SRHE Blog

The Society for Research into Higher Education


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The missing middle ground between research-led and practice-led education

by Saeed Talebi and Nick Morton

A peer reviewer recently challenged our pedagogical approach. We had described embedding an industry-led research project on Digital Twin development into our built environment curriculum as ‘research-informed teaching’. The reviewer disagreed: this was ‘practice-led rather than research-informed,’ they argued, because students weren’t producing research outputs themselves.

The comment revealed a conceptual confusion we suspect is widespread in higher education. We often assume that if students aren’t producing original research, then any industry-focused teaching must simply be vocational training with academic window-dressing. This leaves practice-facing disciplines in an awkward position: industry engagement is essential to what we do, but it risks being dismissed as less scholarly. There is, however, a middle ground.

Healey and Jenkins’ (2009) model offers a useful way through this confusion. They identify four modes of engaging undergraduates with research: research-led (learning about current scholarship), research-oriented (learning research methods), research-based (undertaking inquiry), and research-tutored (engaging in research discussions). These are mapped across two dimensions: whether students are positioned as audience or participants, and whether the emphasis falls on research content or processes. The model’s key insight is that students can be meaningfully engaged with research even when they aren’t producing research outputs themselves. The question isn’t simply whether students are ‘doing research’, it’s whether they’re positioned as passive recipients of established knowledge or as active participants in scholarly inquiry.

Practice-led teaching operates on different logic, though that logic has a closer relationship to applied research than is sometimes acknowledged. Its primary aim is developing professional competence through authentic engagement with messy problems and competing stakeholder priorities. The distinction isn’t whether industry is involved – it can be present in both approaches. The distinction lies in how students are positioned in relation to knowledge. In practice-led education, knowledge tends to be treated as relatively settled. In research-informed education, knowledge is contested, evolving, and open to question. An opportunity arises when these approaches coincide without conscious design, and a risk emerges when they collapse into one another. Research-informed teaching can become performative, referencing staff publications without changing how students learn. Practice-led teaching can slip into employability theatre, where live briefs are added without interrogating what knowledge students are actually developing.

As Professor Hanifa Shah OBE recently argued in Times Higher Education, STEAM education at its best equips students to “move fluidly between analytical and imaginative modes of thinking“, asking critical questions, considering ethical implications, and bringing meaning to innovation. This is precisely the disposition that research-informed teaching seeks to develop. In STEAM disciplines, including architecture, built environment, computing and engineering, emerging technologies create spaces where research and practice intersect meaningfully. Digital Twins and real-time monitoring tools, for example, allow students to work with live systems while engaging critically with the assumptions and ethics embedded within them. Students aren’t merely applying research after the fact, nor mimicking professional routines. They’re learning to question how data is generated, how models simplify reality, and how decisions are shaped by both evidence and judgement. Practice becomes a site of inquiry.

There’s an institutional dimension here too. Across the sector, promotion frameworks, workload models, and teaching quality metrics often reward research visibility and industry engagement without asking how either is translated pedagogically. Academics are encouraged to ‘bring research into teaching’ and ‘embed employability’, yet rarely supported in doing the difficult design work that meaningful integration requires. Recent discussions within the sector have highlighted how delivery models shape the possibilities for integrating academic and workplace learning. These are sector-wide conversations, and they reflect shared challenges around diverse learner cohorts, blended delivery, and the risk of compliance overtaking genuine learning. As a result, many innovative practices remain dependent on individual effort rather than structural support.

None of this means practice-led and research-informed approaches are mutually exclusive. The most effective curricula often blend elements of both. But blending deliberately is quite different from conflating accidentally.

When designing industry-engaged teaching, it’s worth asking honest questions. Are students positioned as inquirers or executors? Are they engaging with contested knowledge or settled practice? Does assessment reward critical reflection or merely competent performance? Is the industry project a vehicle for scholarly inquiry, or is scholarly framing a veneer over vocational training?

The answers won’t always be clear-cut, and that’s fine. But asking the questions helps us design with intention rather than stumbling into confusion – and helps us articulate what we’re doing when a peer reviewer, a sceptical colleague, or a university committee asks us to justify our approach.

Dr Saeed Talebi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at Birmingham City University and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). He has held a number of T&L leadership roles, including Departmental Lead, Course Leader, and Academic Lead for Teaching Excellence and Student Experience. He has a keen interest in pedagogy in higher education, with particular interest in research-informed teaching and the integration of emerging technologies and practice-led projects into built environment curricula to enhance student outcomes and experience. He has also led the delivery of large STEAM research projects.

Professor Nick Morton is the Academic Director of Partnerships and STEAM at Birmingham City University. A Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA), he was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in recognition of his track record in curriculum development. He has held a number of senior leadership roles at BCU, including Associate Dean for Teaching Education and Student Experience, overseeing Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment. He was elected Vice-Chair of the Council of Heads of the Built Environment (CHOBE) in 2012 and is a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (FRICS).


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Reconceptualising transnational education through decolonial approaches

by Nilakshi Das

Transnational Education (TNE) represents a rapidly expanding form of cross-border provision, underpinned by an economic imaginary that positions the UK as a ‘key player’ in the global higher education market. While earlier internationalisation strategies focused primarily on bringing overseas students to Britain, TNE reflects a shift towards delivering British higher education to students globally through offshore provisions. The rapid expansion of TNE has elicited growing academic debate about its potential to reproduce the political, economic and epistemic hegemony of the Global North, reinscribing earlier colonial hierarchies and patterns of dependency.

Before the emergence of TNE, the internationalisation of UK higher education was primarily organised through the academic mobility of overseas students, shaped by Britain’s imperial and post-imperial educational networks. During the 1960s, technical assistance programmes and scholarship schemes, such as the Commonwealth Scholarship programme, facilitated student mobility to British universities. In the 1970s, as overseas student numbers gradually increased, differential student fees were introduced alongside tightening immigration regulations, a shift that continued throughout the Thatcher government in the 1980s into the present day. By the late 1990s, the University of Nottingham had established one of the earliest overseas branches, with the general idea that the curriculum in the host country would largely mirror the home institution. From the 2000s onwards, TNE expanded in scope and provision through franchised programmes, joint and dual degrees, distance and online courses in new markets, particularly across the Middle East and Asia. These arrangements allowed UK universities to expand their global presence and competitiveness beyond traditional overseas student recruitment.

Political economy of TNE and latest policy ambitions

The latest articulation of TNE goals includes the Labour government’s new strategy for national renewal by ‘turbocharging education’ as an engine for economic growth, with a target of £40 billion in education exports by 2030. This decision reflects increasing political pressure to cut net migration by reducing overseas student recruitment. Recent policy recommendations have radically argued that universities should be ‘selling education, not immigration’, with growing concerns that student visas are being used as a backdoor route into the UK labour market. Against broader anxieties around immigration in which international students are repositioned as migration liabilities, TNE offers a politically viable solution by exporting education in favour of substituting inward student mobility. As universities’ budgets shrink due to ongoing visa restrictions for international students, TNE engagements are expected to further increase (Hartmann and Lee, 2026).

According to the latest data, the number of students studying entirely overseas through UK TNE increased by 8% in 2024/25, and has risen by 37% since 2020/21. TNE student numbers are now close to the number of international students studying in the UK, with approximately one in six students in UK HE being educated across overseas campuses. Yet, despite this rapid growth, there is a lack of public data on student experiences at TNE. While aggregate data records the number of students enrolled in TNE programmes and level of education, there is limited publicly available information on student progression, degree outcome and labour market prospects. The experiences of students and educators involved in these programmes often tend to remain marginal within UK policy debates.

As higher education increasingly operates through a ‘big business’ model, institutional priorities have rapidly shifted towards generating revenue and maintaining competitiveness. In doing so,commitments to uphold student welfare, equality, and meaningful international collaboration are often sidelined in favour of positional advantage. Therefore, the expansion of TNE under growing market competition raises further pressing questions about equity and power within global HE systems.

Towards a decolonial approach to TNE

Most of the latest policy and institutional analyses of TNE tend to adopt an instrumentalist perspective focusing on business indicators, such as risk assessment, return on investment, international branding and reputation, quality assurance and transnational management strategies. As a result, TNE is mainly understood through frameworks of foreign investment and transnational service delivery further entrenching the logic of the market that frames education as a tradable commodity rather than a global public good (Lauren Clarke, 2021). While these considerations are important for universities operating in a competitive global environment, they risk overshadowing broader questions about equity, inclusion and the social purposes of higher education.

Adopting a decolonial approach to TNE can help address questions around embedding Western systems and structures of education in the Global South. Debates around the coloniality of TNE are not entirely new. Some scholars have drawn parallels between contemporary TNE arrangements and colonial models of education between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Colonial education systems were often characterised by limited access for the local population, a lack of relevance to local realities, the marginalisation of indigenous knowledge systems, the exclusive use of English as the primary medium of instruction, institutional authority with control originating from colonial centres and limited curricula featuring vocational degrees (Teferra and Altbach, 2004). TNE arrangements have been articulated as operating through a similar binary model in which a ‘core’ of sending institutions from the West sets the agenda for a marginalised ‘periphery’ of receiving partners, perpetuating historical legacies of colonialism (Caruana and Montgomery, 2015).

