Framing the framework: discourses in Australia’s national values education policy

In the past, many Australian state schools avoided teaching about values explicitly. However, the Australian government released Australia’s first official values education policy in 2005: the National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools (NFVEAS). This framework represents a local manifestation of the recent international values education movement. This study contributes to an exploration of what, and who, the government’s construction of Australian values privileges. It uncovered the dominant discourses inherent in the framework through a critical discourse analysis, framing it in relation to the 16 key values education approaches identified in the literature. The data revealed the document’s strong privileging of conservative values education discourses, particularly civics and citizenship education, values inculcation and character education. In practice, some Australian schools have been disrupting this move to conservatism by taking more critical and postmodern approaches. The paper argues for such alternative practices and policy that is more diversified and student-centred.     

Children’s access to pre‐school education in Bangladesh

Using the Education Watch household survey database, this paper explores children’s access to pre‐school education in Bangladesh. Participation in pre‐school education has been increasing in Bangladesh at the rate of 0.6% per year and the net enrolment rate was found to be 13.4% in 2005. Enrolment of over‐aged children in pre‐school education made the gross enrolment ratio as high as 30.5%. However, over half of the four to five year olds at school were actually enrolled in primary school and not in pre‐school. Moreover, 71% of the four‐ to five‐year group were out of school. Only a third of the four‐ to five‐year‐old children enrolled in schools had the opportunity to attend the English‐medium kindergartens or NGO‐run non‐formal schools, both of which provide better quality pre‐school education. Urban children, especially those with educated parents and from more privileged socio‐economic backgrounds, were more likely to have access to pre‐school education. The lack of a common pre‐school curriculum seems to have created further inequity among children at this very early age. An educational policy targeting poor and socially disadvantaged children with support from both the state and current pre‐school providers is urgently needed to provide four‐ to five‐year‐old children appropriate education for their needs.     

Britannia’s children grow up: English education at empire’s end

In 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union: over-65s were more than twice as likely to vote for Brexit as under-25s, amidst campaign rhetoric steeped in colonial nostalgia. This article explores how this generation was taught in many English state schools to imagine Britain’s place in the world during a period of rapid decolonisation from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Drawing on history and geography textbooks, surviving school-work, BBC broadcasts to schools and school wall-maps, it is argued that English schools embellished the idea of a powerful Commonwealth to depict the continuation of Britain’s global might during dramatic imperial decline. Attempts to reconcile decolonisation with the famous red-bespattered ‘imperial’ map are particularly revealing. By presenting decolonisation as the continuation of empire by other means, many educationists attempted to minimise the external changes to Britain’s global status, allowing imperial ideas to survive in schools into the 1970s.     

Ocean to outback: Léonie Rennie’s contribution to science education in Australia

In this article I initially borrow a metaphor from an art exhibition, Ocean to Outback, as a way to express my perspective on the contribution that Léonie Rennie has made to science education in Australia. I then consider Léonie’s contributions as overlapping themes. In particular, Léonie’s well-known research on gender and issues of equity in science education is explored as well as her highly regarded work on learning science in out-of-school settings. Curriculum integration is a less well-known aspect of Léonie’s research that also is considered. Léonie’s important contributions to research training and policy in science education are briefly described and commented on. Finally, I return to the metaphor of Ocean to Outback that reflects the enormity of the contribution that Léonie has made but also gives insight into her personal journey and qualities.

Taking the Scientist’s Perspective

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013) mandates that schools provide students an understanding of the skills and knowledge that scientists use to engage in scientific practices. In this article, I argue that one of the best ways to accomplish this goal is to have students take the perspective of the scientist by reading nonfiction narratives written by scientists and science writers. I explore the anthropological and neurological evidence that suggests that perspective-taking is an essential component in the learning process. It has been shown that by around age 4, the human child begins to be able to take the perspective of others—a process that neuroscientists have shown engages episodic memory, a memory type that some neurocognitive scientists believe is central in organizing human cognition. Neuroscientists have shown that the brain regions in which episodic memory resides undergo pronounced anatomical changes during adolescence, suggesting that perspective-taking assumes an even greater role in cognition during adolescence and young adulthood. Moreover, I argue that the practice of science itself is narrative in nature. With each new observation and experiment, the scientist is acting to reveal an emerging story. It is the story-like nature of science that motivates the scientist to push onward with new experiments and new observations. It is also the story-like nature of the practice of science that can potentially engage the student. The classroom studies that I review here confirm the power of the narrative in increasing students’ understanding of science.     

