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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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Promoting access to higher education worldwide

by Graeme Atherton

The shift to the political right in many countries in the world, including it appears the UK now, presents a new set of challenges for equitable access and success to higher education. Not that it needed any new ones. Inequalities in participation in higher education are pervasive, entrenched and low on the list of priorities of most governments. Since the early 2010s we have been working with other organisations across the world including the World Bank and UNESCO to understand the extent and nature of these inequalities but more importantly to initiate activities to address them. In 2016 working with colleagues including the late, great Geoff Whitty I undertook a project to bring together as much secondary data we could on who participates in higher education by social background across the world.

The Drawing the Global Access Map report found that in all the countries where we could find data (over 90%) higher education participation was unequal. The extent of this inequality differs but it binds together countries and higher education systems of all varieties. Following convening 2 global conferences on higher education access around the time of this report in an attempt to galvanise the global higher education community, we then launched World Access to Higher Education Day (WAHED) in 2018. The aim of WAHED was to create a vehicle that would enable universities to launch activities to address inequalities in access and success on the day in their own place. As the pandemic hit we also started a global online conference and up to 2022 over 1000 organisations from over 100 countries engaged in WAHED. We also produced research to mark the day including the All Around the World – Equity Policies Across the Globe report in 2018 which looked at policies on higher education equity in over 70 countries. The report found that only 32% of the countries surveyed have defined specific participation targets for any equity group and only 11% have formulated a comprehensive equity strategy.

WAHED played an important role as a catalyst for activism, especially in contexts where individuals or departments felt that they were acting in isolation. However, progress will be limited if efforts are restricted just to an International Day of Action. Hence, in December 2024, working again with the World Bank, UNESCO as well as Equity Practitioners in Higher Education in Australasia (EPHEA), and a number of educational foundations, we launched the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN). The aim of WAHEN is to construct an alliance for global, collective action on higher education equity and more information can be found here. It will focus on:

•              Capacity Building via the sharing, professionalisation and enhancement of practice in learning, teaching and pre-HE outreach

•              Collaboration – enabling organisations to formulate and deliver shared goals through a set of global communities of practice.

•              Convening – bringing together those from across countries and sectors to affect change in higher education through World Access to Higher Education Day.

•              Campaigning – advocating and working with policymakers and governments around the world producing research and evidence.

•              Critical thinking – creating an online space where the knowledge based on ‘what works’ in equitable access and success can be developed & shared.

It was because there was a national organisation that works to tackle inequalities in higher education in the UK, the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), that I founded and led for 13 years, that WAHED and WAHEN happened. NEON led these efforts to build a global network. There remains a large way to go for WAHEN to be sustainable and impactful. We are working intently on how to position WAHEN and how it should focus its efforts. Inequalities in access and success are locally defined. They can’t be defined from a Euro-centric perspective, and they can also only be tackled through primarily work that is regional or national. The added value of international collaboration in this area needs to be articulated, it can’t be assumed. But at the same time, nor should the default assumption be that such a network or collaboration is less required where equitable access and success is concerned than in other parts of higher education. This assumption encapsulates the very problem at hand, ie the lack of willingness to recognise the extent of these inequalities and make the changes necessary to start to address them.

The present challenges to higher education presented by the global shift to the right brings into sharp focus the consequences of a failure to deal with these inequalities. Universities and left leaning governments are unable to frame higher education as open and available to all with the potential to enter. The accusations of elitism and the threats to academic freedom etc then become an easier sell to electorates for whom higher education has never mattered, or those in their family/community. It is more important than ever then that something like WAHEN exists. It is essential that we develop the tools that give higher education systems across the world to become more equitable and to resist populist narratives, and that we do this now.

Professor Graeme Atherton is Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford.

A hybrid conference Access and Geopolitics: Next Steps in Tackling the Equity Crisis in Global Higher Education, was held on 3 June 2025 at the Department of Education in Oxford, jointly organised by WAHEN, The Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) and the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). There were almost 40 presentations on: the politics – and geopolitics – of widening participation; the challenge of financing access; private provision and higher education as a public good; populism and the equity ‘backlash’; and, the challenge of generating meaningful participation data. Speakers included: John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students, England;  Dr Jamil Salmi, global tertiary education expert; Professor Shamit Saggar, Executive Director of Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success; Professor Rachel Brooks, Professor of Higher Education, Oxford and President of the British Sociological Association; Professor Johanna Waters, Professor of Human Geography, UCL; Dr James Robson, Director of SKOPE and Associate Professor of Tertiary Education Systems, Oxford; Graeme Atherton, Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford; and Danielle Watkis, DPhil student, Department of Education, Oxford. A full record of the event will soon be available on the CGHE website.


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Bridging borders in knowledge: the internationalisation of Chinese social sciences

by Márton Demeter, Manuel Goyanes, Gergő Háló and Xin Xu

The dynamics of Chinese social sciences are shifting rapidly. As policies aim to balance domestic priorities with global integration, the interplay between China’s academic output and its international reception highlights critical challenges and opportunities. In a recent study published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education, we analyzed 8,962 publications by the top 500 most productive China-affiliated scholars in Economics, Education, and Political Science between 2016 and 2020.

Uneven impacts across disciplines

Our analysis reveals that most Chinese-authored works in these disciplines are published in Western-edited journals. Political Science publications often focus on China-specific topics, creating what may be interpreted as intellectual silos.

