Karen Gravett
Biographic Data
| ID | 374649 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen Gravett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen |
| FAMILY NAME | Gravett |
| SIGNATURE | GRAVETT K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Surrey |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3767-5098 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Relational pedagogies in an age of GenAI: A critical conversation
This point of departure opens a process that we hope will encourage a breadth of submissions to a special issue of Teaching in Higher Education, entitled Relational pedagogies in an age of GenAI. T
The question of efficiency: Teaching and technology in higher education
In this article, we examine the notion of efficiency and the discourses that surround its use in higher education. In recent years, the call for digitally enhanced efficiency has begun to dominate conversations around teaching and learning; educational technology in its various forms is framed as having the capacity to relieve the labour of teaching. We consider what might be lost through this conception of education, how efficiency versus relati…
The higher education research ‘field’: Key developments, questions and possibilities
This article explores the nature of contemporary research within the evolving landscape of higher education studies. Higher education studies have long been the site of significant critique: depicted as a field of divided islands, where research is described as lacking in conceptual framing, and as recurrently under-theorised. And yet, an alternative interpretation is that contemporary higher education research can be viewed as an increasingly ri…
Black Box Assessment: Rethinking integrity and learning for a time of Generative AI
The design of effective assessment has long presented a complex challenge for educators, one that has intensified with the emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). The maintenance of assessment validity in the context of GenAI has been characterised in the literature as a wicked problem: a multifaceted issue lacking a singular solution and necessitating structural rather than purely discursive responses. This paper advances a blue…
The care-full craft of feedback in an age of generative AI
The disruptive and transformative presence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping education and learning. In this paper, we consider how GenAI is redefining what it means for students and educators to engage in feedback encounters, raising questions not only about what matters in feedback, but also about the very values that underpin meaningful learning. Taking stock of this significant shift, we examine what we know a…
Affective economies of AI in digitalised higher education
The integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in higher education has meant that universities are experiencing a significant period of uncertainty and flux. The need to understand how GenAI technologies are shaping students’ evolving experiences of higher education is important. This paper asks: what work do emotions do within the way educators and students engage with AI? Engaging Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economies , and…
A Sociology of Artefacts in Academic Practice: Everyday Encounters of Technologies in Use
Digital technologies now pervade all areas of education, and EdTech actors increasingly configure society and educational practices in ways that are political, practical, and ideological. There is a need to understand digitalisation in critical ways, including how technologies reshape both educational practices and educators themselves. In this article, we examine how technologies act as more than mundane tools: pushing back, shaping action, and …
Critical GenAI Literacy: Postdigital Configurations
Critical Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) literacy cannot be reduced to a universal framework. Rather, it must be understood as a constellation of situated literacies, shaped by disciplinary perspectives, socio-political contexts, and technological affordances. This multi-authored article explores the emerging concept of critical GenAI literacy and its postdigital configurations. Fourteen authors contributed with different sections, fol…
A critical practice for contemporary times
In this point of departure article, I argue for a regeneration of critique. I suggest that there is a need to re-examine critical theorising in contemporary times, to address the limitations of current conceptions of criticality, where critique is at risk of becoming stale, meaningless, even harmful. I propose a move towards critical practice. Rather than critique being a cognitive individualised process, critical practice is understood as affect…
The politics of student belonging: Identity and purpose
Belonging is considered to be a positive foundation for students’ well-being and success at university; however, in this article, we argue that it is time to think about belonging more critically. This research highlights how students experience and create multiple belongings. Drawing upon empirical data from interviews and video blogs with students in the UK and Australia, we identify how calls for integrated, uniform, approaches to building bel…
Authentic assessment as relational pedagogy
This article troubles a pervasive concept within higher education studies: authentic assessment. Authentic assessment is well-established within higher education, and yet its common usage leaves it limited in possibility. Often understood as a practice focused on tasks, where assessments represent a ‘reality’ beyond universities, authentic assessment praxis has missed engaging with wider literature exploring authenticity as an emergent quality co…
Affective encounters in higher education
