Stephen Darwin

Alberto Hurtado University · Facultad de Educación

It is conventionally assumed that student ratings perform a significant function in driving improvement in pedagogical practices in higher education. As a result, this form of evaluation has gradually become institutionalised in recent decades as an essential proxy for understanding teaching and course quality in universities across the world. Howe...

This book provides a comprehensive and engaging analysis of the purpose and function of student evaluation in higher education. It explores its foundations and the emerging functions, as well as its future potential to improve the quality of university teaching and student learning. The book systematically assesses the core assumptions underpinnin...

Action research methodology is commonly used in initial teacher education programmes as a pedagogical strategy to enhance student teacher learning. Action research is most often used in tandem with school-based practicum components in the latter stage of programmes as a means of bridging the theory-practice divide. It is also frequently used as a c...

Student ratings are now an accepted orthodoxy in global higher education environments. They form an increasingly important metric that has been assimilated as a robust proxy measure of quality for evaluating individual, institutional and even system-level performativity. Although the technical design aspects of student ratings have received extensi...

The transforming contexts of higher education are heightening the imperative for more sophisticated understandings of student learning. An increasingly critical challenge is how to most effectively engage with student perspectives to more effectively understand the nature of their learning experiences. Traditionally, student ratings have been the p...

This book is the result of the project EBYL-English books for young learners: una propuesta de corpus literario para la enseñanza del inglés en la educación básica supported and funded by the program Pedagogía en inglés para Educaciòn Design and illustrations: Estudio Emigrantes 2024 ISBN 978-956-418-306-0 3 We are grateful to the Pedagogía en ingl...

This study addresses the underexplored role of teacher educators in initial English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education within the Chilean context. It aims to understand how these educators perceive and instill professional responsibility among pre-service teachers. Data was collected from university-based EFL teacher educators through 48 questio...

Este estudio analiza las experiencias de estudiantes de primera generación (EPG). Para ello, se llevaron a cabo 29 entrevistas con EPG de distintas universidades en Chile. Los resultados revelan que cada trayectoria es el resultado de la interacción de múltiples catalizadores entrelazados: (i) aspiraciones, temores y niveles de apoyo familiar, (ii)...

This paper reports on an investigation of the responses of Chilean higher education to the emergence of regionalised global university rankings in Latin America. Using interviews with educational leaders across 18 institutions, the research sought to understand the effect of these global rankings on conceptions of quality, local academic work, and...

This handbook brings together scholarship from various subfields, disciplinary traditions, and geographic and geopolitical contexts to understand how student voice is operating in different higher education dimensions and contexts around the world. The handbook helps not only to map the range of student voice practices in college and university set...

The professional responsibility of teachers has been primarily understood in international literature in terms of external obligations, primarily from an accountability perspective. Alternatively, more recent approaches have begun to propose that teacher responsibility is more appropriately understood as an internal drive toward their work and its...

Internationally, the investigation of inclusive education in foreign language teaching and foreign language teacher education is a relatively new phenomenon. Part of this imperative has been the pressing need to research how teachers perceive inclusion and learn to support a diverse range of students. Responding to this challenge, this paper report...

nternational literature has characterised professional pedagogical responsibility as related to both the beliefs and emotional responses of teachers. It also identifies that teachers taking responsibility for their work and the society is crucial to the development of effective pedagogical practices. However, how professional responsibility develop...

Professional development through teacher research: stories from language teacher educators, D. L. Banegas, E. Edwards, L.S.V. de Castro (Eds.). Multilingual Matters (2022). 213 pp. The imperative for professional development is a paradox that often haunts the language teacher educator. At one level, teacher educators necessarily portray to their st...

We are interested in contributions that are specifically contextualized in various English language teaching and learning environments in Chile, namely early childhood, primary, secondary or tertiary contexts. Proposals should be informed by a critical perspective on English language teacher education and closely aligned with the principles of a po...

Global university rankings (GUR) have become increasingly influential as a proxy measure of higher education quality. The more recent development of regionalised forms of rankings has increased their global reach, drawing a greatly expanded range of institutions into their orbit. As a result, regionalised GUR have developed an increasing potential...

In highly marketised higher education systems, massification has afforded greater access, particularly for first-in-generation students. Generally, this expansion has been fuelled by neoliberal ideologies that valorise the notion of choice and promise of social mobility. In this study, using interviews with 25 first-generation students, the issue o...

In highly marketised higher education systems, massification has afforded greater access, particularly for first-in-generation students. Generally, this expansion has been fuelled by neoliberal ideologies that valorise the notion of choice and promise of social mobility. In this study, using interviews with 25 first-generation students, the issue o...

A key promise of neoliberalist ideologies in higher education is the valorization of student choice as a means of (re)shaping practices and improving the responsiveness of institutions. The power of this neoliberal imaginary (Ball, 2012) was grounded in market-like policies that demanded institutional accountability to both afford competition and m...

This paper reports on research on the contemporary effect of global university rankings on Latin American higher education. Over the last decade, several major international ranking models have moved to apply rankings metrics at a regional level to address the marginalising of universities from the global south in their lead offerings. Using a crit...

Internationally, there is increasing interest in the value of incorporating core practices into second language (L2) teacher education programs. This article reports on a research project that investigated how a set core practices are integrated into the Methods courses and practicums in Chilean language teacher education programs for English as a...