By contrast, Economics stands out for its significant global impact, with Chinese scholars’ publications frequently outpacing the citation rates of their Western peers. Meanwhile, Education and Political Science publications from China generally attract fewer citations compared to those from the U.S., U.K., and Germany.

Why does Economics perform so well? The field’s emphasis on data-driven, globally relevant research – addressing topics like economic policy, market dynamics, and financial crises – positions it effectively within international discourse. Substantial funding and resources further strengthen Economics’ visibility and impact.

In contrast, Education often highlights region-specific practices that may resonate less with a global audience, while Political Science is constrained by political sensitivities and limited opportunities for broad international collaboration.

Patterns of collaboration

Collaboration offers another perspective of Chinese academia’s strengths and limitations. Scholars in Economics and Education often engage in diverse partnerships, with strong connections to both Western and Asian institutions. In contrast, Political Science remains more insular, with most co-authorships occurring within mainland China. This inward focus may restrict the field’s integration into global academic conversations.

At an institutional level, hybrid collaborations – combining domestic and international partnerships – highlight China’s strategic approach to bridging local and global aspirations. However, the predominance of Western collaborators, particularly from the United States, underscores a continued reliance on established academic hubs.

The duality of “siloed internationalisation”

A significant finding of our study is the duality evident in Political Science research: while these publications often appear in international journals, their focus on China-specific issues reflects a form of “scientific nationalism”. This approach limits their global engagement, confining them to niche scholarly communities rather than positioning them as contributors to broader, international dialogues.

The “international in format but national in essence” approach underscores a broader challenge for Chinese academia. It must navigate the tension between adhering to global visibility standards while championing non-Western perspectives and priorities.

Policy and practical implications

Our findings also carry critical implications for policymakers, institutions, and global academic networks. For China, fostering more diverse collaborations – beyond traditional Western partners – can reduce overreliance on dominant paradigms and contribute to a more equitable global knowledge production system. Initiatives with an emphasis on partnerships with Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Eastern Europe, could play a key role in reshaping these dynamics.

We believe that, for the global academic community, greater inclusivity requires deliberate efforts to decenter Western paradigms. Platforms that ensure equitable participation and strategies to protect collaborations from geopolitical tensions are vital for sustaining open and impactful scientific exchange.

Looking forward

The field of Economics exemplifies how targeted investment and international integration can amplify visibility and impact. To replicate this success in Education and Political Science, expanding international collaboration and addressing thematic silos are essential. At the same time, global academic networks must also embrace diverse perspectives to ensure that voices from regions like China enrich rather than merely adapt to dominant discourses.

Importantly, in an era of geopolitical uncertainty, research can serve as a vital conduit for mutual understanding and collaboration. By prioritising equitable partnerships and sustaining global dialogue, we can work toward a more inclusive and, therefore, more resilient academic ecosystem.

Our study offers practical guidance for addressing the challenges of internationalization in Chinese social sciences, providing valuable tools for scholars, institutions, and policymakers working to advance global knowledge production.

For more details, explore our full paper:

Demeter, M, Goyanes, M. Háló, G and Xu, X (2024) ‘The Internationalisation of Chinese Social Sciences Research: Publication, Collaboration, and Citation Patterns in Economics, Education, and Political Science’ https://doi.org/10.1080/23322969.2024.2438240.

Márton Demeter is a Full Professor at the University of Public Service, Budapest at the Department of Social Communication, and he is the Head of Department for Science Strategy. He has extensively published on academic knowledge production in communication studies and beyond.

Manuel Goyanes serves as Associate Professor of Research Methods at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. His interdisciplinary work revolves around theoretically designing, and empirically testing, cutting-edge quantitative and qualitative methodological procedures to scientifically address challenging aspects of social science inquiry 

Gergő Háló, an assistant professor at the National University of Public Service Budapest, specialises in socio-critical studies of geopolitical and gender inequalities in science, academic performance, research assessment frameworks, and higher education policies.

Xin Xu is a Departmental Lecturer in Higher/Tertiary Education at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, and the deputy director of the Centre for Skills, Knowledge, and Organisational Performance (SKOPE). Her research focuses on tertiary education and the research on research.


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Five challenges for policy research on higher education

by William Locke

Higher education research has grown in recent decades. For example, the number of journal articles published on higher education has increased five-fold in the last twenty years (Seeber, 2023). More is known about higher education than ever before, but there does not seem to be a corresponding growth in higher education policymaking being influenced by this expanding evidence base (Schendel and Knobel, 2024). Indeed, higher education seems to be more or less in crisis – and even under attack – in democratic as well as authoritarian systems, and in rich as well as middle- and low-income countries. Here, I offer five interrelated challenges for policy research on higher education. No doubt, there is more to be said about each of these, and there are other challenges that could be added. Perhaps readers might like to make suggestions in the comments.

1. How to expand international connection and collaboration in an increasingly fragmented and divided world?

Schendel and Knobel (2024) argue for greater collaboration among higher education scholars in different countries and regions, and between researchers and policymakers. They also argue for the translation of knowledge from academic discourse to more accessible forms and between languages, especially to and from the lingua franca of English. They call for connections to be made between different evidence bases, contexts and ways of understanding. These collaborations and connections should not just be among scholars from countries in the ‘West’, but arise from the formation of equitable partnerships between researchers based in the Global South and North, and among those based in expanding and emerging systems. These would allow an exchange of non-Western perspectives and indigenous knowledges within the higher education research and policy communities and “a more global, multi-national, transnational or cosmopolitan optic” (Brooks, 2023, Brooks & Waters, 2022).  Journal editors, for example, should be more sensitive to the location of researchers and the substantive focus of their research (Brooks, 2023).

