Learning and Teaching (LATISS)

This issue of Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences includes work by authors from Austria, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Brazil and Sweden. The five articles cover a diverse range of topics: the third mission of universities, doctoral supervision, internationalisation of higher education, neoliberal think tanks in higher education, and an innovation in the teaching of political thought.

Policy discourses about the third mission of universities in the knowledge economy have placed the question regarding the relation between university and society again high on the agenda. The aim of this article is to reconsider the university's third mission, in the widest sense of its relations with society, and to do so through the lens of the common. The starting point of this reconsideration is the story of the Palestinian experimental university Campus in Camps and their practices of studying the camp, giving way to a series of social and spatial transformations within the camp and its neighbouring area. The relation between university and society comes forward not as given or institutionally settled but as enacted within practices, more particularly within practices of study.

While supervision is often characterised as a relatively private relationship, we would argue it is strongly influenced by departmental, institutional, national and global factors. It is also intertwined with other academic work and life experiences – with time playing an important role, not just as regards lifecourse but also changing institutional policies and practices. Using this embedded dynamic perspective in a longitudinal institutional case study, we examined how individual supervisory practices, embedded within life experiences and the evolving policy contexts of supervision and other academic activities, changed over time. We found that changed institutional supervision expectations and related structures influenced supervisory thinking and actions. Future research could further examine how this dynamic perspective opens horizons for understanding individual supervisor change in light of new institutional expectations.

Taiwan higher education institutions are employing two strategies: Internationalisation at Home (IaH) to promote domestic students’ international exposure and awareness, and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) to promote language skills and professional knowledge. Higher education institutions recognise the synergy of these two strategies and the opportunity through them to attract international students to study in an English-speaking classroom. What is not known is the reaction of the domestic CLIL students in English as a Foreign Language settings to the introduction of native English speakers into their classroom, and this is the focus of this exploratory study. Results suggest that the domestic students are largely positive about the engagement of the exchange students but also raise the issues of internationalised curriculum and intercultural mixing in the monolingual context.

This article discusses the growth of neoliberal student activism in Brazilian higher education, considering the role of organisations called neoliberal think tanks. The following questions are addressed: why and how do these think tanks operate in the field of higher education? How do they articulate and promote student activism? The study provides a historical and contextual review of the origin and performance of the neoliberal think tanks in Brazil, identifying organisations that significantly operate in the higher education field. The case of Students For Liberty Brasil is examined in detail. The results of our study indicate that these think tanks seek to challenge hegemony in the teaching, research and higher education policy agendas and consider students as an important source of neoliberal political leaders.

A perennial problem for teachers of political thought is to decide what thinkers to include in the required course readings. In many cases, teachers have come to rely on an established Western canon as they seek to build a shared disciplinary identity, impart key theoretical insights and provide common points of reference. Increasingly, however, calls have been made to include more non-Western, female and otherwise marginalised voices. In response, this article presents and evaluates an interactive group video assignment by which the students are asked to identify one, hitherto excluded, political thinker and formulate arguments for his or her inclusion in the course readings. As a collaborative exercise, higher-level comprehension, analysis and synthesis are encouraged while the shared ‘canon’ of political thought is widened.

Nicole Brown (2021) Lived Experiences of Ableism in Academia: Strategies for Inclusion in Higher Education Bristol: Policy Press, 352 pp., ISBN: 978-1447354116