Education research in Australia: where is it conducted?

Research assessment exercises aim to identify research quantity and quality and provide insights into research capacity building strategies for the future. Yet with limited knowledge of the ecology of Australian educational research, there is little chance of understanding what research audits might contribute towards a capacity building agenda for such a complex field. This paper draws on secondary data analysis of research outputs submitted by 13 Australian higher education institutions to the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) 2010 and 2012 national research assessment exercises, to show where Australian educational research is conducted. Findings offer a profile of education researchers by location in academic organisational units within universities. By analyzing data not accessible through reported ERA data we were also able to present information about appointment profiles, specifically levels and type of appointment within universities, as well as data on institutional and geographic region, and patterns associated with type of outputs (books, book chapters, journal articles, conference papers and other outputs) and field of research. Analysis of the data reveals definitive shifts in the nature of the published outputs and in employment profiles of researchers and their location across university and regional groupings. Research audits are administrative processes that reshape institutional and disciplinary governance structures, policies, individual outputs, work practices and careers, but they are not the sum total of the field per se.     

Breaking out,breaking through: accessing knowledge in a non‐western overseas educational setting—methodological issues for an outsider

This paper is concerned with processes of international enquiry. It focuses upon the relationship between a research problem and access to conduct research in a country. It uses data from an ethnographic study of primary education in a Northern Indian District. Conceptually drawing upon the insider‐outsider debate within the sociology of knowledge, the paper raises issues about the relationship between the research problem, accessing knowledge and being an outsider to a research setting. It considers problems facing a particular form of outsider—a foreigner. The paper maintains that when researchers who are outsiders embark on designing research in non‐western international educational settings, then questions considering the relationship between the research problem, access strategies and the culture of the research setting are vital. Grappling with such questions allows for the development and promotion of new forms of partnership, alongside a deeper understanding of culture and context, when developing comparative and international research policy agendas.     

(Re-)designing higher education curricula in times of systemic dysfunction: a responsible research and innovation perspective

There is an urgent need to address the grand sustainability challenges of our time, and to explore new and more responsible ways of operating, researching, and innovating that enable society to respond to these challenges. The emergent Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) policy agenda can act as a catalyst towards the development of new and more responsible research and innovation efforts. Inevitably, higher education needs to be closely attuned to this need and agenda, by preparing students to engage in RRI efforts. This paper makes a first step towards guiding the embedding of RRI within higher education. It does so by bringing together academic knowledge with phronesis or practical knowledge about what should be done in an ethical, political, and practical sense. It draws on a literature review and on the reflective practices of partners in the European Commission funded project EnRRICH (Enhancing Responsible Research and Innovation through Curricula in Higher Education), as well as on interviews and case studies gathered as part of the project. The paper suggests elements, especially design principles and a competence framework, for (re)designing curricula and pedagogies to equip higher education students to be and to become responsible actors, researchers, and innovators in a complex world, and to address grand sustainability challenges. In addition, this paper proposes that contemporary higher education teaching and learning policies and strategies, especially those promoting neoliberal agendas and marketized practices, need to adopt a more responsible and responsive ethos to foster the renewal of higher education in times of systemic dysfunction.     

文化比较视野中的高等教育多学科研究

多学科知识介入高等教育研究是我国高等教育学科建设的需要。我国高等教育研究领域中的多学科知识大多是在西方文化土壤中形成的,是西方文化意识形态的反映。多学科知识作为承载西方文化信息的话语,用来解释我国高等教育问题时未必都能相容。研究者只有对多学科知识与我国高等教育问题的文化认知差异进行历史与比较分析,才能发展并创造出我国高等教育学科独特的理论。     

Implications of academic literacies research for knowledge making and curriculum design

This article explores the issue of what academic literacies research can bring to the study of knowledge and curriculum in higher education from a theoretical perspective and by means of illustrations from a work in progress academic literacies research project in the natural sciences. It argues that reading and writing are central to the process of learning in any discipline and that discipline specialists need to take this into consideration when planning their curricula. It also considers what knowledge means in the context of academic literacies research and how this conception of knowledge may differ from the knowledge structures researchers’ concern with knowledge as an object with its own properties. It comes to the conclusion that academic literacies research with its ethnographic-type exploration of social practice and theorisations of knowledge in the knowledge structures research can complement one another because each field of enquiry brings a lens that the other lacks.     

