With increasingly diverse international student profiles, higher education is challenged to enable educational relationships amidst complexity and intersectionality. The purpose of education in contemporary society has received concerted attention (Biesta, 2008, Deng, 2022, Noddings, 2013), focusing on human development and the expansion of both individual and collective capabilities. The question of how these “different combinations of human functionings by people, groups or both” (Deng, 2021: 1662) can be supported by curriculum is answered by a diverse range of voices, some cohering, many contesting.

Set against this increasingly global but contested curriculum landscape, this paper presents a re-envisioned interpretation of curriculum as encounter to examine how student collegiality as a peer-to-peer engagement process can be supported in undergraduate business programmes. Collegiality is recognised as one of the most enduring foundational premises of higher education (Burnes et al., 2014, Fielding, 1999) and espoused as a core value by academic professionals (Macfarlane, 2016). Despite widespread recognition of its importance, a lack of definitional clarity in extant literature remains, which in combination with the use of collegiality to cover a wide range of meanings and interpretations results in an almost mythical quality to the concept (Scoles et al., 2021).

This research extends Fielding’s (1999) radical collegiality as a communal educational practice linked to the development of democracy, thwarting traditional power relations where students are partners, not objects in their learning process. Curriculum as encounter thus provides a theoretical framework built on Greene’s (1993) observation that curriculum always emerges from the interplay between “conceptions of knowledge, conceptions of human beings and conceptions of social order”. Encounters imply conversations, complicated by many factors of the contextuality of time and place, individuality, prior knowledge, and interest or disinterest, of the respective interlocutors (Pinar, 2011). Reimagining curriculum as a lived experience allows the inclusive power of conversation to bring in previously silenced voices in an evolving way “never reaching a final conclusion, always incomplete, but richer and more densely woven” Greene (1993: 213).

Conceptions of knowledge and questions of why and whose knowledge are valuable remain critical in curriculum development, shaped by multiple influences (Priestley et al., 2021). Encounters offer potential to break with the mundane, to challenge perceived realities and inherent ideological and political influences in hierarchical structures of knowledge. Conceptions of human beings address the abstraction and indifference in curriculum in favour of personalisation to foster diversity and inclusion. The “scholarship of the self”, explained by Style (2014: 67) as students’ “lived experiences, stories and methods of meaning-making”, are integrated with objective academic knowledge through "respectful encounter". The sharing of personal stories and experiences through inner thought and open dialogue can enable deeper understanding and both subjective and social reconstruction (Pinar, 2011). Private and public learning are thus inseparable, where the self is not a fixed, separate, or predefined state but one that is continuously evolving, becoming intersubjective through dialogue and narrative. The individual is inherently linked as part of the collective, an amalgamation of “provinces of meaning” (Greene, 1977: 287). Conceptions of social order form the basis for more democratic education not alone in the recognition of difference but in the confrontation of systemic oppression or stereotyping where true citizenship agency is activated. This reflexive form of collective community that curriculum as encounter engenders, contributes to an always evolving democratic ideal. Encounters between students and curricular content leads to cultivation of capabilities and dispositions (Deng, 2017) while exchange of stories from different perspectives “bring something into being that is in-between” (Greene, 1993: 219). This milieu of interconnecting relationships holds potential to be transformational, a collective sense of becoming not just being, of envisioning the possible.

The focus on the student perspective and experience of curriculum and collegiality in this doctoral research inherently recognises that knowledge is socially constructed, bridging the individual and the collective. Collegiality has previously been studied from diverse theoretical perspectives including philosophy and sociology (Fielding, 1999), social practice theory (Brown, 2021), cognitive development theory (Trigwell, 2005), standpoint theory (Scoles et al., 2021), and complexity theory (Elton, 2008). The three conceptions used to analyse curriculum as encounter highlight underlying relational, integrated, and evolving characteristics. Case study methodology within a constructivist paradigm will therefore be used in this qualitative research due to the contemporary focus of the research question (Assalahi, 2015, Kivunja and Kuyini, 2017) and the related extant literature. Knowledge is jointly constructed between researcher and participant based on the lived experiences of those involved. The centrality of context and the exploration of student collegiality within a suite of academic programmes in a single academic department of the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS) in Ireland justifies the use of a case study methodology as a bounded system of embedded graduate and current student cases (Merriam, 1998). This bounded system of multiple embedded cases allows potential comparison to explore changes in both current students and graduates’ views and behaviours in relation to collegiality over time. Qualitative interviews and focus groups will be used in addition to preliminary profiling questionnaire methods.

