Current CEDAM Projects

CEDAM manages, brokers and advises on a range of educational projects that are funded from internal and external sources.

Currently CEDAM is managing and responsble for delivering a healthy spread of projects that contribute to systemic and professional development across the ANU and the higher education sector.

Australian Learning and Teaching Council projects:

Promoting Excellence Initiative

In this project CEDAM is working both the seven ANU Colleges and across colleges to increase the ANU's capacity to engage with the programs of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) and to build a developmental and sustainable teaching and learning culture. This work is in part premised on consolidation of existing communities of practice at ANU and the stratgeic resourcing and building of teaching award winners and CEDAM alumni as an expert cohort to underpin project activity.

Project Team: Linda Hort (Project Leader) Denise Higgins, (Project Manager) Andrea Benson, (Project Administrator)

Contact: Denise Higgins T: 6125 8178, E: denise.higgins@anu.edu.au

The roles and practices of Australian Honours programs

A partnership project between ANU, UTS, UQ, and Newcastle to map the role of Honours across Australian Universities.
To date project has:

• scoped history, development, policy background of Honours and mapping current manifestations, building models of honours, and collecting the online evidence of its current and emerging roles.
• developed and circulated  a position paper after the QPR Conference, audience DVCs and PVCs spelling out issues research has turned up to date). With the purpose of getting their response—a mechanism to elicit a dialogue.
• creating network-embedding discussion across the sector.

Project team: Margaret Kiley (Project Leader) Merrilyn Pike (Project Manager), Ida Nursoo (Research Assistant) and Rayyar Farhat (Research Assistant)

Research Graduate Skills Project: Questions of Curriculum and Pedagogy

This is a scoping project designed to identify and classify the range of training and development initiatives currently being implemented with a view to enhancing the skills of HDR candidates in Australia. Through document/website analysis and interviews with a range of providers, the aim is to generate deeper understanding of, and critical insight to, the curricular and pedagogical dimensions of high-level skill development. Of particular interest will be the extent to which contemporary training and development initiatives align with institutional statements concerning requisite skills and/or attributes for research graduates.

External members (Reference Committee):

• Dr Claire Atkinson, Dept. of Education, Employment & Workplace Relations
• Professor David Boud, University of Technology Sydney
• Professor Alan Lawson, University of Queensland
• Mr Nigel Palmer, Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations
• Mr Chris Peters, ACT Chamber of Commerce

Internal members (Project Team and Reference Committee)

• Dr Jim Cumming
• Dr Linda Hort
• Dr Margaret Kiley, ANU (Chair, Reference Committee)
• Dr Merrilyn Pyke
• Professor Mandy Thomas

Other funded projects:

ARC Discovery Grant: Research Capacity Building: The Development of Australian PhD Programs in National and Emerging Global Contexts.

This project began in 2006 and at this stage has completed the research and interviewing for ANU Case studies. Work is now inprogress on the UNSW case studies. Project completion is due 31 December 2008.

Project team: Margot Preston (Project Leader) Merrilyn Pike (Research Officer).

Investigating Student Retention in ANU Language and Culture Programs

The initial funding for this project ($50,000) was provided by the Vice-Chancellor. This is a pilot project to investigate retention rates in all 20 beginning language and culture courses at the ANU.  The purpose of this project is to collect a substantial sample of initial data on why students do not re-enrol in second year language study following enrolment in first year. This will help guide immediate teaching/planning decisions and to inform the design of a larger project for the future

Project team: Gerlese Akerlind, Project Leader, Loan Dao, Project Officer, Sujatha Kalimili, Project Officer .

Team members: Ghassan Al Shatter, Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Louise Jansen, School of Language Studies, Louise Maurer, School of Language Studies, Roald Maliangkaij, China and Korea Centre, Daniel Mario Martin, School of Language Studies, Maurice Neville, CEDAM

Language consultants:

Recently completed projects

Promoting Teaching and Learning Communities: Institutional Leadership Project

The Promoting Teaching and Learning Communities Project, was one of the first round of leadership projects funded by the Carrick Institute of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. It proved a challenging and transforming initiative for the Centre for Educational Development and Academic Methods (CEDAM) as it used communities of practice to build distributed leadership (in this context meaning shared by the group) capacity in staff committed to enhancing learning and teaching at ANU.

The Promoting Teaching and Learning Communities Project over a two-year period, resourced between four to eight communities of practice, based across a range of disciplines. The project approached communities of practice as groups of people who share a passion for something that they ‘know how’ to do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better (Lave and Wenger 1991). Through this staged action research CEDAM sought to test if such communities were a suitable means for developing leadership capacity for staff engaged in teaching and learning within the higher education sector.

• a useful ‘space’ for working through unstable teaching and learning contexts;
• offer an integrating context for evolution of practice in higher education; and
• act as a bridge between formal, accredited learning and informal, situated and peer based problem solving.

The project also found that communities of practice are an effective means of developing distributed leadership capacity as:

• their leadership boundaries are open—which widens the conventional net of leaders, and fosters contributions from individuals and the group to leadership; and
• they value and use the diversity of expertise spread across it to forge a concertive dynamic beyond than the sum of their individual members.

Please refer to the project website for information about the project and to access the final project report.