2. How to place local and national research in regional and international contexts for a potentially global readership?

There is also evidence that higher education research has become more international in scope in recent years (Brooks, 2023; Daenekindt & Huisman, 2020; Kehm, 2015; Kwiek, 2021; Tight, 2021). However, it is important to distinguish between an increasing number of studies of the internationalisation of higher education – often limited to student mobility between nations – and an international or comparative perspective, which may focus on national, or even local, issues but place these within a broader context. Clearly, the collaboration of researchers from different countries and regions already mentioned can help this comparative and contextualised approach, provided there is a well-developed understanding of the differences between the objects of study as well as the similarities. Loosening the dominance of the English language in international higher education research networks will help to achieve this contextualised comparison.

3. How to encourage contributions from a wider range of disciplines and theoretical approaches?

Higher education is not just a topic of study for higher education researchers. As an ‘open access’ field (Harland, 2012), it is also a focus for disciplines such as sociology, economics, business studies, political science, psychology and even geography.  As in other porous areas of the social sciences, this is to be welcomed as a way of incorporating new perspectives, concepts, theories and methodologies into the field.  While this may have led to a certain lack of interaction and integration initially (Macfarlane, 2012; Tight, 2014), the trend towards interdisciplinary scholarship can bring these different perspectives together in creative ways. After all, it is likely that more holistic, multi-disciplinary and innovative approaches will be needed to understand and address current and future challenges, such as artificial intelligence, decolonising the curriculum, academic precarity and populist critiques of universities. Topic-based networks of scholars – where the focus of study rather than the discipline is prime – can encourage this. A major task, however, is to provide space for indigenous knowledges and new ways of knowing that may challenge traditional disciplinary hierarchies and ‘Western’ epistemologies.

4. How to focus on deeper, longer-term issues without losing immediate relevance for policymaking?

On the one hand, we might ask how evidence-based higher education research is? Some of what is submitted for publication is description, commentary, impressionistic interpretation and, even, polemic. We might also ask what form might an acceptable evidence base take? Policymakers tend to look for unambiguous findings that provide clear-cut guidance for decision-making – hard data of a quantitative rather than a qualitative kind. Yet, in education, meaningful quantitative studies are harder to accomplish than in some other areas of public policy. Systematic reviews of literature and randomised control trials do not work as well in education as in medicine, for example. Do we actively seek to build the evidence base? Or do we risk creating fragmented knowledge produced by a series of short-term, small-scale, barely connected projects, based on different and incompatible theoretical and conceptual foundations or employing methodologies that cannot be scaled up?

We should also acknowledge that higher education researchers are investigating their own world. They are interested parties in the object of their studies. Their research agendas are likely to be influenced by these ‘interests’. (Many readers will be familiar with doctoral students researching areas relating to their own experiences, for example, as students or higher education employees). Researchers are often on the receiving end of many of the policies and their impacts. As a result, too much research on higher education has been based on the assumption of a golden age which is being dismantled, rather than from a forward-looking perspective that seeks to meet broader, emerging societal needs.

So, we should recognise the limitations of this expanding higher education research. To date, much of it has been small scale, short-term and dependent on consultancy-style funding. It has had a fragmented and weak institutional base. It has tended to focus on the ‘public life’ of higher education, on strategic issues and their impact, rather than the ‘up close and personal’ issues that can be uncomfortable to investigate. Some of it is only just becoming “disinterested research on reasonably long timescales, with open agendas and based on reflective and critical intellectual values and practices” (Scott, 2000: 124).

On the other hand, how realistic (or idealised) are our conceptions of policymaking and implementation? It is rarely feasible simply to extrapolate the policy implications from a given set of findings, which may simply analyse a problem rather than propose a solution. “It is not a linear, rational-analytical process of examining all the evidence, ‘reading off’ the policy implications of this and then formulating well-designed interventions guaranteed to achieve the outcomes desired” (Locke, 2009: 124). If we are to understand policymaking, and the place of research evidence within it, we have to acknowledge “…the messy realities of influence, pressure, dogma, expediency, conflict, compromise, intransigence, resistance, error, opposition and pragmatism in the policy process” (Ball, 1990: 9). There are many other factors than research findings to take into account in the world of policymaking, not least politics and political expediency (for example, unifying the party, ideology, public opinion and budgets). “A better understanding of the policy-making process and the factors that facilitate or inhibit the take-up of research findings is needed, including the role of the commissioners of research and how findings are presented to, and understood by, policymakers” (Locke, 2009: 125). 

We should also be thinking about the relations between research, policy and practice.  After all, there are gaps between policy and practice: the infamous unintended consequences of policy implementation. However, there is also the danger of slipping into a utilitarian, ‘what works’ frame. The relations between research, policy and practice are empirical matters, themselves open to research and investigation. Studies of policymaking and implementation can enlighten us about the successes and failures of particular policies in specific contexts, and the factors that influence these.  Perhaps we should be aiming for policymaking that is influenced and informed, rather than driven, by evidence? 

