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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the development of students’ commercial awareness within the curriculum of professional accredited courses. The targeted area of study is the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) accredited property courses. This paper also discusses how the curriculum of RICS-accredited courses can be designed to successfully incorporate commercial awareness within them and suitable delivery methods for developing this within the curriculum. Commercial awareness is one of the most important employability skills, however, employers have expressed dissatisfaction with graduates’ performance in this area.

This paper presents the research findings of two sets of questionnaire surveys, as well as interviews and e-mail discussions with the course directors and current students of the RICS-accredited property courses in the UK. Descriptive analysis was used to analyse the questionnaire data. Fisher’s exact test was used to identify the statistical significance between academics’ and students’ views on the development of students’ commercial awareness as part of the RICS-accredited property courses’ curriculum. Content analysis was used to analyse the texts in the questionnaire survey, interviews and e-mail discussions.

Academics and students involved with the UK RICS-accredited property courses agreed that commercial awareness is an important employability skill in the property sector and they mostly agreed on the definitions of commercial awareness, except in their “understanding of the wider business environment”. They also agreed that commercial awareness has three components: strategic, financial and process. Academics and students agreed that the commercial awareness components and process sub-components are largely incorporated into the curriculum of RICS-accredited property courses but they have divergent opinions on the level of incorporation of strategic and financial sub-components. A suitable way to deliver commercial awareness in RICS-accredited property courses is to incorporate it into the overall curriculum, ensuring that the components of commercial awareness are closely linked to the RICS APC and match relevant competency levels. They also commented that including practical experience in the curriculum is the most useful way to develop a student’s commercial awareness.

This paper is the first to discuss the development of commercial awareness in professional accredited courses such as RICS-accredited property courses and also identifies suitable methods to enhance students’ commercial awareness as part of the curriculum. The research findings can also be applied to other professional accredited courses that have a strong vocational focus, such as nursing, engineering and accountancy. These courses are usually accredited by relevant professional organisations and students studying these courses usually plan to embark on a career in a relevant profession. The design of the course curriculum has a strong focus on equipping students with the essential competencies to develop their careers within the relevant field.

The purpose of this paper is to examine school-embedded instructional coaching as a social activity situated within a new initiative. The coaches were in their first year of implementing new standards and curriculum policy in a large urban school district in the USA.

Using activity theory as a conceptual framework, this study was a qualitative inquiry into the experiences of 20 school-embedded coaches. Data were drawn from multiple interviews over the course of a year, with a total of 49 interviews and an end-of-year questionnaire from all participants.

The study found that within the initial year, coaches had to negotiate a variety of relationships that included the overall school context, teachers, principals and their own responsibilities. While negotiating these relationships, coaches utilized a variety of strategies to accomplish their goals.

All data are self-reported, and there is a limited sample size (n=20). While the sample size may limit generalizability, all coaches in the initiative were participants in the study. By including all coaches, this study had a more complete picture of coaching during its initial year.

This study offers some suggestions that help inform the professional development of coaches.

The present study expands upon the literature by exploring the broader relationships of coaching to other stakeholders. Rather than focusing specifically on the approaches or styles of coaching, this paper focuses on the work of coaches as a social endeavor. It resituates the role of coaches within their context and reframes our understanding of the nature of coach work.

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of the use of the Delphi technique to support curriculum development with a view to enhancing existing literature on use of the technique for renewal of business course curricula.

The authors outline the Delphi process for obtaining consensus amongst a diverse expert group, provide an overview of the results of the study to demonstrate its value and present an analysis of participants’ reflections on the Delphi process experience. Drawing on participants’ reflections and the experience of using the technique the authors present a “good practice guide” for others seeking to apply the technique and discuss implications for practice and research.

Analysis of participants’ feedback identified strengths and limitations of the process. Participants perceived that the process was efficient and fostered reflection on their own practice. The technique’s capacity to draw out varied views due to absence of dominant voices was highlighted. Limitations were perceived to be restrictiveness of the process and potential inability to address varying understandings. Participant feedback suggests the process may provide a fragmented approach to curriculum design.

The findings suggest avenues for future research, including examining how the Delphi technique can be incorporated into a holistic set of curriculum design field studies that are linked and ultimately lead to a well-designed curriculum.

