We interviewed 13 university teachers who research their teaching practices or their students' learning to identify how they understood their development as teachers. We interpreted recurring themes within the data as three ways of conceptualising university teachers' development as teachers. We use a theoretical model to arrange these…

Purpose: Higher education is uncertain which sustainability-related education targets should be sought and monitored. Accepting that something needs to be measurable to be systematically improved, the authors explored how measures relate to potential targets. This paper aims to focus on dispositions to think critically (active open-minded thinking…

This article describes one aspect of a research project that sought to describe and interpret the perspectives of university colleagues who are community-engaged, about their community-engagement, within one research-intensive university in New Zealand. We explored the communication devices and processes used during community engagement, with a…

We explored how academic departments, university teachers and students in one research-led university in New Zealand identified and addressed challenges in achieving three particular graduate attributes. These attributes (global perspective, environmental literacy and those aspect of ethics that involve personal social responsibility) are…

We used a modified circuit of culture enquiry to explore processes of production, representation and consumption of global perspective at our university, in the context of fostering this perspective as a graduate attribute. We identified four frame packages by which this perspective is understood and communicated. Global perspective is framed…

This article addresses the important questions that higher education institutions ask concerning their impact on their students' sustainability-related attributes "How do our students" worldviews change as they experience higher education with us?" The process of monitoring such a dynamic entity is fraught with statistical…

The conceptions an individual holds about a phenomenon can influence and determine associated behaviours and perspectives. Consequently, they have a bearing upon how learning about a phenomenon is undertaken and how that phenomenon is experienced and applied in context. A phenomenographic research approach was used to gather the expressed…

This article shares and extends research-based developments at the University of Otago, New Zealand, that seek to explore how students' worldviews change as they experience higher education with us. We emphasise that sustainability attributes may be described in terms of knowledge, skills and competencies but that these are underpinned by…

We report the development and piloting of an evaluative instrument and process for monitoring the environmental literacy (EL) of undergraduate students in one large research-led university in New Zealand. The instrument addresses knowledge, affect and competencies in the general area of EL in line with this institution's adoption of EL as a…

This collaborative research project devised a framework to support professional development for e-learning within New Zealand's diverse and integrated tertiary education sector. The research was supported by New Zealand's Ministry of Education. The research included reviews of developments in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand and a…

The higher education literature reveals the highly subjective nature of thinking about the roles of higher education and its teachers with respect to "education for sustainability". We used Q methodology to help to clarify and categorise commonly held viewpoints about this complex issue held by teachers in one university in New Zealand.…

This article examines the experiences of final year undergraduate sociology students enrolled in an internship course where they researched a local community project, mostly in small groups, for a client. A sociology lecturer supervised their projects. Course-related outcomes were assessed using conventional university procedures but a research…

Higher education institutions are interested in the impact that they and concurrent life experiences may have on students' sustainability attitudes, but they lack formal processes to monitor changes. We used the NEP to monitor changes in students' ecological-worldviews. We were interested in what variation there would be in a multidisciplinary…

Universities are increasingly using advanced video-conferencing environments to interact for teaching and research purposes at a distance and in situations that combine distant participants with those face-to-face. Those who use these technologies expect professional development support to do so but we do not yet have a comprehensive research…

This paper describes some of the drivers for "education for sustainability" that exist in universities and also explores some of the rationales that underpin higher education's reluctance to engage more formally in education for sustainability. It attempts to provide a balanced commentary on the role and capability of higher education in…