Parental expectations of children’s higher education participation in Australia

The role of parental expectations in determining children's higher education participation is important in understanding both participation and potential policy responses. Using a nationally representative longitudinal survey of Australian households, providing repeat observations on expectations for individual children, this study extends the literature in several respects. First, it examines the adaptation of parental expectations over a 4-year time frame. Second, it looks at how parental expectations for school children are associated with actual higher education outcomes in the future. Third, the longitudinal aspect of the dataset permits more robust analyses of factors that shape parental expectations. The findings indicate that parental expectations of their children's attendance at university are generally stable across time. Perceptions of children's academic achievement at school are shown to be the key influence in shaping parents' expectations, and behavioural issues at school adversely affect expectations. Australian parents from non-English-speaking backgrounds were more likely to form positive expectations of university participation by their children, consistent with studies from other countries. A more nuanced picture of the formation of expectations for sole-parent mothers is also presented. Positive effects of parental education and children's enrolment in a private school on parents' expectations, over and above any effect on school achievement, highlight these socioeconomic factors as potential causal channels for the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic outcomes.     

Knowing feminism: the significance of higher education to women’s narratives of ‘becoming feminist’

ABSTRACT

Educational spaces have long provided opportunities for politicisation and activism. However, research into the processes through which students become politicised can often focus on participation in recognised forms of political action, thereby ignoring the multiple factors active in developing a political consciousness. This paper draws on narrative interviews with feminist women to consider the importance of education to their experience of becoming feminist. It considers how, for a particular group of women who were all students or recent graduates of non-STEM disciplines, academic feminism formed an important part of their narrative of becoming feminist. Each of the women referred to having a long-standing feminist inclination, instinct or feeling and indicated that studying academic feminism offered them the tools for reflecting on and articulating this.     

Australia’s 1988 Bicentennial: national history and multiculturalism in the primary school curriculum

As in many countries, such as Germany, Turkey, the United States and Japan the history/culture wars of the past two decades have increased public interest in what is taught in schools. This has resulted in rigorous debates in the general community, encouraged and sustained through regular media coverage. Partly as a response to this, History has been designated as a separate subject in the first wave of planning and implementation of the Australian National Curriculum. Two of the reasons for this include first, to recognise the importance of teaching historical skills as a distinct subject; and second there is an ongoing bipartisan political interest in privileging history disciplinary knowledge and content to ensure that national history narratives are taught to students. To contribute meaningfully towards the development and implementation of a National Curriculum, it is important to understand past curriculum constructions, so that the disciplinary knowledge and content of history remains independent, and not subsumed within current (or future) political trends. Based on examples of national history from the Queensland Social Studies syllabus and government endorsed sourcebooks in the lead-up to the 1988 Bicentennial of British colonisation of the Australian continent, this article examines the influence and role of multiculturalism in History teaching in primary schools. Particular attention is paid to Indigenous representations and British heritages, as an example of two groups that have often been represented as binaries to each other throughout Australian history. An analysis of the curriculum materials illuminates the differences between multiculturalism and history—highlighting how the two are merged at the expense of accurate historical knowledge and concepts, particularly in the area of national history. This study will demonstrate that as a result of the infiltration of multiculturalism into history content within the Social Studies curriculum, historical knowledge becomes silenced in the school curriculum – resulting in vague and sometimes historically inaccurate information being presented to students; and the privileging of certain types of multiculturalism.     

‘Embodied knowing’: exploring the founding of the Melbourne Rudolf Steiner school in 1970s Victoria,Australia

ABSTRACT

Education in Victoria, Australia not only underwent significant change in the 1970s, but was witness to a widespread educational reform project. Whilst exploration of the more widespread alternatives has been of some interest, the smaller progressive traditions that emerged in some ways ‘alongside’ the broader reforms have rarely been examined in any detail. This article explores the founding of the Melbourne Rudolf Steiner School (MRSS) in the 1970s, the first of its kind in Victoria, and the third such school nationally. Analysis is based primarily on interviews with educators directly involved. L.A. Reid’s notion of education as an ‘aesthetic’ object is drawn on to examine the collective experiences of the founders of the MRSS, and the particular expression they gave to Steiner’s educational ideas.     

