In the post-pandemic context of higher education, the ways academics and staff experience connection through meetings, events, and conferences have undergone significant change. On December 12, 2022, the Department for Learning and Teaching Enhancement at Edinburgh Napier University hosted ‘Beyond the Obvious: Exploring Online, In-Person, and Hybrid Conferences’, an event designed to explore how insights from online teaching and learning might inform the design of academic gatherings. Participants reflected six key themes: language, technology, third-space professionals, belonging, costs, and learning from pedagogy, and were invited to form research collectives. This article reports on the collective that explored sense of belonging, comprising nine researchers from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Belonging was defined as the experience of being welcomed, accepted, and included within a community, characterized by opportunities to build relationships, feel valued, and participate meaningfully in shared purposes. Drawing on thematic analysis, five themes were highlighted: (1) Community: Visibly Defined and Organically Found or Sought, (2) Equity: Embedded and Integrated Inclusivity, (3) Lived Experience: Impacts of Identity, Perception, and Memory, (4) Power Relationships: Positions, Credentials, and Hierarchical Complexity, and (5) Intentional Design: Strategic Hospitality and Continuous Reflection. Findings highlight that conferences function as both relational and performative spaces that can either foster or inhibit belonging. While belonging is recognised as a fundamental human need, some participants did not seek it as a primary motivation for conference participation. The study called for an intentional, equity-driven conference design that accommodates diverse purposes and modes of engagement. Integrating belonging as a relational and structural practice can cultivate agency, authenticity, and inclusive community across the spectrum of academic participation.
Playful learning practices are recognised in higher education as they align with active learning pedagogies. They promote innovation and leadership that influence and inspire educators. An escape room is one such playful learning practice. Among educators, it is commonly identified as a game that is designed mostly by experts. However, this paper presents work by a learning designer with no prior knowledge of designing escape rooms, yet is an enthusiastic learner who wants to inspire the higher education community. The work reflects on the design journey acquired from novice to leader level. Three escape rooms were designed to reflect on the experience. Two of the escape rooms were digital, and the other was in physical space. The paper interprets the experiences and informal feedback from colleagues captured during the design and facilitation of these escape rooms. The reflections indicated that taking the initiative to design and facilitate escape rooms promoted playful learning pedagogy and leadership. Distributed and transformational leadership were visible throughout the journey. This work is situated within educational escape rooms, playful learning and leadership theories. The findings highlighted that the foundation of leadership in playful innovations is being transparent about experiences gained along the journey and encouraging other educators to start with smaller and simple steps. In this way, the community can be inspired to recognise that playful pedagogical innovations are not limited to experts and experienced educators. This inspiration brings the community together, opening avenues for collaboration and co-creation to promote them as leaders in the innovative learning design process. Even though the findings cannot be generalised across all contexts, the paper shares the experience of a novice designer of escape rooms in building community knowledge through pedagogical innovation and leadership.
Professional reliability, including planning, communication, logistical judgement, and accountability, remains important yet often weakly specified in higher music education. This topical discussion offers a design-analytic account of a production-based music module in which work-like conditions are structured through assessment rather than through formally embedded external stakeholders. Rather than reporting empirical outcomes, the paper examines how proposals, checkpoints, documentation, execution under real-time production constraints, and reflective accountability function as assessment signals. It argues that the educational value of preparatory simulation lies less in surface realism than in how curriculum and assessment make professional reliability visible and consequential beyond technical performance alone. The discussion outlines implications for academic practice, curriculum design, and employability development in contexts where externally embedded opportunities are limited or uneven.
This article explores the transformative potential and complexities of integrating disability-related lived experience into higher education pedagogy. It contextualizes the concept of lived experience within phenomenological and autoethnographic traditions, highlighting its value in challenging conventional academic norms. Drawing from narratives of academics and students, we illustrate how the inclusion of lived experience can enrich learning, promote inclusivity, and foster a deeper sense of belonging. We reveal the emotional labour, strategic disclosure, and institutional resistance often faced by disabled academics and students navigating ableist structures. Through first-person accounts, we uncover how vulnerability, when embraced, can disrupt rigid pedagogies and catalyse collective transformation. Our major contribution to higher education practice is a set of practical strategies for incorporating lived experience into teaching. We propose these strategies for academics and students to engage ethically and critically with lived experience, advocating for structural change that centres accessibility and embodied knowledge. We conclude with a call to action: to move beyond tokenistic inclusion and toward a systemic reimagining of education that values lived experience as a foundational epistemology. By reframing disability as a vital source of insight, we position lived experience not as supplementary, but as central to fostering an equitable, empathetic, and intellectually vibrant academic community.
As global mobility continues to increase, a growing number of students are choosing to study abroad, including a substantial population attending UK universities. International students often seek to enrich their lives through higher education; however, many face challenges such as adapting to unfamiliar teaching methods, navigating a new cultural environment, and developing a sense of belonging within host communities. Previous research studies have framed belonging as a student-led process; however this paper argues that international students’ sense of belonging can be shaped, influenced and facilitated through course management structures and academic practices. It investigates how course management processes (e.g. timetabling, course design, delivery, assessment, feedback etc) can both support and hinder inclusion for international students. The purpose of this paper is to propose course management practices that enhance international students’ sense of belonging. Focus groups were conducted with undergraduate and postgraduate business students from India, Pakistan, Nepal, China, Vietnam and Chile at a university business school in the North of England, where three interconnected themes were identified: (1) social integration (2) academic practices and teaching (3) extracurricular activities and employment. The findings highlight the criticality of course management teams who play a frequently overlooked role in facilitating and supporting student integration, together with broadening institutional understanding of belonging to include pedagogical design. A range of practical and scalable approaches are therefore proposed for course leaders, these include structured pre-arrival onboarding, peer mentoring schemes to support cultural integration, development of student-led communities to encourage social and professional engagement and specific training for staff closely involved in supporting international students. This paper contributes to applied academic practice by recommending evidence informed strategies that enhance belonging through programme design and delivery.
