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Agency and Leadership for Learning and Teaching

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The Self-organizing University

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Abstract

In this chapter we take up a second inconvenient truth in the modern university: Despite the fact that the core business of a university is learning and teaching, those who engage with the effort frequently do not know a lot about it in a professional sense. In the following pages, we frame this issue of agency for learning and teaching as a wicked problem for universities and describe how the problem is addressed in the Self-Organizing University (SOU).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A term popularized by the 2006 motion picture of the same title about Al Gore’s environmental campaign. We described the first inconvenient truth in chapter one as the lack of visible and comparable professional practice at scale in universities David et al.(2006).

  2. 2.

    This refers to the way universities use the existence of award winners, facilities, and grants as a basis for their understanding of what learning and teaching means.

  3. 3.

    A wicked problem is one that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize (Wikipedia 2016).

  4. 4.

    This software will be described in Chap. 7.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Arts and Education, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW, Australia

    Alan Bain & Lucia Zundans-Fraser

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  1. Alan Bain
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  2. Lucia Zundans-Fraser
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Correspondence to Alan Bain .

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Bain, A., Zundans-Fraser, L. (2017). Agency and Leadership for Learning and Teaching. In: The Self-organizing University. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4917-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4917-0_6

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-4917-0

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