Characteristics,Academic and Post-university Outcomes of Students with a Disability at the University of Newcastle

A cohort of 108 students with a disability, and a matched sample of students without a disability, were surveyed over a three-year period at the University of Newcastle. The purpose of the study was to examine the characteristics and academic outcomes for students with a disability because this group of students is significantly under-represented at Australian universities. Significant differences were found between some personal characteristics, academic performance, and outcomes following discontinuance or completion of study. The results are discussed within the context of disability legislation and policy in Australia.     

Economic Deprivation and Early Childhood Development

We consider 3 questions regarding the effects of economic deprivation on child development. First, how are developmental outcomes in childhood affected by poverty and such poverty correlates as single parenthood, ethnicity, and maternal education? Second, what are the developmental consequences of the duration and timing of family economic deprivation? And, third, what is the comparative influence of economic deprivation at the family and neighborhood level? We investigate these issues with longitudinal data from the Infant Health and Development Program. We find that family income and poverty status are powerful correlates of the cognitive development and behavior of children, even after accounting for other differences—in particular family structure and maternal schooling—between low- and high-income families. While the duration of poverty matters, its timing in early childhood does not. Age-5 IQs are found to be higher in neighborhoods with greater concentrations of affluent neighbors, while the prevalence of low-income neighbors appears to increase the incidence of externalizing behavior problems.     

Preschool children’s use of meta-talk to make rational collaborative decisions

In collaborative decision-making, partners compare reasons behind conflicting proposals through meta-talk. We investigated UK-based preschoolers’ (mixed socioeconomic status) use of meta-talk (Data collection: 2018–2020). In Study 1, 5- and 7-year-old peer dyads (N = 128, 61 girls) heard conflicting claims about an animal from two informants. One prefaced her claim with “I know”; the other with “I think”. Dyads identified the more reliable informant through meta-talk (“She said she knows”). In Study 2, 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 64, 34 girls) searched for a toy with an adult partner making incorrect proposals. Children refuted this through reporting what they had witnessed (It cannot be there because “I saw it move”, “she moved it”). In preschool period, children start using meta-talk to make rational collaborative decisions.     

Education policy-making and time

This paper examines the global policy convergence toward high-stakes testing in schools and the use of test results to ‘steer at a distance’, particularly as it applies to policy-makers’ promise to improve teacher quality. Using Deleuze’s three syntheses of time in the context of the Australian policy blueprint Quality Education, this paper argues that using test scores to discipline teaching repeats the past habit of policy-making as continuing the problem of the unaccountable teacher. This results in local policy-making enfolding test scores in a pure past where the teacher-as-problem is resolved through the use of data from testing to deliver accountability and transparency. This use of the database returns a digitised form of inspection that is a repetition of the habit of teacher-as-problem. While dystopian possibilities are available through the database, in what Deleuze refers to as a control society, for us the challenge is to consider policy-making as a step into an unknown future, to engage with producing policy that is not grounded on the unconscious interiority of solving the teacher problem, but of imagining new ways of conceiving the relationship between policy-making and teaching.     

Tracking Students Through Life: A Critical Structural Analysis of Academic Tracking of Mexican Immigrant Students in the United States and Korean Immigrant Students in Japan

Students in the United States and Japan from high and middle socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds are afforded greater academic opportunities due to the systemic presence of hegemony in public schools (Darvin and Norton in J Lang Identity Educ 13(2):111–117, 2014). Minority and immigrant students, the majority coming from low SES, are more likely to suffer the negative effects of tracking. This paper explains how Mexican immigrant students in the United States, and Korean students in Japan are tracked into lower-level courses throughout their educational careers. Using critical structuralism as a theoretical framework, the paper analyzes the two educational systems and explains the implications of tracking on students’ access to higher education. The paper presents mediating mechanisms against the negative effects of lower-level tracking, while arguing for college preparatory education for Mexican and Korean immigrants in the U.S. and Japan respectively.     

A roadmap for offering MOOC from an LMIC institution

MOOCs are massive open online courses that are globally accessible, free of charge. Given their cost-free and open accessibility, it is surprising that only a few institutions have offered MOOCs from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Pakistan recently made this short list of LMICs as the first two MOOCs were launched from the country, in 2014 and 2016. Drawing from that experience, the organizers of that course present a roadmap for LMIC institutions for developing a MOOC, focusing especially on the technological and pedagogical limitations that an LMIC institution might find deterring.     

Reflective Teachers and Teacher Educators in the Pacific Region: Conversations with us not about us

This article reports on a study of Pacific primary school teachers’ and university lecturers’ reflections on their involvement in the in-service Bachelor of Education degree programme offered at the regional University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. Two rich sets of data have emerged from this study. Firstly, there are a number of critical reflections by ourselves as teacher educators concerning levels of equitable student access and participation in our degree as it is reconceptualised for distance and flexible delivery to increase levels of teacher professionalism across the Pacific region. Secondly, there has emerged a set of statements from teachers themselves about: teaching and learning; professional development opportunities; and what it means to be a professional educator in the Pacific region. This later data suggests an alternative set of voices in what has largely been a “conversation between us about them” conducted by Ministries of Education, Curriculum Development Units, USP, other educational bodies and the media in the Pacific, but particularly Fiji, about teachers and teachers’ work. Critical reflection upon our own practice as teacher educators and the voices of experienced teachers are particularly pertinent not only as we seek to reshape a degree programme to suit the needs of the region’s primary school teachers but also as “rethinking” debates about the purposes of education in the Pacific region are on-going yet exclusive.     

Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum

Boasting over 6000 objects, including replicas of a western hardware store, a frontier stage stop, and a late nineteenth-century industrial factory, the Cody Firearms Museum, located at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, is “the largest and most important collection of American firearms in the world.” 1 1. Treasures from Our West (Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1992), 44. The museum, which creates a decidedly visual space through its near-exclusive engagement with looking, employs an aesthetic of domestication and sterility to frame firearms for museumgoers. Even as it transforms guns into inert objects of visual pleasure, the museum cannot fully erase the history of violence and colonial conquering in which guns played a starring role. The museum's rhetorical effectivity/affectivity, then, turns upon the unique play of presence and absence.