Against this background, there are growing calls for more introspective approaches to TNE that challenge post-colonial structures of dependence and compliance, while remaining attentive to the risk that transnational partnerships may reproduce these hierarchies through networks of alliance with local elites in host countries. Ravindra Sidhu advocates an ‘engaged pedagogy’ and an ‘ethics of care’ in the design and governance of TNE partnerships, emphasising the need to recognise the histories, aspirations and agency of local communities involved in these programmes.

Drawing insights from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship that emphasise justice, inclusion and agency will enable TNE strategies to better examine their implications on student success, outcomes and experiences as well as their wider impact on local communities and higher education systems in host countries. At the same time, greater attention to the national and cultural contexts in which TNE operates, particularly where differing political and institutional norms raise ethical challenges around academic freedom, governance and accountability, can support more informed institutional decision-making and partnerships. These perspectives will ensure that the expansion of TNE is not guided by short-term commercial imperatives but by broader commitments to equity and responsible global engagement, avoiding polarised strategic approaches (Sanderson, 2023).

Nilakshi Das has recently completed her PhD in History of Science. Her PhD was funded by the ESRC and jointly undertaken at the University of Leicester and the University of Warwick. Nilakshi holds an MSc in Education from the University of Oxford and an MA in Sociology from the University of Manchester, funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship. She is a Fellow of the Institute for Historical Research.


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Inclusion without structural change: what neurodiverse academics tell us about inequality in higher education

by Eleni Meletiadou

The blog is based on the recent outputs from our COST ACTION CA20137 VOICES project entitled: ‘Lived Experiences of Neurodiverse Academics and Early Career Researchers in Higher Education: Identifying Structural Barriers and Pathways to Inclusion.’

Introduction

Higher education institutions across Europe increasingly emphasise equality, diversity, and inclusion, yet neurodiversity remains unevenly addressed within academic career structures. While universities have developed policies to support disabled and neurodiverse students, far less attention has been given to the experiences of neurodiverse academics, particularly early-career researchers and women. As a result, inclusion is often framed as an issue of individual adjustment rather than institutional design.

This blog presents findings from a qualitative survey conducted as part of the work of the VOICES COST Action, which examines inequalities affecting Young Researchers and Innovators (YRIs) from a gender perspective and promotes dialogue between researchers, institutions, and policy-makers across the European research ecosystem. The project explored the lived experiences of neurodiverse academics in higher education to identify structural barriers and inform policy and practice.

The findings suggest that, despite the growing visibility of neurodiversity, academic systems continue to be shaped by narrow assumptions about productivity, communication, and career progression. These assumptions can disadvantage those whose cognitive styles or working patterns do not align with dominant norms, particularly in contexts characterised by high workload, precarity, and informal career expectations.

Academic norms and the persistence of the ‘ideal worker’ model

Participants in the survey frequently described academic work as governed by implicit norms rather than transparent criteria. Expectations related to teaching, research, administration, and collegiality were often perceived as unclear, variable, and dependent on departmental culture.

Previous research has shown that academic environments tend to reward constant productivity, long working hours, and high levels of self-management, reflecting what has been described as the ‘ideal worker’ model. These expectations can create difficulties for academics whose cognitive styles involve fluctuating concentration, sensory sensitivity, or the need for predictable routines.

Respondents highlighted challenges associated with unpredictable workloads, competing deadlines, and the pressure to remain constantly available. Conferences, meetings, and networking events were also described as demanding environments, particularly when participation required rapid communication, multitasking, or tolerance of sensory overload.

Such findings indicate that the difficulties experienced by neurodiverse academics are not simply individual challenges but are closely linked to the way academic work is organised. Consistent with the objectives of the VOICES COST Action, inequalities affecting early career researchers often arise from structural features of the research environment rather than from personal limitations.

Intersectional inequalities: neurodiversity, gender, and career stage

The survey also revealed that neurodiversity intersects with gender and career stage in ways that intensify disadvantage. Early career researchers on temporary or part-time contracts reported reluctance to disclose neurodivergence or request adjustments due to concerns about job security and professional reputation.

These findings align with existing research showing that precarious employment conditions are common in early academic careers and can discourage individuals from seeking support. When career progression depends on short-term contracts, publication output, and informal recommendations, academics may feel pressure to conform to existing expectations even when these expectations are difficult to meet.

Female participants described additional pressures related to expectations of organisation, emotional labour, and collegial behaviour, which have been widely documented in studies of gender inequality in academia. These expectations were perceived as particularly demanding in environments where workloads are high and institutional support is limited.

From the perspective of the VOICES COST Action, such findings highlight the importance of examining inequalities through an intersectional lens. Neurodiversity does not operate in isolation but interacts with gender, career stage, and employment conditions to shape academic experiences.

Inclusion policies and the gap between commitment and practice

Most respondents reported that their institutions had formal equality, diversity, and inclusion strategies. However, the implementation of these policies was often described as inconsistent. Support frequently depended on individual supervisors, line managers, or departmental cultures rather than on clear institutional procedures.

Participants noted that adjustments were typically provided only after formal disclosure, placing responsibility on individuals to identify their needs and request support. This approach can be particularly challenging for neurodiverse academics, for whom disclosure may involve perceived professional risks.

Research on disability and inclusion in higher education has shown that institutional responses often focus on individual accommodations rather than structural change. While accommodations are important, they do not address the underlying assumptions about productivity, communication, and career progression that shape academic work. The findings of this study suggest that inclusion policies may have a limited impact if they are not accompanied by changes to workload models, evaluation criteria, and organisational culture.

Implications for policy and institutional practice

The qualitative data point to several areas where institutional policy could better support neurodiverse academics and early career researchers.

Greater transparency in workload and progression criteria

Clear expectations regarding teaching, research, and administrative responsibilities can reduce uncertainty and support fairer evaluation. When criteria are implicit, those who struggle with informal norms may be disadvantaged.

Flexible and predictable working practices

Flexible deadlines, structured communication, and predictable scheduling can support a wider range of working styles without lowering academic standards. Such measures may benefit many staff, not only those who identify as neurodivergent.

Training for academic leaders

Supervisors, heads of department, and line managers play a key role in implementing inclusion policies. Training that increases understanding of neurodiversity can help ensure that support is applied consistently and fairly.

Mentoring and peer support networks

Structured mentoring programmes can reduce isolation, particularly for early-career researchers and women. Informal support networks were frequently described by participants as essential for coping with the demands of academic work.

Dialogue beyond the institutional level

In line with the aims of the VOICES COST Action, improving inclusion requires discussion not only within universities but also at national and European policy levels. Research evaluation frameworks, funding structures, and career pathways all shape the conditions in which academics work and therefore influence who is able to succeed.

Towards more inclusive research environments

The findings presented here indicate that neurodiversity in higher education continues to be addressed primarily through individual adjustments rather than structural reform. Academic career systems remain shaped by implicit norms that privilege particular working styles and disadvantage those who do not conform to them.

If universities are to meet their commitments to equality, diversity, and inclusion, neurodiversity must be considered within broader discussions of precarity, gender inequality, and the sustainability of academic careers. Creating more inclusive environments requires not only support for individuals but also critical reflection on the assumptions that underpin academic work.

As initiatives such as the VOICES COST Action emphasise, meaningful change depends on sustained dialogue between researchers, institutions, and policy-makers. Without such dialogue, there is a risk that inclusion will remain a policy aspiration rather than an everyday reality.

Higher education has the opportunity to move beyond reactive accommodations towards more inclusive structures. Doing so is not only a matter of fairness but also essential for retaining talented researchers whose contributions may otherwise be lost to systems that remain insufficiently flexible to support diverse ways of thinking and working.

Dr Eleni Meletiadou is Associate Professor (Teaching) at London Metropolitan University and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research focuses on equity, diversity, and inclusion in higher education, with particular emphasis on neurodiversity, gender equality, digital pedagogy, and education for sustainable development. She leads the Research Group on Inclusive Learning, Transnational Education and Academic Sustainability (RILEAS) and the Gender Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (GEDI) Research Group. Her work has been recognised with the British Academy of Management Education Practice Award (2023) and includes several European and international projects on inclusive assessment, AI in higher education, and widening participation. She is an active member of COST Actions examining inequalities in the research ecosystem and the impact of digital transformation on higher education. Her research interests include organisational change in universities, inclusive curriculum design, early career researcher development, and socially just approaches to teaching and learning.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-eleni-meletiadou/


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Judgement under pressure: generative AI and the emotional labour of learning

by Joanne Irving-Walton

What AI absorbs and why that matters

Most debates about generative AI in higher education fixate on what it produces: essays, summaries, answers, paraphrases. I find myself increasingly interested in something else – what it absorbs. Over the past year, as conversations about AI have threaded through seminars and tutorials, a pattern has gradually become visible. In those discussions, students rarely begin with content production; instead, they talk about how it helps them get started and steadies them enough to keep going. They use it when the blank page paralyses, when feedback stings and when uncertainty feels exposing. One student described asking AI to “make it feel possible”. Another spoke of feeding tutor comments into the system so they could be “explained more kindly”. A third reflected, almost apologetically, “I don’t want it to do my work… I just need something to push against before I say it out loud and risk looking stupid”.

