Responsive pedagogy in higher education block delivery: a collaborative autoethnography

Widening participation in higher education has contributed to increasingly diverse student populations, highlighting the need for responsive teaching practices. While research on block model delivery has examined student outcomes and experiences, less attention has been given to how responsive pedagogy is enacted in everyday teaching. This study examines responsive pedagogy within block model delivery at an Australian university characterised by a diverse student population. Using collaborative autoethnography, four teacher-researchers engaged in vignette writing, collaborative dialogue, reflective writing, and recursive analysis to examine their responses to varied student learning needs. Informed by rhizomatic theory, the analysis identified temporality, scaffolding, and differentiation as interconnected dimensions of responsive practice. Findings reveal how these practices are relationally enacted and shaped by the temporal and structural conditions of intensive delivery. The study conceptualises responsive pedagogy in block model higher education as structurally enabled, temporally reconfigured, and relationally enacted, contributing a practice-centred understanding of pedagogical responsiveness in diverse higher education classrooms.