Schools library services: their changing value to the education of London’s children

In the history of education Schools Library Services are relative newcomers. The London County Council and its successor, the Inner London Education Authority, developed Schools Library Services for their own schools from the 1950s onwards. After the Education Reform Act 1988 became law, responsibility for education passed to the inner London boroughs, but the setting up of local Schools Library Services was optional. This article reviews the significance of Schools Library Services in education as it is reflected in the decision‐making process of three boroughs – Hackney, Islington and City of Westminster. It discusses factors which influenced the establishment (or not) of Schools Library Services in all the new local education authorities, and relates elements of the case studies to wider themes in the political and educational environment of the time.     

Validity and participation: implications for school comparison of Australia’s National Assessment Program

The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Australia is a series of literacy and numeracy tests that are used for purposes of school comparison. This paper argues that a key question for this use lies in whether or not this is a reasonable, or valid, use of the test data. Using Kane’s argumentative approach to validity, this paper argues that the comparisons of the quality of student achievement made available on the My School Website have low validity due to the lack of regard to rates of participation in schools. In bringing together the literature that addresses the ‘new governance’ of education through testing and an approach to validity that addresses the technical aspects of test score interpretation, with the ethics of how test scores are used and applied, this study identifies validity as an important consideration in comparative analyses of student achievement data. The identification of the need to consider participation in such comparisons through the application of the argumentative approach to validity highlights the contribution of this article not only to the testing field but also to critical policy literature.     

Giving voice to ‘the silent minority’: the experience of religious students in secondary school religious education lessons

This paper explores the experiences of secondary school students from religious backgrounds in Religious Education (RE). A total of 16 loosely structured, group, pair and individual interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 34 school-age members of four religious communities: one Jewish and three Christian. The findings make a useful contribution to ongoing debates concerning pedagogy and practice in secondary RE. Members of the religious communities consulted often found their tradition stereotyped and simplified in RE lessons. Respondents also found that at times they were expected to be, or felt the need to be, spokespeople or representatives of their religion. However, experiences of religious intolerance and prejudice, or the fear of it, were common. This led to some students being reluctant to reveal or discuss their religious identity in lessons.     

Paragons of Virtue: teachers’ conceptual understanding of high ability in an egalitarian school system

Recent research suggests that teachers are useful in identifying high ability, provided they have some advance guidelines on how such identification should be operationalized and why. But how do teachers in an egalitarian school system, with neither specific knowledge nor guidelines, conceptualize and make provision for highly able pupils? A total of 232 teachers, representing all levels of the Swedish comprehensive school system, were questioned on different aspects of their conceptual understanding of talented pupils. Answers were given as brief written statements, and the data submitted to a content analysis which resulted in four cluster matrices. This showed that teachers can identify high ability fairly accurately with regard to cognitive attributes and personality characteristics, but fail to understand the socio‐emotional dynamics. Thus, highly able pupils appeared to have been regarded as ‘paragons of virtue’ possessing the social attributes of the teachers ‘ideal pupil’.     

Transprofessional competences of school teachers in the digital environment: education employers’ perspective

Education and Information Technologies - The shift towards digitalization in education, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic-related issues, has led to the emergence of a need to expand the borders...     

Reproducing monocultural education: ethnic majority staff’s discursive constructions of monocultural school practices

This paper investigates the role of ethnic majority staff in the perpetuation of monocultural education that excludes non-western, ethnic minority cultures and reproduces institutional racism in schools. Based on qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews in four ethnically diverse schools in the Flemish educational system, we specifically investigate the role of ethnic majority staff in the reproduction of monocultural school practices through a discursive theoretical lens. The study advances the current literature on institutional racism by showing how situated meanings of monocultural school practices at the micro level of individuals are discursively inter-linked with the macro-level monocultural model of education.