In each case, AI is not replacing thinking. It is absorbing part of the emotional labour involved in it, and as that labour is redistributed, the texture of judgement shifts. Academic judgement does not tend to emerge from comfort. It develops in the stretch between knowing and not knowing, when confidence dips, stakes feel heightened, and your sense of competence is quietly tested (Barnett, 2007). Staying in that stretch long enough for thinking to clarify demands more than intellectual effort; it requires emotional steadiness, time, space and the capacity to tolerate uncertainty without rushing to resolution (Biesta, 2013). Traditionally, that steadying work has been shared across learning relationships: tutors reframing feedback, peers normalising confusion, supervisors encouraging persistence through doubt. Generative AI now occupies part of that terrain.

I do not think this is inherently a problem. For some students, it is transformative. It marks a shift in where the labour of learning takes place and that change deserves examination rather than alarm.

Four modes of engagement and emotional labour

When students talk about how they use AI, their practices tend to cluster into four overlapping orientations. These are not moral categories so much as shifts in where emotional and cognitive labour is undertaken.

Instrumental engagement appears when students use AI to summarise readings, refine phrasing or impose structure. Here the friction lies in form-making and shaping thought into something communicable. The judgement at stake is procedural: what is proportionate or efficient in this context?

Dialogic engagement emerges when students test interpretations or rehearse arguments. AI becomes a low-stakes sounding board, absorbing some of the vulnerability of articulating something half-formed. The question beneath it is interpretive: what does this mean, and how far do I trust my reading and myself?

Metacognitive engagement is evident when students ask AI to critique their reasoning or compare approaches. What is absorbed here is evaluative tension and the discomfort of examining one’s own argument. The judgement in play is comparative and strategic: which option is stronger, and why? And then there is affective-regulatory engagement. Here, AI absorbs the anxiety that precedes judgement itself. It breaks tasks into steps, softens feedback, lowers the threshold for beginning, offers reassurance before submission and quietens the internal ruminations and rehearsals of everything that might go wrong. This is not peripheral to learning. It is increasingly central.

Figure: Where the labour of learning now lives

Accessibility, safety and the risk of smoothing too much

For many students, particularly those navigating anxiety, executive dysfunction, neurodivergence or heavy external commitments, this emotional buffering is not indulgence but access (Rose & Meyer, 2002). Breaking tasks into steps or privately rehearsing ideas before speaking can widen participation rather than diminish it.

We should not romanticise struggle. Nor should we imagine that institutional structures have ever been able to hold every student perfectly. For some learners, AI offers another place to rehearse thinking, one that sits alongside, rather than replaces, human dialogue.

But there is a tension here. If AI consistently absorbs the strain of uncertainty before ideas encounter resistance, if feedback is softened before it unsettles, if structure replaces the slow work of wrestling thought into form, then something quieter begins to shift. Much of this work happens privately, in browser tabs and late-night prompts, in spaces students do not always feel comfortable admitting to. That makes it harder for us to see what is being strengthened and what may be thinning. The danger is not comfort, but the quiet disappearance of formative strain.

By formative strain, I do not mean suffering for its own sake, nor simply the “desirable difficulties” described in cognitive load theory (Bjork & Bjork, 2011) or the stretching associated with a Vygotskian zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). I am referring to the lived experience of remaining with ambiguity, critique and partial understanding long enough for judgement to consolidate; the emotional as well as cognitive work of staying with a problem. If that work is always pre-processed, it may narrow the rehearsal space where judgement forms.

Scaffold or substitute

Much depends on whether AI remains a scaffold or begins to function as a substitute. Used as scaffold, it lowers the emotional threshold just enough for deeper engagement, absorbing anxiety without displacing judgement. Used as substitute, it reduces not only strain but evaluation itself; the work of deciding and committing shifts elsewhere. The distinction lies less in the tool than in how it is woven into the learning environment.

Individual awareness and institutional responsibility

It would be easy, and unfair, to frame this as a matter of individual discernment. Students already carry a great deal. But nor is this simply a matter of institutional correction. We are all navigating new terrain in real time, without a settled script.

If we are serious about judgement formation, then responsibility is shared — and it is evolving. This is less about detection or prohibition than about openness. AI engagement is happening whether we discuss it or not. The question is whether we bring it into the light. That might mean inviting students to reflect on how they used AI in a task, not as confession, but as analysis. It might mean modelling, in our own teaching, what it looks like to question or refine an AI response rather than accept it wholesale. It certainly means acknowledging the emotional labour of learning openly (Newton, 2014), recognising that starting can be harder than finishing and that this, too, is part of learning.

At a structural level, we also need some candour. Systems built on speed, metrics and visible output inevitably amplify the appeal of friction-reducing tools. If polish is rewarded more consistently than process, we should not be surprised when students bypass the stretch between uncertainty and articulation. Cultivating discernment, then, is not a matter of allocating blame. It is a collective project of making the shifting terrain of AI use visible, discussable and educative.

Where the emotional work now lives

Generative AI has not diminished the importance of human judgement. If anything, it has made visible how emotionally mediated that judgement has always been (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007). The interior work of learning – the hesitation, the rehearsal, the private negotiation of uncertainty – has never been fully observable. It has always unfolded, at least in part, elsewhere.

What AI changes is not the existence of that interior space, but its texture. Some of that labour now takes place in dialogue with a system that can stabilise, extend or subtly redirect thinking. That creates an opportunity: we are at a juncture where the emotional dimensions of learning can be surfaced and examined more deliberately than before.

It also carries risk. Students can disappear down an AI rabbit hole just as easily as they once disappeared into rumination. The question is not whether the interior work exists, but how it is shaped and whether it ultimately strengthens judgement or thins it.

References

Barnett, R (2007) A will to learn: Being a student in an age of uncertainty Open University Press

Biesta, GJJ (2013) The beautiful risk of education Paradigm Publishers

Bjork, EL & Bjork, RA (2011) ‘Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning’ in MA Gernsbacher, RW Pew, LM Hough & JR Pomerantz (eds), Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56–64) Worth Publishers

Newton, DP (2014) Thinking with feeling: Fostering productive thought in the classroom Routledge

Vygotsky, LS (1978) Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes Harvard University Press Rose, DH & Meyer, A (2002) Teaching every student in the digital age: universal design for learning ASCD

Joanne Irving-Walton is a Principal Lecturer at Teesside University, working across learning and teaching and international partnerships. She is particularly interested in how academic judgement and professional identity develop through the emotional realities of higher education.


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Preparing the Future Leaders of Society with a Systems Thinking Mindset Through Effective Learning and Teaching

by Amrik Singh and Joy Garfield

In a world defined by rapid change, complexity, and interdependence, traditional linear ways of thinking are struggling to keep up. Whether we look at global supply chains, climate challenges, digital transformation, or organizational culture, a recurring truth emerges, everything is connected. This is why systems thinking,a mindset for understanding wholes rather than isolated parts, is becoming increasingly relevant across all sectors (Comstock, 2024). Systems thinking allows us to understand the perspective of multiple stakeholders in the situation and guards against jumping to the right solution, which human nature sometimes make us do. When we understand the notion that problems are multi-faceted and need the buy-in of multiple stakeholders to address the solutions, only then we can really unearth the understanding of complexity and ambiguity of the situation. Higher education students as future leaders of society, need to grasp the concept of systems thinking to explore the complexity and ambiguity of modern-day problems.

Understanding the Complexity of Modern Problems

For much of the 20th century, we operated on the assumption that problems could be broken down and solved independently. Problems and solutions were easily connected. But today’s challenges are mostly complex, dynamic, and interconnected, making reductionist approaches insufficient (Eftekhari Shahroudi et al., 2025).

A decision made in one area can unintentionally trigger effects in others. Without a systemic lens, those secondary impacts are missed until they become major problems. Dynamic conditions change faster than linear plans can keep up. Because challenges evolve through shifting interactions like climate events affecting energy markets, or geopolitical shifts affecting food systems a static, linear approach fails. A systemic perspective helps leaders adapt in real time. Climate change, digital transformation, public health, and security issues span sectors, borders, and disciplines. No single stakeholder can solve them alone; systems thinking helps identify leverage points for multi‑stakeholder actions.

