Author Summaries

By Carolyn Cooke, Petra Vackova, Emily Dowdeswell, Lucy Caton and Donata Puntil The Special Issue on Liberating Learning in Higher Education was an opportunity for us to challenge the culture of undercare in marketized academia through an act of deliberate experimentation with collaborative writing. To counteract the neoliberal climate in which writing has become a source of burnout and anxiety, our biodigital writing experiments forefront ‘storying otherwise’ as an important act of care and of care-full writing in academia. Drawing on feminist and posthuman philosophies, we embrace the sensorial, affective and nomadic aspects of inquiring, questioning, sharing, and responding in […]

Frantzeska Kolyda provides an overview of her article published in issue 27 of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education which aims to encourage educators and universities to explore interventions and practices that cultivate a growth mindset to reduce inequality in the academic success of students and the central role that learning development plays in achieving this. ‘I am not good at maths’, ‘I am not good at this’, ‘my classmates are smarter than me and get things quicker’, ‘I feel like an imposter’; educators may hear students saying. Students’ beliefs about their competence, intelligence, and skills play an important role […]

Authors Professor Debbie Holley and Dr David Biggins provide an overview of their research published in issue 27 of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. Their paper is titled: Designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn. Our work started with students reporting ‘technostress’ during the pandemic (and yes staff experienced this as well) and reporting that they turned to family and friends to seek support, with only 18% turning to the excellent online materials and signposting Universities offered in lockdown. Digital equity remains an issue across the board, and intersectionality of class, race and […]