Online learning communities are frequently created for higher education students; however, these are most often designed to cater to a particular unit or subject. In an effort to strengthen the Bachelor of Arts course at the University of New England, the author sought to create an online space that would promote an interdisciplinary and collegial dialogue among their broad on- and off-campus student cohort. This paper examines the building of an academic community among a large and diverse group of undergraduate students on a Moodle platform. The paper tracks the development of the multi-layered portal from the initial stages of planning to the indicators of strong engagement taken up by students, and eventually leading to the creation of similar portals across the university. In examining this process this paper highlights the shared desire by distance education students and academics for authentic and personal higher education participation regardless of the students' location.

Through data drawn from conversations with academics in history and their students, this paper will offer an insight into the strategic importance of first year studies in Australian History, at Australian universities. It will be evident that this inclusion reflects good pedagogical and epistemological practice.

The higher education landscape is an increasingly competitive marketplace pitting university against university. Within that setting, individual disciplines must also wave a marketable epistemological flag. Among them is the History discipline, a long-standing traditional cornerstone of many university degrees. The web site for each History school or department is a tool for promoting pathways to possible professional futures for students of History as well as indicating the type of engagement in contemporary historical debates that occurs within the school. This online text reflects the changing state of the discipline, the approaches to the scholarship of teaching and learning in History (History SoTL), the philosophical variations between different universities, the influence of political governance and the evolving trends of marketing strategies. Tracking these shifts offers an insight into both the fluidity, and the formidable traditional underpinnings, of the discipline. In this article I explore the shifting views as demonstrated in the online statements of the History discipline over an eight-year period (2008-16) at sixteen Australian universities. The universities selected are diverse in their characteristics and represent the breadth of higher education in Australia.

This paper will explore the personal narratives of my experiences encouraging a diverse cohort of pre-service teachers to think about gender and sexuality. It will demonstrate how self-reflection is such an effective tool for both teaching and learning. The paper will draw from my involvement in teaching the gender component of a broader social justice unit in a school of education. In particular, the paper will articulate the interdisciplinary influences of self-reflection, historicism and feminist theory as interventionist pedagogical practice.

This paper reports on a project that explores the stories of women teachers in four rural public high schools in northwest New South Wales. It has been driven by a curiosity about women's workplace experiences in schools with a focus on career progression, care, leadership and mentoring. Using qualitative in-depth interviews the project draws from feminist poststructuralism and uses analytical tools based on narrative inquiry and situated knowledges. The findings will contribute to a dialogue on reciprocity, generational teachers, gender inequity, professional autonomy and agency.

Over the last decade authors have critiqued the hegemonic structures that perpetuate knowledge hierarchies in the dominant research regimes that foster privilege across the globe. The authors in this article use collective biography to reflectively engage with knowledge production in the academy. They explore the nature of prudentia as an affective shame that surfaces through reflexive engagement with the politics of research cultures. Collective biography, as a 'grassroots' form of deliberate and collaborative interrogation, produces insight from 'difficult knowledge' that sheds light on power imbalance in North/South relations in research practice. In endeavouring to grapple with Southern Theory, the authors surface 'unwelcome truths'. These disquieting ruptures reveal the power of prudentia for academics who are desirous to unsettle the complacency of Northern assumptions as they engage in an ongoing struggle with doing Southern Theory.

Australian Educational theory has drawn largely from the authoritative metropole described by Connell in Southern Theory (2007). In this article, the perilous nature of global north/ south power relations that are embedded in research work is given consideration. Through a collaborative process, the researchers create an assemblage of poems that embody a range of voices from their respective research fields. Drawing from contexts in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, these examples of southern theory fieldwork are used to problematise the notion that it is possible to simply bring the south to the centre. The geospatial politics inherent in Connell's attempt to categorise knowledge production is critiqued. The complexity of 'doing southern theory' is considered as one of many approaches to working with voices from the south.

The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is invested with an affectively loaded 'knowledge economy optimism'. Drawing on recent work in affect and critical geography, this paper considers the e/affects of the promises of the knowledge economy on its knowledge workers. We extend previous analyses of the discursive constitution of academic subjectivity through the figuration of 'emotional knots' as we explore three stories of the constitution of academic subjectivities in institutional spaces. These stories were composed in a collective biography workshop, where participants constructed accounts of the physical, social, material and imaginative dimensions of subjectivities in the 'academic-city' of higher education spaces. Identifying moments of 'perturbation' in these stories, this paper considers the micro-contexts of 'becoming academic': how bodies, affects and relations become knotted in precise times and places. The figuration of 'knots' provides an analytical strategy for unravelling how subjects affectively invest in the promises of spaces saturated with knowledge economy discourses, and moments of impasse where these promises ring hollow. We examine the affective bargains made in order to flourish in the corporate university and identify spaces of possibility where optimistic projections of alternative futures might be formed. These stories and their analysis complicate the metanarrative of 'knowledge economy optimism' that is currently driving higher education reform in Australia.

When writing about the teaching of history in universities, three contexts become apparent. The first is the enormous diversity and sophistication of historical practice and historical thinking. The second is the existence of Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLO) to standardise history teaching. The third is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning which has provided an international intellectual and practical framework within which to discuss discipline teaching. In this chapter, we position this book within those contexts and introduce its purpose.

This chapter considers the importance of leadership in creating an environment in which history teaching can flourish and evolve. It argues that 'enabling leadership' is a way to support individual and collegial endeavour that reinvigorates professional commitment within the context of the managerial revolution.