Modern organisations function as complex adaptive systems shaped by culture, relationships, and information flows. Linear change models often fail because they ignore these interdependencies; systems thinking helps leaders identify leverage points, anticipate consequences, and design resilient structures (Ellis, 2024). Systems thinking literature alike argues that traditional problem‑solving methods lose effectiveness as societal and technological complexity grows, strengthening the case for dynamic, holistic approaches in organisational decision‑making (Eftekhari Shahroudi et al., 2025).

A Harvard Business Review article states that innovations often create unintended ripple effects because interactions across systems are overlooked reinforcing the need for a systemic perspective (Bansal and Birkinshaw, 2025). Problems have multiple interacting causes, not a single root. Reductionist thinking focuses on one cause at a time, but modern challenges involve overlapping drivers, environmental, economic, technological, political, and social. Addressing only one strand often creates new issues elsewhere. The demand for systems thinking based pedagogical higher education is thus very real and requires educators to embrace these methods of teaching and learning.

How Can Education and Learning Shift Toward Systems Thinking Literacy

As future leaders in an increasingly complex and demanding world, higher education students need a solid understanding of social, political, economic, and environmental issues, along with the confidence to propose well‑reasoned solutions. Systems thinking is increasingly recognised as a vital pedagogical approach in higher education, enabling learners to understand complexity, interdependence, and uncertainty within contemporary societal and organisational challenges.

As educators prepare students for an uncertain future, systems thinking literacy is emerging as a core skill. The future of jobs report (World Economic Forum, 2025) indicates that systems thinking, and empathy are very essential core skills needed by organisations. Case studies from engineering and technology education further illustrate the value of systems thinking pedagogy. Dhukaram et al. (2016) show how systems-oriented curricula enhance student capability in diagnosing multifaceted problems, fostering collaborative solution-building, and developing resilience in decision-making processes. These studies collectively highlight that systems thinking not only enhances subject-specific learning but also strengthens transferable skills such as critical reasoning, communication, and adaptive expertise, all very relevant to organisations as cited in the future of jobs report 2025.

Systems thinking pedagogy also allows students to dive into the complexity and ambiguity of modern-day challenges and allows them to understand the multiple stakeholder perspectives and worldviews. Only then can a rich picture of the problem can be ascertained. Studying relationships, patterns, and structures fosters deeper understanding than memorising isolated facts or writing notes of the situation alone. Frameworks such as Soft Systems Methodology (Checkland and Poulter, 2006) enhance critical thinking and decision‑making from multiple perspectives. Sustainability education literature also stresses that complex global issues require integrative thinking, interdisciplinary collaboration, and shared sense‑making, the central tenets of systems thinking (Ezeaku, 2024).

Soft Systems Methodology, although not new, has proven effective across a wide range of settings for tackling complex modern-day problems. Its seven-stage process offers a structured approach to exploring “wicked” issues by first examining what is happening in the real world from the viewpoints of various stakeholders. The methodology then moves to imagining an ideal world, one free from constraints, from multiple stakeholder perspectives, helping to surface differing expectations, needs, and aspirations for a future idealised system. Students should be encouraged to use empathetic dialogue to appreciate the diverse viewpoints present in the situation. By comparing real-world conditions with these idealised models, Soft Systems Methodology enables the development of feasible, mutually acceptable paths forward.

Recent scholarship highlights that real-world, experiential learning environments help students develop the ability to interpret dynamic systems and identify leverage points for meaningful change (Alford et al., 2025). Such approaches support a shift from linear, fragmented learning toward holistic understanding, enabling students to explore the multiple interacting forces shaping modern problems. Soft Systems Methodology can help develop this understanding.

The importance of systems thinking in higher education is also evident in efforts to prepare students for professional environments characterised by complexity and rapid change. As Elsawah, Ho, and Ryan (2022) note, teaching systems thinking requires intentional integration of modelling, reflection, and interdisciplinary engagement to help students internalise systemic concepts. Their work demonstrates that learners benefit from iterative exploration of system behaviours, reinforcing deeper conceptual understanding and long-term retention.

A Mindset for the 21st Century

Across disciplines, systems thinking offers a transformative framework for higher education, supporting educators and students in jointly navigating complex realities while fostering the next generation of holistic, strategic, and future-oriented thinkers.

At its core, systems thinking is more than a method, it is a mindset that promotes deeper insight, anticipatory understanding, and long‑term thinking. Scholars and practitioners argue it is essential for addressing intertwined challenges like climate disruption, social inequality, and technological acceleration (DigitalVital HUB, 2025). By helping individuals and organisations recognise interconnected structures, systems thinking supports more informed, sustainable, and strategic action, shifting us from short‑term fixes to long‑term solutions rooted in an understanding of whole systems (Ellis, 2024).

The combination of Soft Systems Methodology and empathy enhances systems thinking by placing equal emphasis on the human elements and the technical components. It focuses on designing solutions that function not only in theory but also in the complex, unpredictable realities of human‑centred environments. Engaging in empathetic dialogue helps reveal stakeholders’ perspectives and experiences. When problems are rooted in human complexity and ambiguity, the solutions must be human centric also.

We live in an era defined by complexity and constant change. Linear thinking on its own is no longer enough. Systems thinking offers powerful tools for higher education students to see the bigger picture, understanding interconnections, and designing solutions that work not just today, but for generations ahead. As future leaders of society this is a vital commodity that cannot be overlooked. Across sustainability, technology, education, and organisational practice, the evidence converges: systems thinking is shifting from a possibility to a must‑have capability for future leaders (Bansal and Birkinshaw, 2025; Schoormann et al., 2025).

References.

Alford, K.R., Stedman, N.L.P., Bunch, J., Baker, S. and Roberts, T.G. (2025) ‘Real-world experiences in higher education: contributing to developing a systems thinking paradigm’, Journal of Experiential Education, 48(1), pp. 169–188.

Bansal, T. and Birkinshaw, J. (2025) ‘Why you need systems thinking now’, Harvard Business Review, September–October.

Checkland, P. and Poulter, J. (2006) Learning for action: A short definitive account of Soft Systems Methodology and its use for practitioners, teachers and students. Hoboken: Wiley.

Comstock, N.W. (2024) ‘Systems thinking’, EBSCO Research Starters.

Dhukaram, A., Sgouropoulou, C., Feldman, G. and Amini, A. (2016) ‘Higher education provision using systems thinking approach – case studies’, European Journal of Engineering Education, 43, pp. 1–23.

DigitalVital HUB (2025) ‘Systems thinking in innovation design and sustainability: Critical framework for seeing the whole’, 21 March.

Eftekhari Shahroudi, K., Conrad, S., Speece, J., Reinholtz, K., Span, M.T., Chappell, S., Saulter, Q. and Bokhtier, G.M. (2025) ‘Why systems thinking?’, in Practical Systems Thinking. Cham: Springer.

Ellis, J. (2024) ‘Unlocking complex problems: the power of systems thinking’, TheSystemsThinking.com, 30 September.

Elsawah, S., Ho, A. and Ryan, M. (2022) ‘Teaching systems thinking in higher education’, INFORMS Transactions on Education, 22, pp. 66–102.

Ezeaku, E.C. (2024) ‘Systems thinking as a paradigm shift for transformational sustainability’, Global Scientific Journal, 12(1).

Schoormann, T., Möller, F., Hoppe, C. and vom Brocke, J. (2025) ‘Digital sustainability: understanding and managing tensions’, Business & Information Systems Engineering, 67, pp. 429–438.

World Economic Forum (2025) The Future of Jobs Report 2025.

Dr Amrik Singh is a Senior Teaching Fellow at Aston University, UK. He has over 15 years of academic experience in Higher Education. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Advance HE, SFHEA. His teaching areas includes operations management, effective management consultancy, and business operations excellence. 

Joy Garfield holds a PhD in Informatics from the University of Manchester, UK.  She is a Senior Teaching Fellow and Deputy Head of Department for Business Analytics and Information Systems at Aston Business School, Aston University, UK.  With over 20 years of experience in academia, Joy is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.  Joy is currently an external examiner for the University of Westminster Tashkent, Uzbekistan and a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research into Higher Education.


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Can folk pedagogies help us understand the limited impact of research on higher education?

by Alex Buckley

The SRHE conference is a great place to see our field in all its glory. From the sessions I attended in December 2025, one thing that was abundantly clear was the desire of so many HE researchers to change the world. A distinctive feature of contemporary HE research – reflecting the social sciences more broadly – is the focus on political and ethical issues, with avowedly political and ethical intentions. The improvement of society is often the explicit end, rather than the more humble improvement of our own part of the education system.

Despite this desire to make a difference, higher education research has for many years been held up as an area where the impact of those working in the field is not what it could be. As George Keller said in 1985, “hardly anyone in higher education pays attention to the research and scholarship about higher education”,

Asking the right questions?

