Liam Phelan

Scientific thinking is more than just critical thinking. Teaching the full range of ways to think like a scientist who practices high quality science is rare. A new core subject in the Bachelor of Science at the University of Newcastle was developed to allow students to explore six different ways to thinking scientifically through understanding what high-quality science is and contrasting it with poor science and non-science (pseudoscience). Our evaluation indicates that learning about how to think scientifically and be a scientist who practices high quality science is a skill that is valued by and relevant to first year undergraduate students. An evidence-based pedagogy including active learning, participatory learning, student-centred learning, constructive alignment and quality formative and summative feedback to students can support high learning outcomes.

In the rapidly changing global higher education sector, providing a quality educational experience to students increasingly matters. Students want quality teaching and with increasing competition to attract local and international students, quality teaching has become a focus. Academic teachers have traditionally not received formal training in teaching, and although support for quality teaching and learning is increasing through centralised university schemes, these schemes are often criticised. The Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme (PATS) is a new form of Teaching and Learning professional development for academic staff to enhance teaching quality. The scheme provides a structured framework to reinvigorate courses through collegial input and guidance via a process that incorporates goal-setting exercises, peer observation of teaching and analysis of informal student feedback. In addition, workshops covering various aspects related to teaching are offered during the scheme. PATS was in...

Farmers' resilience is routinely named as an agricultural policy objective in Australia and internationally. However, uncritical use of the resilience concept, as well as the disparity observed between policy intentions and outcomes, invites careful analysis of resilience in agricultural policy. Public policy development processes vary internationally; in Australia, governments issue White Papers to articulate public policy. In this paper we examine the resilience language in the Australian government's 2015 Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper and an associated funding initiative, the Managing Farm Risk Program (MFRP). One underpinning assumption in these policy documents is that grain farmers' access to crop insurance for climate-implicated production risks, including drought, would enhance grain farmers' resilience. We argue that the engagement of the White Paper and MFRP documents with resilience is superficial and substitutes a flawed faux resilience through...

The Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme (PATS) is professional development program for academics that provides a structured framework for reinvigorating units and courses and focuses on units and their teachers. PATS was initially developed at Monash University, as a Faculty strategy to improve students’ learning experience by identifying units for targeted remediation, based on low satisfaction student evaluation reports. This driver influenced the initial design of the program, structured to provide an individual teacher with professional development opportunities and with a mentor and a defined process: planning improvement to their unit, implementing the change, and analysing peer and student feedback to measure outcomes. The PATS process has clearly defined activities (for example goal setting, peer observation of teaching, professional development workshops) and a semester-based timeframe. The purpose of a PATS program is quality improvement (QI) of a single unit; people who partici...

This chapter explores the implications of rapid, seemingly continuous change in information and communications technologies (ICTs) for HE institutions and their education missions. The chapter begins by touching on long-standing debates around technological and social determinism, and technological optimism and pessimism, before exploring ways in which ICTs are deeply and increasingly tightly woven into HE institutions and practices. The review is centred on a series of overlapping and intersecting key questions, including (i) the influence of ICTs on educational access and equity, (ii) the opportunities and limitations of autopedagogy, (iii) tightly intertwined technical, pedagogical, and industrial matters, (iv) the evolving role of ICTs in surveillance, support, safety, and pedagogy, and (v) the potential for ICTs to accelerate the push for open access to research scholarship and data. The chapter will be of interest to scholars, policy makers, and practitioners with interests at...

In this Chapter I describe and reflect on the inception and evolution of the Community of Interest (the COI) in Online Teaching, Learning and Research at the University of Newcastle, Australia. The COI was initiated in mid-2012 with support from GradSchool, the Universty’s online postgraduate coursework programs unit, as a way to bring focus to online teaching and learning at the University. The COI brings together colleagues from diverse disciplines across the University’s five faculties, the Wollotuka Institute and the English Language and Foundation Studies Centre. Further, the COI brings together both academic and professional staff. Students are also welcome, but the COI has been less effective in attracting students. The COI’s main mode of function is monthly face-to-face ‘catch ups’, with each one taking the form of a led discussion on a topic focus area proposed and/or presented by a COI participant. Since mid-2012 the COI has evolved in several ways, including ‘spinning off...

