Prelims

Half Title Page

Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

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Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: The Context of Being, Interculturality and New Knowledge Systems

EDITED BY

MARGARET KUMAR

The University of Melbourne, Australia

AND

THUSHARI WELIKALA

St George’s, University of London, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2021

Copyright © 2021 Emerald Publishing Limited

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ISBN: 978-1-80043-007-5 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-006-8 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-008-2 (Epub)

Dedication

We would like to dedicate this book to our respective families for their continued support and encouragement

Contents

List of Contributors

About the Contributors

Ms Karin Båge is an Educational Developer and researcher in sexual and reproductive health and rights at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Her responsibilities involve teaching, training as well as developing support for teachers who teach in the international classroom, with a particular focus on global health and the sustainable development goals. She also strategizes on integrating the sustainable development goal 4 on quality education in curricula and university strategy.

Professor Ronald Barnett is an Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at University College London Institute of Education, where he was a Dean and a Pro-Director. He is a past Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE). He was awarded the inaugural prize by the European Association for Educational Research for his ‘outstanding contribution to Higher Education Research, Policy and Practice’ and is the Inaugural President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the SRHE and the Higher Education Academy, and has published 35 books (several being prize-winners), written over 150 papers, given 150 keynote talks across the world and is a Consultant in the university sector. He has been cited in the literature over 20,000 times and has helped to establish the philosophy of higher education as a field of study. He has been described as ‘the master scholar of the university’.

Professor Estelle Barrett is an Honorary Professorial Fellow of the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne. She has co-edited three books with Barbara Bolt including Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (2007, 2010), as well as reviews and articles in: Cultural Studies Review; Zetesis; Real Time; Artlink; Text; Social Semiotics; Double Dialogues; Studies in Material Thinking; The International Journal of Critical Arts and the Journal of Visual Arts Practice. Her monograph, Kristeva Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts (2011), examines the relevance of the work of Julia Kristeva for the creative arts and creative arts research. Her research interests include psychoanalytical and New Materialist perspectives on art and trauma studies. Her field of practice is creative writing.

Dr Jacques Boulet has studied, worked and lived in five continents. Originally from Belgium, he obtained his Social Work Degree in 1965 and worked for three years as a volunteer in Community Development in the Congo. He lectured in Germany throughout the seventies, then studied and taught at the University of Michigan United States (US), graduating with a PhD in Social Work and in Sociology (1980–1985). From 1985 to 1996 he lectured at Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Universities (Melbourne, Australia) and started the Borderlands Cooperative in 1997, being involved in consulting work in a broad range of research projects in Social and Community Affairs. He was Founding Head of School of the OASES Graduate School for Sustainability and Social Change and Lecturer/Researcher at several universities and is an Adjunct Professor in International Development at Deakin University. He is the General Editor of the New Community, a quarterly journal.

Dr Jeanine Gregersen-Hermans is a Researcher–Practitioner and Former Pro-Vice Chancellor International at Glasgow Caledonian University. She currently is a member of the Supervisory Board of Thomas More University of Applied Sciences and connected to Zuyd University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. At Zuyd, she has joined the research centre ‘Sustainable International Business’ with a focus on sustainable behaviour and intercultural competence. She has participated in several EU-funded projects, among others as a Principal Investigator in the EU project Educational Quality for Inclusive International Programmes (EQUiiP). Her latest book is on ‘Enhancing International Programmes in Higher Education – An Educational Development Perspective’. She is an award winner of the European Association for International Education. Jeanine is a regular speaker at conferences and provides consultancy and professional development on higher education worldwide.

Dr Kevin Haines has worked in International Higher Education Programmes in the Netherlands since 1992, and has worked for the International Classroom Project at University of Groningen since 2013. He specialises in guiding university lecturers and students in international classrooms and in English-Medium Instruction. He is a co-author of the IntlUni Principles (www.intluni.eu) and was Academic Lead of the Erasmus + EQUiiP project (www.equiip.eu) between 2016 and 2019. As of 2021, he is a Deputy Director at the Centre for Academic Language and Development at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom (UK).