Curriculum as encounter presents significant potential as a lens to examine how student collegiality can be supported in higher education. The centrality of communication, the iterative processes of self-reflection and collective sharing and the democratic ethos that emerges from this perspective is consistent with the broad themes in the literature on collegiality. While literature on encounters in curriculum, points largely to the positives, it is important to acknowledge that encounters are not always benign, nor are their constituent conversations, which may suppress as well as give voice to contrasting viewpoints in power relationships. The same holds true in a darker side of contrived or hollowed collegiality (Hargreaves and Dawe, 1990, Macfarlane, 2005, Macfarlane, 2015). The three curricular conceptions of knowledge, human beings and social order are also illustrative for this doctoral thesis. The European Credits Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) established during the Bologna Process may have positively impacted international co-operation and student mobility while simultaneously increasing the level of content specificity in structing knowledge in relation to outcomes, competences, and assessment. In contrast, student collegiality as a capability is not part of any formal curriculum, yet is fundamental to differentiating higher education from school (Elton, 2008). It seems reasonable to surmise that student collegiality, if it exists, is part of the hidden curriculum. The integration of individual and collective in the conceptions of human beings, is wholly commensurate with collegiality as a characteristic that is attributed to the individual through a responsibility to the collective (Fielding, 1999), as such a “vocational commitment to supra-personal norms” (Kligyte and Barrie, 2014: 159). Finally, the conceptions of social order is reflective of the potential that collegiality has, to contribute to the equality, diversity and inclusion agenda in higher education and enhance a sense of belonging as well as becoming.

ASSALAHI, H. 2015. The Philosophical Foundations of Educational Research: a Beginner's Guide. American Journal of Educational Research, 3, 312-317. BIESTA, G. 2008. Good education in an age of measurement. Educational assessment, evaluation and accountability, 21, 33-46. BROWN, K. 2021. Cultivating a ‘collegial turn’ in doctoral education. Teaching in Higher Education, 26, 759-775. BURNES, B., WEND, P. & BY, R. T. 2014. The changing face of English universities: reinventing collegiality for the twenty-first century. Studies in higher education (Dorchester-on-Thames), 39, 905-926. DENG, Z. 2021. Powerful knowledge, transformations and Didaktik/curriculum thinking. British educational research journal, 47, 1652-1674. DENG, Z. 2022. Powerful knowledge, educational potential and knowledge-rich curriculum: pushing the boundaries. Journal of curriculum studies, 54, 599-617. ELTON, L. 2008. Collegiality and complexity: Humboldt's relevance to British universities today. Higher education quarterly, 62, 224-236. FIELDING, M. 1999. Radical collegiality: affirming teaching as an inclusive professional practice. Australian Educational Researcher, 26, 1-34. GREENE, M. 1993. Diversity and Inclusion: Toward a Curriculum for Human Beings. Teachers College Record, 95, 211-221. HARGREAVES, A. & DAWE, R. 1990. Paths of professional development: Contrived collegiality, collaborative culture, and the case of peer coaching. Teaching and teacher education, 6, 227-241. KIVUNJA, C. & KUYINI, A. B. 2017. Understanding and Applying Research Paradigms in Educational Contexts. International journal of higher education, 6, 26. KLIGYTE, G. & BARRIE, S. 2014. Collegiality: leading us into fantasy - the paradoxical resilience of collegiality in academic leadership. Higher education research and development, 33, 157-169. MACFARLANE, B. 2016. Collegiality and performativity in a competitive academic culture. Higher Education Review, 48. MERRIAM, S. B. 1998. Qualitative research and case study applications in education, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers. NODDINGS, N. 2013. Standardized Curriculum and Loss of Creativity. Theory into practice, 52, 210-215. PINAR, W. F. 2011. Introduction. In: PINAR, W. F. (ed.) The Character of Curriculum Studies: Bildung, Currere, and the Recurring Question of the Subject. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. PRIESTLEY, M., ALVUNGER, D., PHILIPPOU, S. & SOINI, T. (eds.) 2021. Curriculum making in Europe : policy and practice within and across diverse contexts, Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited. SCOLES, J., HUXHAM, M., SINCLAIR, K., LEWIS, C., JUNG, J. & DOUGALL, E. 2021. The other side of a magic mirror: exploring collegiality in student and staff partnership work. Teaching in Higher Education, 26, 712-727. TRIGWELL, K. 2005. Teaching–research relations, cross-disciplinary collegiality and student learning. Higher education, 49, 235-254.