Faculty of Education & Society

The higher education landscape is rapidly evolving as universities worldwide respond to multiple pressures. Changes to funding, increasing competition, rising student demand for flexibility and value, and institutions’ shifting role in society threaten their stability. Successful universities will innovate to survive these changes, with opportunities centered on (i) connecting with students via online learning, (ii) collaborating with peer institutions, and (iii) forging external partnerships to improve course relevance and offer practical experience. Graduate education in environmental conservation is ideally placed to benefit from innovation in higher education, as an expanding vocational discipline balancing global perspective with local understanding and practical relevance.
Online learning lures universities with the potential to decouple the link between cost and quality in education and to reach a wider student body. But online learning offers further possibilities: it can also build student engagement through connectivity, increase flexibility in teaching and learning, and offer new pedagogy to promote active learning and student cooperation.
Similarly, university collaboration and external partnerships have more potential than is often exploited today. As well as increasing access to shared funding, students, tutors and learning; collaboration can also forge global student connections and widen discussions. Further, partnerships with organisations such as UN agencies can create student placements and offer input into course materials, adding credibility, student employability and practical relevance.
These innovations in environmental conservation graduate education will help to bridge the gap between academic learning and conservation practice. Institutions will foster inter-departmental teaching, inter-university course swaps, or entirely new multi-university graduate programmes delivered via an online hub. The adaptability and collaborative nature of future graduate learning will enable institutions to meet their rising demands and challenges and also benefit the globally focused yet locally relevant nature of environmental conservation.

International partnerships between universities, facilitated by online pedagogies, have great potential to bring together students and teachers from widely differing backgrounds, cultures and locations to combine global perspectives and local relevance in the widely interdisciplinary subject area of geography. However, collaboration between universities is difficult and often fails due to a lack of a shared vision, poor administrative support and difficulties with funding arrangements, and, while online teaching is rapidly expanding, its use at the graduate level is not widely utilized. We reveal the pitfalls associated with international university collaboration founded on the worry that universities are tying themselves to a long-lasting, rigid relationship that may conflict with other activities. Those universities that have surmounted these barriers to collaboration find solutions through establishing incentive structures that encourage shared teaching, apportioning finances and time to support the initiative, and agreeing set conditions for future partners to join or leave the agreement.

The week of Oct 4-10th is Dyslexia Awareness Week, when organisations promote public engagement with dyslexia, often on a specific theme. In 2021 the focus is on invisible dyslexia, including overlooked dyslexia among adults in higher education. A new study from the IOE highlights how UK university students experienced dyslexia as an often unrecognised and invisible phenomenon. The study contributes fascinating insights into students’ decisions regarding disclosure and concealment of dyslexia as an invisible identity at university and the impacts of these decisions on their self-esteem.

This paper explores the lived experience of university students with dyslexia, focusing on identity and self-esteem. The qualitative study used semi-structured interviews with five students with dyslexia and discussions with learning support tutors at four UK universities. Thematic analysis of the interview data revealed the impact of dyslexia's stigma on students' academic self-concept and self-efficacy in their studies, including how students manage stigma through decisions on when and with whom to declare dyslexia: some even rejected study support. Concealing dyslexia led to identity conflict and low self-esteem, compounding students' already low academic self-concept, particularly when dyslexia had been unrecognised through school. The study highlights significant academic, practical and identity consequences for students who hide dyslexia from their peers, subject lecturers or study support. The conclusions outline priorities to lessen dyslexia's stigma at university, increase student agency in their support and open dialogue on dyslexia, particularly important between students with dyslexia and subject lecturers. By exploring dyslexia's identity impacts and disclosure, this paper contributes to wider conversations on increasing the representation, achievement and retention of students with dyslexia.