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With increasing ethical issues and global corporate scandals, many organisations are now looking to employ well-rounded professionals, who take ownership of their workplace while leading with their heart and soul. These organisations seem to be more concerned with relationship building and future employability (Cunha, Rego, & D’Oliveira, 2006) and are interested in the concept of spirituality with the hope that it could address ethical issues influencing their businesses.

‘Spirituality and ethics are core values that have shaped human life from time immemorial’ (Mahadevan, 2013, p. 91). Ethics and spirituality are interrelated but different as ethics is about customs and habits, while spirituality is concerned with personal meaningful experiences and differs from person to person, making it hard to define.

Organisations moving towards spirituality require leadership that can develop a spiritual climate and their learning and development has to be top priority (Pawar, 2009).

This requires management education to appreciate the concept of spirituality and like some universities globally, incorporate it within their programmes (Harris & Crossman, 2005).

To explore whether spirituality could be incorporated within the higher education curriculum, my PhD researched academic’s viewpoints in selected faculties within a regional university in Australia. This paper reports some of its findings from the data gathered through semi-structured interviews, with a focus on leadership, its relevance to ethics and the teaching of spirituality. Results indicate that academics support the inclusion of spirituality but the programmes need to be carefully designed.

Much rhetoric around the construct of a work-ready graduate has focused on the technical abilities of students to fulfill the expectations of the future workplace. Efforts have been made to extend from the technical skills (e.g., skills in calculation for engineers) to include soft or behavioral skills (e.g., communication). However, within previous models of understanding of the work-ready graduate there has been little done to explore them as critical moral agents within the workplace. That is, whilst the focus has been on being work-ready, it is argued here that in current and future workplaces it is more important for university graduates to be profession-ready. Our understanding of the profession-ready graduate is characterized by the ability to demonstrate capacities in critical thinking and reflection, and to have an ability to navigate the ethical challenges and shape the organizational culture of the future workplace.

This chapter aims to explore a movement of thinking away from simply aspiring to develop work-ready graduates, expanding this understanding to argue for the development of profession-ready graduates. The chapter begins with an exploration of the debates around the characteristics of being work-ready, and through a consideration of two professional elements: professional identity and critical moral agency, argues for a reframing of work-readiness towards professional-readiness. The chapter then considers the role of work-integrated learning (WIL) in being able to support the development of the profession-ready graduate.

This chapter deals with aspects of the overall criticism in regard to higher education and its growing discrepancy between theory and practice, and the meaning of problem-based and authentic learning. The chapter is based on two specific cases that illustrate how higher education is organized in Sweden, and how education could be organized to correspond to the demands of authentic learning and a new form of knowledge production. Work-based learning started as an alternative to the ordinary three-year nursing program at a university college in the western part of Sweden. One main finding was that the students experienced the relation between the different types of teaching in the program as weak, and the different learning contexts in the program as being separate from each other. Higher Vocational Education (HVE) is a market-oriented vocational higher education program with close cooperation between an educational provider and working life. Work-based learning is a cornerstone of HVE, and authentic learning in a real-life setting constitutes a single course governed by its own syllabus. One main finding, was that students experienced a lack of progression in the work tasks and the subject content of the school-based education was not advanced enough. Workplace learning can serve as a structuring resource in education, but it can also be problematic because knowledge is inherent in routines and technologies.

This chapter provides a critical and comprehensive review of internationalisation models and strategies in higher education and offers a conceptual model for internationalising the curriculum, taking educational administration and leadership as an example of its implementation. The chapter starts with an introduction and overview of globalisation and how higher education institutions respond to its increasing effects by adopting different internationalisation strategies. This is followed by a discussion on the different forces and rationales involved and the various models and strategies adopted by higher education institutions as well as the many challenges and obstacles they encounter when implementing these strategies. The third section focuses on ways of internationising the curriculum and how it is a complex, dynamic and developmental process that requires the implementation of most internationalisation strategies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the IHEC model which is created for internationalising the higher education curriculum, focusing on educational administration and leadership as an example. The IHEC model aims to provide students with a universal and holistic learning experience that prepares them for the increasingly competitive and diversified working environment. It also attempts to overcome the Westernisation indigenisation debate by adopting a holistic approach to knowledge and cultural practices that appreciates and integrates different perspectives, knowledge traditions and work practices into the curriculum.

The chapter focuses on humanizing higher education by infusing ethical leadership in the curriculum to improve the public service. Its design is qualitative in nature and literature reviews and document analysis were employed in compiling the chapter. It followed an interpretive paradigm and used Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory as a lens in understanding humanizing education in higher education. Nowadays ethical leadership is of paramount importance in higher education and in the public service. Ethical leadership should be based on the moral person and on the moral manager. The moral person component focuses on desirable personal qualities of leaders such as being perceived as honest, fair and trustworthy. The moral manager focuses on the leader and uses transactional efforts such as rewards and punishments to reinforce desired behaviors. Soft skills are very important in higher education and should be transferred through coursework. Students need to be supported in all aspects of education including the academic, emotional and social demands in higher education.

The past two decades have witnessed exponential growth in the use of mindfulness-based programmes within professional workplace cultures. From digital media giants such as Google, Apple and Facebook, to Fortune 500 companies, hospitals, universities, and government departments, many contemporary workplaces now offer mindfulness-based programmes as a remedy for workplace challenges such as low productivity, employee stress and staff attrition. Using Google’s Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute as a case study, this chapter adopts Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’ as a critical framework for re-evaluating the affective and relational experiences of mindfulness within the contemporary neoliberal workplace. Specifically, it considers the ways in which corporate mindfulness initiatives commonly use the rubric of ‘employee wellbeing’ and ‘self-care’ to pathologise employee experiences of boredom, dissatisfaction and stress while downplaying the social, political and economic factors that contribute to workplace dissatisfaction and employee burnout.

The chapter focuses on how engaging undergraduate and graduate students at a metropolitan university through community-based experiential learning can help them make a difference in their personal relationships, in their workplaces and in their communities.

The chapter explores the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Department of Speech Communication’s integrated approach to undergraduate and graduate curriculum that focuses on four types of casing complex problems and making positive, ethical recommendations to make a difference. Specifically, the chapter explores how problem-based learning; service-learning; narrative ethnography; and research projects can be used as meaningful ways to case complex communication issues and to make ethical, theory-informed recommendations to not only do no harm but also affect positive change and promote social justice in students’ personal relationships, organizations, and communities.

Lessons learned from the programmatic approach are shared that include building a theoretical base for students to draw from, integrating case approaches into the curriculum, and engaging resistance and failure. Chapter recommendations promote using theory as a lever for learning, building meaningful relationships with stakeholders, and adopting a process orientation that embraces failure.

The chapter offers a review of four undergraduate courses and four graduate courses, with explicit applications of the four case approaches. Additionally, learning objectives, major assignment descriptions, and assessment approaches are detailed for each course.