5. How to explore the policy implications of research findings in ways that can be useful to policymakers?

The higher education research and policy communities are not always so separate. Research commissioned by policy bodies makes up quite a large proportion of funded higher education research. Most higher education researchers want their research to have impact, and policymakers (at least below ministerial level) want evidence on which to base their policymaking. There is some movement between these worlds, but there should be more and think tanks play a critical role in mediating between the worlds of research and policy. Finally, networked governance suggests we should be looking at audiences beyond government and parliament, to include wider public engagement with research findings, which is essential to democracies.

But how far should this constructive engagement go? It is naïve to think that educational research can solve problems on its own. The relationship between research and policy has been characterized as indirect and more about ‘sensitising’ policymakers to problems than solving them. Research might be seen more as a means of helping policymakers reconsider issues, think differently, reconceptualise what the problem is, and challenge old assumptions. This suggests a more serendipitous and loose relationship between research and policy. So, perhaps we need to be more modest in our aspirations for evidence-informed policy and practice and adopt a greater degree of realism about what can be achieved.

This is an abridged version of the editorial from the latest issue of Policy Reviews in Higher Education.

William Locke is a founding Joint Editor of the journal and a recovering academic. Recently retired, he is a former Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of Melbourne, Director of the Centre for Higher Education Studies (CHES) at the UCL Institute of Education and Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). He has also had senior policy roles at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Universities UK.


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Landscapes of learning for unknown futures: presenter responses to audience questions (Assemblages Symposium)

by Karen Gravett and Tim Fawns

SRHE’s ‘Landscapes of Learning for Unknown Futures: prospects for space in higher education’ symposium series, delivered with Professor Sam Elkington and Dr Jill Dickinson, aims to foster continuous dialogue around learning spaces. Here, two of our presenters Dr Karen Gravett and Tim Fawns, reflect on some of the ideas and issues raised during the third symposium on ‘Assemblages’. This blog has been compiled by Sam Elkington, Jill Dickinson, and Rihana Suliman (SRHE Conferences and Events Manager.)

What is the role for human agency in these types of assemblages with human and non-human actors, so as not to feel helpless or a “cog” while respecting the need to de-centre the human?

Karen: Humans still have a key role within assemblages but the perspective is shifted from thinking about the relational connection between humans and nonhumans or materials. This enables us to ask new questions, for example with respect to teaching in a classroom, we might notice not just what the teacher is doing or student is doing, but how the space and objects within the class interrelate and entangle to shape learning in different ways. How do bodies and spaces work together and connect? How are relations shaped by object-space arrangements in classrooms and what inclusions or exclusions are produced as a result?

Tim: Agency is always relational, contingent on the agency of other elements. The agency of humans is constrained by the people, technologies and materials we are bound to or surrounded by. However, a complex understanding of constraint also allows for more agency, because by understanding how they are constrained, humans have more possibilities for action. We can more clearly where we can act on entangled relations. For example, by better understanding our place within a system, we can more easily see the different places where we might be able to reconfigure things to free up space to move.

The teaching approach at many HE institutions is heavily lecture-based. How does this lack of interaction with students affect the conversation we’re having around assemblages and learning space more broadly?

Karen: Teaching that does not include interactions between students and teachers or students and peers and that is transmission focused suits many of the traditional tiered teaching spaces that still dominate UK universities today. This is how we often assume teaching should ‘be done’ to students. If we think about these kinds of object-space arrangements we can see that they may not be conducive to creating meaningful dialogue, to fostering relationships, to engaging a diversity of learners, or to enabling innovative teaching to happen. Fortunately, there is also a lot of creative teaching that is happening both within and beyond these spaces that teachers can learn from. Teachers have always found ways to be subversive and also institutions are increasingly creating new and more flexible learning spaces.

Tim: I am wary of assumptions that there is no interaction in lectures. There is always interaction (and intra-action) in any educational activity; that is one of the premises of an assemblage. In this question, the lack of interaction is seen from the teacher’s point of view. It is important that we focus on what students are actually doing rather than what we assume they must be doing according to a particular teaching method. Spaces are always complex; there are always many things going on, many of which will divert from our expectations. However, the material configuration of a space (e.g. tiered lecture seating and a podium), and the scheduling of time, do impose real constraints on the activity that is likely to manifest. Within any method, we can tinker with these parameters of material and temporal configuration and, thereby, open up more possibilities for agency.

Where does collaborative learning happen in our future learning landscapes? We still seem to work in a very individualist learning mode, through assessment practices to curricula and beyond…

Karen: Yes there is a real need to move beyond values of individualism that are present within both academia and society, and to think about our relational connections and how these matter. Collaboration can happen everywhere and anywhere – via a student-staff partnership project; via dialogic modes of teaching, via group work, via walking and other creative pedagogies. Online and offline. We just have to value it and make it happen.

Tim: That our assessment processes and practices, and our formal structures of higher education, are so tightly configured around individualist learning is a challenge. However, it doesn’t change the fact that collaborative learning is inevitable and, to me, the primary form of learning, particularly if we are thinking of assemblages. As we continue to embed more collective and collaborative practices in education, such as student co-design, group work, and the integration of artificial intelligence technologies, alternative narratives will emerge that fit better with our experiences of collective learning and education. It will be fascinating to see if we adapt practices, policies and structures in response, and how the different narratives – collective and individual – will co-exist in tension and negotiation.

