Keynote speakers

Dr Kathleen M Quinlan

Bio: Dr Kathleen M Quinlan is Reader in Higher Education and Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Kent.  She holds a PhD in Education from the Stanford School of Education and has researched teaching and learning in higher education for more than 20 years. She has led educational development programmes at The Australian National University, Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and the University of Oxford and served as Educator-in- Residence (August 2014) at the National University of Singapore.  She has published more than 30 peer reviewed journal articles and seven book chapters, as well as edited books and special issues of journals.  She was recognised for her strategic contributions to teaching enhancement with the award of Principal Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.

Keynote: Leading for Learning: Building on your Values and Teaching Expertise
Kathleen M Quinlan, PhD
Director, Centre for the Study of Higher Education
University of Kent

Dr Quinlan will provide examples illustrating the three main spheres of leadership highlighted in her model of leadership for holistic learning in higher education (Quinlan, 2014). She will show how leaders start with their own sense of identity, values and purpose to create a vision for programmes and subjects and inspire others.  Effective educational leaders draw on expertise about teaching and learning and a scholarly approach to education to realise those visions with colleagues. To support planning and implementation, they attend to the organisational conditions in which students and teachers are embedded.

Kathleen M. Quinlan (2014) Leadership of teaching for student learning in higher education: what is needed?, Higher Education Research & Development, 33:1, 32-45, DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2013.864609


Prof Magda Fourie-Malherbe

Download Magda’s Presentation slides


Bio: Magda Fourie-Malherbe is Professor of Higher Education Studies in the Centre for Higher and Adult Education, Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University. She holds qualifications from the University of the Free State and Stellenbosch University, and has worked for more than thirty years at various public universities in South Africa as a researcher, lecturer, supervisor and senior administrator. Her research includes work on higher education governance, leadership and management, teaching and learning, quality assurance and transformation. Currently sixteen post-graduate students are doing research under her supervision, mainly on institutional factors that enhance or inhibit student success. Magda is a member of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (CHER) and the European Higher Education Society (EAIR), and serves on the Institutional Audits Committee of the Council on Higher Education. She has authored and co-authored more than forty contributions to scholarly journals, books and research reports.

Keynote: Countering carelessness: a case for academic leadership as citizenship
Prof Magda Fourie-Malherbe
Centre for Higher and Adult Education
Faculty of Education

The paper will make a case for academic leadership as citizenship rather than position or power. This case is made against the background of the higher education systemic context becoming ever more compliance and performance driven, resulting in corporatisation and managerialism at the institutional level.  The paper argues that this leads to the workplace being experienced as careless by academics (and students), and contends that this can be countered by employing distributed forms of leadership and an ethics of care – ways in which academic citizenship can take on new significance.