Professor Adrian Holliday is a Professor of Applied Linguistics and Intercultural Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, where he directs doctoral research in the critical sociology of English language education and intercultural communication. He worked in Syria and Egypt throughout the 1980s as a University Curriculum Developer. He has written about appropriate methodology, native-speakerism, qualitative research methods and intercultural communication. His 2011 book, Intercultural Communication & Ideology, Sage, sets out the basic theory of a non-essentialist, postmodern approach; and Understanding Intercultural Communication: Negotiating a Grammar of Culture, Routledge 2019, provides a detailed application of this theory to everyday life.

Dr Mahtab Janfada is a Lecturer in Language and Literacy Education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne and a Melbourne Early Career Academic Fellow. She coordinates subjects in the Master of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Master of Education programs. Her expertise is in critical and dialogic pedagogy in English for Academic Purposes, TESOL, second language curriculum, comparative education and transformative educational leadership. She was formerly an Academic at Tehran University Language Centre.

Dr Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, FRAS, is a Visiting Professor (Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan), a Visiting Fellow (University of Cambridge, UK) and a Senior Research Fellow (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London). She is also a winner of the Rama Watamull Collaborative Lectureship Award (University of Hawaii, Manoa, USA). Her research explores migration, commerce and cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean; African, Malay and Portuguese diasporas within a historical, ethnomusicological and linguistic frame. She is the author of six monographs, two edited books and one co-authored book and the Director/Producer of four ethnographic films. She graduated from the University of London with a BSc (Honours) (Economics), MSc (Finance) and obtained a PhD (Linguistics) on the ‘Indo-Portuguese of Ceylon: History, Linguistics and Literature’ from the University of Westminster. She also holds a Diploma in Piano Performance from the London College of Music.

Dr Michael Knipper is a Physician, Medical Historian and Anthropologist, trained in Germany and Spain. His research focus is on the social, cultural, legal and political determinants of migrants’ health, with a particular attention to mental health of refugees and tuberculosis. In teaching, his focus is on a historically and anthropologically grounded perspective on the social, cultural and ethical dimensions of health, with particular focus on intercultural health, internationalisation and migrant health. He developed an award winning global health curriculum at Giessen University, and is currently directing an interdisciplinary teaching program on migration and human rights.

Dr Margaret Kumar is an Honorary Senior Fellow at The University of Melbourne and Adjunct Professor at Centurion University of Technology and Management, Odisha, India. She has co-edited three books: Positioning Research. Shifting Paradigms: Interdisciplinarity and Indigeneity (2018); Framing my Name: Extending Educational Boundaries (2010); and Where Are You From? Voices in Transition (2010). Using postcolonial theory, her sole-authored book Discursivity, International Students and Representation: Walking Through Different Worlds (2011) focusses on teaching and learning practices for international students. Her field of practice involves Teaching, Clinical Practice and Educational Pedagogies; Second Language Acquisition; Multilingualism; and Postgraduate Language and Learning Academic Skills and Research Training. She has worked as Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education and as Senior Lecturer and Master of Education Coordinator at the Institute of Koorie Education at Deakin University, Australia. Her research interests include new knowledge systems, research methodologies, internationalisation of curricula, global literacies, conceptualisation of Being and interculturality. Presently, she is teaching language and literacy subjects, doing research and postgraduate supervision in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Australia.

Dr Kiprono Langat works in the Faculty of Arts and Education, Charles Sturt University, Australia. His teaching and research focus on education contexts (pedagogical practices), literacies across the curriculum and diversities in education. He is an Advocate for school–community–university partnerships. By applying cross-cultural contexts to learning and teaching, his current research explores provision of education to refugee background learners. He supports educators to enhance meaningful intercultural education approach within an increasing interconnected and interdependent world.

Associate Professor Dr Guo-qiang Liu is an Associate Professor in Chinese studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University in Australia. His research interests include language and identity, language policy and planning, and China’s reconstruction of its national identity. He has published widely on globalisation and identity, the learning experiences of Chinese international students in Australia, Government policies and Chinese language teaching in Australia and China’s Confucius Institute initiative.