There hasn’t been a lot of work on the gap between research and practice in HE – though there is a fair amount in the schools sector from which we can extrapolate, to a greater or lesser extent – but one issue that has received some attention is the fundamental one: are researchers actually asking the right questions?

Vivianne Robinson is a researcher who has laid a substantial amount of blame at the feet of researchers, who “have little to offer by way of alternative solutions, when the problems they have been studying are not those of the practitioner” (Robinson 1993). I have recently used Robinson’s model of Problem-Based Methodology to explore whether research about exams in higher education does engage sufficiently with the challenges that teachers take themselves to face. The results were not encouraging.

One of the more straightforward of Robinson’s criteria for impactful research is that researchers should be addressing teachers’ beliefs, and correcting them where they are erroneous. That’s important, but what if those beliefs are hard to shift? We all have stubborn hunches about how higher education works: good ways of motivating students, how to write feedback that will make students pay attention, how to clearly communicate complex ideas. What if there are teacher beliefs that are deeply embedded, so deeply that we don’t always know we have them, but that aren’t helping us and need to change?

One idea that has been explored in the school sector, but has largely passed us by, is the concept of ‘folk pedagogies’. This idea was developed in the 1990s as an extension of the more famous concept of ‘folk psychologies’: the tacit theories that we all have that allow us to make sense of people’s behaviour. For Jerome Bruner, a natural next step from folk psychologies was the idea that we have intuitive theories about how people learn.

“Watch any mother, any teacher, even any babysitter with a child and you’ll be struck by how much of what they do is steered by notions of ‘what children’s mind are like and how to help them learn,’ even though they may not be able to verbalise their pedagogical principles.” Bruner (1996)

There has been some research in the school sector about the implications of this idea, particularly in terms of how much difference research makes to educational practice. Folk pedagogies have two features that will make them a factor in the impact of education research: they interfere with the uptake of new research-based ideas and approaches, and they are stubborn. On the first point, the idea is that new ideas about higher education will have to replace the old if they are to influence teachers; and on the second, evidence suggests that even where trainee teachers have ostensibly internalised more scientific theories of learning, the folk pedagogies come creeping back.

In the case of higher education, what might these commonsense, intuitive theories look like? They might just be very general ideas about how people learn, applied to the particular context of higher education. Bruner identifies a range of broad folk pedagogical views, such as one which sees ‘children as knowers’, with a focus on the gathering and organising of facts. Perhaps one kind of folk psychology of higher education would be the application of that idea specifically to students in universities rather than other sectors: a focus on the selection, organisation and retention of propositional knowledge within degree programmes. Perhaps there are also specific intuitive theories about higher education that influence teachers’ practices. Perhaps there is a folk intuition that university students should not be spoon-fed – that they must take responsibility for their own learning and seek to develop their own views. Perhaps there is a folk intuition that students should encounter challenging views that encourage them to question their own certainties. In the absence of research, we can only speculate (and introspect).

Respecting the ‘folk’

The idea that teachers have deep intuitions about how students learn, that those intuitions can prevent them from acting on more evidence-based beliefs, and that those intuitions are hard to shake; none of those ideas are particularly earth-shattering. They are probably common sense among those researching and enhancing higher education. The value of the idea of ‘folk pedagogies’ lies instead in the way that it encourages us to take those intuitions seriously, both as an object of study and a powerful barrier to change.

Rather than dismissing intuitions about higher education – as ignorant beliefs and hide-bound traditions – we can study them. What are they? Where do they come from? How do they change? The idea of folk pedagogies is not pejorative. There’s no shame in having intuitions about how learning works. As with folk psychological theories, they are necessary parts of how we navigate the world, and something we can’t do without. There is also deep wisdom to be found in those intuitions, even if they are sometimes misleading. Research goes wrong by departing from common sense, at least as much as the other way around.

Acknowledging the existence of folk theories of higher education can help improve the impact of our research in all sorts of ways. We can research them, to understand why teachers and students (and others) do what they do, and the conditions in which deep intuitions can change. It can help us understand where – and why – research has departed so far from common sense as to be of little practical relevance.

It can also help us understand the scale of the challenge. In much of what we do, we’re seeking to modify what university teachers do, which very often means changing how they think. The reality is that we aren’t usually changing superficial, specific beliefs, at least not where the improvements we’re seeking are substantive. We’re changing deep beliefs picked up over a lifetime. Our model of improvement may then need to fit the old adage: if you’re not making progress at a snail’s pace, you’re not making progress. That’s a bit different from annual quality enhancement cycles or short-term strategic initiatives. We can change the world, but it will take time.

References

Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Harvard

Robinson, V. M. J. (1993). Problem-Based Methodology: Research for the Improvement of Practice. Pergamon Press

Dr Alex Buckley is an Associate Professor in the Learning & Teaching Academy at Heriot-Watt University, Scotland. His research is focused on conceptual aspects of research and practice in assessment and feedback.


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What emergency remote teaching revealed about how we treat international students

by Cosmin Nada, Thais França and Biana Lyrio

Universities around the world, and particularly in postcolonial contexts, are investing significantly in international student attraction. International students feature prominently in brochures, recruitment campaigns, and institutional rankings. But what happens when this spotlight fades and students are left to navigate systems that were never truly designed for them? Our recently-published article, The pandemic as a ‘revelatory crisis’ – the experiences of international students during emergency remote teaching in a postcolonial context, suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible for HE stakeholders to continue turning a blind eye to the epistemic injustice and systemic exclusion of international students.  

The research examined the experiences of international students during the abrupt shift to emergency remote teaching (ERT) in Portuguese higher education (HE). Interviews were conducted with degree-seeking students from China, Brazil, Syria, and Portuguese-speaking African countries (Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe), alongside focus group discussions across four Portuguese cities. To capture institutional perspectives, HE staff members were also interviewed. Drawing on critical pedagogical theories, rooted in the work of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, the article analyses how the pandemic did not merely create new problems but rather exposed and amplified inequalities that had been there all along.

One of the most striking findings of the article concerns the persistence of what Freire famously called the banking model of education: the idea that teaching means depositing knowledge into passive students. For international students, this dynamic takes on an added layer: it is not just any knowledge being deposited, but knowledge rooted in Western and Eurocentric frameworks, which is automatically positioned as inherently superior. The rich cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds that international students bring with them are routinely ignored or, worse, treated as deficits in need of correction. This is not merely a pedagogical shortcoming: it is a form of epistemic violence, rooted in colonial logics that continue to structure how knowledge is valued in most HE institutions worldwide.

The study also reveals that international students are often navigating educational systems that were not built for them. From curricula that assume a uniform cultural background to assessment methods that penalise linguistic diversity, HE institutions in Portugal – as in many other postcolonial contexts – treat international students as problems to be ‘managed’ rather than as valued members of the academic community. During ERT, these pre-existing deficit views and institutional stereotypes were dramatically amplified. Already struggling with the complexities of studying abroad, international students found themselves either invisible in the digital classroom or exposed to rigid pedagogies unadjusted to their needs. Moreover, the support systems that might have partially compensated for these failures in face-to-face settings vanished almost entirely in the online environment.

Rather than pointing the finger at individual HE staff, the study calls for a more systemic interpretation. Many of the HE educators we spoke with were themselves struggling, overwhelmed by the sudden transition to online teaching, often lacking both the digital skills and the pedagogical training to deal with diverse classrooms, while receiving minimal to no institutional support. This points to a significant elephant in the room in HE: in many contexts, including Portugal, academics become educators with little or no previous structured training in how teaching and learning works, let alone in how to engage meaningfully with diversity in the classroom. In other words, the decision to recruit international students is typically made at institutional level, yet the consequences of that decision fall on individual staff members who are given few resources and almost no preparation to adapt to the needs of diverse students.

Even well-intentioned educators, when operating within the colonial atmosphere that persists in most HE institutions and while lacking the pedagogical knowledge to do otherwise, end up reproducing oppressive practices. The findings show how transmissive, lecture-based, and non-interactive teaching methods – already dominant before the pandemic – were simply transferred to the online environment. When care, empathy, and dialogue are absent from pedagogy, even educators who genuinely seek to support their students can inadvertently reinforce the very exclusion they aim to prevent. Without deliberate and informed efforts to build inclusive classrooms, the default mode of teaching may be perpetuating the marginalisation of those who do not fit the assumed ‘norm’.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable finding of this study is what the pandemic revealed about contemporary internationalisation. Portuguese HE institutions – like many across the world – actively recruit international students following a neoliberal logic, treating them essentially as revenue sources. For instance, Portugal’s new International Student Statute marked a shift from viewing students from former colonies as beneficiaries of educational cooperation to positioning them as fee-paying customers. Yet, in this process, the pedagogical and institutional structures remained largely unchanged (and hence equally unwelcoming). During ERT, this contradiction became impossible to ignore: institutions prioritised continuity over quality, maintaining revenue streams while effectively abandoning any potential commitment to care-informed, culturally responsive teaching. Students repeatedly reported that, in such circumstances, their international mobility experience simply ‘wasn’t worth it’.

