The violin duet has long occupied a relevant place within instrumental pedagogy, forming part of the canon of the major historic violin schools and included in recent syllabi of some music performance graded examinations. Scholarship has identified numerous pedagogical benefits from duets. This qualitative interview study explores 31 UK teachers’ perceptions of the types of duetting activity within their violin teaching and the factors influencing their inclusion of duets. These have implications for the ongoing use of duets due to their potentially limited performance visibility, associations with amateurism and contextual aspects such as provision of pianos in teaching spaces, which warrant consideration in relation to the future development of the genre.

In the Fall term of 2024, I taught a class on the ancient Mediterranean, with a focus on Plato, Ovid, and Roman satire. The goals of the class include exposure to epic, philosophy, and humour from antiquity; honing critical thinking skills; and consideration of how human nature has changed (or has not) over the millennia. To pull back the curtain surrounding generative AI tools, I required students to use Claude.ai on their essay assignments. Students critiqued the large language model (LLM)’s composition of essay questions, its judgement of virtue of fictional characters, and its gloss on Platonic idealism. I also required students to write about their experiences with Claude.ai at the end of term. This paper offers a case study of classroom use and my own explorations of this emerging technology. While instructors’ apprehension surrounding AI tools is justified, there is room for using LLMs to show students what the tools can and cannot do. As familiarity with these tools becomes a requirement for new graduates and rising professionals, we need not forget the lessons of antiquity. My investigations illustrate a challenge that humanity has always faced: we must learn how to confront the siren song of technology without it leading to our demise.

This article reflects on opportunities for Middle East studies practitioners to engage relational pedagogies in their practices of teaching and learning in higher education. In particular, students as partners (SaP) has become an accepted approach to achieving pedagogical transformations, including curriculum cocreation and redesign. We discuss our experiences with a funded SaP course redesign project and our partnership, consisting of a history faculty member and two former students of the faculty instructor’s Middle East history course at a research university in Canada. We join existing scholarship on the benefits of student–faculty collaborations and we reflect on what the SaP approach can offer instructors in higher education in Middle East studies. In reflecting on our experiences of the partnership and our relational work, we argue for the importance of SaP in the construction of Middle East studies curricula and the underexplored impacts of faculty–student partnerships for those involved in SaP projects, including opportunities for mentorship, professional development, and decolonizing pedagogies.

This paper investigates the use of humour as a pedagogical tool in primary music education, highlighting its potential to improve attention and foster a climate of collaboration and trust among students. Using a qualitative approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 music teachers from primary schools in southern Spain to find out how they perceive and apply humour in their classes. The results indicate that humour not only acts as a catalyst for children’s motivation and well-being but also promotes deeper and more creative musical learning. However, the study also highlights the challenges of its implementation, such as the need for specific teacher skills and sensitivity to cultural diversity. Despite these challenges, the potential benefits of humour justify a more structured and conscious approach to its use. It is suggested that educational institutions and teacher education programmes consider these findings to improve the integration of humour into music pedagogy, ensuring that it contributes positively to the holistic development of students in a respectful environment. This approach offers new perspectives and tools for music teachers, transforming the quality of the educational process by making the teaching-learning process more enriching.

Spurred on in part by the large social justice mobilizations that began in 2020, recent years have seen growing calls for diversifying and decolonizing the disciplinary practices in the field of International Relations (IR). In response to these calls within the field and across academia more broadly, faculty and students in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University embarked on a project to produce a ‘Resource Bank’ highlighting and centring alternatives to Euro-American epistemologies, pedagogies, and ontologies that have thus far dominated the IR field. Drawing on our experiences as project managers of this Resource Bank project since its inception in 2021, we discuss some of the most salient issues and important challenges that emerged in the course of this work. We employ a postcolonial theoretical framework to tease out and problematize the Eurocentric foundations of the IR field and utilize the Resource Bank to reimagine research and teaching in the IR field.

International Relations (IR) has come under increasing and sustained criticism for marginalizing Africa’s intellectual traditions, rich history, Indigenous knowledge systems, and lived experiences. Several scholars of IR have argued that meaningful engagement with African contexts and thought would lead to better theory and pedagogy, more robust concepts, sharper analysis, and the study of issues that have greater relevance to contemporary global life. Despite the seriousness and widespread nature of the criticism, it is rare to find manuscripts in major IR journals that move beyond critique to demonstrate concretely how centring Africa in IR scholarship could transform the discipline or substantially enhance its analytical tools. This symposium takes up that difficult task by showing how a focus on African systems of thought can enrich IR’s conceptual vocabulary, reorient core assumptions, and expand the range of questions the discipline is equipped to address.

This paper examines the educational experience in Sudan from 2023 until the present. In 2023, with the outbreak of the civil war, the Sudanese universities completely ceased operations. Since late 2025, there has been highly limited in-person teaching when safe in some universities, but this is not widespread or comprehensive due to the destruction of infrastructure. Under these circumstances, some professors and students resorted to developing alternative solutions, the most prominent of which was the use of WhatsApp as an educational platform for communication, lectures, discussions, and exams. The research presents my experience as a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Khartoum, where lectures were prepared in small PDF files, audio recordings of the explanations were sent, and then discussed within WhatsApp groups. The university also organized exams through multiple centers to overcome transportation difficulties and later launched an official electronic platform for distance learning, reflecting a significant digital transformation despite the war. The research concludes that this experience is unique globally and confirms the importance of innovation and flexibility in continuing the educational process during crises. WhatsApp is no longer just a means of social communication or family chatting. In Sudan, it has become an effective educational tool that has proven its worth across multiple universities. In the absence of official online platforms and the difficulty of accessing high-speed internet, WhatsApp provided a reliable alternative, especially since it requires little data and allows for the direct and rapid sending of audio, text, and video files.

This comment examines the shifting landscape of student engagement in UK history departments, drawing on research conducted at the universities of Bristol and Warwick. Moving beyond narrow definitions of engagement as attendance, the study explores the complex interplay of workload pressures, relationships and community, and the cultures and environments of learning that shape students’ everyday experiences. Student testimony highlights how financial precarity, mental‑health challenges and competing demands on their time profoundly influence how (and indeed if) they engage. At the same time, factors – ranging from staff/student interactions to seminar atmosphere and assessment design – are powerful determinants of whether students feel able and motivated to participate fully. While acknowledging the broader socio‑economic forces that constrain both staff and students, the comment proposes a set of principled, discipline‑specific approaches centred on reflection, communication, adaptability and compassion. It argues that, although no single solution can resolve the problem of engagement, history departments can meaningfully support students by cultivating inclusive, responsive and relational learning environments.