This paper presents the design and application of a major individual assessment task created in part to develop students’ capacity for lifelong assessment, a key element of lifelong learning. Additionally the task contributes to fostering a sense of community in asynchronous online learning environments. The task is a supra disciplinary report, recently trialled and now adopted for two postgraduate environmental studies courses offered online. The task design’s theoretical underpinnings are reviewed with reference to (i) lifelong assessment, (ii) the value of lifelong assessment from the perspective of environmental studies, and (iii) the importance of fostering community to support learning in online contexts. The paper describes the task’s disaggregation into three discrete stages, and the opportunities this provides for fostering community and for supporting students to engage in critical assessment of the quality of their own and their peers’ written work, through a transparent,...

The Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology was the first comprehensive and international anthology dedicated to green criminology. It presented green criminology to an international audience, described the state of the field, offered a description of a range of environmental issues of regional and global importance, and argued for continued criminological attention to environmental crimes and harms, setting an agenda for further study. In the six years since its publication, the field has continued to grow and thrive. This revised and expanded second edition of the Handbook reflects new methodological orientations, new locations of study such as Asia, Canada and South America, and new responses to environmental harms. While a number of the original chapters have been revised, the second edition offers a range of fresh chapters covering new and emerging areas of study, such as: conservation criminology, eco-feminism, environmental victimology, fracking, migration and e...

The Hunter Valley, in New South Wales, Australia, is a globally significant coal mining and exporting region. The Hunter economy's strong basis in fossil fuel production and consumption is challenged by civil society campaigns employing environmental justice discourses. This paper analyses how two civil society campaigns in the Hunter region (‘Stop T4′ and 'Groundswell’) have countered the regional hegemony of fossil fuel interests from an environmental justice perspective. However, the discursive dominance of the 'jobs versus environment’ frame hinders efforts to build solidarity amongst local environmental justice goals on the one hand, and workers and union aspirations for secure, quality jobs on the other. Long-term structural decline of global coal markets adds pressure for economic transition. We argue that campaigns to open up possibilities for transition away from fossil fuel dependency to a post-carbon society can be strengthened by engaging with the 'just transition’ discourses that are typically associated with organised labour. Doing so can create synergy for social change by aligning community and labour movement interests. Inclusive social movement partnerships around this synergy must address structural disadvantage that creates social and economic insecurity if communities are to prevail over the fossil fuel sector's hegemony.

This book explores the role of the insurance industry in contributing to, and responding to, the harms that climate change has brought and will bring either directly or indirectly. The Anthropocene signifies a new role for humankind: we are the only species that has become a driving force in the planetary system. What might criminology be in the Anthropocene? What does the Anthropocene suggest for future theory and practice of criminology? Criminology and Climate, as part of Routledge’s Criminology at the Edge Series, seeks to contribute to this research agenda by exploring differing vantage points relevant to thinking within criminology. Contemporary societies are presented with myriad intersecting and interacting climate-related harms at multiple scales. Criminology and Climate brings attention to the finance sector, with a particular focus on the insurance industry as one of its most significant components, in both generating and responding to new climate ‘harmscapes’. Bringing t...

Challenges to ensuring teaching quality in higher education give ongoing impetus to invest in teaching quality improvement. While a significant body of literature has recognised challenges faced by academics seeking to improve teaching practices, processes for developing constructive responses to identified barriers have attracted less attention. A synthesis of literature on barriers to improvement of teaching is presented and used as a framework to assist an identification of barriers. This article reports on a national Australian trial of a collegial quality development process aimed at supporting academics to both identify and surmount barriers to improving teaching quality. Evidence of the nature and extent of barriers to improving teaching was collated from data provided by 28 academics across five Australian universities. Adopting a thematic analysis approach, a broad range of perceived barriers were identified, largely consistent with barrier categories defined in the extant literature internationally. Findings reveal that, with the support of peers, participants were able to implement effective solutions to their identified barriers to improving teaching quality. This article provides a synthesis of current barriers to improve teaching and offers a collegial quality development process as a strategy to overcome these barriers.

Peer observation of teaching can provide valuable insights into effective educational practices. By adopting a developmental focus, peer observation can also provide insights into how practices might be enhanced and, importantly, how enhancements in practices might be aligned to teachers’ development goals. However, a review of peer observation of teaching undertaken at Australian universities demonstrates that observation instruments and protocols typically do not explicitly afford alignment of peers’ observations with teachers’ developmental goals. Analysis of observers’ uses of popular peer observation instruments through the deployment of the Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme through multiple institutions across Australia has informed the development and trial of a novel observation instrument and protocol design that is aligned with observer use characteristics, and provides a focus on development goals. This study will be of interest to teachers and academic developers researching and implementing goal-oriented curricular and pedagogical development through peer observation.