Devena Monro, PhD Candidate is a proud Butchulla and Garawa Woman of Australia, who believes in the importance of connection and relationality, to her People and Country. For well over 30 years, she involved herself in various management roles, in the areas of training, education, native title, land tenure, management and governance. Gaining experience and knowledge through her career and creating her balance of living as Aboriginal women in today’s society has not only opened her mind and understanding and her identity but most importantly opening a space in developing appropriate lifestyle choices. In 2003 in undertaking a BA in Adult Education and Community Management degree, grew within her a greater passion for assisting her people in developing communities. Feeling she needed her voice to be heard she then in 2014 successfully obtained a Master of Education and is currently undertaking a PhD with The University of Melbourne in the areas of Educational Governance and Indigenous Knowledge Systems.

Dr Ndungi wa Mungai is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Prior to taking a teaching position Ndungi worked in a variety of social work settings in Australia. The main teaching subjects include social work and human rights and social work Theory and Practice. He has published over 30 book chapters and journal articles. Recent published works include: Early Career Researcher’s Peer Support Group (2018); African Refugee Women in Australia: Domestic and Family Violence Experience (with Lydia Gitau) (2019); Afrocentric Social Work: Implications for Practice Issues (2015); Forced Eviction in Bangladesh: A Human Rights Issue (2015), (with Rezaul Islam).

Dr Jenny Murray-Jones studied a Diploma of Fine Arts at Caulfield Institute of Technology, Australia. She worked as a Graphic Designer in a private agency, newspaper and commercial printers. She was then employed at the Victorian College of Agriculture and Horticulture designing external studies material. Returning again to study at Deakin University, Australia at the Institute of Koorie Education, (now NIKERI Institute), she graduated with a double degree, Arts & Education (Secondary Visual Arts) as well as Honours gaining a 1st Class result Year 2000. She lectured at the Institute of Koorie Education Deakin University in Graphic Design, along with other Arts electives in the Creative Arts Degree. Whilst working for the Department of Education and Training in the Koorie Support Team, Geelong Office, she has further developed and presented Cultural Understanding and Safety Training to the Department of Education and Training staff across the Geelong region, currently a mandatory four-hour Professional Development for all. Presently, Dr Murray-Jones co-ordinates the Creative Arts Faculty at NIKERI Institute.

Dr Deborah Padfield is a Visual Artist, Senior Lecturer in Arts & Health Humanities, St. George’s, University of London and Lecturer, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (UCL). Collaborating with leading clinicians and academics, her research explores the potential of photographic images, co-created with people with pain, to facilitate doctor-patient communication. Her collaboration, perceptions of pain, with Dr Charles Pither and patients and staff from Input Pain Unit St. Thomas’ Hospital, London, in 2001, resulted in a series of publications and exhibitions. These were further developed with Prof Joanna Zakrzewska and patients and staff from University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH), resulting in on-going exhibitions, publications and films. Funded by numerous bodies including: Sciart Consortium, Arts Council England (ACE); Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC); Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects (CHIRP) UCL; and Research England’s Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), she is the recipient of many awards. Her recent edited volume Encountering Pain (Padfield & Zakrzewska 2021) is published by UCL Press. She exhibits and lectures nationally and internationally and is a Council Member/Trustee of the Association for Medical Humanities (AMH).

Dr Raman Preet is a Research Coordinator at Umeå University, Sweden. She is a Dental and Global Public Health Professional trained in India, United Kingdom (UK) and Sweden. Her research interests are in the inclusion of oral health and gender perspectives in global health. As a teacher, she meets many professionals groups; teaches diverse aspects of global health to medical students, child oral health to dental students and collaboration/research management to public health students. Raman is the co-coordinator of EU-H2020-funded international research consortium, ZikaPLAN, hosted by Umeå University. She is a Member of the Swedish Medical Society’s Committee for Global health.

Dr Fengqi Qian is a Cultural Historian. She received her PhD in cultural heritage at Deakin University, Australia. Her research interests are in history, cultural heritage and memory studies, with special focus on China. She participated as the Investigator in three research projects on cultural heritage interpretation and management in Asia and the Pacific, funded by the Australian government. In recent years, her research has also included cultural understandings in the multicultural education environment. Her research has been published widely in book chapters and peer-reviewed journals in these areas. She lectures in Chinese studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Australia.

