Addressing Factors Affecting Ongoing Professional Development in Community Teachers’ Colleges in Papua New Guinea

The concept of sustainable professional development in the context of community teachers’ colleges in Papua New Guinea is reviewed, with particular reference to the Papua New Guinea Community Teachers’ College Lecturers’ Professional Development Project. Seven obstacles to sustaining professional development are described, and strategies are suggested for building on the achievements of the Project in relation to personal professional development of lecturers and the review of institutional programmes and procedures.     

学校领导的新进展：从教学领导到转型领导

学校领导的研究已有100余年的历史,20世纪80年代后出现了两种占主导地位的领导范式:教学领导和转型领导。前者强调自上而下的控制;后者强调自下至上的参与式改革,是一种分享式的领导范式。教学领导凭借管理与控制组织成员导向既定的目标;转型领导则通过提升组织成员的期望值来憧憬、创造未来。鉴于两者的优点与不足,未来的领导范式将是两者的有机整合。     

Mother tongue-based bilingual education in Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea (PNG), an independent state in the southwest Pacific, is the most linguistically diverse country in the world. Its roughly six million people speak over 800 distinct languages. In spite of this diversity, in 1995 the Papua New Guinean government established a mother tongue-based bilingual education programme in which community languages are taught as a subject and used for instruction in the first three?years of formal education. English is introduced as a subject in the third year of school and becomes one of the languages of instruction, with the community language, in early primary. In grades seven and eight, teachers use only English for instruction, although community languages can still be used informally. By the early 2000s, over 400 languages were being used in PNG??s formal education system. This paper describes the background to PNG??s bilingual education programme, then provides an overview of its main features and the positive outcomes as well as the problems encountered since it was initiated 15?years ago.     

近代移民对巴布亚新几内亚发展的影响

巴布亚和新几内亚地区向具有现代意义上的生产生活方式的过渡是伴随着殖民历程的。随着地理大发现,特别是欧洲工业化的开展,探险家、商人、传教士、行政官员纷纷踏足古老的巴布亚和新几内亚大陆,殖民当局的政策在经济、政治、文化、宗教、教育、医疗卫生等多种社会层面上影响了巴布亚和新几内亚的发展,成为其进入资本主义时代的开端。     

Evolution Education in Papua New Guinea: trainee teachers’ views

Educated Papua New Guineans’ conceptual ecologies need to accommodate competing and conflicting traditional ethnoscientific, Western religious and modern scientific paradigms. Papua New Guinea is a constitutionally self-declared ‘Christian country’ and evolution is a controversial issue. The upper secondary school biology syllabus contains a terminating unit on evolution but the curriculum is of expatriate design and the rapid localisation of senior educational positions makes the views of indigenous teaching personnel a high research priority, particularly in the light of the current upgrading of secondary teacher training to degree level. This paper presents data arising from a study of trainee primary and secondary science teachers’ views towards evolution education. Primary science trainees were found to exhibit a poor awareness of the centrality of evolution to modern biology. For secondary science trainees, it was found that exposure to upper secondary school biology, in spite of adding little to students’ knowledge about evolution, was associated with their increasingly positive attitudes towards evolution education, as was the dual acceptance of evolution and religious belief.     

The politics of free education in Papua New Guinea

In 1981, the members of Papua New Guinea's National Assembly moved that education should become free from Grades 1 to 10 the following year. The motion was partly supported for humanitarian reasons. But in the original debate, and even more strongly during subsequent discussion and attempts at implementation, political factors came strongly to the fore. One fact which was not emphasised, when the parliamentarians originally passed the motion, was that the national government, in a decentralised system, actually had no power to abolish fees; and because of poor organisation and political rivalries, the scheme largely backfired. This paper examines the reasons why the scheme was launched, the reasons for its demise, its implications for social and inter-provincial inequality, and its effects on national-provincial government relations.