Comparative higher education: potentials and limits

Research on higher education is an object-focussed area based on a broad range of disciplines. The institutional base is often shaky and diverse. Various characteristics, notably the blurred distinction between the scholar and the reflective practitioner, contribute to considerable tensions, though research on higher education enjoys substantial public attention.Interest in comparative research on higher education grew in recent years and was reinforced by the community of higher education researchers in Europe. As it can be conceptually and methodologically demanding and fruitful, the growing interest could serve as a stimulus for enhancing a common identity and a growing quality. However, few comparative research designs represent the ideal type of setting a research agenda of clearly defined hypotheses to be tested, and if they do so, the study mostly turns out to be too simplistic due to disregard of the complex context. Rather, most comparative projects are exploratory and most productive in providing unexpected insight.In addition, comparative research faces many problems of a practical nature. Costly research seems to be granted sufficient funds only if it addresses issues of current political concern. Language barriers and limits of field knowledge often lead to a poor provision of information. International collaborative research teams tend to be vulnerable due to, among others, a heterogeneity of schools of thoughts, spiralling costs and different work styles.The author argues that comparative studies on higher education are most fruitful in destroying conceptual reasoning based on narrow experience; they are a gold mine for the early stages of conceptual restructuring. They are indispensible for understanding a reality shaped by common international trends, reforms based on comparative observation, growing trans-national activities and partial supra-national integration in higher education. Comparative projects can be regarded as theoretically and methodologically most promising if they are based on a semi-structured research design, whereby the strengths of various conceptual approaches in explaining the phenomena are analysed and the researchers systematically deal with the fact that the project is likely to generate surprising information requiring to restructure the initial conceptual framework.     

Social Determinants of the Physical Education System

ABSTRACT

The physical education (PE) system is a consequential social determinant of pediatric health and well-being. Granting selective achievements, sub-optimal PE outcomes for school-aged children as well as teachers necessitate improvement models and redesign initiatives. This agenda depends on knowledge about the malleable social determinants of the PE system, particularly social-institutional reproduction dynamics, occupational socialization, and public policy. Theoretical propositions and their corollaries lend structure to discipline-specific and interdisciplinary research and development agendas. Pediatric researchers from Kinesiology and Public Health are essential contributors, particularly as social-ecological models gain traction, physical activity discourses replace PE’s, and interest resides in whether and how children’s participation extends beyond schools and stretches into adulthood.     

AIDS and Democratic Education in Uganda

Education remains the effective way of preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. Drawing on a study of AIDS education in Uganda, data showed an exclusive curriculum characterised by denial of knowledge, marginalisation of young people (especially girls), lack of straight means for questioning the subject content, and the failure to inform. Possible pedagogies emerge to address the problem of the spread of AIDS in young people. This article discusses the AIDS pedagogy and democratic education in Ugandan schools by examining possibilities using three illustrations derived from action research: pupil participation in curriculum formulation, pupils setting the agenda for AIDS education delivery and individual choice of AIDS education. The realities of teenage sexuality were being addressed with positive responses to the AIDS curriculum. Action research offered the opportunity for a democratic pedagogy and learning--fundamental to young people's response to the AIDS curriculum and adoption of safer sexual practices.     

An implementation study of a TPACK-based instructional design model in a technology integration course

The purpose of this study was (a) to develop an instructional design model for preservice teachers’ learning of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) in multidisciplinary technology integration courses and (b) to apply the model to investigate its effects when used in a preservice teacher education setting. The model was applied in a technology integration course with fifteen participants from diverse majors. Data included individual participants’ written materials and TPACK survey responses, group lesson plans, and the researchers’ field notes. The data analysis results revealed that: (1) the participants had difficulties understanding pedagogical knowledge (PK), which hindered their learning of integrated knowledge of TPACK and (2) their learning of TPACK was the combination rather than the integration of PK, technological knowledge, and content knowledge. Suggestions and implications for refining the model and future research possibilities are discussed.     

Emotions and reflexivity in feminised education action research

The paper addresses contemporary relations between emotions, gender and feminist action research. Starting from analysis of the increasing emotionalisation of everyday life, it explores the quasi‐feminist—or what the author calls ‘feminised’—forms of incitement to reflexive confession that are increasingly gaining favour within professional and higher educational contexts and draws on literatures and sets of debates that inform education action research, including: childhood and governmentality; feminist research; and international development critiques. The author proposes that reflexivity as an educational and research practice has come to stand in for, and thereby limits, the contemporary focus on ‘participation’ to reduce its radical collaborative and action agenda and instead incite researchers to work on ourselves, and only on ourselves. The paper warns against underestimating the speed and flexibility by which neo‐liberalism absorbs and co‐opts creative strategies—such as reflexivity—for its subversion, and returns them to old‐style individualism.     

