Academic ‘place-making’: fostering attachment,belonging and identity for Indigenous students in Australian universities

Place is a concept used to explore how people ascribe meaning to their physical and social surrounds, and their emotional affects. Exploring the university as a place can highlight social relations affecting Australian Indigenous students’ sense of belonging and identity. We asked what university factors contribute to the development of a positive sense of place for these students. Findings are presented from two Australian universities, based on focus groups with Indigenous students, and interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff. Students prioritized relationships with academics as a key theme, stressing academic’s flexibility and understanding enabled their persistence at university. Students situationally manage self-identification, requiring academics to engage effectively with diverse students, but staff felt they required further professional development. We argue that academics can ‘make’ university places in their pedagogies and mentoring roles, but require universities to recognize this pedagogical caring as a legitimate and valued element of their work.     

Prose organization and recall

In two experiments, subjects read prose materials with various organizations of the superordinate and subordinate conceptual structure of the passage. Variables included organizational salience, massed versus distributed repetition of the passage, nature of the cueing at recall, and number of exposures. In Experiment I, distributed repetition resulted in superior recall, extending the generality of that effect to prose materials; and an advance organizer treatment resulted in lower recall for scrambled materials, contrary to Ausubel's (1960) cognitive theory. High ability subjects recalled more categories than low ability subjects, but the same amount of within-category information. In Experiment II, materials which increased the salience of the organizational structure of the passage were better recalled than scrambled materials after three exposures, or on a test which cued the major categories in the passage. Cueing was detrimental to performance for subjects reading the scrambled passage. Results are discussed in terms of implications for educational practice.     

Using valsiner’s zone theory to interpret Teaching practices in mathematics and science Classrooms

This study explores the use of Valsiners zone theory as a way to interpret the zones of proximal development of three secondary teachers in mathematics and science. Specifically, we used classroom discourse to identify what the participating teachers promoted (zone of promoted action) or allowed (zone of free movement) in the classroom as a way to understand better their potential for development. We found that teachers who promoted actions or events that they ultimately did not allow students to experience seemed to be at a point in their development analogous to Vygotskys pseudo-conceptual stage, prior to full concept formation. Moreover, we found that, at this illusionary zone, the teachers capacity to listen actively to students thinking seemed to affect the teachers transition toward more inquiry-based forms of practice. We concluded that understanding the zone of promoted action and the zone of free movement the teacher organizes in the classroom can indicate the existence or absence of an illusionary zone and thereby provide insight into a teachers potential for development.     

Globalization and science education: The implications of science in the new economy

Science has seen considerable change in recent decades with the emergence of a new economic and sociopolitical contract between science, the nation, state, and private commercial interests. Generally regarded as having been precipitated by globalization, these changes in the sciences are beginning to be documented by a range of commentators. Clearly, science's changing forms hold profound implications for the development of science education. As there is little science education scholarship exploring the implications sciences' altering forms, this paper attempts to investigate the relationship at more depth. Detailing this relationship is important because it can help formulate new questions, and methods for their investigation, relevant to the work of science education in the newly global world. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 617–633, 2008     

Instructional Audio Guidelines: Four Design Principles to Consider for Every Instructional Audio Design Effort

This article contends that instructonal designers and developers should attend to four particular design principles when creating instructional audio. Support for this view is presented by referencing the limited research that has been done in this area, and by indicating how and why each of the four principles is important to the design process. The four principles pertain to selection of the narrative format, the fleeting nature of spoken words, the environmental soundscape, and the difference between listening and hearing. These four principles are relevant to designers seeking to use only sound (audio) for instructional delivery.     

“It’s Time to Pause and Reflect”: Museums and Human Rights

Abstract As museum professionals become more aware of their institutional ability to promote the realization of human rights, so too are the missions, exhibitions, and programming initiatives of many museums around the globe responding to an evolving human rights culture. Here, we will briefly discuss the museum institution’s past relationship with the concept of rights, and identify some of its challenges in taking up a more activist role.