Purpose: This paper aims to explore doctoral candidates' ethical work in writing the acknowledgements section of their theses. With interest in the formation of academic identities/subjectivities, the authors explore acknowledgements writing as always potentially a form of parrhesia or risky truth-telling, through which the candidate places…

Indigenous academics are often faced with a balancing act between the danger and risk of critiquing the institutions within which they reside, and the duty or obligation they feel to do so. As Indigenous Maori academics located within three different business schools across Aotearoa New Zealand, our work in both research and teaching is often…

This article reports on the professional benefits of using Critical Friends Group discussion protocols within a Collaborative Action Research project facilitated by two teacher-educators with four junior secondary school teachers in New Zealand. The teachers were encouraged to conduct Action Research projects on topics of their own choice.…

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in…

This paper looks at ways in which methods used in literary analysis can contribute to higher education research. I start by describing a methodology commonly used in the analysis of literary texts, close reading or textual analysis, and outline how it can be utilised in conjunction with several theoretical approaches in the literary studies…

E-learning entails a different cognitive performativity from class or textual teaching and learning. It is critiqued through three case studies from lecturers working digitally in different ways. The authors' various challenges in shifting from the classroom to the "digitas" illuminate the risk of interpassivity into which…

Within the background where education is increasingly driven by the economies of scale and research funding, we propose an alternative online open and connected framework (OOC) for building global learning communities using mobile social media. We critique a three year action research case study involving building collaborative global learning…

This article reports research that critically examined our teacher education outdoor education pedagogy. The purpose was to use visual ethnography to critique our teaching over twenty years of annual five-day bush-based residential camps. The bush camps were situated in an outdoor education programme contributing to a four-year undergraduate…

Is the doctoral "viva voce" a reasonable method of examination? This exploratory paper proposes that the doctoral "viva voce" (oral examination) is a slightly different hurdle for doctoral candidates for whom English is an additional language (EAL, also termed ESL) than for those whose first language is English. It investigates…

This study explores how a group of learners of English as a second language (ESL) criticize in everyday situations compared to the native speaker (NS) with a view to expanding the range of speech acts under inquiry in the interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) literature. Data were collected from five NSs of New Zealand English and five intermediate…

This multidisciplinary collection examines the connections between education, migration and translation across school and higher education sectors, and a broad range of socio-geographical contexts. Organised around the themes of knowledge, language, mobility, and practice, it brings together studies from around the world to offer a timely critique…

Institutional mergers are among the range of government-driven reforms of teacher education and, by extension, the teaching force. Such reforms inevitably provide positive outcomes for some and challenges for others. In this paper the authors focus on the anticipations, experiences and reflections of a group of teacher educators during a period…

The course for the final year project for engineering students, because of its strongly research-based, open-ended format, tends to not have well defined learning outcomes, which are also not aligned with any accepted pedagogical philosophy or learning technology. To address this problem, the revised Bloom's taxonomy table of Anderson and…

The author's experience of ethical review over six years as an academic member and chairperson of a university human ethics committee has been largely positive and educative. The account brings together archival records and personal experience to create a "transactive" account of the practical experience of doing ethical review in one…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to critically review dominant conceptions of and approaches to quality in higher education. It suggests an alternative approach with potential to shift the focus of quality activities from accountability and control to improvement. Design/methodology/approach: The applicability and limits of quality concepts…