* How can academics carve out new and effective ways of working with students against a background of constant change and policy pressure? * How can university teachers both enhance student learning and realize their own educational values? * What might be the shape of a new professionalism in university teaching? At the heart of this book is a small group of academics from very different disciplines making sense of their teaching situations. We witness each of their struggles and celebrations in designing a new course, engaging a large first year class, introducing a mentoring programme, nurturing independent learning through project work, using debates to develop students' critical thinking, and evaluating the success of their teaching. This book is the story of a higher education project, and central to the story are the attempts of university teachers to enact a critical professionalism in their everyday lives in teaching and learning; and also their development of a shared and collaborative dialogue. Each of the team seeks not only to improve their practice of teaching but also to explore amongst themselves what kind of professional they want to be and how to realize it in their work with students. Reconstructing Professionalism in University Teaching reveals how academics working together on researching their own teaching can both improve their students' learning and start to redefine their own professional roles.

"This is a book for everyone doing educational research. It is not simply a routineprovocation directed at positivists by a group of researchers advocating qualitativemethods. The book makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the ethicsof educational research by offering something more than opposition to the narrowutilitarian research agenda." British Journal of Educational Studies The Moral Foundations of Educational Research considers what is distinctive about educational research in comparison with other research in the social sciences. As the contributors all agree that education is always an essentially moral enterprise, discussion about methodology starts, not with the widely endorsed claim that educational research should be 'useful' and 'relevant', but with the attempt to justify and elaborate that claim with reference to its moral foundations. Determining the nature of 'usefulness' and 'relevance' is not simply a matter of focussing on impact and influence but involves a radical re-conceptualisation of the moral and educational significance of what is deemed to be 'useful' and 'relevant'. There is no argument with this emphasis on the generation of 'useful' and 'relevant' knowledge, but it is suggested that educational research requires a fuller and more rounded understanding that takes account of the moral values of those who conduct it. Educational research is grounded, epistemologically, in the moral foundations of educational practice. It is the epistemological and moral purposes underlying the 'usefulness' and 'relevance' of educational research that matter.

- What are professional doctorates? - How do they change professional knowledge and improve practice? - How can universities organise doctoral programmes to facilitate professional learning and development? - What is the most appropriate relationship between professional and academic knowledge? This book examines the relationship between advanced study on higher education courses and professional practice. It explores contributions made by research on practice to professional development. The editors document and explain strategies that universities use: - in recruitment - aims and purposes of the degree - selection of content and focus - assessment procedures - curricular structures - pedagogy - teaching strategies - conditions for learning - support for professionals - relations with interested bodies and stakeholders. The book uses in-depth case studies of three professional doctorates: the doctorate in business administration (DBA), the engineering doctorate (DEng) and the education doctorate (EdD). Examining Professional Doctorates makes an important contribution to this neglected area of research. Essential reading for policy makers in higher education and anyone interested in professional doctoral study.

"This book is an exceptional introduction to some difficult ideas. It is full of downright good advice for every academic who wants to do something practical to improve his or hers students’ learning." Paul Ramsden, Brisbane, Australia "Biggs and Tang present a unified view of university teaching that is both grounded in research and theory and replete with guidance for novice and expert instructors. The book will inspire, challenge, unsettle, and in places annoy and even infuriate its readers, but it will succeed in helping them think about how high quality teaching can contribute to high quality learning." John Kirby, Queens University, Ontario, Canada This best-selling book explains the concept of constructive alignment used in implementing outcomes-based education. Constructive alignment identifies the desired learning outcomes and helps teachers design the teaching and learning activities that will help students to achieve those outcomes, and to assess how well those outcomes have been achieved. Each chapter includes tasks that offer a 'how-to' manual to implement constructive alignment in your own teaching practices. This new edition draws on the authors' experience of consulting on the implementation of constructive alignment in Australia, Hong Kong, Ireland and Malaysia including a wider range of disciplines and teaching contexts. There is also a new section on the evaluation of constructive alignment, which is now used worldwide as a framework for good teaching and assessment, as it has been shown to: Assist university teachers who wish to improve the quality of their own teaching, their students' learning and their assessment of learning outcomes Aid staff developers in providing support for departments in line with institutional policies Provide a framework for administrators interested in quality assurance and enhancement of teaching across the whole university. The authors have also included useful web links to further material. Teaching for Quality Learning at University will be of particular interest to teachers, staff developers and administrators.

Higher education is a particularly complex site for enhancement initiatives. This book offers those involved in change a coherent conceptual overview of enhancement approaches, of the change context, and of the probable interactions between them. The book sets enhancement within a particular type of change dynamic which focuses on social practices. The aim is to base innovation and change on the probabilities of desired outcomes materializing, rather than on the romanticism of policies that underestimate the sheer difficulty of making a difference. Following a theoretical introduction to these ideas, there are case studies (from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Norway) at the national, institutional, departmental and individual levels, illustrating the argument that enhancement is best achieved when it works with social practices in real institutional and organizational settings. In a final section, the authors link the case examples and theoretical frameworks, inviting readers to consider their own enhancement situations and apply the 'frameworks for action' offered in earlier sections of the book. The book doesn’t offer quick-fix solutions but aims to support change with practical examples, conceptual tools and reflexive questions for those involved in change at all levels. It is key reading for higher education lecturers, managers, educational developers and policy makers.

What does higher education learning and teaching enable students to do and to become? Which human capabilities are valued in higher education, and how do we identify them? How might the human capability approach lead to improved student learning, as well as to accomplished and ethical university teaching? This book sets out to generate new ways of reflecting ethically about the purposes and values of contemporary higher education in relation to agency, learning, public values and democratic life, and the pedagogies which support these. It offers an alternative to human capital theory and emphasises the intrinsic as well as the economic value of higher learning. Based upon the human capability approach, developed by economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, the book shows the importance of justice as a value in higher education. It places freedom, human flourishing, and students’ educational development at its centre. Furthermore, it takes up the value Sen attributes to education in the capability approach, and demonstrates its relevance for higher education. Higher Education Pedagogies offers illustrative narratives of capability, learning and pedagogy, drawing on student and lecturer voices to demonstrate how this multi-dimensional approach can be developed and applied in higher education. It suggests an ethical approach to higher education practice, and to teaching and learning policy development and evaluation. As such, the book is essential reading for students and scholars of higher education, as well as university lecturers, managers and policy-makers concerned with teaching and learning.

Is access to higher education really open to all? How does the experience of higher education vary between social groups? Are graduate jobs harder to find for some than for others? The transformation of higher education from an elite experience to a mass system delivering advanced education to a socially mixed clientele has often been conflated with a process of equalization through wider access. But is this really the case? Andy Furlong and Fred Cartmel fear not, arguing that young people from social and economically disadvantaged families suffer from unfair access arrangements, have a poorer student experience and have limited contact with their middle class peers. Moreover, students from less advantaged families who successfully complete their courses tend to face greater difficulty securing graduate jobs and may be left with higher levels of debt. Taking a holistic approach that focuses on access to higher education, experiences in higher education and gains derived from participation, the book explores the barriers that impede the progress of young people from less advantaged families and outlines the various forms of stratification that help limit the possibilities for social mobility through education. Higher Education and Social Justice provides essential reading for anyone who has an interest in higher education or a concern for social justice, including lecturers, administrators and policy makers in higher education.