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The purpose of this study is to explore how US graduate students described their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) education and engagement experiences outside their academic departments.

This study used a critical constructivist qualitative approach and methods (i.e. interviews) to explore how 44 graduate students across various disciplines and fields at two public research institutions in the USA described their DEI education and engagement experiences outside their departments.

Students identified expanded DEI and professional knowledge as key learning outcomes, while also highlighting the benefits and negative effects of the identity-centered (dis)connection, community and personal fulfillment that came from these experiences.

Given that DEI education and engagement opportunities addressed some students’ needs and were unsatisfactory for others, more scholarship on the nature of these experiences is needed to better understand factors that contribute to students’ desirable and undesirable outcomes. There are also practical implications for faculty who advise graduate students and administrators who are responsible for funding the campus spaces in which these experiences occurred (e.g. graduate colleges, identity-based student organizations).

Few studies have explored graduate students’ participation in DEI education and engagement opportunities outside of their academic departments. Consequently, the efficacy of these initiatives, and the extent to which students benefit from them, warrant investigation. This study, thus, adds to researchers’ and practitioners’ understanding of this topic by highlighting the benefits and limitations of these experiences for graduate students.

Collaboration between universities and industry is increasingly perceived as a vehicle to enhance innovation. Educational institutions are encouraged to build partnerships and multidisciplinary projects based around real-world open problems. Projects need to benefit student learning, not only the organisations looking for innovations. The context of this study is a multidisciplinary innovation project, as experienced by the students of an University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The purpose of this paper is to unfold students’ conceptions of the learning experience, to help teachers and curriculum designers to organise optimal conditions and processes, and support competence development. The research question was: How do students in higher professional education experience their learning in a multidisciplinary innovation project?

The study took a phenomenographic approach. The data were collected in the form of weekly diaries, maintained by the cultural management and social services students (n=74) in a mandatory multidisciplinary innovation project in professional higher education in Finland. The diary data were analysed using thematic inductive analysis.

The results of the study revealed that students’ understood the learning experience in relation to solvable conflicts and unusual situations they experienced during the project, while becoming aware of and claiming their collaborative agency and internalising phases of an innovation process. The competences as learning outcomes that students could name as developed related to content knowledge, different personal characteristics, social skills, emerging leadership skills, creativity, future orientation, social skills, technical, crafting and testing skills and innovation implementation-related skills, such as marketing, sales and entrepreneurship planning skills. However, future orientation and implementation planning skills showed more weakly than other variables in the data.

The findings suggest that curriculum design should enable networked, student-led and teacher supported pedagogical innovation processes that involve a whole path from future thinking and idea development through prototyping to implementation planning of the novel solution. Teachers promote deep comprehension of the innovation process, monitor and ease the pain of conflict if it threatens motivation, offer assessment tools and help in recognising gaps in individual competences and development needs, promote more future-oriented, concrete and implementable outcomes, and facilitate in bridging from innovation towards entrepreneurship planning.

The multidisciplinary innovation project described in this study provides a pedagogical way to connect higher education to the practises of society. These results provide encouraging findings for organising multidisciplinary project activities between education and working life. The paper, therefore, has significant value for teachers and entrepreneurship educators in designing curriculum and facilitating projects. The study promotes the dissemination of innovation development programmes in between education and work organisations also in other than technical and commercial fields.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what impacts university students perceived from their short-term intensive international courses as part of undergraduate multidisciplinary education.

The study design was informed by interpretative phenomenological analysis. Semi-structured interviews explored informants’ views of their experience to elicit key themes of their experience.

The analysis resulted in four major themes: personal development, generic skills, global perspectives and subject-specific matter. Some text segments were coded with multiple themes, which suggests that the impacts of short-term international courses are multifaceted.

Academic topics of the courses substantially centred around humanities and social sciences at a particular university. This paper furthermore primarily depended on students’ self-reported answers, and it is possible that the participants who chose to enrol in the elective international courses may be principally willing to acquire global competence. Therefore, this study did not set out to present the generalised impacts of any short-term international courses.

The findings could be used as a conceptual tool for the design and evaluation of new and existing courses. In addition, the four major themes that this study elicited are useful as a cue for students’ self-reflection about their own learning experiences.

There have been significant efforts devoted to increasing the quantity of short-term international programs, but there has been less focus on the quality of these programs. This study supports the findings of existing literature but also identified one of the potential unfavourable impacts that short-term international courses may have on students’ development.

