Bonnie Amelia Dean

Building an Online Community to Support the Professional Development of Casual Teachers.

Abstract With the burgeoning casualisation of the higher education workforce, the precarious nature of casual teaching has become increasingly well documented. Universities are recognising that enhancing quality learning and teaching must include attention to the provision of services, support, and professional development for teachers employed on a sessional or casual basis. This paper presents a study investigating an online course for supporting and connecting dispersed and diverse casual teachers at an Australian university. The study explores the role of community and the impact of professional development for casual teachers across discipline boundaries in an institution-wide online course.

Mobilizing PD: Professional development for sessional teachers through mobile technologies

The emergence of mobile technologies has changed the higher education landscape. The expansion of mobile technologies in our classrooms presents new learning opportunities not just for students but also for teachers. While professional development is core business for higher education providers, over the years, increasing attention has been afforded to the growing cohort of casual teachers typically overlooked. Sessional teachers are at the interface of learning, yet have historically experienced limited professional development. A unique opportunity is presented to utilize the flexibly of mobile technologies with the needs of time-poor, provisional sessional teachers. This chapter explores this notion and what this might look like by offering two exemplary cases. B. Dean (*) • M. Zanko • J. Turbill University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia e-mail: bonnie_dean@uow.edu.au; mzanko@uow.edu.au; jturbill@uow.edu.au # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 Y.A. Zhang (ed.), Handbook of Mobile Teaching and Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-54146-9_55 165 These cases demonstrate ways in which to use the affordances of mobile technologies to deliver and customize professional development, thereby embedding professional learning in practice. This is an important strategic, pedagogical, and capacity building movement that currently seems to be lacking in uptake and explication of best practice.

First-in-family students, university experience & family life

In a time when universities are widening participation and simultaneously looking closely at attrition rates, the research in this book advances our understanding of students first in their family to participate in higher education. First-in-family students, university experience & family life is written by academics at two Australian universities. The book is based on a three-year Australian-based qualitative research project supported by funding from the Office for Teaching and Learning and other smaller grants. During this time, 124 interviews and 213 surveys elicited insights into the perspectives of first-in-family (FiF) students, their family members and significant others. While the target readership for the book could include students and families in the topic of interest, the writing conventions and extensive referencing suggest it has been written for an academic audience. The significant theoretical contribution of this work is therefore appropriately suited to potential readers. One of the first and immediate contributions of the book is a concise definition of ‘First in Family’ (FiF) students. According to O’Shea, May, Stone and Delahunty (2017, p. vii),

Re-viewing student teamwork: preparation for the ‘real world’ or bundles of situated social practices?

Research in Australian business education continues to emphasise the importance of students learning teamwork as an integral part of the undergraduate curriculum. However, entrenched conceptual and practical confusion as to what the term ‘teamwork’ means and how it ought to be enacted remains a vexed issue capable of distorting and diminishing teamwork, learning and related pedagogy. In this paper, we critically re-examine the view that developing teamwork in an undergraduate business degree equips students for work in the real world. By focusing on the ‘real world’ metaphor-in-use in a cross-disciplinary business capstone subject, we interrogate the spatio-temporal dimensions of teamwork and its realist conceptions and performance. The research draws upon the perceptions of interviewed academics conducting teamwork activities in undergraduate business courses and the lived experiences of the authors. The findings highlight how the use of multiple models of teamwork, constructed by competing discourses and linked to the dualities and invocations constructed by ‘the real world’ metaphor, further exacerbate confusion. We suggest re-viewing and re-valuing student teamwork as the performance of situated, social practices opening new spaces for student teamwork, learning and pedagogical practice.