Ian M Kinchin
Biographic Data
| ID | 272916 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian M Kinchin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian M |
| FAMILY NAME | Kinchin |
| SIGNATURE | KINCHIN I M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Surrey |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5425-4688 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 36 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Lessons from lichens for the future university
Inspired by the writings of Donna Haraway, Ron Barnett and Henry Giroux, this article explores the value of the lichen-university metaphor in working towards post-neoliberal higher education. A lichen-inspired university sector would recognise that academics, like lichens, survive and flourish through entanglement, collaboration, and attunement to precarious, damaged environments. It would value the slow, the relational, and the interdependent ov…
From archipelagos to lichens: Reimagining academic life through contrasting metaphors of fragmentation and entanglement
Bridging the symbolic abyss: A relational grammar of liminality in higher education
This article proposes a relational reframing of liminality in higher education. Drawing on Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance and the semiotic interpretation of liminality by Land et al., we argue that liminality is not merely an internal blockage within the learner, but a symbolic and relational misalignment between teacher and student. To address this misalignment, we introduce a relational grammar grounded in four dimensions of meaning…
Reframing Academic Development for the Ecological University: From ‘Change’ to ‘Growth’
This paper contributes to an emerging multi-layered perspective of academic development that embraces the diversity of knowledges that exists across the university campus. However, across these multiple layers there are a few universal characteristics that can provide cohesion and sustainability for third-space practitioners. A focus on growth allows academic development to align with a philosophy of becoming that is supported by the powerful ada…
Authorised but unsustained: How universities suppress ecological leadership by action and omission
Ecological leadership – grounded in trust, relational care, and adaptive collaboration – is increasingly recognised as a vital yet fragile form of academic development. While its emergence signals a shift towards more humane and responsive educational models, its suppression remains under-theorised. This article examines how such leadership is undermined, through a comparative analysis of two institutional cases: one in the UK, where a thriving p…
Composing and de-composing identities of an emeritus professor: Academic, post-academic or pre-compost
This article addresses the narrative desert that exists around the role of emeritus academics by considering how such colleagues fit within the narrative ecology of the university. By drawing on my personal experience of becoming emeritus, I illustrate how the dynamic tension of composing and de-composing processes of identity construction can be traced within an adaptive cycle of development. In this case, the anomic deconstruction of the academ…
Towards an ecological university: A new dawn or a ‘Silent Spring
The need for a paradigm shift in university governance has been explored recently in the literature. In particular, a proposed move from neoliberal values of commodification towards ecological values of care and relationality may offer universities a way forward to achieve greater alignment with the wicked problem of the Anthropocene. University managers have a key role to play in this transition and their influence may support a move towards a ‘…
Spaces and Places for Connection in the Postdigital University
This study focuses on the spaces and places for learning and teaching connections in higher education. Using a photovoice research method, we ask: what role do spaces and places play in offering opportunities for learning and teaching connection, and what do they tell us about the evolving practices of teachers in contemporary higher education? Whilst considerable attention has been paid to the learning spaces of students, we argue that less atte…
Five moves towards an ecological university
The shift towards an ecological university may be the key to achieving greater levels of social justice within higher education. This assumes that we could change the root metaphor of higher education – away from the current industrial model that is infused with neoliberal ideology and towards a more sustainable ecological model. This change involves five key moves that require us to: construct an institutional natural history to understand the n…
Poems and pedagogic frailty: Uncovering the affective within teacher development through collective biography
To explore the affective domains embedded in academic development and teacher practice, a team of academic developers was invited to consider a poem and how it reflects the emotions and feelings underpinning experiences as teachers within Higher Education. We used a method of arts-informed, collective biography to evaluate a poem to draw upon and share memories to interrogate lived experiences. Our research is framed using the lens of pedagogic f…
The Ecological Root Metaphor for Higher Education: Searching for Evidence of Conceptual Emergence within University Education Strategies
Recent research has suggested that Higher Education would benefit from the adoption of institutional models that relinquish ties to industrial thinking and associated metaphors. This long-established, market-led managerial perspective has been colonised by neoliberal values that work against education. A move towards models that have greater resonance with ecological thinking is considered to better align the institutional purpose with tackling t…