In this article, we examine how thinking with affect theory offers fertility within higher education studies to see and do teaching and learning differently. For many educators in universities, the idea that teaching is a cognitive process of information transmission is still taken-for-granted. These beliefs are visible through the persistence of nomenclature such as 'content', predictable learning 'outcomes', and by the dominance of linear teach…
Different voices, different bodies: Presence–absence in the digital university
The move to digital, and now hybrid, education has defamiliarised teaching practices and unsettled experiences of what it means to be and to engage at university. In this article, I examine what new questions evolving teaching and learning practices provoke with regards rethinking notions of the body, and concepts of presence and absence. Interweaving theories of performativity, of strangeness, and of agency as a cutting together/apart, I explore…
Pedagogies of mattering: Re-conceptualising relational pedagogies in higher education
This article engages posthuman theory to propose a rethinking of the theory and practice of relational pedagogies within higher education (HE). There has been renewed emphasis within HE discourses on the significance of relationships within learning and teaching as a means to offer a counter-view to an uncaring marketised HE system. This article argues the need to build on and extend the current framing of relational pedagogies. It argues for an …
Feedback literacy-as-event: Relationality, space and temporality in feedback encounters
Research on student and teacher feedback literacies is currently a flourishing sub-field of higher education, as scholars seek to address the durable and dissatisfying dilemmas that feedback processes represent. To date, however, higher education scholarship has been dominated by cognitive and humanist conceptions of feedback literacies, with the focus primarily placed upon how teachers and students might become more feedback literate. Drawing up…
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…
Doctoral literacy practices as sites of connections, competition and discomfort
Due to a changing higher education sector, doctoral literacies are evolving. Students are increasingly expected to navigate a diverse range of literacy practices beyond the traditional monograph. Engaging ideas from the fields of Academic Literacies and New Literacy Studies, this study sought to explore what doctoral literacy practices students are engaged in and how these are acquired. Findings revealed that whilst some students maximised opport…
Scoping academic oracy in higher education: Knotting together forgotten connections to equity and academic literacies
Although the importance of developing students’ academic literacies has been well-established, academic oracy has been forgotten. There is a paucity of attention to oracy in higher education, despite the key role played by students’ oral communication in academic achievement and graduate employability. This study offers a scoping review of the international scholarly literature that does exist, to explore how oracy has been framed and discussed i…
Intersections of space with wellbeing and learning: Awakening space research
In this commentary, Ajjawi and Gravett examine the role of space in learning and urge the field to research learning spaces from a more theoretically informed position
Exploring the notion of teacher feedback literacies through the theory of practice architectures
Feedback literacy research has largely focussed on learner processes and how teachers can support them. However, a socio-material perspective on feedback as a situated practice foregrounds the interplay between actors, resources, contexts and structures, requiring a repositioning of teachers as entangled with others within practice. This merits further exploration of teacher feedback literacies. We undertake this exploration through the theory of…
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…
Belonging as flickering and in flux in academic work: A collective biography
In this article, we explore the concept of belonging and its utility as a means for understanding academics’ experiences of working in the academy. Transformative changes have reorientated academic work in recent years and continue to do so as we grapple with what it means to work and live in a post-digital, post-covid, world. We engage a collective biography methodology to highlight the embodied spatial-material assemblages in which belonging ca…
Beyond Technology in Online Postgraduate Education
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…
Making connections: Authenticity and alienation within students’ relationships in higher education
In the context of a marketised higher education system, meaningful interpersonal connections remain of paramount importance to many students. Using a story-completion method, we examine how relationships impact upon students’ experiences of higher education, and explore the importance of relational pedagogies. We draw upon data from a longitudinal study in which students were invited to complete stories that enabled them to draw upon experiences …
Belonging as situated practice
This article offers a rethinking of a fundamental area of higher education research and practice: the concept of belonging. Extending the considerable international research attending to belonging, we suggest that normative narratives often contain a number of omissions. Such omissions include a consideration of the experiences of those students who may not wish to, or who cannot, belong, as well as a questioning of the very boundaries of belongi…
Story Completion: Storying as a Method of Meaning-Making and Discursive Discovery