The article is clear that minor adjustments will not suffice. What is needed is a fundamental transformation of how HE institutions approach international students. Institutions must invest in equipping academic and non-academic staff with the necessary knowledge and competences in diversity and care-based pedagogies. In addition to staff training, it is fundamental that they create participatory structures where international students’ voices are heard and where they can actively contribute to curricular and pedagogical decisions as equal co-creators of knowledge.

The pandemic has passed, but the challenges it exposed remain. As universities now face new pressures – from the widespread use of artificial intelligence to geopolitical uncertainties, and to the reversal of internationalisation and cooperation agendas – the lessons from this crisis are more relevant than ever. If HE institutions are to remain meaningful actors in forming future generations of workers and citizens, they must stop treating students as commodities to be recruited and start working towards the provision of a truly meaningful and powerful learning experience for all.

Cosmin Nada is an education expert and researcher based at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa. With over a decade of experience in conducting research on education, he focuses on migration and education, diversity and inclusion, internationalisation of higher education, social justice, educational policies, and wellbeing in education.

Thais França is an Assistant Researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa. Her research focuses on the everyday experiences of racialised and gendered subjects. She is Vice Chair of the European Network on International Student Mobility and Coordinator of the Inclusion+ project (2024–2026): Tackling the Challenges of Erasmus+ Mobility Inclusion and Diversity at HE Level.

Biana Lyrio is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT-Portugal). She is a doctoral student in Urban Studies, a joint programme between Iscte-IUL and the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University Lisbon.


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“Network Rail”: postmodern irony defined

by Paul Temple

We left the pub in good time to walk to Waverley station to catch the 18.52 Avanti West Coast train to Euston. The departure board told of signalling problems on the East Coast mainline, but as we weren’t heading for King’s Cross that didn’t bother us. We even remained relaxed when the display didn’t give a platform for our train, as it was still shown as being on time. Until it wasn’t. Damage to the overhead wires just south of Carstairs Junction meant that no trains from either Edinburgh or Glasgow could travel south on the West Coast mainline. A broken-down train in the Scottish borders added to the fun. The apocryphal London newspaper headline, “Fog in the Channel, Continent isolated”, came to mind, but black humour about England being cut off took us only so far. Railway staff advice varied between “Wait to see if trains start running” and “There may be a rail-replacement bus to Manchester” – I thought, wouldn’t a hot-air balloon be a more realistic option?

There was certainly no shortage of railway staff on the Waverley concourse that evening: the crews of non-running trains gossiping among themselves; station staff in high-vis jackets with not much to do; bored-looking coppers … what there wasn’t was anyone who looked as if they might be doing a spot of managing, perhaps even providing up-to-date news to a generally good-humoured crowd of would-be travellers. It wasn’t hard to understand why this element was missing: the situation involved four train companies, Network Rail fixing (we hoped) the overhead wires and the signalling, and another part of Network Rail running the station. Take a look at the Network Rail organisation chart and tell me whose job it would be to take action over the effective closure of the main station of Scotland’s capital.

Not that long ago, there was a notion that higher education might work better if universities were ”unbundled”, to use the then-fashionable term. After all, went the argument, university finance or HR departments aren’t specialists in medieval history or particle physics, so they could provide professional services to random academic departments from what are currently different universities, so gaining economies of scale. Potential history students would be unlikely to be interested in a physics course, so why make them apply to an institution teaching a range of subjects? Let academic faculties do their own things in teaching and research, paying for the support services they need from the fees they receive, from whichever providers of services and infrastructure can offer the best deal. The academic units that prove to be good at operating in this new environment will grow, others will fail, but overall students, and some staff members, will benefit. The comprehensive, unitary university, went the argument, was a carry-over from the days of small, elite institutions, outdated in today’s mass higher education environment, and missed important efficiency gains. Modern corporations generally outsource non-core functions such as logistics and property services; academic units could do likewise. (Older readers may recall that the late Charles Handy described the unbundled corporation, employing a minimal group of core staff, on these lines.)

The case for the break-up of British Rail in the mid-1990s was, as I recall, less sophisticated than this, relying largely on lazy thinking about the supposed bureaucratic inflexibilities of state-owned businesses. There was certainly no suggestion then of state rail companies from other European countries becoming shareholders in the new UK train companies, in most cases receiving substantial subsidies from British taxpayers. The results of unbundling in the rail industry were on display during my recent prolonged stay at Waverley station: what privatisation had apparently overlooked is that railways are network organisations, where each element interacts with many others, and the failure of one ripples out across the network. Burton Clark in his 1983 classic, The Higher Education System, argued that the idea of integration was central to understanding how universities worked; they “symbolically tie together their many specialists” (p136): they are, in other words, network organisations, not simply collections of different disciplinary groups. We shall have to see if the promised Great British Rail can recapture the benefits of an integrated organisation, with managers having the responsibility for the functioning of the whole network, not just one part of it. Perhaps some university managers could offer advice.

SRHE Fellow Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.


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What is a poem doing in a literature review?

by Nguyen Phuong Le, Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan and Thang Long Nguyen

If the phrase ‘write a poem’ makes your stomach do a tiny backflip, you are in good company. The three of us came to poetry from very different places. Kathleen has been working with poetry in teaching and research for many years, across different countries and contexts. Phuong first encountered poetic inquiry while working with Kathleen as a research assistant, learning her way into the field as a newcomer. Long joined as a critical reader of this blog, bringing curiosity from outside poetry‑based research.

Those different starting points matter. None of us came to this work believing poetry was an obvious or easy fit for literature reviewing.

In our conversations, workshops, and conference sessions, we have seen friends, postgraduate students, supervisors, lecturers, and experienced researchers worry that they are ‘not creative’. Some worry their English is not ‘good enough’. Others feel uneasy because poetry sounds personal, exposing, and even childish, in a higher education context.

Our starting point is simple: using a small, low-stakes poetic process to think with literature, stay engaged, and find your way into scholarly conversation. When you do this with another person, the process can feel even more doable. You cannot get this wrong, because the point is not to produce a ‘professional’ poem.

Why poetry in a literature review, seriously?

You don’t have to write poems to review literature. Most reviews are written in conventional academic prose. But if you are doing qualitative research, you may already know that knowledge is not only built through tidy argument. It is also built through attention, resonance, discomfort, contradiction, and voice.

Literature reviews can become a performance of mastery: you read fast, extract key points, categorise, critique, cite, and move on. Although these steps seem straightforward, the focus on moving quickly and efficiently may mean we miss what texts invite us to feel, picture, and connect with. The emotional texture of reading disappears, along with much of what makes qualitative work matter: empathy, imagination, and relational engagement.

Poetry calls for slower digestion. It invites you to ask, ‘What stays with me?’. It offers a way to respond before you feel ready to produce polished academic claims. That response can later feed your analytic writing, without needing to look like academic writing at the start.

What do we mean by “collaborative feedback poetry”?

Kathleen and Phuong’s article, ‘Reimagining qualitative literature reviewing through collaborative feedback poetry’ (Pithouse-Morgan & Le, 2025), introduces the term collaborative feedback poetry to describe a literature-reviewing strategy in which people respond to academic texts through short poems and exchange poetic responses with one another.

In such a strategy, collaboration matters. Many researchers struggle not only with the literature and writing, but also with the loneliness of the process. Working alongside someone else shifts the emotional climate. You are no longer trying to “prove” that you understand. You are noticing, articulating, and learning together.

Feedback matters as much as the poem. In academic settings, feedback often points out what is missing, what is weak, and what needs to be fixed. In collaborative feedback poetry, the focus is not on correction but on extension. The poem becomes a doorway, inviting you to walk further into the text rather than retreat from it.

“But I’m not a poet!”

That’s the point.

In the first few minutes of Kathleen’s collaborative feedback poetry sessions, the atmosphere is often tense. People apologise before they write. They say they are not creative, have never written a poem, or worry that their English is not good enough.

What changes things is permission: Permission to know, from the start, that there is no way to get this wrong.

Permission to be simple.

Permission to be incomplete.

Permission to use a home language.

When that permission feels real, participants begin to read, talk, and act differently. The literature starts to feel less like a wall and more like a space they can enter – through poetry, in whatever form it takes.

Phuong has seen these hesitations surface in conference conversations and informal chats with colleagues in Vietnam. After presentations on poetry as a literature‑reviewing practice, people are often interested but quiet. Later, they admit their worry about whether there is a ‘right’ kind of poem, or that writing poetry in a second or third language will expose them as less than capable.

That hesitancy matters. So instead of defending poetry in abstract terms, we slow down and walk through a small example.

Here is one example, a short haiku:

Creative Arts Professors’ Concerns

Pandemic’s harsh fall,

professors’ struggles echo,

incomplete sonnets.

