Teamwork: education for entrants to the environment professions

Numerous reports over recent years emphasise the importance of teamwork training in undergraduate programs in environment education at tertiary level. This paper describes a project undertaken by a team of final year undergraduate environment students from four faculties at RMIT University in Australia working on a multi‐disciplinary environment project in Vietnam. The students clearly gained confidence in teamwork and working as professionals. Importantly, they identified some of the key issues associated with teamwork, and with professional activities. While they had not yet entered professional work, the students demonstrated that they had learnt skills that would be of direct importance to them in the professional conduct of a multi‐disciplinary project. The project also demonstrated that multi‐disciplinary teamwork fits well into environmental projects, and importantly that the experiences are recognised by students as being valuable preparation for their environmental professions.     

‘What I thought university would be like … ’ close reading as collaborative performance

ABSTRACT

This article develops an account of an extracurricular reading group convened in a small theatre/performance department, consisting of postgraduate and honours students. The origins of the group in a formal seminar/class are discussed, including a shift in syllabus design based upon breadth of reading/content to one based upon depth, taking up the practice of reading as a core classroom activity. This activity is understood as a technē: an aided bringing forth of disclosure, revealing reading to be a constructive, temporal, embodied labour, rather than a cognitive function, involving simply the decoding or retrieval of meaning from written language. Drawing upon the reflections of participants in the reading group, the article documents the rich outcomes of such a practice, arguing that, notwithstanding the apparent costliness of such a model of pedagogy for university classes, the benefits are palpable, and worth arguing for.     

Mapping the development of a new MA programme in higher education: comparing privately held perceptions of a public endeavour

After spending a year working on the development of a new online Master’s programme in higher education, members of the development team were interviewed to reveal their thoughts about the nature of the programme. The dialogue of each interview was summarised as a concept map. Analysis of the resulting maps included a modified Bernsteinian analysis of the focus of the concepts included in terms of their semantic gravity (i.e. closeness to context) and the degree of resonance with the underpinning regulative discourse of the programme. Data highlight a number of potential issues for programme delivery that centre around the use of appropriate language to manage student expectations in relation to the process of learning and the emotional responses this can stimulate, as well as the tensions that can be foregrounded between the demands of teaching and research within a university environment.     

Teachers' thinking elicited from interactive multimedia professional development courseware

This paper reports data obtained on practicing teachers' thinking as they interacted with a professional development interactive multimedia (IMM) courseware package. The data were obtained from 11 participating teachers via stimulated-recall interviews. Two types of thinking are detailed and discussed. The first type is those mediating processes engaged in by teachers during study sessions that related to the academic and professional content of the IMM package. The second type is those evaluative thoughts reported by teachers that related to instructional design aspects of the IMM courseware. The latter data were used to develop a classification system that provides a conceptualization of the major components, as perceived by the participating teachers, that relate to instructional design. He has been involved in teaching mathematics education courses at a distance via printed text to inservice teachers and through interactive multimedia (IMM) courseware to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teacher education students in their home communities. His current research interests focus on tertiary students' thinking while studying from IMM materials and their usage patterns of IMM courseware. He also supervises post graduate students in the area of teaching problem solving in upper primary and lower secondary school. Her fields of teaching and research interests concern the cultural contextualization of instructional design of interactive multimedia (IMM) and the World Wide Web (WWW). Other research interests focus on the mental models, thinking processes, and teaching-learning strategies used by teachers and learners when interacting with electronic databases, IMM, and the WWW. His areas of expertise are special education and distance education. His current research interests with respect to interactive multimedia (IMM) focus on tertiary students' thinking while studying with IMM materials and their usage patterns of IMM courseware. He is also involved in a number of school curriculum and systemic evaluations.     

Primary science education: Views from three Australian States

This paper reports an empirical study of science education in Australian primary schools. The data show that, while funding is seen as a major determinant of what is taught and how it is taught, teacher-confidence and teacher-knowledge are also important variables. Teachers are most confident with topics drawn from the biological sciences, particularly things to do with plants. With this exception there is no shared body of science education knowledge that could be used to develop a curriculum for science education. There was evidence that most teachers see a need for a hands-on approach to primary science education involving the use of concrete materials. A substantial proportion of teachers agree that some of the problems would be alleviated by having a set course together with simple, prepared kits containing sample learning experiences. Any such materials must make provision for individual teachers to capitalise on critical teaching incidents as they arise and must not undermine the professional pride that teachers have in their work. Specializations: science education, school effectiveness, teacher education Specializations: science education, teacher education in science     

College MOON Project Australia: Preservice Teachers Learning about the Moon’s Phases

This paper is a report of the Australian segment of an international multi-campus project centred on improving understanding of the Moon’s phases for preservice teachers. Instructional strategies adopted for a science education subject enabled Australian participants to make extended observations of the Moon’s phases and keep observational data records which were shared in asynchronous on-line discussion with fellow preservice teachers in the USA. An adaptation of an online inventory of lunar phases was completed by participants before and after the observation cycle. The analysis of inventory data showed that although there was statistically significant overall improvement in mean scores for the inventory this could be accounted for by statistically significant increases in only some conceptual domains related to the lunar phases. In addition, the findings indicate that some concepts involved in having a deep understanding of lunar phases can be improved by instruction however, misunderstandings of other concepts involved in lunar phases are difficult to change and may require increased attention to developing students’ visual-spatial capabilities.