HASSE inspires students into STEM

young female scientists nurtured

Women in STEMM Australia

On December 9th 2017, I joined many other girls from schools across NSW, to depart from Sydney Airport to fly to Houston Texas. We were part of the Houston Association for Space and Science Education (HASSE) Senior Space Program, and arrived in Houston on the 10th of December to start classes for a week at the Johnson Space Centre. This week of activities focussed on life in Space. Week two of the HASSE experience began with the X Prize presentation (17th December), where we all worked in teams of five.

Eliza at space school! [Image: T Turner-Jones] Our team’s name was based on the Phoenix Mars Mission, so we called our team the ‘Golden Phoenix’. The overarching goal of working together was to achieve the objective to launch a rocket from Earth to the Moon where a lander would go from the rocket to the surface of the Moon…

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Powerful knowledge in the fishbowl

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By Jim Hordern

A review of an SRHE South West Regional Network event on ‘Knowledge and power in higher education’

On 8 May 2018 an SRHE SW Regional Network event held at the International Centre for Higher Education Management (ICHEM) at the University of Bath examined ‘knowledge and power in higher education’. Two speakers, Michael Young and Melz Owusu (who also treated the audience to some rap), gave opposing views. This was followed by brief comments from David Packham and a ‘fishbowl’ discussion session, which offered audience members opportunities to voice their opinions on the topic.

Young, well known for his advocacy of ‘powerful knowledge’, outlined key tenets of his thesis: firstly, that the knowledge taught in schools and higher education should be specialised and differentiated from everyday experience, and secondly that the disciplines in higher education provide a reasonable means for organising that knowledge. Young emphasised that access to…

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Why write?

hmmmmmm

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By Joy Jarvis

Why do we write? The University of Hertfordshire’s in-house journal, LINK, ‘aims to support academics and professionals in contributing to the understanding and development of educational practice’. This means it supports and promotes academic writing, and my recent article for LINK on pedagogic frailty suggests a place to start when thinking about why we write. We might of course need to think about REF, but there are other sorts of writing that might be equally valuable. Is ‘REFability’ valuable beyond what it achieves in terms of university scores? Why did we write before the REF? Those of us who have been in universities for many years do remember that time!

The pedagogic frailty article was written to give information about something important for university leaders and managers to consider. It aimed to

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