Current literature on the Delphi technique does not provide participants’ perspectives on the process nor researcher reflections on use of the technique. The authors address this gap and generate good practice guidelines for using the Delphi technique as a tool for curriculum renewal.

The definition of individual generic skills is problematic, despite the pressure for the development of such skills during accounting degrees coming from government and employers. This study aims to present definitions to allow academics to establish a point of reference when designing accounting curricula to encompass such skills.

The skill classification of explicit curriculum content is straightforward, and is undertaken by using content analysis to record objectives and/or tasks that are clearly stated in the curriculum documents. The classification of implicit skills was developed by setting, as clearly as possible, internal criteria that are used to determine whether a task embodied a particular behavioural skill.

The results show that not all 22 personal and interpersonal skills which should be developed during an accounting degree, according to the Australian professional accounting bodies, are in fact developed. The higher order and difficult skills of: think creatively and innovatively; handle conflict; handle challenges; handle change and empathy are not present in either the explicit or implicit curricula.

Concepts and understandings of many of the behavioural skills are abstract and a range of interpretations exists. Although the definition of each skill presented in this study is not as extensive or exhaustive as a lexicographer's compilation, this study is unique in that it offers clearer and more acceptable definitions for accounting educators to use than has previously been available.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how a consortium of universities in the Asia Pacific region are endeavouring to make a contribution to the implementation of education for sustainable development (ESD) through their participation with and the operation of the Promotion of Sustainability in Postgraduate Education and Research Net project.

The paper describes the evolutionary development of one of the projects of this network (specifically related to ESD in business schools) as the members seek to institute changes at their respective institutions at the same time as contributing to project collaboration in order to enhance the contribution to regional ESD.

The paper discusses the challenges confronting higher education institutions in the context of the decade of education for sustainable development (DESD) and finds that whilst many local actions within universities are being initiated in relation to ESD, there is insufficient cross institutional collaboration occurring to achieve the transformative agenda of ESD. In particular, universities are leaving it to individuals and departments to develop new curriculum for ESD. To overcome this, work is required at a discipline level across the higher education sector (both nationally and internationally) to support curriculum development for ESD.

Issues confronting this project and its consortium members are issues confronting many institutions of higher education (IHE) across the globe as they seek to give effect to the ramifications of ESD. The identification of issues by the project and the steps taken to overcome obstacles will be relevant to many IHE.

The challenges of ESD require not only local changes and improvements (within an organisation) but compel the connection between local and global and consequently between individual organisations and the “system” in which they operate. This applies particularly to individual universities and to the education “system” in relation to ESD, especially as there are considerable expectations of the education system to reorient and reshape our future leaders to understand and incorporate sustainability into their future careers and ways of life. Conventional and traditional approaches to curriculum development at individual universities is impeding the implementation of ESD. This project is endeavouring to develop a model for shared curriculum development which will speed up the implementation of ESD and ensure that individual universities and individual departments can focus on the transformative aspects of ESD in the curriculum.

This chapter discusses the pilot study of an Education for Sustainable Development Self-Evaluation Tool (ESD-SET), created by the Quality Enhancement Directorate (formerly the Learning and Teaching Development Unit) at Cardiff Metropolitan University, as both a means of auditing the extent to which academic programs embed ESD and a catalyst for curriculum development.

The chapter evaluates the effectiveness and usefulness of the self-evaluation for both auditing ESD and curriculum development. Responses to the self-evaluation questions by Programme Directors were analyzed and follow-up interviews carried out with the Programme Directors to explore their experiences of the tool.

Results indicate that the self-evaluation tool is fit-for-purpose as a means of auditing the integration of ESD within academic programs. The self-evaluation exercise promoted team discussion around sustainability issues and raised staff awareness and understanding of the concept of ESD and how to effectively embed sustainability-related themes within their discipline. The exercise had a transformative impact on the way some program teams approached curriculum design and delivery. There was evidence that engagement with the tool contributed to further embedding of sustainability within curricula across all disciplines involved in the pilot study.

This chapter will provide an overview of how Problem Based Learning (PBL) is used to support first year chemistry students at the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. The chapter will go on to provide an overview of the learning journey that we have undertaken over the last seven years by discussing the challenges we have encountered and by including details of how we have adapted our approach based on student and staff feedback and other considerations. The chapter is a follow up to a previously published article with a focus on the changes made since this initial publication (Williams, Woodward, Symons & Davies, 2010).