Some universities have created a lot of flexible collaborative classroom spaces – we find that when we create them at my institution, faculty either don’t know how to utilise them or prefer to still use them as lecture halls continuing the individualist learning.  How can we create a space that ‘entangles’ both?

Karen: I find really helpful what Diane Mulcahy (2018, p 13) says about space, that “Thinking the term ‘learning spaces’ as something we do (stage, perform, enact), rather than something we have (infrastructure) affords acknowledging the multiplicity, mutability and mutual inclusivity of spatial and pedagogic practices”. In this case educators may need support to think about how they can make and enact the classroom to become an inclusive space. In my institution this happens via conversations for example as part of our PGCLTHE or other peer observation and mentoring practices. Perhaps teachers could be supported to see different ways to teach and to learn from others who are innovating and experimenting in the classroom.

Tim: The configuration of those spaces is actually a big step forward, even if practice and culture are slow to adapt to the new possibilities. A large part of what we need to do now is share practice and engage in open conversations about new possibilities. Individualist teaching may be the bigger barrier here: if we teach as individuals not as teams, and if we don’t talk enough about what we are all doing, we will have less exposure to alternative ways of educating. I think we are then less likely to develop practices that attune to wider contexts and possibilities.

Reference

Mulcahy, Dianne (2018) ‘Assembling Spaces of Learning ‘In’ Museums and Schools: A Practice-Based Sociomaterial Perspective.’ in Spaces of Teaching and Learning, Understanding Teaching-Learning Practice, edited by Ellis, E and Goodyear, P 13–29. Singapore: Springer

Dr Karen Gravett is Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focuses on the theory-practice of higher education, and explores the areas of student engagement, belonging, and relational pedagogies. She is Director of the Language, Literacies and Learning research group, a member of the SRHE Governing Council, and a member of the editorial board for Teaching in Higher Education, and Learning, Media and Technology. Her work has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Society for Research in Higher Education, the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education, the British Association for Applied Linguistics, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her latest books are: Gravett, K. (2023) Relational Pedagogies: Connections and Mattering in Higher Education, and Kinchin, IM and Gravett, K (2022) Dominant Discourses in Higher Education.

Tim Fawns is Associate Professor at the Monash Education Academy, Monash University, Australia. Tim’s research interests are at the intersection between digital, clinical and higher education, with a particular focus on the relationship between technology and educational practice. He has recently published a book titled Online Postgraduate Education in a Postdigital World: Beyond Technology. Personal website: http://timfawns.com. Twitter: @timbocop


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The value and values of third sector collaboration for equality of opportunity

by Ruth Squire

In October 2022, as part of a foreword to the Office for Student’s consultation on ‘regulating equality of opportunity in English higher education’, the Director for Fair Access and Participation set out that he expects ‘more, and more impactful, strategic, enduring, mutually-beneficial partnerships with schools and with the third sector’ (OfS, November 2022).

The expectation has carried through into more recent guidance issued by the OfS (OfS, March 2023a), which names the third sector as potential collaborators in supporting school attainment and student outcomes. This is not a new expectation – the OfS, its predecessor organisations, and the DfE have repeatedly stressed the value of collaboration and HE providers (HEPs) collaborating with the ’third sector’ for access and participation – but it does warrant some scrutiny, as it can carry several implicit assumptions about the value and values that the ‘third sector’ can bring to access and participation. In its summary of consultation responses, the OfS notes that some respondents were ‘unsure’ whether third sector collaboration was appropriate (OfS, March 2023b), suggesting that not everyone has the same understanding or enthusiasm around these potential relationships as the OfS.

Questioning the third sector imaginary

The term ‘third sector’ (as opposed to a voluntary, community or charity sector) carries with it a lot of political history and assumptions. Organisations considered ‘third sector’ have been generally assumed to be, in some ways ‘better’ than alternatives in the public or private sectors, whether ethically or in terms of structures that make them more effective at tackling social issues (Macmillan, 2015). These organisations have been assumed to have innovation, effectiveness and (the right) values ‘baked in’ to their organisational structure. These assumptions can become particularly problematic when they are framed in opposition to the work of HEPs, whose widening access work has sometimes been criticised for making slow progress and being informed by institutions’ market interests. Rather than considering these qualities as attributes of ‘types’ of organisations or sectors, it might be better to ask what qualities we need and value in widening access and participation, and how these can be supported in all contexts. Simply ascribing qualities or values, even implicitly, to third sector organisations can frame them either as an ‘add on’ or even antidote to access and participation within HEPs – not particularly collaborative.

The examples of third sector collaboration offered by the OfS and its predecessors have tended to focus on particular ‘types’ even within the third sector – mostly social enterprises and philanthropic organisations. These are often ‘hybrid’ organisations that explicitly combine social and economic value and/or blend public and private sector practices. Among these, the Sutton Trust, with its blended focus on research, lobbying and activity delivery, and a message focused on access to the most elite professions and universities, has become the most prominent. However, the majority of non-HEP access and participation organisations do not have the resources of the Trust, nor is it appropriate for all organisations to follow this blended model of delivery. The presence of such a dominant model of ‘third sector’, which is particularly attractive and well-known among political figures, can create both opportunities and challenges for other third sector organisations, particularly in terms of advancing alternative visions of widening access and collaboration.