数据素养研究热点与主题变迁——基于CiteSpcae知识图谱可视化分析

文章基于CiteSpace知识图谱可视化分析,以CNKI数据库206篇数据素养文献为研究对象,采用关键词共现网络及聚类分析,生成数据素养领域的研究作者、研究机构、研究热点和研究时间态势的知识图谱,重点分析关键词共现网络的信息素养、教育大数据、科学数据素养、数据素养教育、科学数据等5个自动聚类,宏观揭示数据素养领域研究文献的演进路径,为进一步深化数据素养研究提供参考。研究表明:数据素养研究受国家政策驱动明显,整体研究水平还有待于提升;图书馆是数据素养教育的主阵地;数据素养研究内容以国外教育案例介绍为主,研究方法以理论研究为主,实证应用研究不足。     

Managing the teaching–research nexus: ideals and practice in research-oriented universities

This paper demonstrates that while ideals of close linkages between research and teaching are widely embraced in research-oriented universities, a practice of division of labour between teaching-oriented and research-oriented staff persists. In an investigation of how the research–teaching nexus is managed at three Swedish universities, we identify a perceived misalignment between institutional incentives for individual academic staff and the needs of teaching. Under pressure from such tensions, managers are forced to deploy pragmatic strategies for the staffing of undergraduate education tasks. This includes allowing research needs and agendas to take priority over teaching needs. While managers seek to secure the participation of senior researchers in education, they often actively prefer to delegate the bulk of teaching activities to less research-active staff. Such strategies seem to reinforce existing patterns of division of labour among academic staff.     

The Knowledge of Policies: The Personal Dimension in Curriculum Policies in Portugal

In the study of the construction of curricular knowledge in Portugal between 1970 and 2009, we argue that the practice of the established curriculum guidelines has a close relationship with the personal dimension of its actors. Therefore, it is not possible to separate the life history of each actor from the curricular policy measures they developed. This means that we sought not only to identify who the political actors were, but also how they built their knowledge and the relationship this has with their life story, by making their social and cognitive map. The sources that we used were laws, reports and interviews with political actors. We conclude that the choice of political leaders for education is not innocent or even indifferent to their life policies, since the knowledge built by each one is integrated into their educational proposals. Although the agenda for education is defined at the supranational level, national policies take different directions. Thus, the study also suggests the need to research the relation between the collective and the individual in educational policies.     

What works? Academic integrity and the research-policy relationship

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the intensifying pressures on critical research and academic integrity in a research policy context that has come to be increasingly dominated by an instrumentalist mind-set. Using sensitising resources drawn from Geoff Whitty’s critique of the ‘what works’ agenda, we reflect on the current conditions of academic labour and some of the key issues and dilemmas they pose for critical researchers in the sociology of education and beyond. In particular, we underline the trend for ‘what works’ agendas to become constitutive of academic identities and practices, including at micro-levels, such that the option of ‘standing outside’ them is shifting from being merely personally taxing to being institutionally disallowed. In addition to highlighting the dilemmas this creates for critical researchers and the threat this poses to expansive and democratic approaches to education, the paper emphasises the centrality of relationship-forming in understanding and underpinning academic integrity.     

Environmental education research in Brazil: some highlights from theses and dissertations

Abstract

This article discusses an analysis of abstracts of Brazilian theses and dissertations on environmental education from a database organised and maintained by a group of researchers in the EArt Project (www.earte.net). In presenting extracts of key trends in this dataset, our aim is to provide a snapshot of the many possible approaches to, and histories of, Brazilian environmental education research. The data also allow us to raise some questions that explore possible ‘blank spots’, ‘blind spots’ and ‘bald spots’ in Brazilian research on environmental education. Given the temporal development of the research field since the 1980s, we illustrate these ‘spots’ by exploring data related to epistemological and methodological diversity, from the viewpoint of knowledge areas as well as the graduate programmes that have been developing research on environmental education. Finally, we draw a picture of the methodological trends that have been privileged by Brazilian researchers, and pose questions as to what is needed in shaping an agenda for research on environmental education in Brazil into the future.     

