Held in the Larry Saha Room, Haydon-Allen #2175, ANU.  All welcome. Presented by Pamela Roberts, Senior Lecturer, CEDAM, Research School of Arts and Social Science

Barnett & Coate (2005: 14) argue that curriculum is a "missing term" in higher education, which represents the lack of a framework for seriously considering educational matters.  My research explores how academics in a research-intensive university make curriculum decisions and their perceptions of what influences their decisions, with a particular focus on research. Investigating how academics make curriculum decisions allows me to identify the key elements used to construct curricula and decision making sequences.  My main interest is in how academics’ educational values and beliefs and perceptions of our context shape curriculum decisions. Toohey (1999) identified five distinctive orientations to university curricula, based on the work of Eliot Eisner (1974) in schools.  The influence of research is missing from Toohey’s framework and in most of the higher education teaching and curriculum literature. My research seeks to identify curriculum orientations that are relevant to our current higher education landscape and to explore the impacts of changes that include learning technologies, research-teaching relationships and an emphasis on performativity and workplace readiness.