Action research is characteristically used to provide research experience for late-stage, pre-service teachers as a means of breaching the perceived divide between theoretical knowledge and contexts of practice. However, aside from the considerable methodological challenges of enacting action research itself, pre-service teachers also enter schools...

La actual pandemia de COVID-19 ha puesto de manifiesto uno de los principales retos contemporáneos de la enseñanza superior: cómo lograr la participación más efectiva de los estudiantes. El paso a la enseñanza en línea ha aumentado la distancia potencial entre los profesores y los estudiantes, amplificando los retos de diseñar las condiciones para...

The current COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharper relief one of the key contemporary challenges of higher education: how to most effectively engage students. The move to online teaching has increased the potential distance between teachers and students, amplifying the challenges of designing conditions for meaningful learning (Marinoni, Land,...

This paper reports on the outcomes of a qualitative study that investigated the discursive position of the student voice in contemporary Chilean higher education. The data for the study was derived from the analysis of the system-level accreditation frameworks and publicly available institutional documents, in tandem with interviews with key univer...

This paper reports on a qualitative research project undertaken in a major Australian university that sought to investigate the potentiality of harnessing the student voice as a productive provocation for enhanced academic engagement and the improvement of pedagogical practices. A critical dimension of this research was to specifically seek to cros...

The exploration of the primary research focus of student evaluation—particularly the processes and integration of quantitative forms of survey-based student feedback—is foregrounded in this chapter. The critical foundations of this research have been largely framed around the validity and reliability of ratings-based metrics for teaching and course...

In this introductory chapter, the broad social and epistemological origins of student evaluation in higher education are systematically considered. This includes discussion of the formative development of student evaluation, which was shaped in its earliest form by behaviourist experimentation around the nature of student responsiveness. From these...

This chapter introduces two practice-based case studies undertaken in a major Australian university centred on using the student voice as a catalyst for pedagogical development. This research was designed to provide an insight into the potential of the student evaluation formed around more qualitative forms of data and collaborative academic dialog...

In this chapter, the use of the expansive learning cycle—centred on elevated use of qualitative student feedback data—will be critically analysed drawing on the empirical data generated by the two CHAT-informed, action research case studies reported in the preceding chapters. Specifically, the value of more collective forms of academic dialogue, ba...

This final chapter considers the future potential of student feedback in higher education. With the relentless rise of neo-liberalist, market-based models in higher education, there has emerged a powerful and seemingly irresistible demand from students, institutions and even socially for survey outcomes to assure the quality of university teaching....

There has been considerable research interest in both the technical dimensions and situated use of quantitative forms of student evaluation. However, the epistemological assumptions of student evaluation have remained largely undisturbed by this research effort. Similarly, limited attention has been directed to what academics actually think about s...

Student evaluation in contemporary higher education environments operates within the increasingly contesting activities of institutional quality assurance, individual performance management and its original objective of improving the quality of higher education teaching and learning. Moreover, the elevation of comparative quality assurance metrics...

In this chapter, the outcomes of the second case study centred on the elevated use of qualitative student evaluation data are detailed. Unlike the first case study, the program under investigation in this case was a well-established program with a long history of broadly successful educational outcomes. However, the program had recently undergone s...

Does the student voice have the potential to encourage improved forms of collaborative learning among academics? Can the elevated use of student evaluation become a productive generator of professional knowledge or situated academic development? In this chapter, evidence that emerged in the case studies about the developmental potential of student...

Student feedback-based evaluation performs a significant social role in framing perceptions of the quality of teaching in contemporary Australian higher education. Yet its emergence is a relatively recent phenomenon, having only been in widespread application since the mid-1980s. The early manifestations of student feedback-based evaluation came wi...

With the rapidly transforming nature of vocational work, it is increasingly challenging for vocational teachers in institutional environments to develop learning that is relevant and sustainable. Although it has been widely observed that new pedagogies are essential in this changing vocational environment, little guidance is emerging for both vocat...

There is no doubt that the Australian higher education system has grown dramatically in the last fifty years. Yet so much of this growth has not been primarily driven by the genuine educational aspirations of government leaders to grow a high quality university system. Instead, growth has primarily (though not exclusively) come from real political...

Conventional student-led evaluation is now an orthodox feature of the North American, UK and Australian higher education landscape. Increasingly, it is guiding major institutional decisions around educational quality, academic promotion and more recently institutional funding by government. Yet significant research around student-led evaluation has...

This paper explores debates emerging in the VET sector around the impact of competency based approaches (and more recently training packages) on the capacity of VET to assist in developing lifelong learners. It considers debates around the assumed 'conventional' training paradigm of VET (that is focussed on task reproduction for work) and to what e...

Cultural–historical activity theory (CHAT), founded on the seminal work of Vygotsky and evolving in the subsequent work of Leont’ev and Engeström, continues to emerge as a robust and increasingly widely used conceptual framework for the research and analysis of the complex social mediation of human learning and development. Yet there remains ongoin...

Conventional student-led evaluation has been a characteristic feature of Australian higher education for at least two decades. Increasingly it is now being used to guide major institutional decisions around educational quality, academic promotion and most recently institutional funding by government. Yet significant research around student-led eval...

The student evaluation of teaching and courses is ubiquitous and an increasingly influential element of the Australian higher education landscape. It is significant in the assessment of the value of academic work and often central in promotional processes and privileged in institutional funding arrangements. Yet the assumptions of the student evalu...