Belonging in Science: Democratic Pedagogies for Cross-Cultural PhD Supervision
This research used Novakian concept mapping and interview techniques to track changes in knowledge and understanding amongst students and their supervisors in the course of full-time research towards a laboratory science-based PhD. This detailed longitudinal case study analysis measures both cognitive change in the specific subjects that are the topic for research, and the understanding of the process of PhD level research and supervision. The da…
An ecological lens on the professional development of university teachers
This article presents an ecological frame for reflection on teaching at university. It is suggested here that the process of professional reflection on practice can be better aligned with processes of institutional development by applying the adaptive cycle. This heuristic emerged from the scientific literature on ecosystem maintenance and has been repurposed to allow the consideration of complex social-ecological systems – such as a university. …
Exploring dynamic processes within the ecological university: A focus on the adaptive cycle
The university-as-ecosystem concept provides a framework for the analysis of the dynamic maintenance of sustainable pedagogies within the university. Application of Holling’s adaptive cycle, used to describe the active constructive and destructive processes of stabilisation and destabilisation within an ecosystem, is explored here in the context of the ecological university. The cycle predicts that disruptions to the system initiate a period of r…
Considering the concept of recipience in student learning from a modified Bernsteinian perspective
The concept of recipience is emerging within the literature as a useful idea to inform our understanding of student engagement with feedback. In this paper, the applicability of the concept of recipience is broadened from its origins in the literature on student feedback to consider its role in developing student knowledge structures that are more receptive to development. This will promote cumulative/meaningful learning that is required to const…
Concept Mapping in the Age of Deleuze: Fresh Perspectives and New Challenges
This conceptual paper offers a reconsideration of the application of Novakian concept mapping to higher education research by putting to work the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome. We ask: what does thinking with Deleuze’s concepts offer researchers interested in concept mapping, and what conceptual, and terminological, obstacles might be created through such a reconceptualization? We have focused on the rhizomatic principles of mapping and tracin…
Revisiting ‘A “teaching excellence” for the times we live in’: Posthuman possibilities
This article proposes a rethinking of the contested concept of teaching excellence within higher education. In order to do, so we engage posthumanist theory to reconsider teaching excellence from a new perspective that shifts the gaze beyond the measured individual to explore our intra-actions within a wider context. Taking Skelton’s original conception of teaching excellence as a starting point, we explore what a values-based concept of excellen…
Frailty in transition? Troubling the norms, boundaries and limitations of transition theory and practice
This article focuses on ‘transition’ and how it is understood within higher education. Drawing on data from concept map-mediated interviews at two institutions, we examine the conceptions of transition held by academic and professional staff, who work to support students’ learning into and through higher education. We suggest that normative understandings of transition often draw upon a grand-narrative that orchestrates and reiterates a stereotyp…
The development of academics’ feedback literacy: Experiences of learning from critical feedback via scholarly peer review
The emerging literature related to feedback literacy has hitherto focused primarily on students’ engagement with feedback, and yet an analysis of academics’ feedback literacy is also of interest to those seeking to understand effective strategies to engage with feedback. Data from concept map-mediated interviews and reflections, with a team of six colleagues, surface academics’ responses to receiving critical feedback via scholarly peer review. O…
More than customers: Conceptions of Students as Partners Held by Students, Staff, and Institutional Leaders
Students as partners (SaP) practices are emerging in today’s universities as a means to offer a more participative agenda, and to transform institutional cultures within an increasingly economically driven higher education context. This study contributes to understandings of partnership approaches, which largely still remain under-theorised, through exploring the conceptualisation of SaP by institutional leaders, staff, and students. Drawing on d…
Reflection/Commentary on a Past Article: “Using Concept Mapping to Enhance the Research Interview”
Tracing pedagogic frailty in arts and humanities education: An autoethnographic perspective
This paper offers an approach to support the development of reflective teaching practice among university academics that can be used to promote dialogue about quality enhancement and the student experience. Pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching within universities by helping to maintain a simultaneous focus on key areas that are thought to impede development …
Mapping pedagogic frailty in geography education: A framed autoethnographic case study
Pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching within universities by helping to maintain a simultaneous focus on key areas that are thought to impede the development of pedagogy. These areas and the links that have been proposed to connect them are interrogated here through the analysis of an autoethnographic narrative produced by a community “insider” who has consid…
Understanding (in)formal learning in an academic development programme: A social network perspective
Using Concept Mapping to Enhance the Research Interview
In this paper the authors report the use of concept mapping as a means of summarizing interview transcripts in the study of the information-seeking behavior of employees in an organization. Concept mapping differs from traditional methods of textual coding for interview analysis by making underlying cognitive structures transparent and giving a focus to the sets of propositions by which individuals construct meaning. Concept map structure correla…
Using Concept Mapping to Enhance the Research Interview
In this paper the authors report the use of concept mapping as a means of summarizing interview transcripts in the study of the information-seeking behavior of employees in an organization. Concept mapping differs from traditional methods of textual coding for interview analysis by making underlying cognitive structures transparent and giving a focus to the sets of propositions by which individuals construct meaning. Concept map structure correla…
Understanding (in)formal learning in an academic development programme: A social network perspective
Making learning visible: The Role of Concept Mapping in Higher Education
This article develops the concept‐mapping method as a tool for enhancing teaching quality in higher education. In particular, it describes how concept mapping can be used to transform abstract knowledge and understanding into concrete visual representations that are amenable to comparison and measurement. The article describes four important uses of the method: the identification of prior knowledge (and prior‐knowledge structure) among students; …
Universities as centres of non-learning
It has been claimed that one of the overriding purposes of the scholarship of teaching movement is to make more visible what teachers do to make learning happen. The authors of this article are critical of the literature on the scholarship of teaching for not having made more progress towards this aim. They support these assertions through analysis of recent literature and consultation with academics teaching in a variety of disciplines. The weak…
Mapping pedagogic frailty in geography education: A framed autoethnographic case study
Pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching within universities by helping to maintain a simultaneous focus on key areas that are thought to impede the development of pedagogy. These areas and the links that have been proposed to connect them are interrogated here through the analysis of an autoethnographic narrative produced by a community “insider” who has consid…
More than customers: Conceptions of Students as Partners Held by Students, Staff, and Institutional Leaders
Students as partners (SaP) practices are emerging in today’s universities as a means to offer a more participative agenda, and to transform institutional cultures within an increasingly economically driven higher education context. This study contributes to understandings of partnership approaches, which largely still remain under-theorised, through exploring the conceptualisation of SaP by institutional leaders, staff, and students. Drawing on d…
Tracing pedagogic frailty in arts and humanities education: An autoethnographic perspective
This paper offers an approach to support the development of reflective teaching practice among university academics that can be used to promote dialogue about quality enhancement and the student experience. Pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching within universities by helping to maintain a simultaneous focus on key areas that are thought to impede development …
Poems and pedagogic frailty: Uncovering the affective within teacher development through collective biography
To explore the affective domains embedded in academic development and teacher practice, a team of academic developers was invited to consider a poem and how it reflects the emotions and feelings underpinning experiences as teachers within Higher Education. We used a method of arts-informed, collective biography to evaluate a poem to draw upon and share memories to interrogate lived experiences. Our research is framed using the lens of pedagogic f…
Making learning visible: The Role of Concept Mapping in Higher Education
This article develops the concept‐mapping method as a tool for enhancing teaching quality in higher education. In particular, it describes how concept mapping can be used to transform abstract knowledge and understanding into concrete visual representations that are amenable to comparison and measurement. The article describes four important uses of the method: the identification of prior knowledge (and prior‐knowledge structure) among students; …
Universities as centres of non-learning
It has been claimed that one of the overriding purposes of the scholarship of teaching movement is to make more visible what teachers do to make learning happen. The authors of this article are critical of the literature on the scholarship of teaching for not having made more progress towards this aim. They support these assertions through analysis of recent literature and consultation with academics teaching in a variety of disciplines. The weak…
Using Concept Mapping to Enhance the Research Interview
