Honours: a taken-for-granted pathway to research?

In this paper we examine variations in Honours programs in Australian universities and the consequences that this has for students who wish to undertake higher degrees by research after their undergraduate programs have been successfully completed. Our review of universities’ Honours programs across rural, regional, and urban Australia has indicated that there is a degree of variation that is localised as far as each university is concerned, and that there is a lack of consistency in various universities’ application of policies or procedures in the implementation of their Honours programs. We conclude by calling for greater consistency across universities in Australia in the awarding of Honours, certainly, but also suggesting that a review needs to be undertaken as part of national, systematic and orchestrated project.     

Framing justice: challenges for research

This paper raises questions about the apparent research commonsense that has developed in much English and Australian policy sociology in relation to neo-liberal or ‘post-welfarist’, education reform. These questions arise out of an interrogation of two evaluations of social justice in neo-liberal education contexts: Gewirtz's social justice audit which is reported in The Managerial School and an analysis of social justice in the context of training reform in Victoria, Australia. By exploring the dissonances in these two evaluations, the paper problematizes social justice within post-welfarism, the way these developments are being theorized and what counts as decisive information which serves as evidence of justice.     

Reading the Local and Global: Teaching Literature in Secondary Schools in Australia

Recently Australia has witnessed a revival of concern about the place of Australian literature within the school curriculum. This has occurred within a policy environment where there is increasing emphasis on Australia’s place in a world economy, and on the need to encourage young people to think of themselves in a global context. These dimensions are reflected in the recently published Australian Curriculum: English, which requires students to read texts of ‘enduring artistic and cultural value’ that are drawn from ‘world and Australian literature’. No indication, however, is given as to how the reading and literary interpretation that students do might meaningfully be framed by such categories. This essay asks: what saliences do the categories of the ‘local’, the ‘national’ and the ‘global’ have when young people engage with literary texts? How does this impact on teachers’ and students’ interpretative approaches to literature? What place does a ‘literary’ education, whether conceived in ‘local’, ‘national’ or ‘global’ terms, have in the twenty-first century?     

Exploring the experience of ten Australian Honours students

Honours study is viewed as a transition from undergraduate to postgraduate study and/or to enhanced career prospects. In Australia, Honours is usually an adjunct to the standard undergraduate degree. This paper provides an ethnographic study of 10 Australian Honours students. Seeing their experience through their reflections, in their own voices, reveals that Honours may be more than transitional – these students were transformed personally. Such emotionally charged transformations require academics to reflect on the best forms of support for Honours students.     

Learn to Lead: Mapping Workplace Learning of School Leaders

In recent years policy makers’ interest in the professional development of school leaders has grown considerably. Although we know some aspect of formal educational programs for school leaders, little is known about school leaders’ incidental and non-formal learning in the workplace. This study aims to grasp what workplace learning activities school leaders value most, what work-related questions incite them to learn, what outcomes they achieve through workplace learning and what conditions support workplace learning of school leaders. In order to generate answers to the research questions, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 Dutch school leaders in secondary education, which also served as a form of reflection for the respondents. Results show that school leaders mostly value workplace learning through working on improvement and innovation and through reflection. In addition to outcomes for the school leader, working on improvement and innovation also leads to learning outcomes for teachers, and seems to provide opportunities for teachers to influence changes in the school. On the other hand, teachers take little or no part in reflection. Here, school leaders find peace and stability to reflect with fellow school leaders. If adjusted to a specific context, the methods used in this study might be transferred to other contexts, to study workplace learning of all kinds of leaders.     

The effects of discourses in regional contexts on the development of curriculum-based literacy standards for adolescents in schooling: a comparative study of South Australia and Ontario

This study analyses how discourses in regional contexts affect the development of curriculum-based literacy standards for adolescents in schooling. A comparative case-study research design enabled the influences of discourses at the regional level to be analysed. The case studies include the development of curricula to define a minimum literacy standard for the final years of schooling for adolescents in Ontario, Canada, and South Australia, Australia. Critical discourse analysis of key texts associated with the development of literacy standards in each region reveals how globally shared meanings about standard setting for schooling interact with other discourses operating in local contexts to produce curricula that define literacy standards. The results indicate that, while a global discourse about standards-based reforms may be foregrounded in curriculum, locally generated discourses can challenge key ideas associated with a simplistic discourse about standards. Discourses about literacy in Ontario and South Australia contest the assertion that literacy at the end point of schooling can be defined as a basic competency and local meanings associated with literacy are emphasised within the curriculum for each location. Language choices, involving particularly lexical cohesion, complex noun groups and nominalisation, are used to ensure that local meanings inform literacy standards for the endpoint of schooling.     