The legacy of colonisation and apartheid in South Africa has resulted in a radical challenge to the public universities. The successful #FeesMustFall campaign that took place in 2015 accentuated several aspects of post-apartheid transformation that have not been adequately attended to. The public universities are now faced with meeting the needs of students and interested parties who would like to see transformation at various levels, in particular, the decolonisation of knowledge. This paper aims to present an approach to address the decolonisation of knowledge.

Shifting universities’ approach to teaching and learning is a challenging endeavour, especially as it entails an embrace of previously ignored worldviews. Taking a metaphoric approach, an analysis of this problem is presented in systemic terms from a family therapy approach adhering to second-order cybernetics. A solution to bridging the disconnect between the participants in the decolonisation of knowledge in a South African context is presented.

Early successes were attained on the back of a therapeutic approach to meeting the needs of students who took part in curriculum and policy changes. The findings suggest that for a transformation to take place, all the participants in the university should acknowledge that the problem (which may have different forms) is a shared one and that decolonisation requires the participants to learn about other participants in the system. Reflecting on historical narratives and its present status quo from the epistemology of the directly affected parties is suggested as an indispensable step that should occur prior to the implementation of any solutions. Without the reflection process, the other members of the system may not understand the context and reasoning for the decolonisation, resulting in friction and fear, in turn mitigating the decolonisation process.

Methods of empathetically engaging people who have been discriminated against is important in the goal of restoring equality and social justice. Family therapy is presented as a vehicle for communal dialogue in a therapeutic empathetic context. This approach has value in many settings other than in the education arena.

Legacies of apartheid are still in effect in the South African public university system. Decolonising knowledge is one topic that may address social justice which helps to diffuse social tension and subsequent protest action.

Family therapy as an approach to decolonisation of knowledge and as an approach to appeasing social tension in the educational context is unique.

Empirical research on leadership for social justice is in progress in many parts of the world. The purpose of this paper is to explore principals’ school-leadership journeys in response to social-justice issues caused by specific contextual changes at times of uncertainty. It seeks to answer the following key questions: What social-justice issues do principals identify as arising from their schools’ transformation due to contextual changes? How do principals practise leadership for social justice in response to these contextual changes at different levels?

This paper is based on qualitative data from a cross-case study of two principals’ school-leadership journeys. The authors pay particular attention to the understanding of leadership for social justice grounded in principals’ efforts to foster equality in learning development for a diverse student population.

Timely adverse conditions may be required to foster leadership for social justice in schools. The principals reacted to contextual changes at several levels, planning and implementing innovative and flexible interventions to ensure equality in students’ learning development. These findings contribute to international accounts of educational leadership.

This study of leadership for social justice in schools is contextually specific. Therefore, more empirical comparisons of school leadership are required in future studies, as principals’ practices vary between education settings.

This paper offers insights into the evolution of leadership for social justice in schools in response to contextual changes. Principals’ leadership strategies can be reoriented and their actions reshaped to overcome threats to social justice in schools. Accordingly, although leadership for social justice in school communities is culturally and pedagogically inclusive, it is also socially distinctive.

The impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on architectural education (AE) was investigated, and a framework was proposed to reduce the impacts' negative consequences.

Systematic literature review, bibliometric and content analyses were combined to gain an in-depth understanding of the effects of the pandemic on AE and projections for its future. Relevant documents were extracted from the Web of Science (WoS) database. Bibliometric connections in the context of AE and COVID-19 pandemic were explored using text-mining and content analysis was performed.

The challenges, development tendencies and collaboration networks in AE during the pandemic were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. The most influential articles, journals, authors and countries/regions were highlighted using a bibliometric analysis. The analysis of keyword tendencies and clusters indicates that new concepts have emerged in AE research during the pandemic involving online, in-person and hybrid education. Using content analysis of 57 subtopics, 39 (18) were categorized as having negative (positive) effects. A comprehensive mitigation framework was designed to reduce the impact of the pandemic on AE.

The study findings can enable practitioners to construct effective solutions to COVID-19- and other disaster-related problems regarding AE. The implications, obstacles and mitigation framework presented can help identify gaps in the literature and guide further research.

This paper presents the first bibliometric and content analysis of AE and COVID-19 pandemic-related studies published from January 2020 to June 2022 to highlight several research directions and academic development within the field.