This study explores the elusive “X-factor” of dance professionalism through the lens of dispositions—habitual orientations of thought, feeling, and action that underpin artistic practice. Using Q methodology, five dance artist-educators ranked 24 disposition statements, revealing three interrelated profiles: the Disciplined Artist, the Adaptive Artist, and the Relational Artist. Findings demonstrate that dispositions are not discrete traits but clusters of moral, affective, and performative orientations that together form the professional identity of the dancer. Q methodology enabled tacit values to surface as interpretable patterns of meaning, illuminating the hidden curriculum of dance education. The study argues that unveiling these dispositional constellations makes explicit the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of professionalism. Articulating the dispositional “signature” of the discipline renders the X-factor teachable and assessable, offering educators a framework for fostering holistic artistry—what makes not only the competent dancer, but the A+ artist.
This study investigates how educators understand and address gender within cultural entrepreneurship education (CEE) in art and design higher education in the Netherlands. CEE has become central to preparing students for increasingly precarious cultural labour markets and, in Europe, is informed by fields long criticised by feminist scholars for privileging traditionally masculine-coded norms such as competitiveness and risk-taking. Despite this, gender has received virtually no explicit attention in CEE policy and research. Drawing on interviews with 18 CEE educators and (co-)heads of Fine Art programmes across all eight state-funded institutions in the Netherlands, the study identifies a disconnect between educators’ awareness of gender inequality and its largely ad hoc integration into teaching. Despite their awareness, educators reinforce this disconnect through gender blindness and non-performativity. Their accounts sustain the belief in CEE’s neutrality, potentially disadvantaging women despite their majority presence in Fine Art higher education.
This paper examines Work-integrated Learning (WIL) as a pedagogy within Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) learning and teaching. It examines WIL as an important strategy for ensuring that the university is contemporary, connected, and engaged with the realities of the rapidly changing nature of work. WIL has the capacity to enable greater mobility between the university and strategic partners – encompassing industry, business, community, not-for-profit, cultural and governmental bodies, and even other areas of the educational institution – and can demonstrate the value of HASS both to partners and to students themselves. This article positions HASS disciplines in relation to the contemporary Australian higher education sector’s employability agenda, argues for the value of these disciplines to employers, the workforce and to the future of work, and offers recommendations for designing contemporary curricula using the pedagogy of WIL as seen through the lens of HASS disciplinary learning. This is important in a global context in which HASS is increasingly under attack for being inward-looking, siloed, and irrelevant. The Australian context provides an apt case study, demonstrating the intersection of governmental policy settings, responses from Higher Education Providers, and the norms, values, and priorities of individual disciplines. Moreover, the challenges that face HASS disciplines in the contemporary Australian tertiary sector, where HASS learning is routinely derided, and indeed legislated, as not ‘job-ready’, are particularly acute and serve as a warning to other national contexts. It is imperative, at this inflection point in Australian higher education, when conceptions of knowledge work are being ruptured by generative AI and forces like an expanding gig economy, that HASS learning is framed as future-ready; as preparing students for a full working and civic life, not just a first (professional) job. To that end, this paper critiques mainstream employability discourse and celebrates HASS learning as authentically work-ready while also outlining recommendations for scaffolding through a future skills matrix and supporting pedagogies to foster authentic, industry-partnered WIL to enrich students’ engagement with study, each other, and their communities.
Generative AI poses a distinctive challenge for humanities pedagogy, one that existing AI-in-education frameworks do not fully address. Humanities teaching is organized around interpretive openness, productive ambiguity, close reading, and a conception of evidence as something argued for rather than merely cited. In common classroom use, generative AI favors fluency, plausibility, and resolution in ways that work against those commitments. This article proposes a conceptual framework that treats AI as material for interpretive inquiry rather than as a tool for efficiency. Drawing on rhetorical analysis, dialogic pedagogy, and theories of revision, it develops four instructional roles for AI in the humanities classroom: object of interpretation, rhetorical artifact, revisable draft, and dialogue partner. The article argues that the most productive response to AI in the humanities begins with disciplinary redesign rather than with adoption or prohibition--and that the difficulty the humanities cultivate is not an obstacle to learning but its method.
This study explores how academic xenophobia and class hierarchies intersect within South African higher education institutions. Drawing on a decade of the author’s personal experiences through autoethnography and vignettes, it reveals the subtle, non-violent forms of xenophobia embedded in recruitment, classroom dynamics, and academic interactions. The research demonstrates how race, class, and nationality intersect to marginalise foreign academics, reinforcing exclusion and perpetuating structural inequalities rooted in apartheid. Framed by intersectionality and critical race theory, the study argues that these institutional practices mirror broader societal discrimination. The implications extend beyond individual experiences, affecting academic culture, staff wellbeing, and the pursuit of inclusive scholarship. By centring my lived experiences as a site of critical inquiry, this study contributes to the humanities debate by calling for a re-examination of policies and attitudes within universities to better support equity, diversity, and an inclusive scholarly environment.
