Learning and Teaching (LATISS)

This issue of Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences features authors from the UK, Denmark, Germany and the United States. They write about three aspects of teaching and learning – through the senses in Anthropology, information literacy among postgraduates in Politics and International Relations, and student mentoring – and about three aspects of governance and collegiality – the current state of universities, academic career development, and tempered resistance in defence of shared governance.

We live in multisensorial environments where tacit knowledge, from sensory perception and emotion, is key to navigating and making meaning of the world. Yet higher education heavily favours cognitive knowledge as a medium of instruction and learning, based on pedagogical concepts of knowing educator and learning student, leading to a hierarchy of intelligences. Explicitly incorporating sensory knowledge into teaching and learning practice enables students to become experts in their field, and it is the combination of sensory and cognitive knowledge that enriches learning. We explore the links between sensory perception, emotion and cognition through an urban anthropology lecture and a workshop that enable students to connect popular music with urban theory. This demonstrates the potential to incorporate sensory teaching and learning into other disciplines.

We theorise and illustrate the deinstitutionalisation process that universities are currently undergoing. This deinstitutionalisation process is triggered by a loss of moral values that have formed the basis of a certain self-description and self-identity of the university as an institution for more than a century. It manifests itself in certain funerary practices that are adopted to veil, take advantage of, or cope with this loss. We look in particular at three funerary practices. First, we highlight the increasing investments in branding and marketing activities and their impact on the image of universities. Furthermore, we explore shifts in governance and the authoritarian turn in university leadership. Third, we will take a closer look at expressions of dissatisfaction and dissent among its members. In the remainder, we will reflect on the future(s) of universities at this critical juncture.

In a relentless pursuit of ‘excellence’, academic communities are facing challenges of loneliness, burnout, loss of motivation and lack of legitimacy. How should we rethink career development in research? Traditionally, ‘talent’ (picked locally or acquired externally) is hired into positions with an expectation to perform along similar and standardised norms; we argue for more diverse and individual approaches to academic careers as part of academic citizenship. We outline a career programme for scientists and academic leaders developed by professors at the University of Copenhagen. We describe the programme's structure, content and outcomes, and evaluate the participant's gains from the first two rounds, each lasting ten months. We posit that senior scholars and top researchers can be drivers of creativity and academic leadership training across universities – a task that ideally should be part of their tenure.

Shared governance (SG), the joint responsibility of administration, faculty and trustees to govern, is one of the most distinctive features of US universities. However, in recent years, neoliberal reform efforts have undermined its practice. This article examines how the faculty senate of a university resisted neoliberal changes to reassert SG. Drawing on an autoethnographic account from the faculty senate floor over four years, supplemented by other data sources, the authors examine how senate resistance evolved in response to control mechanisms employed by the administration and the trustees. This article's primary contribution is presenting ‘tempered resistance’ as a viable ‘middle’ way – between acquiescence and radicalism – to confront the neoliberalisation of universities. This article underscores the importance of collective faculty voice in safeguarding the University's mission and uplifting campus morale.

As ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have swept into the world of higher education, more attention than usual is being paid to the way in which students behave in relation to information. One claim is that some students are not using AI-generated material with acceptable levels of care and ethical attention. This article does not test this accusation. Rather, it explores the notion on which this argument rests, namely that experienced students know how to respond appropriately to any piece of information, AI-based or not. In this article we assess this assumption through a study of the information behaviours of a cohort of students who ought to be amongst the most sophisticated in terms of their relationship with information: taught postgraduate students (from two universities) studying Politics and International Relations.

The transition from school to university can be overwhelming for some students. Mentoring schemes provide guidance and support during this transitional period of change in their lives, helping students adjust to the academic, social, and personal challenges that begin to face them. This qualitative research aims to explore the experience of first-year students and student mentors of the student mentoring scheme in a UK university. Online, semi-structured interviews were conducted. Thematic analysis identified a number of themes, which are discussed in relation to existing literature. Despite the small sample size, the findings identify strengths of the scheme and areas for improvement to be considered.