This practice report provides an overview of a podcast series designed to support first-year student transition to university and promote wellbeing and belonging. The podcast was established in 2017 in a compulsory first year law subject (Legal Institutions and Methods) at La Trobe University, Australia. The podcasts record interviews with…

Benefits of the study-abroad (SA) experience have been reported in many studies. However, most prior studies on EFL students' SA experiences track students in relatively short ESL programs during school vacation months. In addition, EFL learners' SA experiences in non-English-speaking countries, where English is not the L1, remain underexplored.…

Student volunteer experiences are ubiquitous within higher education contexts. Despite this, there is further scope for understanding the qualitatively different ways students experience volunteering. To achieve this an explicit focus on understanding volunteer experiences from the students' perspective and the relationship these experiences have…

Drawing from a study that explored how international students experience cross-cultural transitions after living and studying in Melbourne for a few years, this paper, in particular, examines the participants' experiences with culture shock, social interaction, and friendship development. The findings include narratives of their personal stories…

Twenty-seven first-year nursing students, divided across six focus groups formed on the basis of their past chemistry experience, were interviewed about their chemistry experience as a component of a Health Science unit. Information related to learning and academic performance was able to be established from student conversations resulting in…

This study contributes to child voice research that seeks to understand the early childhood education and care (ECEC) experiences of young children. Forty-seven children from seven disadvantaged communities in NSW Australia, including urban, rural and remote areas, participated in a face-to-face interview guided by Ecocultural theory. The children…

This paper invokes the voices of young people who had been separated from mainstream schooling because they were positioned as "disengaged" and "at risk of failing". The authors argue that streaming students out of schooling needs serious questioning as an escalating number of young people are framed as non-performers within a…

Women remain severely under-represented in engineering in Australia as in all Western countries. This limits the pool of talent, standpoints and approaches within the profession. Furthermore, this under-representation equates to restriction of the benefits of being an engineer mainly to men. Gendered workplace experiences have been found to…

This study explored the experiences of 32 male Aboriginal students from regional and remote towns and communities while they attended a metropolitan boarding school away from home and family in Perth, Western Australia. Using narrative interviews it specifically investigated how these Aboriginal students construct meaning around the transition…

Academic culture is a distinct and unique field, and perhaps may best be conceptualised as a space. Although access to university has traditionally been restricted, recent efforts on a number of fronts have attempted to "open" the space of the academy. In particular, enabling programmes such as Preparatory Programs and Foundation Courses…

This study considers the conceptual space, or extent of autonomy, given to coursework Masters students before, during and after a Business Ethics course that explicitly developed and assessed their research skills. This vocationally oriented and academically challenging course used the "Research Skill Development framework" as its…

Background: School Health and Physical Education (HPE) and sport has increasingly become a complex cultural contact zone. With global population shifts, schools need policies and strategies to attend to the interests and needs of diverse student populations. School HPE and sport is a particularly significant site as it is a touchpoint for a range…

Intellectual risk is valued among 21st century skills. Three primary teachers who promoted positive learning within mathematical inquiry collaborated with researchers to design and apply a rubric to assess children's progress in taking intellectual risks twice during the year. Results suggest that handling setbacks and giving feedback to peers…

This paper tackles what is arguably one of the most pressing and intractable educational issues confronting western democracies--the disengagement and disconnection from schooling of alarming numbers of young people. The paper looks at the policy response in Victoria, Australia, and through ethnographic interviews with a small number of young…

Pathway programs exist to prepare students for progression into university degrees but the transition experience for many students may not be as smooth as is suggested by the notion of the pathway. While attending a pathway program and at the beginning of their university degree, students may be in a third space, a liminal space where they engage…