If we look wider than this narrow understanding of the ‘third sector’ and how it should operate, then there are a whole range of different organisations that could be and have been collaborators in access and participation. These include campaigning organisations, grassroots community organisations, parent-teacher associations or students’ unions. Collaboration with charitable and/or community organisations around widening access is not new for HEPs. Nor is it a new way of delivering on widening participation aims. However, with a dominant view of what qualifies as ‘third sector’ it is unclear whether these organisations offer the value or values expected by the OfS.

Looking more closely at the capacities and qualities of third sector collaborators can also reveal some assumptions we make about the shape of collaboration and the role of HEPs. Many third sector organisations, even those referenced as exemplars by the OfS, need to collaborate with universities to deliver their missions and to survive. However, they rarely have the security of long-term relationships that can support the effectiveness and innovation that are supposedly their essential characteristics. Examples of existing partnerships have tended to frame third sector organisations as deliverers of activity or consultants, with the HEP in control. What ‘impactful, strategic, enduring and mutually-beneficial’ looks like may require a change from current practice, questioning that power dynamic.

Values-driven organisations

The supposed neutrality and (non-partisan) values of third sector organisations working in widening participation have sometimes made them particularly attractive to political figures and to policy makers, singling these out as examples of good work. Despite values being seen as a positive quality in the work of the third sector, relatively little scrutiny has been placed on values in access and participation practice and policy more broadly. The quality of ‘good people doing good things’ is certainly not unique to the third sector, especially given that they are often the same people and same values as those working in HEPs or even the OfS.

Personal and institutional values have a core role in the enactment of widening participation in all settings. In a survey conducted with widening access professionals in 2021, personal experiences and values were a motivating factor in their roles for all respondents, regardless of the type of organisation they worked for (McCaig, Rainford & Squire, 2022). However, this is not to say that context is not important. Third sector organisations are often materially different to HEPs, not least in their relationship to widening participation policies. In that same survey, there were notable differences in how respondents described their organisations’ motivations, both within and between third sector organisations and HEPs.

There is a growing argument that we need to look more closely at the enactment of widening policy and how it is translated into practice within organisational and national contexts (Rainford, 2020; Benson-Egglenton, 2022). This is as true of third sector organisations working in this space as it is of HEPs (and of the FE colleges, employers and virtual spaces which are also often not included in policy and research). Understanding more about the different contexts in which widening participation is enacted and about those who enact it is an important component in understanding how some of the broader goals of widening participation can be achieved. We also need to pay critical attention to the different roles and capacities of organisations in the widening participation policy space, and their interests. Third sector organisations, just like HEPs, are not neutral by virtue of being charities. Values matter and they offer the potential for meaningful and enduring connections that are not based on organisation ‘type’. If we are to build the type of partnerships the OfS is calling for it will be crucial to move beyond assumptions and develop greater understanding of our similarities and differences .

Dr Ruth Squire is Evaluation and Impact Manager at Leeds Trinity University. Her PhD thesis explored the role of third sector organisations in widening participation policy and practice and she continues to research the enactment of policy, evaluation practice and widening access and participation work.


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In search of the perfect blend – debunking some myths

by Ling Xiao and Lucy Gill-Simmen

A blended learning approach has been adopted by most UK universities in response to the Covid pandemic. Institutions and higher education educators have become fully committed to and invested enormous resources in delivering such an approach. This has helped to maintain a high quality education and to some extent, to mitigate the potential dire impact of the pandemic on the students’ learning experience. This approach has no doubt accelerated a reshaping of pedagogic approaches, facilitating deep learning, autonomy, personalised learning and more. With the rapid pace of the UK’s vaccine rollout, and the semi promise by the UK Government that we’ll be back to some kind of normal by the end of June, there is hope for a possible return to campus in September, 2021.  As a result, this now marks a time when we need to reflect on what we have learned from the blended learning approach and figure out what to take forward in designing teaching and learning post-pandemic, be it hybrid or hyflex or both.

The Management Education Research Group (MERG) in the School of Business and Management at Royal Holloway, University of London recently held a symposium on ‘Reflecting on Blended Learning, What’s Next?’. It showcased blended learning examples from various universities across the UK and was followed by a panel discussion where we posed the question: what worked and what didn’t work? We found that some of our previous assumptions were brought into question and a number of myths were debunked.

Myth 1: Pre-Recorded videos should be formal and flawless

Overnight, and without any training, educators took on the role of film creators, film editors and videographers. Spending hours, days, weeks and even months developing lecture recordings from the confines of our home working spaces we were stopping, starting, re-starting, editing out the slightest imperfection. It has to be perfect, right? Not so fast.

For many institutions, recorded video is the primary delivery vehicle for blended learning content, with academics pre-recording short presentations, lectures and informal videos to complement text-based information and communication. Many of us postulated that a formal and meticulous delivery style for pre-recorded videos is required to help to maintain high quality educational materials and for students to perceive us as professionals. Academics’ personal experiences however suggest it is vital to keep the human elements, as students enjoy and engage better with a personalised delivery. A personalised style helps to build relationships with students which then provide foundations of learning. Mayer (2009) describes it as a personalisation principle of learning through video and recommends that a conversation style is preferential to a formal style for learning. This also resonates with recent insights from Harvard Business School Professor, Francesca Gino, who reflects in her webinar on the power of teaching with vulnerability in COVID-19. She explains the importance of being open, honest and transparent with students and sharing one’s own human side in order to strengthen the educator-learner bond.