This study examined and compared attitudes of both students and instructors, motivated by an interest in improving the development and delivery of online oral communication learning (OOCL). Few studies have compared student and instructor attitudes toward learning technologies, and no known studies have conducted item response theory (IRT) analyses on these factors. Two independent and anonymous surveys resulted in 255 participants (124 university students, and 131 instructors). Exploratory factor analyses produced final item sets and a two-factor model for student attitudes (Technology Self-efficacy [TSE], and Positive Attitudes [PA]), and a three-factor model for instructors (TSE,

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the experiences of tertiary students learning oral presentation skills in a range of online and blended learning contexts across diverse disciplines. Design/methodology/approach – The research was designed as a “federation” of trials of diverse online oral communications assessment tasks (OOCATs). Tasks were set in ten courses offered across all five faculties at University of Newcastle, Australia. The authors collected and analysed data about students’ experiences of tasks they completed through an anonymous online survey. Findings – Students’ engagement with the task was extremely positive but also highly varied. This diversity of student experience can inform teaching, and in doing so, can support student equity. By understanding what students think hinders or facilitates their learning, and which students have these experiences, instructors are able to make adjustments to their teaching which address both real and perceived issues. Student experience in this study highlighted five very clear themes in relation to the student experience of undertaking online oral communications tasks which all benefit from nuanced responses by the instructor: relevance; capacity; technology; time; and support. Practical implications – Using well-designed OOCATs that diverge from more traditional written assessments can help students successfully engage with course content and develop oral communication skills. The student experience can be used to inform teaching by catering for different student learning styles and experience. Student centred approaches such as this allows instructors to reflect upon the assumptions they hold about their students and how they learn. This understanding can help inform adjustments to teaching approaches to support improved student experience of learning oral communications tasks. Originality/value – The importance of learning oral communication skills in tertiary education is widely acknowledged internationally, however, there is limited research on how to teach these skills online in a way that is student centred. This research makes a contribution toward addressing that gap.

There is merit in lecturers seeking students’ perspectives on their learning experiences in order to foster high quality teaching and learning: Brookfield argues that simply seeking to understand students’ experiences of their learning is a key indicator of good teaching practice. However, students’ perspectives on learning experiences can be considered feedback only when lecturers acknowledge and act on them. That is, when outputs of a course, i.e. students’ reporting of their learning experiences, are used by the lecturer as inputs into the same course in a way that changes the course. When such feedbacks are created and applied within a course’s teaching term, the feedbacks can be of immediate developmental benefit, and visibly so for students. In this paper, we report and analyse lecturers’ responses to students’ reports of their learning experiences, consistent with Brookfield’s call for teachers to use students’ perspectives to support critical reflection on their teaching. Data were collected as part of a multi-institutional trial of the Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme (PATS) across five Australian universities in 2012. The data analysed in this study comprise: (i) lecturer’s interpretations of students’ perspectives on their learning experiences; and (ii) lecturers’ decisions to vary or not vary teaching strategies and course management in response. Considering students’ reports of their learning experiences is typically a highly individualised aspect of teaching practice. In contrast, PATS creates a collegial and constructive framework in which responses to students’ experiences of teaching can be crafted. Keywords: feedback, peer assisted teaching scheme, Brookfield, student perspectives, collegiality, systems.

The Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme (PATS) provides a structured yet flexible approach to reinvigorating teaching practice in a supportive and collegial environment. This paper reports on the experiences of the multi-institutional trial of PATS conducted in five Australian universities and provides valuable information to academics and academic developers considering such a scheme.

The Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme (PATS) provides a structured yet flexible approach to reinvigorating teaching practice in a supportive and collegial environment. This paper reports on the experiences of the multi-institutional trial of PATS conducted in five Australian universities and provides valuable information to academics and academic developers considering such a scheme.

Some of the highlights and themes from the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) 2010 International Climate Adaptation Futures Conference are discussed. Some of the other issues with regards to adaptation that came up at the conference are highlighted.

This paper presents the design and application of a major individual assessment task created in part to develop students’ capacity for lifelong assessment, a key element of lifelong learning. Additionally the task contributes to fostering a sense of community in asynchronous online learning environments. The task is a supra disciplinary report, recently trialled and now adopted for two postgraduate environmental studies courses offered online. The task design’s theoretical underpinnings are reviewed with reference to (i) lifelong assessment, (ii) the value of lifelong assessment from the perspective of environmental studies, and (iii) the importance of fostering community to support learning in online contexts. The paper describes the task’s disaggregation into three discrete stages, and the opportunities this provides for fostering community and for supporting students to engage in critical assessment of the quality of their own and their peers’ written work, through a transparent, structured process of giving and receiving peer feedback.