Beyond the local/general divide: English for academic purposes and process approaches to cross disciplinary,doctoral writing support

One of the outcomes of the policy emphasis upon skills formation in countries like Australia and the UK has been an increase in cross-disciplinary structured programs for higher research degrees raising implicit, but often unexamined, questions about the curriculum and expertise that should inform them. Key insights from applied linguistics and composition studies about disciplinary similarities and differences and writing pedagogy for the development of university-wide structured programs are discussed in the article. In addition, student evaluations of two ‘social sciences, humanities and business' writing programs that were developed to reflect these insights are reported. The findings are read to suggest that the framework within which research training is conceptualized must consider not only the diversity of domains and activities that characterise higher degree research, but the communicative purposes against which research texts are evaluated and differentiated. The overlapping and contrasting nature of these purposes suggests collaborations among specific discipline groups in structured program provision within the research degree cohort, rather than the local/general research training split that is often assumed.     

Conceptualising Curriculum Knowledge Within and Beyond the National Context

The core theme of this article is the implications of a global language for the curriculum and how it can be dealt with in terms of content knowledge and reform. First, the article conceptualises curriculum from the perspective of schooling within a geographical territory, symbolising its own cultural history and the nation as a key agent in reform. Second, it takes a closer look at current reform designs and asks how they represent equivalent but also contrasting arguments and rationales about curriculum beyond the national. Third, the article discusses implications of globalisation for curriculum pertaining to both cultivation and qualification as indispensable parts of education and schooling. The main empirical point of departure is the formal curriculum guidelines in Norway, written policy documents, expert reports and evaluation frameworks, written within the last two decades. Through the application of a new language for change, these documents advocate world-wide expectations which could harmonise curriculum across national boarders. However, the design of the reform is of core significance in standardisation processes, and highly dependent on the way matters and meanings are conceptualised in the professional semantics which accompany reform efforts within and beyond the national context.     

Whose quality? The (mis)uses of quality reform in early childhood and education policy

This paper reports on the findings of an in-depth genealogical study of the discourse of quality in Australian Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy. Quality reform has become the foremost global policy agenda for ECEC due to assumptions about the economic potentials of quality services. In Australia, the recent National Quality Framework elevated early childhood policy in Australia from the margins as the lynchpin of a broader economic reform agenda. However, quality ECEC – what it is and does – is a complex, contestable notion that could be considered problematic for the sector to execute, particularly through market models of provision. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discourse as the ‘already said’, the truth assumptions that have underpinned policy uses of quality ECEC in Australia are identified and critiqued. It is shown that the discourse of quality has been tactically deployed in Australian ECEC policy to realign quality ECEC outcomes with educative outcomes, as a means for government to selectively grow and govern human capital. This positions quality as a high-stakes reform discourse for early childhood stakeholders, entwined with the expanded reach and intensification of selective, performance-related standards and incentives.     

The Absence of Knowledge in Australian Curriculum Reforms

This article draws on a study of Australian curriculum shifts between 1975 and 2005 to take up two themes of this special issue: the question about what conceptions of knowledge are now at work; and the consideration of global influences and national specificities in the reformulations of curriculum. It discusses two important approaches to curriculum in Australia in recent times, the 'Statements and Profiles' activity of the early 1990s, and the 'Essential Learnings' formulations of the past decade. The global tendencies we see at work in these two major approaches are, first, an increasing emphasis on externally managing and auditing student progress as a key driver of how curriculum policies are being constructed; and, secondly, a growing emphasis on approaching curriculum aims in terms of what students should be able to do rather than what they should know. We argue that in the contexts we discuss here, these approaches offered a way of marrying 1970s progressive views on child development and knowledge-as-process (views widely held by influential curriculum professionals in Australia) with late 20^th century technologies of micro-management and instrumental agendas favoured by politicians — but that many questions about knowledge were left off the agenda.     

Positioning within a cultural context: using Ricoeur’s preunderstandings as a heuristic for narrative data analysis in exploring identity,structure, and agency

I argue that Ricoeur’s preunderstandings can be used as a heuristic to aid researchers who collect narratives as data (1) to identify cultural meanings that become resources for participants’ positioning work, (2) to ground the identified cultural meanings in participants’ experiences, and (3) to understand participants’ interpretations of constraint and agency within that context. I outline how the philosophical hermeneutics of Ricoeur is consistent with a sociocultural perspective on positioning and identity, as well as present data analysis questions developed from Ricoeur’s ideas of narrative configuration to explore common cultural meanings used by participants in interpreting their lived experience. These questions provide a strategy to examine how participants may be referring to common cultural meanings but their individual interpretations of these meanings can have different implications for their feelings of agency.     

Andragogy and the accreditation of prior learning: points on a continuum or uneasy bedfellows?

The current move towards outcomes or competence‐based qualifications within the education and training arenas begs many questions about the processes of learning as well as the measurable results. This paper explores how far the principles embedded in the andragogic approach to adult learning through the accreditation of prior learning are at odds with a qualification system predicated on the measurement of performance. It proposes a model of student‐controlled reflection that can lead to the identification of a range of prior achievements which may then form the basis for claiming credit, thus creating a bridge between two apparently opposed frameworks.     