(First published in Pithouse-Morgan & Le, 2025)

Phuong wrote this haiku in response to two papers by creative arts educators in higher education: Holmgren (2018) and Meskin and van der Walt (2022). Holmgren’s paper, written before the COVID-19 pandemic, explores musical interpretation through philosophic poetic inquiry and autoethnodrama. Meskin and van der Walt’s paper, written during the pandemic, uses poetic inquiry and reciprocal found poetry to reflect on disruptions to educator-artists’ academic and creative lives.

Rather than summarising either paper, Phuong read them together and asked: ‘What feeling carries across both texts?’ The answer was interruption – teaching and creative work that could not fully unfold. This is where ‘incomplete sonnets’ came from.

The poem does not replace the literature review. Instead, it marks what stayed with the reader after reading closely. This is not (just) an artistic move, but an act of attention and relation.

When we introduce this process, we usually ask a few simple questions, such as ‘What stayed with you after reading?’ ‘Which words carry that feeling?’ ‘What happens when you space those words out on a page?’ And ‘What occurs when another person reads and responds to your poem?’

When we introduce this process, we ask readers to notice what remains with them after reading. Kathleen’s poem Growing Beyond came from that noticing: reading across texts about doctoral students’ poetic inquiry (Chan, 2003; Kang et al, 2022) and attending to what stayed with her. In their poetry, Chan and Kang et al wrote about what it felt like to be doctoral students, including experiences of isolation, marginalisation, and internal struggle. Their work highlights the restorative, reflective, and critical possibilities of poetic inquiry in higher education. The poem opens with an impulse Kathleen recognised in their writing:

A sudden compulsion,

a yearning to express,

to write poetry.

                (First published in Pithouse-Morgan & Le, 2025)

Why the collaborative element carries weight

Higher education research can be intensely individualised. Even when we are part of a student cohort or a research centre, as students or academics, we often read and write alone before submitting work for evaluation or review. Collaborative feedback poetry encourages a different kind of scholarly space. The goal is not to show you are clever, but to practise staying with ideas and emotions in the supportive presence of another.

That matters for students and academics at different levels, and for supervisors and educators trying to teach literature reviewing without turning it into a fear-fest. It also matters for multilingual writers, who are too often made to feel that academic voice counts only when it sounds like confident English.

Collaboration does not remove difficulty; it changes what difficulty feels like. You are not stranded in it. You are accompanied. To us, this companionship feels more welcoming than working alone, not least because, like many of you, we are also trying to find and express our voices within the wider literature.

A takeaway for you

If you want to try this, keep it small. Choose one article. Give yourself ten minutes to jot down words that come to mind as you read, and select phrases from the text that grab your attention. Shape these into a short poem, in any form, with space around the words. Share it with someone you trust. Ask them to respond – not by grading it, but by writing back with their own short poem. Then briefly discuss what the poems say and why that matters.

If you leave with just one idea, let it be this: literature reviewing is not only about demonstrating coverage. It is also about cultivating relationships with ideas, voices, emotions, and sometimes with each other. Collaborative feedback poetry is one way to make these relationships visible and accessible.

By now, we hope you feel encouraged to step into poetic literature reviewing in ways that feel doable and enjoyable. With baby steps, of course.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust through the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Scheme. (Grant holder: Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan).

Nguyen Phuong Le is a lecturer in English Education at Hanoi National University of Education, Vietnam. She is a graduate of the Master of Arts in Digital Teaching and Learning at the University of Nottingham, UK, and the Bachelor of Arts in English at Northern Kentucky University, US. Passionate about digital education and literature, she has held various positions in research, teaching, and learning across higher education and educational organisations.

Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan is a Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, UK, and an honorary professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She focuses on professional learning and supporting professionals as self-reflexive, creative learners. Passionate about arts-inspired research and teaching, especially using poetic methods, she co-convenes the British Educational Research Association’s Arts-Based Educational Research group.

Thang Long Nguyen is currently a student of the Master of Arts in Sociology at University College Dublin, Ireland. Graduated from Doshisha University in Japan with a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts, he has an interdisciplinary interest in themes of nationalism. Still, he is deeply concerned with the progress of education in social sciences and humanities in his home country, Vietnam.

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Weekend read: What you need to know to make sense of the row about student loans

by Rob Cuthbert

In January and February the mainstream media were full of stories about the unfairness of student loans and the burdens on graduates facing huge debts and effective tax rates of more than 50%. They cut through in a way that the long-running stories about universities’ financial problems had not, and even dominated Parliamentary questions to the Prime Minister (PMQs) on 25 February 2026. But student loan repayments and universities’ financial problems are two sides of the same coin – how to finance mass higher education. The political debate about student loans is a case study in how almost everyone who didn’t know enough got almost everything wrong at first, until more realism gradually emerged.

Under Labour governments from 1997 there was a heated but, by comparison, measured debate about the costs of higher education, and who should pay for it. As HE participation rates soared from 10% towards 40-50% the international consensus was that it was reasonable for students or graduates to bear some of the cost. Higher education benefited society but also individuals who enjoyed a ‘graduate premium’ of higher lifelong earnings. Nevertheless, when the £1000 undergraduate tuition fee was raised to £3000 in 2003 it nearly brought down the Labour government. That probably represented about half of the total cost at that time. Students were of course vehemently opposed to fees, but for some in HE it felt about right to share the costs equally between students and general taxation.

Demand for HE continued to rise but total costs were controlled because government still determined total student numbers. Then came the Coalition government of 2011 with its determination to make higher education a market. The Liberal Democrats reversed their pre-election pledge to abolish student fees, instead agreeing as part of the coalition to triple fees to £9000. And government abolished its control on total student numbers. Universities Minister David Willetts claimed that student choice would “drive up quality”, but he, almost alone, expected a spectrum of fees from £6000-9000 to emerge. Everyone else realised that price would be the loudest signal of quality, and almost every university went for £9000.

The £9000 fee probably covered most of the costs of undergraduate tuition, although some grant funding remained for specialist high-cost courses, and Oxbridge complained that for them £13000 was the break-even figure. £9000 became the highest nationwide tuition fee in the world, and England still enjoys that dubious world-leading position. To keep higher education accessible to all, in theory at least, new arrangements were needed to make HE affordable at the point of delivery, with the cost being partly paid by students after graduation.

Under the new student loan system graduates would start to make repayments once their salary was above a specified threshold. Their debt would increase at a specified rate additional to the Retail Prices Index (RPI). The total repayments each month were capped, so most graduates would never repay their total debt, but any remaining debt was wiped out after 30 years. The explicit intention was that both fees and salary thresholds would rise with inflation.

This means that student loans are not like commercial loans. The system was never designed to get all the money back. It was designed to be progressive, like income tax, so that among graduates “those with the broadest shoulders”, as the Prime Minister likes to say, should bear a greater share of the repayment burden. In 2012 it was intended that the system should deliver about 72% of the total cost in repayments. The unmet cost (government subsidy) was known as the Resource Accounting and Budgeting (RAB) charge.

Almost immediately the RAB charge began to rise above its planned level, and the government soon found it necessary to restrict enrolments in many new ‘challenger’ institutions, which were providing courses of debatable quality, mostly in business and management, mostly in London. Far from driving up quality, student choice seemed to be driving it down. But these problems paled into insignificance as the economy continued on its path of sluggish low growth. To make things worse, government had to abandon a “fiscal illusion” in government accounting, as the Office for National Statistics forced a justified change which put more costs onto current balance sheets rather than allowing them to be deferred for many years. For a while, the fact that interest rates were near zero concealed the punitive possibilities of debt levels and loan repayments, but then government – facing budgetary pressure – decided to freeze thresholds and change repayment terms. (Jim Dickinson’s Wonkhe blog on 2 February 2026 was a detailed explanation of how we got to where we are). Interest rates rose to 3-4% but government persisted with the use of RPI + 3% as the loan interest rate, even though for almost every other purpose it used the lower figure of CPI (consumer prices index). The current outcry on loans became inevitable; indeed, it had even been predicted by Nick Hillman, one of the architects of the loan system, who wrote in a 2014 Guardian article: “… come with me to the election of 2030. Those who began university when fees went up to £9,000 in 2012 will be in their mid-thirties by then. That is the average age of a first-time homebuyer and the typical age for female graduates to have their first child. By then, there will be millions of voters who owe large sums to the Student Loans Company but who need money for nappies and toys, not to mention childcare and mortgages. So, however reasonable student loans look on paper now, the graduates of tomorrow could end up a powerful electoral force.”