Myth 2: Students enjoy learning from the comfort of their homes

Blended learning empowers students to become autonomous learners, since they can engage with their courses when real-time contact with lecturers is not possible. However, such autonomy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and turns out to be a lonely road for many students. Instead of relishing staying at home and learning when they want, some students declare they miss the structure, the sense of community and the feeling of belonging they associate with attending university in person.

Universities are more than places for learning, they serve as the centre of their communities for students. Students not only learn directly from the education but also, just as much, from interaction and collaboration with lecturers or their fellow classmates. It emerged in conversation between students and faculty that students felt it generally took longer to establish a sense of community in an online class than in a traditional face-to-face classroom but that it could be achieved. So, it’s up to us as educators to foster a sense of community amongst online learners.

Central to learning community is the concept of cooperative learning, which has been shown to promote productivity, expose students to interdisciplinary teams, foster idea generation, and to promote social interaction (Machemer, 2007). One such technique is to introduce collaborative learning opportunities, and those that reach beyond online group work and assessment – which in itself may prove problematic for learners. Instead, educators should look to develop co-creation projects such as wikis or blogs where students can come together to cocreate content together. Social annotation platforms such as Google Docs and Padlet enable students to share knowledge, develop the understanding of learning objects through collaborating on notes, commenting specific parts of materials, etc (Novak et al, 2012; Miller et al, 2018). Padlet for example has proved to be particularly popular with students for collaborative learning given its ease of use.

Myth 3 :  It makes sense to measure student engagement merely by participation metrics

After months of preparation and instructional design and preparing the perfect learning journey for students, we tend to expect students to learn and to engage in a way that we as educators perceive to be optimal for fulfilment of learning outcomes.

We all know that students learn and engage in many different ways, but we often find ourselves trawling the data and metrics to see whether students watched the videos, engaged in the readings we provided, posted on the fora we clearly labelled and participated in the mini quizzes and reflection exercises we created. However, as our hearts sink at what appears to be at times a relatively low uptake, we jump to the conclusion that students aren’t engaging. Here’s the thing:  they are, we just don’t see it. Engagement as a construct is something far more complex and multi-faceted which we can’t necessarily measure using the report logs on the VLE.

Student engagement is often labelled the “holy grail of learning” (Sinatra, Heddy and Lombardi, 2015: 1) since it correlates strongly with educational outcomes, including academic achievement and satisfaction. This can therefore lead to a level of frustration on the part of educators when engagement appears low. However, engagement comes in many forms, and in forms which are often not directly visible and/or measurable. For example, cognitive, behavioural and emotional engagement all have very different indicators which are not immediately apparent. Hence new ways of evaluating of student engagement in the blended learning environment are needed. Halverson and Graham (2019) propose a possible conceptual framework for engagement that includes cognitive and emotional indicators, offering examples of research measuring these engagement indicators in technology mediated learning contexts.

Myth 4: Technology is the make or break for blended learning

The more learning technologies we can add to our learning design, the better, right? Wrong. Some students declared the VLE has too much going on; they couldn’t keep up with all the apps and technologies they are required to work with to achieve their learning.

Although technology clearly plays a key role in the provision of education (Gibson, 2001; Watson, 2001; Gordon, 2014), it is widely acknowledged that technology should not determine but instead complement theories and practices of teaching. The onset of Covid-19 has shifted our focus to technology rather than pedagogy. For example, educators felt an immediate need for breakout room functionality: although this can be a significant function for discussion, this is not necessarily the case for disciplines such as accounting, which requires students continuously to apply techniques in order to excel at applied tasks. Pedagogy should determine technology. The chosen technology must serve a purpose and facilitate the aim of the pedagogy and should not be used as bells and whistles to make the learning environment appear more engaging. In our recent research, we provide empirical evidence for the effective pedagogical employment of Padlet to support learning and engagement (Gill-Simmen, 2021). Technology has an impact on pedagogy but should not be the driver in a blended or hybrid learning environment. Learning technologies are only applicable and of value when the right content is presented in right format and right time.

In summary, we learned these lessons for our future approach to hybrid learning:

  1. Aim for ‘human’ not perfection in instructional design
  2. Students don’t want to learn alone – create opportunities for collaborative learning
  3. Student engagement may not always be measurable – consider tools for assessing emotional, cognitive and behavioural engagement
  4. Technology should support pedagogy, not vice versa – implement only those technologies which facilitate student learning

SRHE member Dr Ling Xiao is the Director of MERG and a Senior Lecturer in Financial Management at Royal Holloway, University of London.  Follow Ling via @DrLingXiao on Twitter.

SRHE member Dr Lucy Gill-Simmen is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Royal Holloway, University of London and Program Director for Kaplan, Singapore. Follow Lucy via @lgsimmen on Twitter.

References

Gill-Simmen, L. (2021). Using ‘Padlet’ in Instructional Design to Promote Cognitive Engagement: A Case Study of UG Marketing Students, (In Press) Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education.

Machemer, P.L. (2007). Student perceptions of active learning in a large cross-disciplinary classroom, Active Learning in Higher Education, 8(1): 9-29.

Mayer, R. E. (2009). Multimedia learning Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press (2nd edn).