This article focuses on a method of data collection that exists in the margins of qualitative research: story completion. Story completion has a background of usage within disciplines such as psychology, feminist theory, and psychotherapy. However, this method is still uncommon and underutilized and has not been widely put to work as an approach for qualitative education research, despite its rich potential as a tool for accessing participants’ m…
Troubling transitions and celebrating becomings: From Pathway to Rhizome
Student transitions are a central part of higher education policy and practice internationally. However much of the work within this important area is underpinned by unquestioned and limited assumptions of what transition as a concept might mean. Moreover, too often understandings of transition defer to narratives that sustain a stereotypic understanding of students’ experiences. This study contributes to a major shift in our understanding of the…
Affective encounters in higher education
In this article, we examine how thinking with affect theory offers fertility within higher education studies to see and do teaching and learning differently. For many educators in universities, the idea that teaching is a cognitive process of information transmission is still taken-for-granted. These beliefs are visible through the persistence of nomenclature such as 'content', predictable learning 'outcomes', and by the dominance of linear teach…
Storying students' becomings into and through higher education
This article employs a new approach to understanding student transition. This area of theory and practice has developed a huge global significance. However, transition as a concept is under-theorised, and a discourse that reiterates stereotypic narratives of students’ normative and linear trajectories can be seen to permeate the field. Drawing on data collected using story completion methods, together with semi-structured interviews, we examine t…
Belonging as flickering and in flux in academic work: A collective biography
In this article, we explore the concept of belonging and its utility as a means for understanding academics’ experiences of working in the academy. Transformative changes have reorientated academic work in recent years and continue to do so as we grapple with what it means to work and live in a post-digital, post-covid, world. We engage a collective biography methodology to highlight the embodied spatial-material assemblages in which belonging ca…
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…
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…
I’m not sure where home is’: Narratives of student mobilities into and through higher education
The concept of a typical pathway to becoming a student is a pervasive narrative within higher education, with moving away from home to live at university framed as the “traditional student experience”. In response, recent literature has begun to trouble the thinking around student mobilities. Building on this work, this study draws upon semi-structured interviews with students who have moved away from home into university residences in order to s…
Feedback literacies as sociomaterial practice
Feedback remains a fundamental and challenging aspect of higher education policy and practice. Increasingly research has sought to understand how to more effectively develop students’ feedback literacy in order to improve individuals’ engagement with assessment feedback. To date, work within this area has been underpinned by cognitive and affective conceptions of feedback literacy, and feedback is commonly conceptualised as a binary, dialogic, re…
Story Completion: Storying as a Method of Meaning-Making and Discursive Discovery
This article focuses on a method of data collection that exists in the margins of qualitative research: story completion. Story completion has a background of usage within disciplines such as psychology, feminist theory, and psychotherapy. However, this method is still uncommon and underutilized and has not been widely put to work as an approach for qualitative education research, despite its rich potential as a tool for accessing participants’ m…
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…
Feedback literacies as sociomaterial practice
Feedback remains a fundamental and challenging aspect of higher education policy and practice. Increasingly research has sought to understand how to more effectively develop students’ feedback literacy in order to improve individuals’ engagement with assessment feedback. To date, work within this area has been underpinned by cognitive and affective conceptions of feedback literacy, and feedback is commonly conceptualised as a binary, dialogic, re…
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…
Disrupting the doctoral journey: Re-imagining doctoral pedagogies and temporal practices in higher education
This article reconsiders narratives of the doctoral journey. It aims to contribute to a small but growing body of work which offers an irruption to widely accepted notions of learning as a linear pathway with a fixed end-point. The article engages two of Deleuze and Guattari’s many generative concepts: rhizome and becoming. In doing so, it explores the value of attending to the multiple and messy becomings that researchers experience, as they evo…
Publishing and flourishing: Writing for desire in higher education
In the current performative climate of higher education, where academic outputs are highly valorised, professional academic writing has become ‘high stakes’ and is often framed as fraught with tension and anxiety. In this article, we contest the phrase ‘publish or perish’ and argue that is not necessarily helpful or, indeed, always true. Through interviews involving critical incidents with a team of academics, the authors found that tensions in e…
I’m not sure where home is’: Narratives of student mobilities into and through higher education