School English,literature and the knowledge-base question

This article takes up questions about knowledge and the school curriculum with respect to literary studies within subject English. Its intention is to focus on literary studies in English from the context of current waves of curriculum reform, rather than as part of the conversations primarily within the field of English, to raise questions about the knowledge agenda, and the knowledge-base agenda for teaching and teacher education. The selection of texts and form of study of literature within the English curriculum has long been an area of controversy. Without assuming a particular position on knowledge in this area, this article shows that important questions of what knowledge-base teachers are expected to bring to their work are elided both in current regulations and debates, and in research on ‘good teaching’ in this area. If ‘literary studies’ (as a discipline or university major) is itself an unstable and changing field, what kind of knowledge does a good English teacher bring to their work? This paper takes up these questions in the context of the Australian Curriculum and standards for teacher registration, but it also points to the way these issues about knowledge are of broader relevance for researchers and teacher education.     

Discursive constructions of equity in Australian higher education: Imagined worlds and the case of people seeking asylum

There is a strong rationale for people seeking asylum and refugees given temporary protection to be key beneficiaries of Australian higher education equity practices. However, despite the extreme precarity they face, this group remains among the most educationally disadvantaged populations in Australia. Here, we use critical discourse analysis to examine the publicly available statements of 38 Australian universities to identify discursive representations of equity practices and connections, with our analytic gaze focused through the lens of people seeking asylum. Using a three-part analytic heuristic examining ‘statements’, ‘practices’ and ‘connections’, we offer a critical discourse analysis of how each public university expresses its commitment to the equity agenda in powerful stakeholder-facing documents—such as annual reports, strategic plans and media releases—and we compare this analysis against institutional stated practices with regard to people seeking asylum. In identifying misalignments between equity statements and stated practices, we suggest that institutional equity narratives articulate ‘imagined worlds’, in which all marginalised groups can access higher education. We argue that now is the time to move beyond these ‘imagined worlds’, to enact stated commitments to universal education, by instituting real and effective practices to facilitate equitable access to Australian higher education for people seeking asylum.     

Toward a 3-P Model of Workplace Learning: a Literature Review

The interest in research focusing on learning taking place at work, through work and for work has considerably increased over the past two decades. The purpose of the paper is to review and structure this wide and diverse research field. A tentative holistic model—the 3-P model of workplace learning—is presented, in relation to which the following six lines of research are identified: (1) studies describing the nature of workplace learning, (2) research on work identities and agency in workplace learning, (3) studies on the development of professional expertise, (4) analyses of competence development in education–work contexts in vocational education and training as well as in higher education, (5) research on communities of practice, and (6) research on organisational learning. The research lines and the holistic 3-P model should be seen as analytic tools for understanding the diversity in workplace learning research. They may also serve as a kind of map for individual researchers, helping them to locate their main areas of interest in this broad field of research and to outline research designs for future studies.     

Disciplinary Literacies and Learning to Read for Understanding: A Conceptual Framework for Disciplinary Literacy

This article presents a framework and methodology for designing learning goals targeted at what students need to know and be able to do in order to attain high levels of literacy and achievement in three disciplinary areas—literature, science, and history. For each discipline, a team of researchers, teachers, and specialists in that discipline engaged in conceptual meta-analysis of theory and research on the reading, reasoning, and inquiry practices exhibited by disciplinary experts as contrasted with novices. Each team identified discipline-specific clusters of types of knowledge. Across teams, the clusters for each discipline were grouped into 5 higher order categories of core constructs: (a) epistemology; (b) inquiry practices/strategies of reasoning; (c) overarching concepts, themes, and frameworks; (d) forms of information representation/types of texts; and (e) discourse and language structures. The substance of the clusters gave rise to discipline-specific goals and tasks involved in reading across multiple texts, as well as reading, reasoning, and argumentation practices tailored to discipline-specific criteria for evidence-based knowledge claims. The framework of constructs and processes provides a valuable tool for researchers and classroom teachers' (re)conceptualizations of literacy and argumentation learning goals in their specific disciplines.     

Gender and management in further education in Scotland: an agenda for research

Research on gender and education is somewhat limited in Scotland, and research that explores the further education sector from a gender perspective is particularly lacking. This paper argues for such work, and underlines its importance given the prominence of FE in the Scottish policy context as a key contributor to the knowledge economy and lifelong learning agendas of the Scottish parliament. The argument is also made that research on gender—including masculinities—may have particular salience in Scotland because of specific cultural assumptions and practices that inhibit the recognition of women in management. The paper reports on a small pilot study of senior women managers in the further education sector in Scotland, and draws on their experiences to advocate further research that is attentive to the gendered nature of organizations and the interrelationship of masculinities and managerialism.