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In 2012, the Department of English at the University of Sydney, Australia, established The LINK Project, a faculty-driven outreach program that builds sustainable partnerships with low socioeconomic status (SES) secondary schools across the state of New South Wales. Focused on discipline-centered engagement, LINK positions pedagogic work as a vital site for the advancement of a social inclusion agenda. However, the operative logic of such programs present a distinct set of pedagogical challenges if they are to negotiate the established scholarly frameworks that resist principles of inclusion and threaten to displace and exclude the cultural knowledges, skills, and capitals of students of low SES backgrounds.

This chapter postulates a framework for productive disciplinary engagement that generates new spaces for “relational equity” (Boaler, 2008) between post-secondary institutions and outreach high schools and within diverse tertiary classrooms. It draws on three LINK learning modules designed to foster new ways of forming attachments and enhancing achievement in outreach contexts. In doing so, it describes an approach that seeks to open higher education institutions to multiple knowledges and ways of knowing (Gale & Mills, 2013) in the pursuit of what Jacques Rancière (1987, p. 2) calls “the minimal link of a thing in common.”

The framework of the Bologna Process, the bachelor's–master's degree structure, was introduced into the Netherlands in 2002. At the moment many other countries in Europe have adopted this structure, or are in the process of restructuring their higher education system in that direction. The so-called Dublin descriptors have been developed to provide a general statement of qualifications that students should have acquired at the end of each cycle. These descriptors can be seen as criteria in terms of competence levels regarding the following aspects: acquiring knowledge and understanding, applying knowledge and understanding, making informed judgements and choices, communicating knowledge and understanding, and capacities to continue learning. It can be argued that these competences are interdisciplinary in nature. For instance, a university graduate has to be able to collaborate and communicate in multi- or interdisciplinary teams. However, many of these competences will be acquired in disciplinary settings, and faculty will not easily recognise the general terms in which the descriptors are formulated. This raises questions about the interchangeability of the competences between disciplines. In this chapter we will argue that some of the Dublin descriptors can be seen as an attempt to make it clear that there is a common interdisciplinary language in certain fields of attributes, whereas there will be a strong component of disciplinarity in the programmes. An example in the field of research and enquiry competences will be elaborated for two distinctive programmes: in natural sciences and in social sciences.

This chapter enters an old debate on the shape of validation processes in qualitative research. We discuss a reflective research validation framework related to teaching approaches and practices. The majority of investigations in this area draw mainly on indirect observation, semi-structured interviews or the application of questionnaires and inventories. To this extent, only “half-the-story” has been reported. The validation framework here develops a five-part three stage structure, conceptualized as an “iterative-interactive-process,” integrating a set of strategies aimed at the “minimization of invalidity.” The application of the framework is illustrated through a longitudinal study investigating the relationship between classroom questioning practices and teachers’ preferential teaching approaches. Fieldwork in this naturalistic-interpretative research was conducted during four academic years and entailed close collaboration with a group of four university teachers lecturing biology to undergraduates.

Menopause discourse plays a powerful cultural role in the west, serving to mark a (negative) shift in women's social status, shaping both social norms and women's self-appraisals and dividing women's lifecourse into two: fertile and post-fertile, with value attributed only to the former. However, in 2019 a new ‘solution’ to the problem of menopause entered public discourse in the form of a new surgical technology, offered by the private health provider ProFam, to delay menopause via ovarian freezing techniques. Aimed in the first instance at women seeking to avoid the disruptions of severe symptoms, it also quickly became framed as a way in which (especially childless) women might extend their fertility. In this chapter I explore menopause discourse as it appears in medical and popular sources associated with this new technology, looking at the continuities and discontinuities with earlier forms of menopause discourse. I also take a broader view in placing technologies for delaying menopause in the context of reproductive technologies used by women at all stages of the lifecourse, critically examining the claims that they give women choice, freedom and control over time. I suggest that in fact they are implicated with rather more complex temporal structures, captured in the concept of ‘ambivalence’ and characterised by a mixture of gendered expectation, anticipation and suspension of agency. Finally, I explore whether it is menopause itself, rather than its delay, that, in serving to disrupt such temporal ambivalence among other things, can in fact introduce the possibility of freedom.