The concept of a typical pathway to becoming a student is a pervasive narrative within higher education, with moving away from home to live at university framed as the “traditional student experience”. In response, recent literature has begun to trouble the thinking around student mobilities. Building on this work, this study draws upon semi-structured interviews with students who have moved away from home into university residences in order to s…
Storying students' becomings into and through higher education
This article employs a new approach to understanding student transition. This area of theory and practice has developed a huge global significance. However, transition as a concept is under-theorised, and a discourse that reiterates stereotypic narratives of students’ normative and linear trajectories can be seen to permeate the field. Drawing on data collected using story completion methods, together with semi-structured interviews, we examine t…
Troubling transitions and celebrating becomings: From Pathway to Rhizome
Student transitions are a central part of higher education policy and practice internationally. However much of the work within this important area is underpinned by unquestioned and limited assumptions of what transition as a concept might mean. Moreover, too often understandings of transition defer to narratives that sustain a stereotypic understanding of students’ experiences. This study contributes to a major shift in our understanding of the…
Beyond Technology in Online Postgraduate Education
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…
Making connections: Authenticity and alienation within students’ relationships in higher education
In the context of a marketised higher education system, meaningful interpersonal connections remain of paramount importance to many students. Using a story-completion method, we examine how relationships impact upon students’ experiences of higher education, and explore the importance of relational pedagogies. We draw upon data from a longitudinal study in which students were invited to complete stories that enabled them to draw upon experiences …
International students’ linguistic transitions into disciplinary studies: A rhizomatic perspective
This paper offers a reconceptualisation of international students’ transitions into and through UK higher education. We present two case studies of students which explore their transitions in terms of their academic speaking skills from pre-sessional courses into their disciplinary studies. Students describe how the development of their confidence and performance in academic speaking was contingent on a number of factors and micro-moments, and ho…
Language, literacies and learning in the disciplines: A higher education perspective
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Belonging as situated practice
This article offers a rethinking of a fundamental area of higher education research and practice: the concept of belonging. Extending the considerable international research attending to belonging, we suggest that normative narratives often contain a number of omissions. Such omissions include a consideration of the experiences of those students who may not wish to, or who cannot, belong, as well as a questioning of the very boundaries of belongi…
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…
Doctoral literacy practices as sites of connections, competition and discomfort
Due to a changing higher education sector, doctoral literacies are evolving. Students are increasingly expected to navigate a diverse range of literacy practices beyond the traditional monograph. Engaging ideas from the fields of Academic Literacies and New Literacy Studies, this study sought to explore what doctoral literacy practices students are engaged in and how these are acquired. Findings revealed that whilst some students maximised opport…
Scoping academic oracy in higher education: Knotting together forgotten connections to equity and academic literacies
Although the importance of developing students’ academic literacies has been well-established, academic oracy has been forgotten. There is a paucity of attention to oracy in higher education, despite the key role played by students’ oral communication in academic achievement and graduate employability. This study offers a scoping review of the international scholarly literature that does exist, to explore how oracy has been framed and discussed i…
Intersections of space with wellbeing and learning: Awakening space research
In this commentary, Ajjawi and Gravett examine the role of space in learning and urge the field to research learning spaces from a more theoretically informed position
Exploring the notion of teacher feedback literacies through the theory of practice architectures
Feedback literacy research has largely focussed on learner processes and how teachers can support them. However, a socio-material perspective on feedback as a situated practice foregrounds the interplay between actors, resources, contexts and structures, requiring a repositioning of teachers as entangled with others within practice. This merits further exploration of teacher feedback literacies. We undertake this exploration through the theory of…
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…
Belonging as flickering and in flux in academic work: A collective biography
In this article, we explore the concept of belonging and its utility as a means for understanding academics’ experiences of working in the academy. Transformative changes have reorientated academic work in recent years and continue to do so as we grapple with what it means to work and live in a post-digital, post-covid, world. We engage a collective biography methodology to highlight the embodied spatial-material assemblages in which belonging ca…
Sociology (29 works) · Pedagogy (28 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Higher Education Practises and Engagement (19 works) · Higher education (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Evaluation of Teaching Practices (10 works) · Art (9 works)