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The purpose of this study is to offer exploration of pedagogic frailty as a framework to support professional development of university teachers in a personalised and discipline-sensitive way.

The method involves participants constructing a concept map for each dimension of the model. These maps must have high explanatory power to act as a frame for developing a personal narrative to support reflection on practice. This reflection starts from the academic’s current knowledge structure and provides a bespoke, individualised focus for further learning.

This conceptual paper is informed by case studies of academics’ interactions with the frailty model that have helped to refine it as a faculty development tool. This is clarified by providing explicit requirements of an “excellent” map, and places the reflective process within a learning theory that is aligned with the values that underpin the model.

The type of rhizomatic learning that is supported by the model, in which there are no imposed learning outcomes or strictly delineated pathways to success, is particularly suited to support the professional development of more senior academics. This represents an innovative approach to faculty development.

Concept maps have been described as a valuable tool for exploring curriculum knowledge. However, less attention has been given to the use of them to visualise contested and tacit knowledge, i.e. the values and perceptions of teachers that underpin their practice. This paper aims to explore the use of concept mapping to uncover academics’ views and help them articulate their perspectives within the framework provided by the concepts of pedagogic frailty and resilience in a collaborative environment.

Participants were a group of five colleagues within a Biochemical Science Department, working on the development of a new undergraduate curriculum. A qualitative single-case study was conducted to get some insights on how concept mapping might scaffold each step of the collaborative process. They answered the online questionnaire; their answers were “translated” into an initial expert-constructed concept map, which was offered as a starting point to articulate their views during a group session, resulting in a consensus map.

Engaging with the questionnaire was useful for providing the participants with an example of an “excellent” map, sensitising them to the core concepts and the possible links between them, without imposing a high level of cognitive load. This fostered dialogue of complex ideas, introducing the potential benefits of consensus maps in team-based projects.

An online questionnaire may facilitate the application of the pedagogic frailty model for academic development by scaling up the mapping process. The map-mediated facilitation of dialogue within teams of academics may facilitate faculty development by making explicit the underpinning values held by team members.

The visualisation of knowledge structures through concept mapping can be employed to reveal critical links between theory and practice. This allows consideration of particular disciplinary knowledge structures and the active role of the student in manipulating these structures to gain understanding, in a manner that can encourage students to contribute to the evolution of practice. The focus on knowledge structures can highlight the relationship between the curriculum and the discipline, and provides a tool to facilitate the integration of contemporary educational theories that may underpin teaching and curriculum development, such as learning styles, threshold concepts, conceptual stasis and semantic gravity. Visualisation invites original connections to be made between ideas and re-orientated to reveal new ways of conceptualising teaching at university: to include the structural transformation of knowledge as a potential threshold concept in higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to explain and develop a classification of cognitive structures (or typologies of thought), previously designated as spoke, chain and network thinking by Kinchin et al.

The paper shows how concept mapping can be used to reveal these conceptual typologies and endeavours to place the concept‐mapping method in the broader context of learning styles and learning theory.

The findings suggest that spoke structures are indicative of a naïve epistemology, or of “learning‐readiness”; chain structures are indicators of “goal‐orientation” and networks are indicators of expertise. Furthermore, change that comprises simple elaboration of existing spokes or chains is likely to be the result of surface learning styles and the emergence of networks indicative of deep learning. The utility of these different cognitive approaches is discussed.

The work is limited by the general lack of empirical testing, but the approach is presented as an important source of hypotheses for future research.

The practical implications of the research are considerable. First, concept mapping provides a framework for documenting and assessing understanding at “novice” and “expert” levels. Second, where definitive criteria can be developed from the learning styles literature, cognitive change in the course of learning can be evaluated to distinguish between deep versus surface or holist versus serialist approaches, for example.

The papers original and comprises a synthetic approach to the study of learning style and learning theory through the use of the concept‐mapping method. It has both practical and theoretical value because it suggests a new approach and is an important source of testable hypotheses.

This paper aims to describe a method of teaching that is based on Novak's concept‐mapping technique.

The paper shows how concept mapping can be used to measure prior knowledge and how simple mapping exercises can promote the integration of teachers' and students' understandings in ways that are meaningful.