Dr Namrata Sharma is on the faculty of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, State University of New York, USA. She is an Expert with the United Nations’ Harmony with Nature Knowledge Network. She is also an International Education Consultant, and on the boards of various research centres. Her scholarly contributions have appeared in several journals, and she has authored several books including Value-creating Global Citizenship Education for Sustainable Development: Strategies and Approaches (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Dr Joram Tarusarira is an Assistant Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding and the Director of the Centre for Religion, Conflict and Globalization at the University of Groningen. His research focusses on religion, conflict, peacebuilding and conflict transformation, post-conflict reconciliation and the sacred in climate conflicts. He is the author of Reconciliation and Religio-political Non-conformism in Zimbabwe and co-editor (with Ezra Chitando) of Religion and Human Security in Africa (2020) and Themes in Religion and Human Security in Africa (2021).

Professor Sheila Trahar is a Professor Emerita of International Higher Education, University of Bristol. The integration of the two interdependent concepts of internationalisation of higher education and social justice in higher education has long been the focus of her intellectual scholarship and her work is innovative in the field for its use of narrative inquiry and autoethnography. From 2016 to 2019, she was a Co-investigator on the ESRC/Newton Fund Southern African Rurality into Higher Education (SARiHE) project that investigated, with three South African universities, the transition of students from deep rural areas of South Africa into higher education.

Dr Jennifer Valcke is an Educational Developer at Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, Sweden. Her role includes teaching, training and advising on issues related to international/intercultural education and English-Medium Instruction. She provides support and prepares teaching staff for multilingual and multicultural learning spaces; and she provides support for educational leaders to implement KI’s internationalisation strategy.

Dr Thushari Welikala is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education Innovation and Development at the Institute of Medical and Biomedical Education at St George’s, University of London and a Visiting Lecturer at the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine at King’s College London. She has developed a research background in internationalisation and intercultural aspects of teaching and learning. Her expertise in the area of internationalisation has been shared with national and international contexts of higher education through her research, publications and consultancy work. She also focuses on how strategies and policies on inclusion can lead to exclusion in education. She takes a socio-politically situated approach to researching international/intercultural aspects of learning and teaching and developed the concept of ‘cultural scripts for learning and teaching in higher education’. She has been invited by national and international organisations to deliver talks on internationalisation. She is an ordinary member of the Executive Committee of the British Association for International and Comparative Education.

Dr Mary Wickenden is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, United Kingdom (UK). Initially educated as a Speech and Language Therapist, she subsequently trained as a Medical and Social Anthropologist developing a particular interest in disability and chronic illness. She has worked extensively in South Asia and East/Southern Africa exploring the lives and experiences of children and adults with disabilities in rural and urban settings, using qualitative participatory approaches to hear their perspectives. Current research interests include: developing disability inclusive participatory methodologies, experiences of families of disabled or chronically ill children or adults, relationships between disability and poverty, participatory evaluation of intersections between disability and other identities, sexuality/sexual abuse of disabled people, body/mind relationships and mainstreaming of disability inclusive perspectives into broader teaching and research agendas.

Foreword

Skilfully edited and guided by two highly experienced and deeply expert scholars, Dr Margaret Kumar and Dr Thushari Welikala, this is a book that, to put it colloquially, really ‘hangs together’, that is to say a book that is cohesive and coherent in its content and the spirit of its message. Essentially what Kumar and Welikala have managed to do so well here is to perform what they proclaim, to be what they do. Knowledge, and the systems into which knowledge is organised, are notions that have long been central to the social sciences and humanities, in education and in various other academic disciplines. Being, however, or asking questions about what it means ‘to be’, has by contrast been subsumed and sometimes smuggled into our sense what it is to know and what it means to interact across cultures. The focus of this book goes to the heart of ideas related to Being, which have been half-posed and part-tackled for decades.