The objective of the study was to explore which COVID-19 teaching and learning methods, that enhanced accounting students' learning experience, should be applied at a residential university after the pandemic.

A qualitative exploratory approach within an interpretive paradigm was applied. A total of 15 semi-structured interviews were conducted with accounting students and the data were analysed using thematic analysis.

This study shows how pre-COVID-19 accounting education can be adapted by learning from the teaching and learning experiences gained during the pandemic and that there are various teaching and learning methods that can be applied in the post-COVID-19 period to enhance students' learning experience. These blended active teaching and learning methods include: the flipped classroom, discussion forum, electronic platform (to ask questions during class), key-concept videos and summary videos. Introducing these teaching and learning methods comes with challenges and the study provides recommendations on how to overcome foreseen obstacles. The contribution of the research is that it informs accounting lecturers' decision-making regarding which teaching and learning methods to apply in the aftermath of COVID-19 to enhance students' learning experience.

It is uncertain which teaching and learning methods employed during the COVID-19 pandemic should be applied at a residential university to enhance the teaching and learning experience after the pandemic. Accounting lecturers might return to their pre-COVID-19 modus operandi, and the valuable experience gained during the pandemic will have served no purpose.

Entrepreneurship education (EE) is critical for developing the skills of tomorrow's entrepreneurs and leaders. While significant research examines the content, student learning processes and outcomes, less studied are the entrepreneurship educators and their pedagogical preferences. Following a cognitive process model of decision-making, this study explores how self-efficacy, philosophy of teaching, entrepreneurship training and teaching experience influence entrepreneurship educator preferences to follow either a teacher-centric or a student-centric approach. This study also includes gender in a secondary analysis of the relationships.

The data were collected from 289 entrepreneurship educators in 2021, and fuzzy-set comparative qualitative analysis (fsQCA) was used to obtain configurations of conditions (causal recipes) that lead to teacher-centric or student-centric model. A secondary analysis explores whether there are different configurations of conditions when gender is added to the analysis.

The results of our fsQCA analysis reveal multiple configurations of conditions (causal recipes) that result in a preference for either a teacher-centric or student-centric approach to teaching entrepreneurship. The authors find that teaching experience is the main condition for the teacher-centric model, while self-efficacy and entrepreneurship training are the main conditions for the pathways leading to student-centric model. The fsQCA results also show that the configurations are affected when gender is taken into account in the analysis.

This study, one of the first of its kind, uses a configurational approach to examine pathways that contribute to the teaching preferences of entrepreneurship educators. This paper uses self-efficacy, teaching philosophy, teaching experience and entrepreneurship training as conditions to identify multiple unique pathways that result in either a teacher-centric or student-centric pedagogical model in EE. Notably, differences by gender are also found in this study.

Recently, various policies have been implemented in Saudi Arabia to reform science teaching at K-12 levels in order to focus on critical thinking, inquiry-based learning, and problem solving. Research is needed to explore the adequacy of teacher preparation programs to determine whether these programs sufficiently prepare Saudi science teachers to teach according to these new reforms. This study explores the challenges that Saudi pre-service science teachers face in these higher education programs. Results indicated that graduates of the programs studied were satisfied with their experiences; however, various concerns were expressed by some pre-service teachers regarding the theory-practice gap between their university coursework and field experiences, and the supervision structures and functions in place for the professional experiences component. Modifications to the teacher preparation programs are suggested in order to address these concerns and to successfully enact reforms in science education in Saudi Arabia.

This paper aims to probe into the implementation of internship courses under the five-year cosmetology program in Taiwan from the perspective of Dewey's philosophies in hopes that the analysis can serve as reference for schools in planning their internship courses in the future.

This paper probes into the off-campus internship courses under Taiwan's five-year junior college education program by applying Dewey's empirical philosophy.

The study aims to understand the learning experience acquired by students from learning by doing internship courses as reference for future internship design. The current internship courses comprise the follows: summer, during the semester and for a full academic year. The experience of summer internship is career exploration, the experience for semester internship is career experience and the experience from academic-year internship is career choice. The internship strategies are designed according to the three different internship approaches, so that the internship courses can implement the educational effect of “learning from experience”.

To minimize the discrepancy between the cosmetology program under the five-year junior college education and the employment market, credit-based off-campus internship courses are arranged for students' final years at school.

Through on-site trainings, students accumulate work experience and explore into a related career field. The accumulation of experience and gaining of insights mirror the philosophy of learning by doing, which involves students' reflective thinking.