The concept‐mapping method facilitates quick and easy measures of student knowledge‐change so that teachers can identify the parts of the curriculum that are being understood and those that are not. This is possible even among very large student groups in the 50‐minute slots that are allocated to so much teaching in higher education.

Concept mapping is discussed in the wider context of student learning style. The styles literature has been criticised because it tends to encourage undue labelling of people or behaviours. The approach described here also uses “labels” to typify learning (using the terms non‐learning and rote or meaningful learning to identify different qualities of change).

The difference in this approach is that terms are attached to empirical measures of learning outcome, not to personal or psychological styles. Concept mapping makes learning visible so that the actual quality of the learning that has occurred can be seen and explored. Using concept mapping in the course of teaching means that learning is no longer a complex and intractable process, measurable only by proxy, but an observable phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the role an intentional and cohesive research group for doctoral researchers and supervisors can play in surfacing and de-mystifying many of the implicit doctoral literacy practices involved in doctoral study.

This participatory, collaborative project, involving 11 doctoral researchers and three supervisors, was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, doctoral researchers and supervisors engaged in a discussion which resulted in a shared concept map. The concept map was then used as a prompt for stimulated recall interviews in which the participants reflected on the connections and peer learning afforded by the research group.

Drawing on ideas from Communities of Practice theory, the data revealed that the research group, including both supervisors and doctoral students, developed knowledge, relational connections and an awareness of a range of doctoral literacies.

This paper makes suggestions for how those in doctoral education can develop and embed research groups into institutional practices.

This study demonstrates the significant role a research group which is structured, intentional and guided plays in supervisors’ and doctoral students’ development of doctoral literacies and the fundamental intellectual and relational connections afforded by participating in such communities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the professional context of the educator and architects who designed and conceived Woodleigh School in Baxter, Victoria, Australia (1974-1979) and to identify common design threads in a series of schools designed by Daryl Jackson and Evan Walker in the 1970s.

The research was derived from academic and professional publications, film footage, interviews, archival searches and site visits. Standard analytical methods in architectural research are employed, including formal, planning and morphological analysis, to read building designs for meaning and intent. Books, people and buildings were examined to piece together the design “biography” of Woodleigh School, the identification of which forms the basis of the paper's argument.

Themes of loose fit, indeterminate planning, coupled with concepts of classroom as house, and school as town, and engagement with a landscape environment are drawn together under principal Michael Norman's favoured phrase that adolescents might experience “a slice of life”, preparing them for broader engagement with a world and a community outside school. The themes reflect changing aspirations for teenage education in the 1970s, indicating a free and experimental approach to the design of the school environment.

The paper considers, for the first time, the interconnected role of educator and architect as key protagonists in envisioning connections between space and pedagogy in the 1970s alternative school.

The purpose of this paper is to build a new theoretical framework for inscribing the constituents of therapeutic community (TC) practice in prisons and other secure psychiatric settings looking at three core element: homeliness, hope and humour.

The study is based on theory building, review of related literature, including research and policy, and synthesis from related funded research projects (Sociology of Health and Illness, Arts Humanities Research Council).

Home-as-method, and the concept of transitional home, highlights how a well-designed therapeutic environment looks and feels and can act as a base for effective rehabilitation. The TC aspires to offer a corrective new synthesis of home superseding the resident’s prior experience. A through-going definition of hope-as-method is outlined. It is argued that hope is co-constructed on the TC, and that there is a necessary challenge in gauging fluctuations in hope across time. Humour is a much overlooked idea but arguably an integral ingredient of healthy transactions between prisoners and staff. The particularities of humour present a challenge and an opportunity for harnessing the conditions when humour can flourish and conversely, the chain of events when mal humour damages community atmosphere.

H³ provides a new framework for reflecting on current TC practice, and also a model for developing novel ways of seeing, including the development of research and policy guidance. H³ also provides a philosophical base for developing a curriculum for education and training.

The 3Hs offers a rubric for positively narrating the aspirations of a prison milieu. The idea is purposively simple, and so far the authors have found that staff, prisoners and service directors are receptive to the concept, and there are plans for the 3Hs are set to be a narrative descriptor for developing practice in prisons.