Corporate federalism and the reform of teacher education in Australia

Current Australian commitments to competency‐based teacher reforms have wide acceptance. The key to this has been the affirmative stance adopted by the peak education unions and by ‘progressive’ educationalists, the nominal guarantors of recent professional advances in teaching. Since Australian approaches to ‘competencies’ are part of a more general agenda of industrialization of education, what is clearly indicated are radical changes in the way that nominally independent/critical language of education is currently being interpreted and applied: this is now being used to support an overall restructuring in which substantive (professional) forms of teacher authority are being uncompromisingly targeted. The transformations identified in this paper as having special strategic significance involve the themes of ‘school as community’ and ‘critical practice’. These have been detached from their traditional (robustly anti‐industrial) reference points and redeployed to authorize a more active (because supposedly conflict‐free) regulatory role by newly empowered managers and to advance the claim that ‘the practical’, on its own, can now be revalorized to allow real scope for creative and contextualized interventions by teachers. A strictly managerialist/technicist perspective upon schooling is thus represented as occupying the highest moral and cognitive ground. Correspondingly ruled out is the case for any real measure of educational pluralism or leamercentredness, no matter the sociocultural complexities, thereby licensing the extension to the school site itself of direct (educationally unmediated) political controls over education. As its counterpoint to the new agenda, this paper stresses the need for a robust decision‐making role by educators at all levels of policy formation, and for learner‐centred interventions which are much more than technical, whatever the processes of revalorization supposedly at work.     

Variation in Student Reflections on their Conceptions of and Approaches to Learning Biochemistry in a First‐year Health Sciences’ Service Subject

Many factors affect students’ learning approaches, including topic conceptions and prior study. This research, undertaken after a first‐semester compulsory subject, explores students’ conceptions of biochemistry and how they approached their studies. Students (n=151) completed an open‐ended survey analysed phenomenographically. Those with cohesive conceptions were found to be more likely to adopt deeper approaches to study than those with fragmented conceptions, a result unaffected by various demographic parameters. Compared with earlier research, a semester of study increased the percentage of students with a cohesive view, with no concomitant change in learning approaches, suggesting that cohesive conceptions are a necessary but not sufficient criterion for deep learning outcomes. Compared with results for a science major subject, more of the students with cohesive conceptions used surface approaches. This may reflect a regression to safe surface approaches when faced with an unfamiliar topic or high total workload driving a strategic approach to learning. It could also reflect a perception that this material is only a tool for later application. The present findings indicate the crucial importance, when university studies begin, of enabling students to build an overarching conception of the topic’s place in professional practice. This concept building should be applied across the entire curriculum to emphasize application and integration of material (key graduate attributes). Improved conceptions may provide crucial motivation for students to achieve deeper learning, especially in these foundation service subjects. These essential changes to the learning context may also better prepare students for increasing self‐directed/life‐long learning.     

Policy mobilities and methodology: a proposition for inventive methods in education policy studies

ABSTRACT

The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘policy mobilities’ can be applied, and are in fact required, to examine and research the networked and relational, or ‘topological’, nature of globalised education policy, which cuts across the new spaces of policymaking and new modes of global educational governance. In this paper, we examine the methodological issues pertaining to the study of the movement of policy. Informed by contemporary methodological thinking around social network analysis and the ethnographic notion of ‘following the policy’, we discuss the limitations of these approaches to adequately address presence in policy network analysis, and the problem of representing speed and intensity of policy mobility, even while these attempt to solve the problem of relationality and territoriality. We conclude that the methodologies of policy mobility are inexorably intertwined with the (constantly) changing phenomena under examination, and hence require what Lury and Wakeford describe as ‘inventive methods’.     

The Publishing Industry in Indonesia

Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world with more than 250 million people and 17,000 islands. Indonesia was the guest-of-honor at the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair, and as such was the first southeast nation to be represented. The publishing industry in Indonesia has an annual net revenue of USD 466 million (2013) and is dominated by a few large players. Almost 40,000 new titles are published annually. About half of all books published are translations. Ebooks currently contribute only 2 % of total turnover.     

Placing PISA and PISA for schools in two federalisms,Australia and the USA

ABSTRACT

This paper accepts that the OECD’s PISA has become influential in policy terms globally, but analyses the ways that the main PISA and PISA for Schools tests are positioned differently in Australia and the USA because of contrasting educational federalisms in the two nations. Our argument is that while PISA is undoubtedly influential, its effects are nonetheless mediated by the political structures – here, the different models of federalism – present within different nations, which in turn leads to quite distinct ‘PISA effects’. For instance, Australia oversamples on main PISA to make its data available for national and state-level policymaking, whereas the USA, with its focus on local governance in schooling, does not oversample, meaning that main PISA does not have a comparable policy salience as in Australia. Conversely, the newer PISA for Schools test originated in the USA with pressure from educators and philanthropic interests and has been implemented in a good number of schools, but it has not been taken up in the same way in Australia. Our analyses show how these differences reflect the idiosyncratic workings of federalism in the two nations, in which the federal government has a stronger policy and funding role in Australia than has hitherto been the case for the federal government in the USA.     

Accountability and Control: a sociological account of secondary school assessment in Queensland

This paper analyses sociologically the current form of school‐based secondary assessment in Queensland which is criterion‐referenced to Year 10 and a hybrid criterion/norm referenced form at the end of Year 12. Habermas’ arguments are used to suggest that this assessment pattern will give the state potentially greater ‘steering capacity’ over education by ‘rationalising’ it — the ‘scientisation of schooling’. This form of assessment fits within the accountability discourse of the economically parsimonious 1980s while meeting selection demands. However, the approach does meet some educational demands. The paper also reflects upon the role of the state and expert knowledge in policy formulation.

     

Enriching educational accountabilities through collaborative public conversations: Conceptual and methodological insights from the Learning Commission approach

Journal of Educational Change - This article describes the use of a Learning Commission to experiment with conceptualising and implementing richer modes of educational accountability. A Learning...