Meanwhile, some of the graduates of yesterday were quick to ride the coat-tails of the loans debate and cry “more means worse”, even as all the more successful world economies continue in the opposite direction. Often mentioned but never identified, ‘Mickey Mouse courses’ also took a supposed share of the blame, despite expert commentators like David Kernohan of Wonkhe pointing out the extreme difficulty of identifying them in ways that government or the regulator could operationalise. The Labour government adjusted its stance on exactly what the country needs with some vaguely quantified assertions about skills in its White Paper, and former Skills Minister Robert Halfon popped up on Times Radio on 14 February 2026 to argue, as he always did, for more apprenticeships. Acknowledging employers’ decades-long unwillingness to pay for training, he suggested they should be ‘incentivised’ with £1billion of public money. But even with public funding for employers’ costs, vocational training apprenticeships will mostly remain a great idea ‘for other people’s children’, as Alison Wolf once witheringly put it. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch got the kind of publicity she probably hoped for as she proposed in an ITV interview to help Plan 2 graduates by reducing interest rates, even as personal finance guru Martin Lewis pointed out this would only help the richest graduates, and the way to help people was by unfreezing the salary thresholds at which the higher repayments kicked in. He apologised for gatecrashing the interview, but he was quite right, and understandably frustrated. Badenoch said this could be afforded by removing 100,000 students on ‘low quality’ courses and using the consequent savings. Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott, under pressure from the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, waxed lyrical about LEO data on graduate salaries and suggested that Creative Arts courses were low quality and should feature in the 100,000 reduction. She refused to say that university closures could be ruled out, but there was, of course, no coherent plan for the supposed reductions and their effects on local economies, especially in regions where salaries are lower.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was unabashed and led with the topic at PMQs on 25 February 2026 and Jim Dickinson blogged the same day for Wonkhe, pointing out the problems with most of the interventions from backbenchers of all parties, and noting that things will soon get worse with barely-noticed measures affecting postgraduate student support in the previous budget. Prime Minister Keir Starmer committed to a review of the loans problem, but in Times Higher Education on 27 February 2026 Helen Packer had experts queueing up to point out that: “Quick tweaks to the terms of English student loans are unlikely to satisfy disgruntled graduates and may conflict with wider plans to reform post-16 education.”

The major problems with HE finance have still not yet had equivalent mainstream recognition. In recent years the tuition fee income of universities fell from £12billion to £10billion simply through inflation and the freezing of tuition fees. 40 % of universities are reporting deficits and the majority are making staff redundant. Government has unfrozen tuition fees but then hit universities with a levy on international student fees which more than wiped out the extra income from fee increases. Visa restrictions have also hit international student enrolment and severely reduced some universities’ opportunity to compensate for the losses on home students. In 2011 Universities UK hoped that accepting the £9000 fee would rescue the HE sector from the coming austerity, but the rescue was short-lived, as fees failed to rise with inflation. Now another government faces the challenge of finding a long-term sustainable solution to the problem of funding higher education. It seems far from the top of the agenda for the embattled Starmer administration, but the media outrage over student loans might push it higher.

Successive cohorts of students have experienced various Plans for repayment. The main problem is Plan 2, affecting students who started their courses from 2012-2013 to 2022-2023. The numbers rapidly become hugely confusing, and some commentators fail to recognise even such basic issues as the need to ensure that all costs and prices are on the same base. But almost all agree that Plan 2 is unfair and should be changed.

American students have more orthodox commercial loans to pay for their tuition and in the USA the growing scale of student debt also became a major political problem. However Americans are much more accustomed to the high costs of HE: the culture encourages parents to save from birth to pay for tuition, and the taxation system rewards both savings and loan repayments. In addition, a ‘borrower defense’ program, created in 1994, allows students to get loans cancelled if they are misled by their colleges about their future employment prospects. The Obama administration began to penalise institutions, mostly for-profit institutions, which did not adequately prepare students for gainful employment which would enable them to repay their loans. Student debt rose to about $1.6trillion; by January 2025 President Biden had forgiven $183.6billion of debt, before President Trump set out to turn the clock back. In the USA the ‘graduate premium’, the advantage for graduates who earn on average higher pay than non-graduates, has continued to rise despite continuing HE expansion, whereas in the UK, almost uniquely, the premium has declined. This suggests, as Jim Dickinson has argued on Wonkhe, that the problem is one of supply rather than demand – employers will not or cannot pay more in the sluggish UK economy. Graeme Atherton (West London) pointed out in Times Higher Education on 26 February 2026 that despite Trump’s changes the US system is still more progressive than Plan 2. John Burn-Murdoch had a telling chart in his Financial Times article on 16 February 2026, ‘Is higher education still worth it is the wrong question’, showing that in the UK the graduate premium had decreased from 1997-2022 as HE numbers increased, contrary to the trends in the USA, Canada, Netherlands, France and Spain.

The problem of financing UK HE remains unsolved and the clamour of vested interests has become almost deafening. The main architect of the fees regime, David Willetts, who wrote a book about intergenerational unfairness, tried hard on Conservative Home to blame someone else while defending progressive expansion rather than reduction in HE student numbers. Alternative solutions abound, but have not yet penetrated the mainstream media debate about HE policy. Nick Barr (LSE), a longstanding expert commentator on HE finance, wrote in July 2023 about ‘A fairer way to finance tertiary education’.  There was detailed and expert analysis in Financial modelling by London Economics in March 2024. In September 2024 Tim Leunig, a former Chief Analyst at the Department for Education wrote a HEPI blog on ‘Undergraduate fees revisited’ alongside his HEPI debate paper, which promised that “Highest earners would pay the most, as is appropriate in a social insurance scheme”. The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) in April 2025 published a report asking ‘How should undergraduate degrees be funded? A collection of essays’. Mike Larkin (emeritus, Queen’s University Belfast) posted on his Total Equality for Students blog on 13 January 2025 a detailed and plausible set of proposals for reform of the present system, summarising many of the attempts to initiate debate.

Yet it is only now that the financing of HE might creep into the mainstream debate, entering through the back door of unfair student loan repayments and threatening to deliver results that may help some graduates but damage higher education even more. Nick Hillman has argued persuasively that of the three main proposed solutions to the student loans furore, one is unwise, one unaffordable, one unpalatable, and all are unfair. Nevertheless, something must be done. Former Director of Fair Access John Blake, interviewed by Nicola Woolcock in The Times on 4 February 2026, said;“…  a system that feels so suffocating to so many is fundamentally broken, no matter how many graphs about average graduate salaries we make…. I think we may need to move to a formal graduate tax. There are no popular options here, it’s not just people saying I’m in debt and it’s going up every year. Even if the system computes, it has a sense of being ridiculous when you’re in it. This system has run out of road.” Blake is Director of the new think tank The Post-18 Project. ‘The walls are closing in on our doomed student loans system’, as Jim Dickinson wrote for Wonkhe on 11 February 2026.

When it started, the student loan system was perhaps financially logical, if you accepted its progressive premise of redistribution. Repeated government tinkering in the face of extreme budgetary pressure, especially the freezing of thresholds, made it successively more and more unfair, and has now exposed the underlying psychological and emotional illogicality. The oppressive psychological impact of the loan system on graduates facing a difficult job market makes it unsustainable. So what is to be done?

If  higher education is free, poor people who don’t go to university pay for the education of rich people who do. If students pay all the cost of their higher education, as is now being widely proposed, then everyone suffers because economic growth and incentives are diminished. We need to find a halfway house which shares the cost of higher education between graduates and the wider society which benefits from HE. The immediate challenge is to find a sustainable way to preserve the progressive and redistributive nature of student finance, which is not experienced by successive cohorts of graduates as oppressive and demotivating.

The Labour government has accepted the need for a comprehensive review of how HE should be financed, but it remains a work in progress, promised but not near the top of the agenda. Short-term budget fixes like the international students’ fees levy suggest that there is limited sympathy in government for the financial plight of many universities. Previous governments of various stripes have resorted to bipartisan national inquiries (Dearing, Browne) which straddle general elections to reduce their electoral risk, and such a device cannot be ruled out this time. The danger is that, under the short-term pressure of finding a fix for the student loans problem, government will lurch into a ‘solution’ with possibly massive collateral damage to the whole HE sector, and to local economies. Government is desperate not to increase its spending and borrowing any further, and in any case has other higher priorities than HE. But a solution to student loan repayments which requires HE to contain the cost of improving the system may force the closure of a significant number of universities, with long-term and possibly irreparable damage to their local communities and economies – probably mostly in the Midlands and the North, not London and the South East. Brian Bell (King’s College London) has just been appointed principal adviser to both the PM and the Chancellor on macroeconomics and fiscal policy. He spoke at an LSE event in February about migration, where he said, discouragingly: “I’m sure we’d all like for there to be a complete rethinking of university financing, and perhaps even the university model across the UK – perhaps we shouldn’t all be teaching three-year degrees in X and Y – perhaps we should have different universities doing different things. But I see no realistic prospect of that happening.” These are hard questions with no easy answers, but too many people are getting too many things wrong about both the costs and the benefits of higher education. Let us at least start by understanding what the problem is.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.