Proposals to form an insurance mechanism to support Small Island Developing States’ adaptation to climate change were first raised in 1991. At that time, the Alliance of Small Island States proposed an international, state-based insurance framework to assist adaptation to sea level rise. After two decades, an effective agreement and institutional structure on climate change insurance is yet to be realised. However, in the last two years, insurance has resurfaced in negotiations within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process. The 2013 United Nations climate conference meeting in Warsaw created a loss and damage mechanism and reinvigorated interest in risk transfer mechanisms to assist developing countries in adapting to climate change. This article argues that an existing regional international disaster risk-pooling facility, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, offers an instructive model for a regional risk transfer mechanism to further adaptation to climate change-related extreme weather events in the Pacific. The article concludes that there is a good case, on pragmatic grounds and also under existing burden sharing principles in global climate governance, for leading developed states to take a leadership role in developing regional risk-pooling initiatives in the Pacific.

In this article, I reflect on the politics, practices and possibilities of the open educational resources (OER). OER raise important implications for current and potential students, for postsecondary education institutions, and for those currently teaching in higher education. The key questions raised by OER centre on the role of teaching in learning, the potential for a shift in societal conceptualizations of learners from didactic to autodidactic beings, and what roles teachers may play in a potentially radical broadening of access to postsecondary education.

This article discusses whether the very act of accessing online students’ experi- ences of teaching may itself foster students’ sense of belonging to a learning community. The article reports and reflects on the application of Brookfield’s critical incident questionnaire (CIQ) in postgraduate courses delivered online in 2008–2010 through the University of Newcastle in Australia. The anonymous CIQ is designed in part to access students’ views of teaching practice, and was deployed as part of an ongoing interest in quality teaching. The article makes recommendations for deploying the CIQ in online learning spaces and concludes with some reflections on unexpected opportunities thoughtful CIQ deployment may provide. The practice of sharing students’ anonymous responses may have helped to foster students’ sense of a shared learning community. This may be particularly valuable in an asynchronous online learning context where students are typically geographically isolated from one another.

This paper proposes reflexive mitigation as an ecologically effective insurance system response to dangerous anthropogenic climate change. Reflexive mitigation is an adaptive approach to mitigating climate change recognizing (1) atmospheric CO2e concentrations consistent with Earth system stability will vary over time in response to changes in the Earth system and the global economy, and in the relationship between them; and (2) relationships between the Earth system, the economy and the insurance system are evolving, and therefore understanding of them is necessarily incomplete. The paper presents a complex adaptive systems approach to anthropogenic climate change and demonstrates that the Earth system, the global economy and the insurance system are connected social–ecological systems. Current insurance system responses to anthropogenic climate change are generally adaptive and weakly mitigative rather than strongly mitigative. The paper argues successful insurance system adaptation to anthropogenic climate change depends on returning the climate to a stable, familiar and relatively predictable state: effective mitigation is therefore a necessary precondition for successful longer-term insurance system adaptation.

Market approaches to limit CO2e emissions such as carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes (ETSs) aim to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change by ascribing a financial cost to emissions. Yet such approaches have failed to establish either emissions limits or carbon prices equal to the task. We propose an approach to carbon pricing that better reflects the biogeophysical limits of the Earth system by drawing on aspects of insurance systems including forms of social insurance and the insurance industry. Our proposal achieves this by: (i) creating a financial liability link between current emissions and attributable near future losses; and (ii) applying Fraction Attributable Risk (FAR) analysis to determine the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to increased probability of experienced damaging weather events. Our proposal, a departure from current approaches to pricing CO2e emissions, has aspects that are consistent with existing forms of insurance. It requires participation by states and a small number of larger and established reinsurers. Our proposal provides both the scientific–technical capacity and the political–economic incentive to shift the anchor point for carbon prices away from pressing short-term political and economic considerations and closer to strategic ecological requirements for Earth system stability: the balance is shifted to favour changes in the global economy necessary to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change over current estimations of what is politically and economically feasible or desirable. Our proposal is an example of reflexive mitigation, grounded in complex adaptive systems theory, and centres on relationships between the Earth system, the global economy and insurance systems.