In this paper the authors report the use of concept mapping as a means of summarizing interview transcripts in the study of the information-seeking behavior of employees in an organization. Concept mapping differs from traditional methods of textual coding for interview analysis by making underlying cognitive structures transparent and giving a focus to the sets of propositions by which individuals construct meaning. Concept map structure correla…
Understanding (in)formal learning in an academic development programme: A social network perspective
Mapping pedagogic frailty in geography education: A framed autoethnographic case study
Pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching within universities by helping to maintain a simultaneous focus on key areas that are thought to impede the development of pedagogy. These areas and the links that have been proposed to connect them are interrogated here through the analysis of an autoethnographic narrative produced by a community “insider” who has consid…
Tracing pedagogic frailty in arts and humanities education: An autoethnographic perspective
This paper offers an approach to support the development of reflective teaching practice among university academics that can be used to promote dialogue about quality enhancement and the student experience. Pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching within universities by helping to maintain a simultaneous focus on key areas that are thought to impede development …
Reflection/Commentary on a Past Article: “Using Concept Mapping to Enhance the Research Interview”
Concept Mapping in the Age of Deleuze: Fresh Perspectives and New Challenges
This conceptual paper offers a reconsideration of the application of Novakian concept mapping to higher education research by putting to work the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome. We ask: what does thinking with Deleuze’s concepts offer researchers interested in concept mapping, and what conceptual, and terminological, obstacles might be created through such a reconceptualization? We have focused on the rhizomatic principles of mapping and tracin…
Revisiting ‘A “teaching excellence” for the times we live in’: Posthuman possibilities
This article proposes a rethinking of the contested concept of teaching excellence within higher education. In order to do, so we engage posthumanist theory to reconsider teaching excellence from a new perspective that shifts the gaze beyond the measured individual to explore our intra-actions within a wider context. Taking Skelton’s original conception of teaching excellence as a starting point, we explore what a values-based concept of excellen…
Frailty in transition? Troubling the norms, boundaries and limitations of transition theory and practice
This article focuses on ‘transition’ and how it is understood within higher education. Drawing on data from concept map-mediated interviews at two institutions, we examine the conceptions of transition held by academic and professional staff, who work to support students’ learning into and through higher education. We suggest that normative understandings of transition often draw upon a grand-narrative that orchestrates and reiterates a stereotyp…
The development of academics’ feedback literacy: Experiences of learning from critical feedback via scholarly peer review
The emerging literature related to feedback literacy has hitherto focused primarily on students’ engagement with feedback, and yet an analysis of academics’ feedback literacy is also of interest to those seeking to understand effective strategies to engage with feedback. Data from concept map-mediated interviews and reflections, with a team of six colleagues, surface academics’ responses to receiving critical feedback via scholarly peer review. O…
More than customers: Conceptions of Students as Partners Held by Students, Staff, and Institutional Leaders
Students as partners (SaP) practices are emerging in today’s universities as a means to offer a more participative agenda, and to transform institutional cultures within an increasingly economically driven higher education context. This study contributes to understandings of partnership approaches, which largely still remain under-theorised, through exploring the conceptualisation of SaP by institutional leaders, staff, and students. Drawing on d…
Considering the concept of recipience in student learning from a modified Bernsteinian perspective
The concept of recipience is emerging within the literature as a useful idea to inform our understanding of student engagement with feedback. In this paper, the applicability of the concept of recipience is broadened from its origins in the literature on student feedback to consider its role in developing student knowledge structures that are more receptive to development. This will promote cumulative/meaningful learning that is required to const…
The Ecological Root Metaphor for Higher Education: Searching for Evidence of Conceptual Emergence within University Education Strategies
Recent research has suggested that Higher Education would benefit from the adoption of institutional models that relinquish ties to industrial thinking and associated metaphors. This long-established, market-led managerial perspective has been colonised by neoliberal values that work against education. A move towards models that have greater resonance with ecological thinking is considered to better align the institutional purpose with tackling t…
Belonging in Science: Democratic Pedagogies for Cross-Cultural PhD Supervision
This research used Novakian concept mapping and interview techniques to track changes in knowledge and understanding amongst students and their supervisors in the course of full-time research towards a laboratory science-based PhD. This detailed longitudinal case study analysis measures both cognitive change in the specific subjects that are the topic for research, and the understanding of the process of PhD level research and supervision. The da…
