‘Write every day!’: a mantra dismantled

Numerous books, blogs, and articles on research productivity exhort academics to ‘write every day’ even during the busiest of teaching times. Ironically, however, this research-boosting advice hangs from a perilously thin research thread. This article scrutinises the key findings of Robert Boice, whose pioneering studies of ‘professors as writers’ in the 1980s and 1990s are still widely cited today, and offers new empirical evidence to suggest that the writing practices of successful academics are in fact far more varied and individualistic than has generally been acknowledged in the literature.     

My experience with academic intolerance

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, formerly a United States representative to the United Nations and a member of the Cabinet. She is also senior research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. This article is adapted from a keynote address given at the first national conference of the National Association of Scholars, held in New York City from November 11 through November 13, 1988.     

Help! I'm selecting children's books

Publishing houses, like the “mill” in the old folk tale “Why the Sea is Salty”, churn out books unceasingly day after day. There are over 2,000 children's books published each year and these books are of varying quality.     

A Comfortable Start for Everyone: The First Week of School in Three Multi-Age (K-2) Classrooms

This article describes the start of the school year in three multi-age classrooms where 8 new kindergarten children join 16 returning first and second graders. The authors (professor/observers and teachers) describe what happens during the first week of school in this setting where the students remain with their teachers for 3 years. They explain what the start of the year is like for the returning students (first and second graders), the new students (kindergartners), the parents, and the teachers.     

Frustrated academic writers

This paper aims to start a conversation about a common yet under-examined emotion experienced by academic writers worldwide: frustration. What is frustration, exactly? What are its causes and effects, its symptoms and its cures? Is frustration an impediment to writing or a motivational impetus? Can academic writers vanquish frustration, or must we merely learn to live with it? Mirroring rather than mastering the complexities of this multifaceted emotion, we have structured our inquiry as a multiple-entry maze where frustration unfolds beyond each threshold as uncharted terrain: a place of neurological explanations, playful etymological twists and metaphorical metamorphoses. The paper re-enacts our own collaborative journey through the maze, meditating on and modelling some of the frustration-easing strategies that we developed along the way.     

Dancing on the bottom line: an unruly cost–benefit analysis of three academic development initiatives

This article offers an unconventional cost–benefit analysis of three academic development initiatives at a large Australasian university: a three-day foundation course for new academics, a series of one-on-one teaching consultations and a two-year postgraduate certificate program. Weaving together qualitative, quantitative and arts-based methodologies, I examine the pros and cons of each mode, arguing that higher education research is enriched rather than diminished by hybrid strategies that challenge the status quo.