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With less time spent on campus, students are increasingly forming peer friendship and study groups either face to face or online. Communities of practice (CoP) with academic support in the wings could benefit students, but little is known in the about their use in the undergraduate space, or how best they may be structured and facilitated (Andrew et al., 2008). The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues.

An online CoP was created in partnership with undergraduate bachelor of midwifery students at the University of South Australia using an action research model. This provided an ongoing ability to continuously plan, act, observe and evaluate all aspects of the community created, so that adjustments could be made during the two cycles of the study.

The time paucity of the cohort impacted on their ability to participate fully as partners in the project, and in the community itself. The Facebook community received more visitation than the Weebly community. The student panel reported that despite the online CoP fitting better with their schedules, they would prefer more opportunities to interact face to face with their peers.

Students who spend limited time on campus may prefer more real life social contact and support, despite the convenience of an online community. A larger cohort, drawing from a non-professional degree would have allowed greater membership and community participation for a prospective study such as this.

Remote study is a growing phenomenon, and students need to feel socially connected and supported to remain enroled and engaged.

There has been much discussion around the amount of time individuals spend online, and whether support groups formed by students on social media support student learning, or encourage unprofessional behaviours without academic support present.

This study reports that online communities are not always a logical solution to time poor students, and they may prefer face to face interactions to build their social and professional relationship.

Any topic can be sensitive, and every subject area will have sensitive issues and topics that academics in higher education and further education settings will be expected to negotiate. Your ability to negotiate sensitive topics is important because the ways in which you engage and teach about sensitive topics will affect your ability to provide a positive learning experience and teaching alliance with students. In practice, you will face enormous pressure to ‘deliver’ on teaching, which will only be mirrored by similar freedoms in deciding on how and what needs to be done to get students to where they need to be. Negotiating, identifying, preparing for and delivering teaching on sensitive subjects and topics can be difficult in individual academics. This chapter, seeks to prepare you for developing a deeper understanding of some of the philosophical, theoretical, and practical-based concerns and issues related to teaching sensitive topics and subjects. This chapter begins with providing a rationale for what follows, and it explores some of the key themes, positionality, identity, transformational learning and lived experience, that are explored in greater depth in the collection. This chapter also contains a detailed breakdown of the structure and the content of this edited collection, and it concludes with some reflective comments about the implications of the collection for you as an individual and your career.

To better understand the key issues surrounding Global Ecopolitics, it may be beneficial to examine the background to the environmental movement over time. The environmental movement is perhaps the most significant contemporary global movement to have emerged in recent decades. The relationship between humankind and nature has been the subject of much debate and enquiry over time. The environmental movement had its cultural origins in literary accounts of humanity's relationship with nature, beginning from the romantic poets such as William Blake, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, whose works were concerned with the reconciliation of man and nature. This aesthetic could also be found in subsequent transcendentalist American literature, such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden, published in 1854 (Shabecoff, 2003, pp. 37–71). The transcendentalists were interested in the spiritual connections that connected humankind and nature with God and could be seen as the forefathers of deep green ecologists. Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species was published in 1859, creating further interest in the understanding of nature. George Perkins Marsh wrote of the destructive impact of agriculture in his book Man and Nature in 1864. President Teddy Roosevelt would develop the National Parks with Gifford Pinchot of the Forestry Service in the early 1900s. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, concerns about protecting wildlife led to the emergence of a progressive conservation movement, alongside federal regulation of natural habitats and the establishment of national parks. Influential conservation groups included the National Audubon Society, founded in 1886, and the Sierra Club, founded by John Muir in 1892. Muir and Pinchot would become adversaries in the campaign to prevent the building of a dam in Yosemite National Park in the early decade of the nineteenth century (ibid.).

Discusses customer dissatisfaction and how it is expressed. Reports on a study showing that customers will complain to management if the problem is severe and if they are encouraged to participate in service management, whereas if service firms create barriers within the complaint‐handling process and set up luxury‐oriented and aloof service images, customers will adopt more harmful negative word of mouth forms of complaining. Proposes ways of managing customer complaints, for controlling the more harmful types of dissatisfaction and for maximizing opportunities to develop loyal customer bases through effective handling of problems.

Workplace health promotion initiatives are an effective way to reach adults, and provide safe and healthy working environments that support individual health. The purpose of this project was to: learn how organizations/businesses define workplace health; assess employer support and commitment for workplace health initiatives; assess facilitators and barriers to workplace wellness/health; and understand workplace needs around evaluation and outcome measures.

A community partnership, Wellness Initiatives Network (WIN), was established to provide a forum for organizations in Atlantic Canada to share knowledge and experience on workplace health. Focus groups were conducted with businesses/organizations in the four Atlantic Provinces. Tape‐recorded transcriptions were analyzed using thematic analysis.

Ingredients for successful workplace health initiatives include onsite programs, the provision of incentives and recognition for employees, and the need to build awareness, understanding and commitment among managers who can help to create a supportive culture, which supports employee health. Measuring outcomes related to workplace health is critical.

Workplace health promotion should encompass a comprehensive approach that acknowledges the important roles of personal, social and environmental factors.

There is both interest and readiness to implement workplace health in Atlantic Canada. Workplace health is a responsibility of all – individual employees, employers and workplaces, and government. All stakeholders must be involved to help employees, workplaces and the health system cope with an aging population and concomitant increasing stresses at work and home. Engaging leaders is a critical step in building an integrated, comprehensive and sustainable approach to workplace health.