There is a dissonance between the formal role of head of academic department represented in institutional discourses and the reality of heads' working practices. This paper provides insight, from the perspective of heads, about how the role is experienced and enacted in one institution. Data are derived from 20 semi-structured interviews with…

Leadership plays an important role in an educational establishment as they help to manage the day-to-day activities. Instructional leadership has always played a distinct role in higher education as the role of instructional leadership was always to influence on effective teaching and learning processes. The purpose of this research is intended to…

This paper provides a small-scale exploration of the evolvement of leadership roles in higher education academic units (AUs), namely Departments, Schools & Faculties. A literature review provides theoretical examples of the evolution of professional services (PS) staff. Changes in PS leadership roles are also explored alongside the emergence…

Through an evaluation of an institution-wide curriculum change process, this paper analyses how strategic policy is variously enacted in departmental communities. Linguistic ethnography of public, institutional and internal policy documents illuminates departments' engagement with the change process. With curriculum change positioned as a…

In the study being reported here, heads of composition at a selection of music conservatoires (n = 6) in the UK were invited to share their experiences of teaching composition. Arising from the analysis of interview data, three main themes, termed 'pedagogical goals', emerged as important for undergraduate and postgraduate students to progress as…

In this article, Theo Woods shares the experience of one history department as they embarked on a substantial process of curriculum review and development. The department sought to address concerns that the range of history taught in their school, across the full seven years of students' secondary experience, was too 'traditional, White and…

In this paper we move from considering the chair as an (inanimate) object, to exploring its vitality through a more vibrant and active reading of this inescapable everyday item. We are inspired by feminist new materialism and how affect shapes our understanding of matter. Reading matter in this way surfaces our orientations toward everyday items…

Foundation Years (FY) have proliferated within UK Higher Education in recent years, and their benefits and successes have been well documented (e.g. the enhancement of opportunities for underrepresented students, second-chance education, skills and confidence enhancement, and a pipeline into STEM. However, when managed centrally, their…

This paper posits that the foundations of the teaching of political theory at Makerere University College obtain from British and American hegemony. The hegemonic tendencies are exemplified by the content of what was taught as political theory, the nature of the teaching staff in the Department of Political Science -- the country of origin, the…

Little is known about how researchers in higher education institutions (HEIs) experience and respond to support received from their departments. The present study investigated how support for researchers' autonomy (choice and self-expression), relatedness (through connections with colleagues) and competence (feeling effective in one's work)…

Both of us were drawn into the writing assessment field initially through our lived experiences as schoolteachers. We worked in radically different contexts -- Martin was head of a languages department and teacher of French and German in the late 1990s in the UK, and David was a Grade 12 teacher of Academic English in Alberta, Canada, at the turn…

Academic culture now places high expectations on researchers to demonstrate research productivity alongside teaching, leadership and knowledge exchange. In two studies of researchers across career stages in UK higher education institutions (HEIs), we examined workplace climate within academic departments as (1) supportive of researchers' needs for…

This study investigates the perceived benefits to academics who assess HEA Fellowship applications in one institution. Results show that the assessors experience similar benefits from engaging with the continuing professional development (CPD) scheme as those reported by applicants. The data also indicate that the scheme nurtures a…

Being lectured by a woman physicist can benefit students' performance, motivation, and engagement with physics. However, due to the severe underrepresentation of women physics faculty, these instances may be scarce. Through semistructured interviews with seven women physics lecturers, we used expectancy-value theory to understand the situative…

This paper seeks to analyse lecturers' views on how they understand academic development in order to elucidate current arguments around how knowledge is codified in higher education, and to what end. Whilst work of this nature has been carried out in a number of national and institutional contexts, much attention has been given to research…