About the Editor and Contributors

In the last decade ‘quality’ has assumed the status of one of the meta-discourses across many domains of public policy, including education. This paper focuses on the specific example of quality policy in Australian higher education of the 1990s, and in particular, on the micro level of quality policy practice as experienced by academic practitioners in 6 universities. As such, it forms a follow-up to an article published earlier in the Journal of Education Policy (Vidovich and Porter 1997) which examined macro (national) and intermediate (the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) levels of a quality policy cycle consisting of contexts of influence, policy text production and practice, as articulated by Ball and colleagues (Bowe, Ball and Gold 1992, Ball 1994). The findings of in-depth interviews with key university personnel provide evidence of the ‘messy’ realities of the policy process and considerable variation in quality policy practices at local sites, particularly in terms of the different historical contexts of universities which were categorized as ‘traditional’, ‘alternative’ and ‘former college’ types. However, despite such variation, the ‘bigger picture’ effect of the quality policy under investigation was to enhance Australian national Government control of higher education, albeit at a ‘distance’, characteristic of the culture of performativity increasingly pervading higher education across many OECD countries. A further effect was to increase inequalities, both between and within universities.     

Capturing and Enhancing Science Teachers’ Professional Knowledge

This paper reports research from a three-year Australian science teacher professional learning project, the Science Teaching and Learning (STaL) Project, in which groups of science teacher participants (across years K – 12) worked with academics over a one-year period as teacher researchers. Through reflecting on their experiences within the STaL Project and collecting data from their classrooms related to specific science teaching concerns, teacher participants constructed cases around particular aspects of their professional learning. The cases that these participants developed elicited rich insights into their teaching and their students’ learning of science. This paper discusses how the cases were developed by the teacher researcher participants and uses exemplars as a way of illustrating the nature of the professional knowledge developed.     

Effect of Including Parents in a School-Based Exercise and Nutrition Program for Children

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of parental involvement in a school-based program about exercise and nutrition. One fifth grade and one sixth grade class were randomly assigned to each of the three different treatment conditions, a school-and-home condition (n = 45), a school-only condition (n = 43), and a control condition (n = 44). In the school-and-home condition, the children's parents were also asked to participate in nutritional and exercise activities at home as a family “home team.” A multivariate analysis of variance on change scores was completed on the following variables: height, weight, skinfold, sit-and-reach, sit-ups, mile run, exercise knowledge, saturated fat, cholesterol, percent calories from fat, percent calories from carbohydrates, and nutrition knowledge. There was a significant difference among groups. The school-and-home and school-only groups showed significantly greater improvement than the control group but were not significantly different from each other. Univariate analyses on posttest scores indicated that the school-and-home children scored significantly higher than the control group on sit-and-reach flexibility and nutrition knowledge. The results indicate that including the family was primarily effective in facilitating children's improvements in flexibility and nutrition knowledge rather than in diet and exercise behaviors.     

Moving towards transdisciplinarity: an ecological sustainable focus for science and mathematics pre‐service education in the primary/middle years

One reason we have difficulty finding sustainable solutions is in part because we are unable to see the bigger picture. Capra (2000 Capra, F. 2000. The challenge of our time.. Resurgence, 203: 18–20.  [Google Scholar]) argues, “To become ecologically literate we must learn to think systemically – in terms of connectedness, context and processes” (p. 270). We have attempted to structure connected learning experiences through our transdisciplinary approach to teaching for learning science, mathematics and ecological aspects of society and environment. We support Jucker's (2002 Jucker, R. 2002. Our common illiteracy: Education as if the Earth and people mattered, Frankfurt: Peter Lang.  [Google Scholar]) view that we must have lateral rigor across disciplines and vertical rigor within disciplines in order to best prepare students for teaching. This paper explores the theoretical underpinning of this complex approach to undergraduate teaching and reports on how our teaching team has worked collaboratively to structure a sequence of three, one semester integrated, core courses that explicitly uses an educating for ecological sustainability theme as the basis for each course and associated assessment.