Changes in pedagogy to emphasise independent study and group work have increased the need for informal learning spaces on campuses. University libraries have been quick to respond to this need, partly because of the decline in book lending and partly because of technology enablers. Furthermore, new types of buildings that combine many types of…

Facebook studio groups/pages are commonly used by applied music faculty to communicate with current students, recruit new students, share students' activities, and promote faculty members' professional performances and academic endeavors. However, the blurred lines between academic, professional performance, and social activities in the field have…

Journal clubs are meetings where participants engage in discussion or appraisal of professional literature and research. This study investigates the perceived value of librarians' participation in journal clubs. Using a hermeneutic dialectic process, we built a construction of the value of journal club participation based on interviews with…

The nature and significance of students' informal peer feedback networks is an under-explored area. This paper offers the findings of a longitudinal investigation of the informal peer feedback networks of a cohort of student teachers [n = 105] across the three years of a UK primary education degree programme. It tracked the dynamic nature of these…

Out-of-class learning with technology comprises an essential context of second language development. Understanding the nature of out-of-class language learning with technology is the initial step towards safeguarding its quality. This study examined the types of learning experiences that language learners engaged in outside the classroom and the…

Informal science learning has drawn the attention of researchers, educators and museum administrators for a long time. However, the problem of how to better support visitors to be more engaged while visiting exhibits and improve informal science learning performance is still missing. Context-aware technologies have the advantages of fostering…

In a university environment dominated by a traditional way of understanding knowledge, we argue that it is possible and necessary to foster capabilities among engineering students. Capabilities are understood as reasoned and substantive freedoms to lead the kind of life that people value, within a framework of respect for the core values of human…

Becoming a researcher is one of the roads travelled in the emotional, social, and intellectual process of PhD journeys. As such, developing a researcher identity during doctoral study is a social undertaking. This paper explores instances and practices where doctoral students identify as becoming researchers. Based on interviews with 30 PhD…

A body of research suggests that learning communities provide a range of academic benefits by increasing social connectedness. Researchers have also hypothesized that informal learning spaces--nonclassroom spaces (NCSs)--can facilitate learning by supporting social connectedness. This study uses qualitative methods to explore the way nonclassroom…

Located between senior management and academic staff, the role of the Associate Dean in universities appears to be growing in number, complexity and importance in recent years. A role arguably fraught with complexity, it remains largely undefined and under-researched. While little is known about the role in general, less still is known about their…

Despite the ubiquity of staff soft skills programmes, few studies have examined why and how academic and corporate services staff utilise these programmes for self-care/governance. This study reports on findings from an ethnography of soft skills learning and development programmes (LDPs) in a UK university, focusing on interviews with programme…

Conducting qualitative research in any discipline warrants two actions: accessing participants and eliciting their ideas. In chemistry education research (CER), survey techniques have been used to increase access to participants and diversify samples. Interview tasks (such as card sorting, using demonstrations, and using simulations) have been…

Active citizenship is increasingly being framed in the context of lifelong and life-wide learning. However, research on young people's participation in and experience of different forms of civic practice, particularly in informal settings in different sociocultural contexts, is scarce. Consequently, little is known about how these experiences…

The proposed benefits of participatory arts for older adults continue to attract empirical attention, but how informal group participation aids personal enrichment is not yet fully understood. This qualitative case study of a University of the Third Age 'outdoor sketching group' explores the meanings its members attach to art-making in retirement…

Language plays a key role in statistics and, by extension, in statistics education. Enculturating students into the practice of statistics requires preparing them to communicate results of data analysis. Statistical argumentation is one way of providing structure to facilitate discourse in the statistics classroom. In this study, a teaching…