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.     

Civilisation and colonial education: Natal and Western Australia in the 1860s in comparative perspective

This paper examines how two Britons, working in Western Australia and Natal, respectively, engaged with ideas about the civilisation and education of Indigenous people. It is argued that concepts of civilisation were debated by missionaries, researchers and members of the public. Using the correspondence, publications and private journals of two educators, Dr Henry Callaway, Church of England missionary in Natal, and Ann Camfield, teacher in Western Australia, the paper draws attention to their respective approaches to education. Each contributed to broader imperial debates concerning the meaning of race in relation to educability. Education in both places, while connected to these global ideas, was also profoundly influenced by local context. ‘Civilisation’ and the ‘civilising mission’ may have been unifying goals for missionaries in different sites of Empire, but understandings of what civilisation should inculcate, or do, varied according to particular circumstances. These histories are best understood in transnational and comparative perspective.     

Searching for the public: school funding and shifting meanings of ‘the public’ in Australian education

School funding is a principal site of policy reform and contestation in the context of broad global shifts towards private- and market-based funding models. These shifts are transforming not only how schools are funded but also the meanings and practices of public education: that is, shifts in what is ‘public’ about schooling. In this paper, we examine the ways in which different articulations of ‘the public’ are brought to bear in contemporary debates surrounding school funding. Taking the Australian Review of Funding for Schooling (the Gonski Report) as our case, we analyse the policy report and its subsequent media coverage to consider what meanings are made concerning the ‘publicness’ of schooling. Our analysis reveals three broad themes of debate in the report and related media coverage: (1) the primacy of ‘procedural politics’ (i.e. the political imperatives and processes associated with public policy negotiations in the Australian federation); (2) changing relations between what is considered public and private; and (3) a connection of government schooling to concerns surrounding equity and a ‘public in need’. We suggest these three themes contour the debates and understandings that surround the ‘publicness’ of education generally, and school funding more specifically.     

The Construction of Facts: Preconditions for meaning in teaching energy in Swedish classrooms

This article investigates the mechanisms that govern the processes of inclusion and exclusion of knowledges. It draws on three cases from Swedish classrooms about how energy is created as an area of knowledge. We are interested in how knowledge is made valid and legitimate in a school context, and in defining and finding tools to identify structures that govern potential meanings in a certain situation. To do this we develop a theoretical model that explains the preconditions for meaning. The purpose is to understand why certain knowledges are legitimated in the classroom and to explain how this happens. The analysis is based on participatory observations in classrooms, audio recordings of students engaged in group projects, educational materials, and the students' own work. The apparatuses of the school offer a wide range of possible meanings concerning energy. At the same time there are forces evolved in the school practice that effectively sift out what counts as values from what counts as facts and valid knowledge. These forces create a certain order and certain effects for what counts as truth. The article investigates the nature of the correlations between the different preconditions identified that makes one discourse more likely and “true” than another.     

发达国家职业教育教师的任职资格要求

完善符合职业教育特点的教师资格标准已成为当前我国职业教育领域师资建设的一项重要课题。在保证职业教育教师质量方面,法国、英国、美国、澳大利亚和德国在对职业教育教师任职资格方面的规定,可以对完善符合我国职业教育特点的教师资格标准有所借鉴。     

Meeting Tomorrow’s Expectations

Today, experts agree that the level of cognitive development of modern young people affects the long-term life goals and outcomes that they set for themselves. During the course of numerous studies experts have identified such key competencies as problem solving, information literacy, and critical thinking. However, there are still many unanswered questions about what the components of these competencies are and how they should be evaluated. The aim of this article is to analyze the above competencies, to identify them within the context of different conceptual approaches, and to evaluate their significance for university graduates and the working population. In conclusion, we examine the basic difficulties encountered when developing tools for assessing the identified core competencies.     

Students ‘at‐risk’ policy: competing social and economic discourses

Within a context of global reform agendas that promote economic ideologies in education the discourses surrounding ‘school failure’ have shifted from ‘individual risk’ to ‘a nation at‐risk’. Enhancing the quality of schooling through improving educational outcomes and standards for all, and thereby reducing ‘school failure,’ is simultaneously constructed as enhancing both social justice and a nation’s economic advantage in the global marketplace. Within this broader context, this research explores the complexity of issues related to policy for students at educational risk through an analysis of the Education Department of Western Australia’s ‘Making the Difference: Students at Educational Risk Policy.’ This research adopted a theoretical framework of a ‘policy cycle’ (that allowed for an exploration of power relations within the policy process. Primarily, consideration is given to the competing social and economic discourses found within the policy text and subsequent tensions reflected and retracted throughout the policy process from macro (system), to meso (district) and finally to micro levels within the schools and classrooms.