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Exploring notions of ‘good’ academic leadership in challenging times

by Alan Floyd

Due to the nature of academic work it is accepted that leaders cannot be effective without the support of their departmental colleagues. Consequently, academic leadership is seen as more of a collective responsibility. Arguably, ‘distributing’ and sharing leadership is even more important in universities than in other organisations as academics are well educated, largely autonomous, and trained to be highly critical, so are more likely to oppose and challenge traditional leadership models and behaviours and may need a subtler form of leadership than other occupational groups. This perceived shift in leadership power, moving from people in formal positions to the whole academic body, is important for universities as it has been shown that the leadership activity of academics outside formal leadership roles can be very influential in effecting organizational change. Such a power shift may also allow academics to discuss and decide on leadership issues in a more collegial manner, a practice more in line with the shared value systems of the academy. But what are academics’ expressed notions of ‘good’ leadership within this context?  This blog explores these issues by drawing on data from research that has explored more flexible ‘distributed’ and ‘collaborative’ models of leadership, crucially focusing on data from both leaders and the led (see Floyd, 2019; Floyd and Fung, 2017; Floyd and Fung, 2018).

From this work, it appears that academics construct ‘good’ leadership predominantly in terms of understanding and supporting others, empathy, the ability both to act with integrity and as a role model, and the willingness to engage in genuine dialogue.  Academics apparently want to see in their leaders all of these personal qualities and knowledge and understanding of the whole ecosystem of higher education and the ability to make tough decisions to make that successful when needed.

The data suggest that academics understand the need for strong academic leadership in the current higher education landscape and there is a lot of empathy for the complexities of leadership practice in these turbulent times. In addition, academics are clear that individuals cannot just ‘plough their own furrow’ without considering the overall needs of the department or institution overall. Thus, academic leadership was seen as being a collective act (Bolden et al, 2009). Shared understandings of good academic leadership included words like ‘respect’, ‘feeling valued’, ‘fairness’, ‘being realistic’, and being ‘open’ and ‘communicative’. In relation to distributed leadership practice then, it seems that academics are happy to work with leaders in achieving shared institutional goals as long as they perceive the decisions taken to be in the best interests of the group, that all people involved (those whose roles are teaching-focused as well as those who are research-focused) are treated fairly and with respect, and that leaders show effective communicate skills and engage in genuine dialogue with academics rather than just transmitting information.

In their personal accounts about the characteristics of ‘good’ academic leadership, some leaders stress the importance of having the right set of skills, while others emphasize a set of underpinning values. There is some difference in emphasis between those whose roles are predominantly focused on research and those whose main focus is student education, but interviewees typically construct a sense of needing to respect both research and teaching as vital strands of academic practice. Most also see academic leadership as necessarily negotiating the sometimes-differing needs of the institution itself and the individuals being led.

There were many similarities in our findings between the two groups. For example, from the leaders’ point of view, good academic leadership was characterised by holding ‘shared underpinning values’, ‘good listening and communication skills’, being ‘understanding’, ‘supportive’, and ‘even handed’, and ‘human’ in their relationships with academic staff.  There also appeared to be a shared understanding from both groups of the need and difficulty in ‘balancing’ institutional and individual needs.

One key theme that emerged from our data was the perceived need for appropriate career support from leaders in relation to academics’ chosen career paths. This finding suggests that the focus of development training and support activities for academics who take on leadership roles may need to be widened from traditional activities (for example, linked to managing conflict and finance) to include more discussions on individual staff development needs. Such a finding reflects the move towards more portfolio based careers for academics, with career development responsibility seemingly shifting from the institution to the individual (Floyd, 2012), and an accompanying shift in associated developmental needs for academic leaders (Floyd, 2016). More fundamentally, it also suggests the need for academic work, including research and education, to be seen as a scholarly whole (Fung, 2016), and for university leadership to be seen as a special form of academic endeavour directed at strengthening the synergies between these different areas – for the good of both the individuals themselves and their institutions. The tensions between what is deemed good for the individuals (both leaders and those who are led) and what is good for the institution lie at the heart of the challenge, and our data suggest that all parties appreciate explicit discussion about these tensions, so that shared solutions and indeed shared values and goals can be developed.

Acknowledgments

The research on which this blog is based was funded by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and undertaken with Professor Dilly Fung. I gratefully acknowledge their support. Interpretations and errors remain my own.

SRHE member Alan Floyd is Professor of Education at the University of Reading where he is also the EdD Programme Director.

References

Bolden, R, Petrov, G and Gosling, J (2009) ‘Distributed leadership in higher education: rhetoric and reality’ Educational Management, Administration and Leadership, 37(2): 257-277

Floyd, A (2012) ”Turning points’: the personal and professional circumstances that lead academics to become middle managers’ Educational Management, Administration and Leadership, 40(2): 272-284

Floyd, A (2016) ‘Supporting academic middle managers in higher education: do we care?’ Higher Education Policy, 29(2): 167-183

Floyd, A (2019) ‘Investigating the PDR process in a UK university: continuing professional development or performativity?’ Professional Development in Education, 1-15

Floyd, A, and Fung, D (2017) ‘Focusing the kaleidoscope: exploring distributed leadership in an English university’ Studies in Higher Education, 42(8): 1488-1503

Floyd, A, and Fung, D (2018) ‘Stories of leading and being led: developing collaborative relationships in an English research-intensive university’ in Gornall, L, Thomas, B and Sweetman, L (eds), Exploring consensual leadership in higher education London: Bloomsbury Academic

Fung, D (2016) ‘Strength-based scholarship and good education: the scholarship circle’ Innovations in Education and Teaching International 54(2): 101-110