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While most language departments of the university offer service-learning (SL) subjects based on language teaching, such as “Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in Local Schools” and “Serving the Community through Teaching English,” this paper aims to argue that teaching students to teach language(s) is yet to be the best strategy to serve the service recipients.

SL is widely understood as an experiential learning pedagogy that integrates academic focus, reflection and community service and is shown to be impactful. In Hong Kong, the first university that has made SL a graduation requirement is the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (the University). Considering this, new SL courses have proliferated over the past decade. Adopting a narrative inquiry approach, this paper examines personal narratives from a new SL subject aiming to raise awareness of refugees in Hong Kong. The data includes students’ reflective journals, co-created personal narratives and podcasts and semi-structured interviews.

This paper finds that crafting and recording narratives of shared experiences deepens cultural understanding, cultivates empathy and facilitates language learning in a genuine setting.

Ultimately, this paper advocates a well-designed SL that combines language, content and technology as a powerful, transformational experience for both college students and service recipients.

This paper focuses on a brand new SL course, “Storytelling for Understanding: Refugee Children in Hong Kong,” offered in Semester 1, 2022–2023. The subject was developed by the two authors from a language division affiliated to the University. The deliverables were podcast recordings, co-authored and co-edited by the students and the children.

This study aims to explore how university language students evaluate different sustainability themes and examine the overall relevance of ecological, social, cultural and economic sustainability dimensions in language education.

A questionnaire was designed to study Finnish university language students’ (n = 55) order of priority for sustainability dimensions and their sub-themes and the justifications for the priority orders using a mixed methods design. Qualitative content analysis was conducted using NVivo software, and weighted rankings were used to analyse the quantitative data.

The findings of the study showed that language students evaluated the social and cultural dimensions as the most relevant in language teaching. In all dimensions, students approached sustainability mainly by prioritising larger issues and advancing towards smaller ones. Most non-directional responses appeared in the economic dimension. In addition, individual prioritising and justification approaches varied between different sustainability dimensions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous studies have examined language students’ evaluations of and justifications for all four sustainability dimensions. The results highlight the need to use multiple, holistic approaches and systems thinking to incorporate education for sustainable development.

The study directs attention to the psychological conditions experienced and knowledge management practices leveraged by faculty in higher education institutes (HEIs) to cope with the shift to emergency remote teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. By focusing attention on faculty experiences during this transition, this study aims to examine an under-investigated effect of the pandemic in the Indian context.

Interpretative phenomenological analysis is used to analyze the data gathered in two waves through 40 in-depth interviews with 20 faculty members based in India over a year. The data were analyzed deductively using Kahn’s framework of engagement and robust coding protocols.

Eight subthemes across three psychological conditions (meaningfulness, availability and safety) were developed to discourse faculty experiences and challenges with emergency remote teaching related to their learning, identity, leveraged resources and support received from their employing educational institutes. The findings also present the coping strategies and knowledge management-related practices that the faculty used to adjust to each discussed challenge.

The study uses a longitudinal design and phenomenology as the analytical method, which offers a significant methodological contribution to the extant literature. Further, the study’s use of Kahn’s model to examine the faculty members’ transitions to emergency remote teaching in India offers novel insights into the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on educational institutes in an under-investigated context.

This study aims to assess the spread of environmental literacy graduation requirements at public universities in the USA, and to highlight factors that mediate the adoption of this curriculum innovation.

The author analyzed the undergraduate general education curriculum requirements at all 549 public BA-granting higher education institutions in the USA between 2020 and 2022.

The study found that only 27 US public universities out of 540 have an environmental literacy graduation requirement, which represents 5% of universities and is substantially lower than previous estimates.

First, this study provides a more complete, more reliable and more current assessment of the graduation requirement’s presence at US tertiary institutions, and shows the number of universities that have implemented this innovation is lower than was estimated a decade ago. Second, it draws from the scholarship on the infusion of sustainability into the university curriculum to provide a comprehensive discussion of factors that mediate the pursuit and implementation of the graduation requirement. As well, it identifies factors that played a key role in one pertinent case.

The purpose of the current study is to assess Omani teachers’ performance on tasks related to the stages of engineering design. To achieve this, data from an engineering design test was used, and demographic variables that are correlated with this performance were identified.

This descriptive study employed a cross-sectional design and the collection of quantitative data. A sample of preservice science teachers from Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) (n = 70) participated in this study.

Findings showed low and moderate levels of proficiency related to the stages of engineering design. Differences between males and females in terms of performance on engineering design tasks were found, with females scoring higher overall on the assessment. Biology preservice teachers scored higher than teachers from the other two majors (physics and chemistry) in two subscales. There were also differences between teachers studying in the Bachelor of Science (BSc) program and the teacher qualification diploma (TQD) program.

This study provides an overview, in an Arab setting, of preservice science teachers’ proficiency with engineering design process (EDP) tasks. It is hoped that the results may lead to improved instruction in science teacher training programs in similar contexts. Additionally, this research demonstrates how EDP competency relates to preservice teacher gender, major and preparation program. Findings from this study will contribute to the growing body of research investigating the strengths and shortcomings of teacher education programs in relation to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.