An ecological lens on the professional development of university teachers
This article presents an ecological frame for reflection on teaching at university. It is suggested here that the process of professional reflection on practice can be better aligned with processes of institutional development by applying the adaptive cycle. This heuristic emerged from the scientific literature on ecosystem maintenance and has been repurposed to allow the consideration of complex social-ecological systems – such as a university. …
Exploring dynamic processes within the ecological university: A focus on the adaptive cycle
The university-as-ecosystem concept provides a framework for the analysis of the dynamic maintenance of sustainable pedagogies within the university. Application of Holling’s adaptive cycle, used to describe the active constructive and destructive processes of stabilisation and destabilisation within an ecosystem, is explored here in the context of the ecological university. The cycle predicts that disruptions to the system initiate a period of r…
Spaces and Places for Connection in the Postdigital University
This study focuses on the spaces and places for learning and teaching connections in higher education. Using a photovoice research method, we ask: what role do spaces and places play in offering opportunities for learning and teaching connection, and what do they tell us about the evolving practices of teachers in contemporary higher education? Whilst considerable attention has been paid to the learning spaces of students, we argue that less atte…
Five moves towards an ecological university
The shift towards an ecological university may be the key to achieving greater levels of social justice within higher education. This assumes that we could change the root metaphor of higher education – away from the current industrial model that is infused with neoliberal ideology and towards a more sustainable ecological model. This change involves five key moves that require us to: construct an institutional natural history to understand the n…
Poems and pedagogic frailty: Uncovering the affective within teacher development through collective biography
To explore the affective domains embedded in academic development and teacher practice, a team of academic developers was invited to consider a poem and how it reflects the emotions and feelings underpinning experiences as teachers within Higher Education. We used a method of arts-informed, collective biography to evaluate a poem to draw upon and share memories to interrogate lived experiences. Our research is framed using the lens of pedagogic f…
Reframing Academic Development for the Ecological University: From ‘Change’ to ‘Growth’
This paper contributes to an emerging multi-layered perspective of academic development that embraces the diversity of knowledges that exists across the university campus. However, across these multiple layers there are a few universal characteristics that can provide cohesion and sustainability for third-space practitioners. A focus on growth allows academic development to align with a philosophy of becoming that is supported by the powerful ada…
Authorised but unsustained: How universities suppress ecological leadership by action and omission
Ecological leadership – grounded in trust, relational care, and adaptive collaboration – is increasingly recognised as a vital yet fragile form of academic development. While its emergence signals a shift towards more humane and responsive educational models, its suppression remains under-theorised. This article examines how such leadership is undermined, through a comparative analysis of two institutional cases: one in the UK, where a thriving p…
Composing and de-composing identities of an emeritus professor: Academic, post-academic or pre-compost
This article addresses the narrative desert that exists around the role of emeritus academics by considering how such colleagues fit within the narrative ecology of the university. By drawing on my personal experience of becoming emeritus, I illustrate how the dynamic tension of composing and de-composing processes of identity construction can be traced within an adaptive cycle of development. In this case, the anomic deconstruction of the academ…
Towards an ecological university: A new dawn or a ‘Silent Spring
The need for a paradigm shift in university governance has been explored recently in the literature. In particular, a proposed move from neoliberal values of commodification towards ecological values of care and relationality may offer universities a way forward to achieve greater alignment with the wicked problem of the Anthropocene. University managers have a key role to play in this transition and their influence may support a move towards a ‘…
Lessons from lichens for the future university
Inspired by the writings of Donna Haraway, Ron Barnett and Henry Giroux, this article explores the value of the lichen-university metaphor in working towards post-neoliberal higher education. A lichen-inspired university sector would recognise that academics, like lichens, survive and flourish through entanglement, collaboration, and attunement to precarious, damaged environments. It would value the slow, the relational, and the interdependent ov…
Sociology (20 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Higher education (15 works) · Pedagogy (14 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Mathematics education (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Higher Education Practises and Engagement (9 works) · Social science (8 works)