Bernadette Knewstubb
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Dr Bernadette Knewstubb, Lecturer Academic Development |
Responsibilities and Professional Activities
I am a lecturer in Academic Development in the Centre. My main area of responsibility at present is coordinating and developing the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Learning and Teaching (PHELT) programme, as well as providing general academic development support. I am one of the Centre's contacts for the Faculty of Education
I also have experience in areas such as in new lecturer development, peer observation and mentoring programmes, curriculum mapping and design at course and programme level, and teaching and learning in first-year classes.
I am happy to discuss any of these areas, and others with you, as I find that in this role I usually learn as much from the people I work with as they can ever learn from me.
Professional Activities
- Associate Editor for Higher Education Research & Development
Background
As is the case for many academic developers, I came to this role by a circuitous route. Initially I studied at the University of Otago, where I completed my B. A. hons and M. A in English literature. My Masters thesis, A gathering of forgers, explored the development of literary forgery in the 18th Century. I then spent five years teaching and then coordinating a large first-year Communication course, where I became interested in research concerning first-year learning and large-group teaching.
After a year teaching English as a Second Language in South Korea, I returned to Dunedin in 2001, where I held concurrent roles as a Student Learning Advisor at Otago University's Student Learning Centre, and as a Research Fellow on a project which studied the development of teaching academics over a three-year period.
In 2003, I moved to the University of Aberdeen, where I worked as part of a small educational development team, teaching in a graduate certificate programme and working largely with tutors and new academics, as well as on faculty projects . Between 2005 and 2011, I worked as an academic developer in both central and faculty roles at La Trobe University in Melbourne, before joining the team here at Victoria's Centre for Academic Development in mid-2011.
I am currently completing a doctoral thesis, the teaching-learning nexus: teaching and learning as communication, using higher education research and linguistic theory to investigate how it is that students and their lecturers understand one another (or don't!).
Research Interests
My two major areas of research interest presently are the communicative relationships between lecturers, tutors and students, and the development of curricula to embed discipline-defined graduate attributes.
However my education interests are varied, and I am happy to discuss any ideas you might have for developing your own teaching and learnng reserch.
Some recent Publications
Knewstubb, B. (2016). The learning–teaching nexus: modelling the learning–teaching relationship in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 41(3) 525-540. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075079.2014.934802
Knewstubb, B., & Ruth, A. (2015). Gestalt and figure-ground: reframing graduate attribute conversations between educational developers and academics. International Journal for Academic Development, 20(1), 4-17. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1360144X.2014.946931
Spencer, D., Riddle, M. and Knewstubb, B. (2012) Curriculum mapping to embed graduate capabilities. Higher Education Research & Development. 31(2), pp. 217-231 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2011.554387
Knewstubb, B. (2010) The Search for Relevance: Student sense making in a multiple-lecturer subject. Paper presented at the eighth annual Hawaii International Education Conference,7-10 January, 2010. Honolulu
Knewstubb, B. and C. Bond (2009). "What’s he talking about? The communicative alignment between a teacher’s intentions and students’ understandings." Higher Education Research & Development 28(2): 179-193.