How can something so wide-ranging in its ambition and dealing with three concepts of great complexity, written by diverse authors from different perspectives, actually cohere? Principally because of a coherent conception, expert guidance provided to the contributors and expert editing. The editors, like the contributors, are perfectly selected for their roles. Dr Kumar is attached to Centurion University of Technology and Management at Odisha in India and Senior Fellow (Hon) at The University of Melbourne. She has not only observed and studied the critical themes of this book, but has lived them, taught them and reflected on them, deeply and for an extended time. As an academic, a research supervisor, lecturer, prolific author and reflective scholar, Dr Kumar brings a wealth of cultural and educational experience with Indigenous societies and diverse knowledge systems to bear on the complex issues raised in contemporary higher education. For Dr Kumar facilitating communication within and among different educational, cultural and individual groups, not only requires performativity in negotiation and awareness of difference, but also reflection on systems of difference and the problems of teaching, learning and mediation in the contemporary world.

I have had the pleasure of working with Dr Kumar for many years and I am constantly impressed by the scope of her vision for transforming how we teach and how people learn to generate a fairer and more effective educational practice. This reforming mission for higher education is for an envisaged world, which we can only imagine and aspire to achieve at present. But we must prepare for this imagined world in which epistemological principles are more democratic, negotiated and complete compared to current inequalities.

Dr Thushari Welikala is Senior Lecturer in higher education at the Institute of Medical and Biomedical Education at St George’s University of London. Her profound suitability for the challenge contained in the chapters of this book comes from her roles as Director of Continuing Educational Development at the Centre for Innovation and Development in Education at St George’s. Here she contributes to improving professionalism and generally to make teaching and learning more effective. In all this she imagines and creates practices of education that are, as this book proclaims and delivers, responsive to the potential multicultural, multilingual and multisemiotic, superdiverse societies we inhabit today. Whether it is life sciences, medicine, or language, Dr Thushari, clearly understands, from practice, praxis and theory, from writing and teaching, that internationalisation and interculturalism in learning and teaching, mean profound changes to how we conceive of knowledge itself. It also means changes to concepts of who learners and teachers are, and how their engagement in processes of teaching and learning change and affect all participants. Dr Thushari is also able to inform her reflections with an acute sensitivity to comparative education research, so that how ‘difference’ is conceived in different places is itself an issue for interrogation and reflection, comparison and study.

The inevitably interdisciplinary character of this book is already present in the academic and professional trajectories of its editorial partnership. In today’s higher education, more than ever before, old and new ‘Beings’ enter and are given life in educational settings where intercultural encounter is normal. However, the specific elements, such as the combination of languages, literacies, semiotic practices, desires and assumptions, that combine in higher education today are not ones for which history can offer much guidance. Too much is new and uncharted in what we do that unique interactions arise in contemporary global education and so new knowledges need to be generated. These new knowledges are organised into New Knowledge Systems which reflect the different geographic and disciplinary backgrounds of learners and teachers, and so provide a multitude of trajectories into and from teaching, learning and research.

This brave book looks to deepen these everyday encounters in higher education by looking squarely into its deepest corners: the conceptualisation of Being, Interculturality and New Knowledge Systems. Because these concepts are interrogated from a variety of personal experiences the collective impact of the chapters forces the reader to see not just an abstract and philosophical idea of the concept of ‘Being’ or ‘to be’, and not just concepts of the capitalised Intercultural or New Knowledge Systems. Instead, the reader is forced to confront definitions and extrapolations of these important concepts in the concrete lived experience, and even the psychological personalities, of individuals. Being, at its centre, and perhaps the least discussed concept in recent history, is therefore instantiated in a range of communities and personal dispositions, cultures and professional activities. There are many ways to be, and many ways to think about how to be, and these are never far from how we forge and form other educationally relevant concepts which we define and discuss much more often.