Considering the potential of Collaborative International Online Learning (COIL) for cross-boundaries interacting and collaborating effectively, this study aims to explore the intercultural awareness of pre-service language teachers after participating in a COIL project.

Following a quantitative research approach and an exploratory cross-sectional method, the authors administered a 13-item questionnaire to unveil the perceptions of 64 future language teachers from Spain after their online experience with counterparts from the USA.

Participants consider that COIL may have enhanced their intercultural and global awareness and equipped them with valuable skills and knowledge for the future, being women more positive than men. Moreover, the results also suggest that those participants who have not traveled abroad consider COIL to be a good opportunity to compensate for the lack of knowledge or experience with other cultures resulting from not having had the opportunity to visit other countries.

COIL needs to be seen as a powerful tool to promote global learning, intercultural understanding and the development of skills among students that will be vital for success in today’s interconnected world. Nevertheless, universities and teacher training centers need to rethink the preparation of future teachers for the increasing demands to prepare students for the requirements of the global world, and to do so, they need to consider that COIL may offer them significant benefits.

This work offers an interesting exploration of teachers’ attitudes toward COIL, providing insights into the potential of online collaboration for developing intercultural awareness.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to knowledge about the diversity of credibility arrangements in new audit spaces “in the margins” of auditing and the implications of such arrangements.

The paper is based on an in-depth qualitative study of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) rights certification run by the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Rights (RFSL) during its first decade of operation. We have interviewed employees and studied documents at the certification units within the RFSL. We have also interviewed certified organizations.

We highlight two features that explain the unusual credibility arrangements in this audit practice: the role of beneficiaries in the organizational arrangements chosen and the role of responsibility as an organizing value with consequences for responsibility allocation in this certification. These features make it possible for the RFSL to act as a credible auditor even though it deviates from common arrangements for credible audits.

The RFSL certification is different in several ways. First, the RFSL acts as both a trainer and an auditor. Second, the trainers/auditors at the RFSL have no accreditation to guarantee their credibility. Third, the RFSL decides for itself what standards should apply for the certification and adapts these standards to the operation being audited. Therefore, this case provides a good opportunity to study alternative credibility arrangements in the margins of auditing as well as their justifications.

This paper explores the potential that block teaching offers to enhance employability in the context of large-scale classes. It suggests that block teaching, with its condensed structure, necessitates curriculum innovation, fosters participatory learning and peer-to-peer networking, and has been shown to increase student focus and enhance engagement and attainment, especially amongst diverse learners. As these are the same challenges that large-scale teaching faces, it is proposed that intensive modes of delivery could be scaled up in a way that may help to mitigate such problems as cohorts in business schools continue to increase in size.

The paper is based on secondary research and provides an overview of literature that looks at block teaching, followed by that which explores the challenges of large-scale teaching contexts. It compares and contrasts the gaps in both to suggest a way that they could be combined.

The paper provides key insights into changes in the contemporary landscape of teaching within UK business schools, which have seen increasingly large cohorts and draws out the key strengths of intensive modes of delivery, which include helping students to time manage effectively, encouraging curriculum innovation and the creation of participatory learning opportunities as well as providing closer personal relationships between students and staff. Outlining some of the well-documented issues that can arise when teaching larger cohorts, the paper suggests that scaling up blocked delivery may offer a new way help to overcome them.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results are subject to generalisation. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions in large-scale teaching scenarios.

This paper includes implications for the development of innovative modes of teaching in the context of large cohorts, an experience that is increasingly common amongst British business schools and beyond.

This paper brings together two bodies of literature for the first time – that of intensive modes of teaching and that focuses on large-scale teaching contexts – for the first time to show how the former may help to overcome some of the key issues arising in the latter.

The authors are developing a model for rural science teacher professional development, building teacher expertise and collaboration and creating high-quality science lessons: technology-mediated lesson study (TMLS).

TMLS provided the means for geographically distributed teachers to collaborate, develop, implement and improve lessons. TMLS uses technology to capture lesson implementation and collaborate on lesson iterations.

This paper describes the seven steps of the TMLS process with examples, showing how teachers develop their content and pedagogical knowledge while building relationships.

The TMLS approach provides an innovative option for teachers to collaborate across distances and form strong, lasting relationships with others.

This paper aims to investigate the process by which performative technologies (PTs), in this case accreditation work in a business school, take form and how humans engage in making up such practices. It studies how academics come to accept and even identify with the quantitative representations of themselves in a translation process.

The research involved a longitudinal, self-ethnographic case study that followed the accreditation process of one Nordic business school from 2015 to 2021.

The findings show how the PT pushed for different engagements in various phases of the translation process. Early in the translation process, the PT promoted engagement because of self-realization and the ability for academics to proactively influence the prospective competitive milieu. However, as academic qualities became fabricated into numbers, the PT was able to request compliance, but also to induce self-reflection and self-discipline by forcing academics to compare themselves to set qualities and measures.

The paper advances the field by linking five phases of the translation process, problematization, fabrication, materialization, commensuration and stabilization, to a discussion of why academics come to accept and identify with the quantitative representations of themselves. The results highlight that the materialization phase appears to be the critical point at which calculative practices become persuasive and start influencing academics’ thoughts and actions.