CeAL News

CeAL Co-Director, Mick Healey, awarded visiting scholar in New Zealand

Professor Mick Healey spent part of July and August in New Zealand as the 2006 Visiting Scholar to the New Zealand Branch of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA). 

In a four-week period he gave 19 presentations and workshops at nine different universities and colleges.  He was based in five different centres around New Zealand — Auckland, North Palmerston and Wellington in North Island, and Christchurch and Dunedin in South Island.  Topics varied from the development of the scholarship of teaching and learning, and active learning, to the learning experiences of disabled students.  Linking research and teaching was the most popular subject

New Zealand is unique in that the teaching-research nexus is enshrined in legislation. The New Zealand Education Amendment Act (1990) defines a university as where “teaching and research are closely interdependent and most of their teaching is done by people who are active in advancing knowledge.”  All universities were audited in terms of their delivery of the teaching-research nexus in 2000, but the policy appears to have received less emphasis recently as more attention has been given to the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF), their version of the UK’s research assessment exercise.  Michael Cullen, Tertiary Education Minister, recently suggested lifting the requirement that degrees must be taught by people involved in research.

“This was a wonderful experience and a great honour”, Mick said, “I took the opportunity to visit colleagues in geography and related disciplines at each of the places in which I was based to collect case studies of interesting active learning practices and to discuss possible student links with Gloucestershire University through CeAL.” 

As a result of Mick’s visit Dr Andrew Codling, Deputy President Academic, UNITEC, based in Auckland, will be visiting Cheltenham on October 19-20th for the opening of the CeAL Building.  Mick explained that, “We are exploring the feasibility of establishing ‘a 12,000 mile studio’, a shared landscape architecture studio project to be undertaken by students from University of Gloucestershire and UNITEC.  The idea was proposed by Nick Robinson, who used to work at Gloucestershire and is now in practice in New Zealand.”

September 2006

For more information on the Centre for Active Learning contact:
Barbara Rainbow, Tel: +44 (0)1242 714683, E-mail: brainbow@glos.ac.uk