I have the impression that today ‘culture’ does a lot of work in a range of fields. The culture concept, or a concept of culture, is recruited to explain failures to communicate and failures to understand. I can recall police departments, hospitals and other institutions apologising for ‘cultural problems’ in their interactions with the public, often with the new publics of minority populations who are asserting their rights not to be ignored, assimilated and overlooked. But culture as an adjective describing how any human system works collectively, and what its values and symbols predispose it to do, is employed even more widely. Perhaps it is true to say that today the culture concept suffers from too much exposure and diffusion; that it does too much work.

The same cannot be said of Being, which is far too little discussed and far too little reflected upon. Too much about what it means ‘to be’ is taken for granted or totally ignored. At least in educational institutions of superdiverse societies any kind of human interacting across differences must come up across different notions of Being and its many cultural manifestations. Yet the Being concept is hardly noticed and rarely poked at conceptually. Much less commonly than ‘culture’ is the concept of Being and the multiple ways ‘to be’ a human subject, teased out and talked about. Redressing this paucity of attention is what this book aims to achieve. Foregrounding Being in cultural discussion moves towards an active representation of culture, whereas it is often defined as closed and homogenous within interculturality. Often the limitations injected into the way culture informs policy and practice in education end up raising barriers, foregrounding separation and even fostering segregation behind superficial ‘difference’, when in fact most human interactions are in some sense deeply cross-cultural. The dynamic and non-essentialist conception of Being that pervades the chapters of this book allow us to see to new horizons and to review what we might have overworked in the past in a richer light.

The narratives that form the bulk of the book discuss radically different processes of interaction, but they are based on a shared critical realist view of knowledge and how it is constructed. The authors look with a critical eye at relevant academic writing and theories, and at real world problems, to explore different knowledge systems in interaction. Some knowledge systems they address are emergent, others are dominant, some are oppressed and repudiated, while others are arrogant and wield the power of hegemonic prevailing. All people, as individuals, and all Peoples, as groups, have knowledge. Individual items of knowledge are drawn from and carry residues or traces of the ‘systems’ from which cognition is drawn. This is the essential message of the compelling writing in this book and it is for all of us in higher education who teach and research immersed in the encounters of migration, indigeneity, mobility and knowledge creation.

We are being asked to look in and at ourselves, at what we know, how we know what we know, what we don’t know that others know, and whether we know that we don’t know. These kinds of searching processes can help us to know more deeply, more democratically, and more productively, to see our learners as participants with us in shared discovery. The aim is to help guide our stressed societies to a more collaboratively interacting, and just, deliberation of our increasingly shared life. To help us to teach more effectively, to research more productively in collaborations, and to produce the professionals who deliver services to society more attuned to living in a world of expanding and deepening acceptance.

I think this book succeeds very well in its generous invitation to us to critically engage with stories that problematise the familiar and familiarise the strange. At the very least the book asks us to acknowledge the legitimate and already present existence of the different, to not judge it strange, and to do all this without recourse to exotica or hierarchy.

Because the three main concepts recur throughout the writing, they help the book to ‘hang together’. While the book is about education, and specifically higher education, and therefore about teaching and learning, the pedagogical and disciplinary scope of its central concepts of Being, Interculturality and New Knowledge Systems, percolate much more widely. They reach into global health (in the era of COVID no less), into psychology and subjectivity, into linguistic and multiple language ecologies, into settings of postcolonial accommodation and also within the centres from various colonisation processes originated.

For all these reasons the book will appeal across academia, in university disciplines as much as college and professional curriculums, to researchers and practitioners from multiple scholarly backgrounds. I can see people in academic support activities and also medical practitioners of diverse kinds benefitting. For immigrant, tribal, Indigenous and First Nations people engaged in taking up new openings to teach better, to teach more democratically, or to reclaim space taken from them, and who want to design and deliver more effective and more just education, the book is a rich repository of ideas, perspectives and reflections.

At its base, the book and all authors want to improve education and enrich knowledge through new and sometimes challenging perspectives. In a more active stance the book’s contributors, if I can generalise across their differences, want to inject into education a message of the significance of the three concepts and link this to an ambition of repairing injury, past damage and collective limitation. In effect the book opens a civilisational dialogue about human mentalities in higher education.

Joseph Lo Bianco, AM, FAHA

Professor Emeritus

The University of Melbourne, Australia