research project at an Australian regional university reframed "disability" by defining the diagnosis of a disability with an impact on learning as a "learning challenge." Using the terminology of "learning challenge," an anonymous, online survey found there was a significant number of students who chose…

Organisational change literature is littered with labels for those who instigate, support, resist, or implement change. Absent is research into the perspectives of those who are given these labels. This paper reports findings from a literature search, journal scan and a case study of an Australian university where change agents were labelled…

Students with disabilities (SWD) in Australian higher education need to disclose to their institution to access a range of 'reasonable adjustments' to support their learning. Nationally, 5.8% of the university population disclose their disability to their institution. It is suspected that there is a much larger population of students who choose…