It is hoped that the analysis can serve as reference for internship courses planning in the future.

In this article, we examine the experiences of African American engineering undergraduate students who participated in two student–faculty mentoring programs. This work provides critical insights about important factors that enhance students' experiences in higher education (e.g. the need for informal community spaces, mentoring and representation).

Using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach, participants were surveyed and interviewed about their experiences in the mentoring programs. Data were analyzed using basic statistical methods and thematic analysis.

Findings indicate that students prosper in informal community spaces, where representation allows them to build mentoring relationships that are fostered naturally through common identities in a shared space.

Given the intimate size of the program, the sample population was limited.

To benefit student development, mentoring program practices should consider dedicating funding and space for students and faculty of shared racial backgrounds and lived experiences to meet informally.

This work identifies explicit mentoring program factors that support the development of minoritized students in engineering.

At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, an annual short-term, research abroad non-credit program was created in 2012 as a core component of the undergraduate research initiative that achieves learning outcomes in a meaningful way. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In order to describe, and analyze the short-term research abroad activity, an instrumental case study design was created. The instrumental case study was chosen as a means of allowing the facilitators/authors to communicate how they attempted to assure that the program was educative. In order to determine if the program was in fact educative and that it met its goal of being an effective research experience the authors utilized two additional research methods. The first was a document analysis of the participant’s research artifacts. Each participant was required to communicate their findings by writing a paper that was submitted for publication to an applicable research journal.

The study found that an experiential education as a pedagogical framework coupled with a short-term research abroad activity can lead to a substantive educative experience, where the authors described and analyzed attempts to ensure that the short-term research abroad program was educative, it also describes the educational assessment findings which describe what was found when the authors tested whether they, in fact, met this goal.

During the design phase of the short-term research abroad program, the authors turned to experiential education as a principle for how they would ensure that the program was grounded in an acceptable educational theory. Experiential education is a widely accepted educational practice used in experiences such as co-ops and internships, study abroad, undergraduate research and service learning.

To frame the short-term cultural research abroad program as something from which student could learn the authors utilized the National Society of Experiential Education’s (2013) list of eight principles of good practice. In order to safeguard that an activity is educative, an assessment or an evaluation of a demonstrative artifact is essential. In assessing the final artifact against a rubric or some other non-biased or less biased criteria, an educator can ensure that the student has gained new knowledge in the form of student learning outcomes (SLOs). In addition, the educator can use the results of this assessment to modify many different aspects of the experience ranging from the timing, the modality, the pre-work, even the learning outcomes themselves.

Given financial and curriculum inflexibility of some students, Universities and faculty could achieve attainment of research-based, program agnostic, SLOs by offering short-term study abroad alternatives to the traditional semester or year-long experiences. With graduates looking to enter the job market where businesses are more globalized and executive’s recognition of a need for more international experience, carefully constructed short-term study abroad programs are meaningful avenues to build those credentials.

Such offerings can be constructed as customized experiences to achieve highly integrated skills across all degree programs.

This study aims to explore how the boundary between science and society can be addressed to support the transformation of higher education towards sustainable development (HESD) in the sense of the whole institution approach. It analyses students’ learning experiences in self-led sustainability projects conducted outside formal curricula to highlight their potential contribution to HESD. The students’ projects are conceived as learning spaces in “sustainability-oriented ecologies of learning” (Wals, 2020) in which five learning dimensions can be examined.

Using an iterative, grounded-theory-inspired qualitative approach and sensitising concepts, 13 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted exploring students’ learning experiences. Interviews were categorised in MAXQDA and analysed against a literature review.

Results revealed that students’ experiences of non-formal learning in self-led projects triggered deep learning and change agency. Trust, social cohesion, empowerment and self-efficacy were both results and conditions of learning. Students’ learnings are classified according to higher education institutions’ (HEIs) sustainability agendas, providing systematised insights for HEIs regarding their accommodative, reformative or transformative (Sterling, 2021) path to sustainable development.

The education for sustainable development (ESD) debate focuses mainly on ESD competences in formal settings. Few studies explore students’ learnings where formal and non-formal learning meet. This article investigates a space where students interact with different actors from society while remaining rooted in their HEIs. When acting as “change agents” in this hybrid context, students can also become “boundary agents” helping their HEIs move the sustainability agenda forward towards a whole institution approach. Learning from students’ learnings is thus proposed as a lever for transformation.