“Under pressure I fall back to being a teacher…” confronting contending desires for schooling and teaching in a middle school reform project

This article examines a Victorian high school’s implementation of a new Year 9 program which was intended to interrupt a traditional academic curriculum and to create an imagined oasis of care and personal development for students. It explores ways in which (1) the existing culture and context of the school continues to frame the subjectivities of teachers, students and parents in relation to the new program, (2) the attempt to preserve a competitive academic traditional orientation alongside an alternative approach is a central dilemma for this school, and (3) the new relationships between teachers and students are experienced by them as an interplay of pleasure and surveillance, connection and discipline. The article argues that the conflicts and pressures experienced by the teachers and students are not simply local and contingent ones but indicative of wider tensions in current Australian education policy.     

The legislative requirements for measuring quality in transnational education: Understanding divergence while maintaining standards

Australian universities have been actively engaged in transnational education since the 1990s. The challenges of assuring quality have seen a changing regulatory framework increasingly designed to ensure equivalence of standards wherever a course of study is offered and however it is delivered. Transnational Higher Education has grown significantly and the issues that flow from operating across jurisdictions, cultures and contexts have been addressed primarily by institutions themselves in complying with regulation. This article identifies how the Australian quality agency TEQSA (Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency) has revised its Standards Framework to support divergence appropriate to local culture and context, while assuring quality provision across the student life cycle. It concludes that the maturity of the quality agency may not yet reflect the provision of transnational education in practice. The article identifies a need for significant further research so that theory and practice can reflect opportunities to better serve students in a mature quality environment.     

Lost in Translation: Public Policies,Evidence-based Practice,and Autism Spectrum Disorder

Prevalence rates of autism spectrum disorder have risen dramatically over the past few decades (now estimated at 1:50 children). The estimated total annual cost to the public purse in the United States is US$137 billion, with an individual lifetime cost in the United Kingdom estimated at between £0.8 million and £1.23 million depending on the level of functioning. The United Nations Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has enshrined full and equal human rights—for example, for inclusion, education and employment—and there is ample evidence that much can be achieved through adequate support and early intensive behavioural interventions. Not surprisingly, most governments worldwide have devised laws, policies, and strategies to improve services related to autism spectrum disorder, yet intriguingly the approaches differ considerably across the globe. Using Northern Ireland as a case in point, we look at relevant governmental documents and offer international comparisons that illustrate inconsistencies akin to a “postcode lottery” of services.     

Computerised screening for visual stress in reading

Visual stress is the experience of unpleasant visual symptoms when engaged in reading and some other visual tasks. There is currently no objective diagnostic test for this condition, which affects a substantial proportion of the population and which can disrupt development of reading skills. The reliability of subjective reports of symptoms has been questioned, especially where children are concerned. Diagnosis by positive response to the preferred treatment method, either the sustained voluntary use of a coloured overlay or immediate improvement in reading rate when using an overlay, is usually regarded as the best option. Recent research has reported that children who are significantly impaired by a visually stressful pattern during reading‐like visual search are more likely to show significant improvement in reading speed when using an overlay. This study was designed to evaluate a prototype computerised visual stress screener that incorporated visual search. The results confirmed that primary and secondary school children who were classified by the screener as having high susceptibility to visual stress had larger percent increases in reading rate with an overlay compared with those with low visual stress. The results also indicated that subjective reports of symptoms may not always be diagnostically effective with younger populations. It was concluded that screening for visual stress in reading using a computerised visual search task is an educationally promising development.     

Breaking the Cycle of Victimization: A Structured Interview Technique

In this short paper Lyn Harrison seeks to go beyond policy to effective practice. She suggests that in the case of at least some schools' bullying policies, teachers do not have the appropriate skills to deliver them. An approach using structured interview techniques is presented as a way of addressing this problem. This is an approach which could provide schools with a practical starting point for both discussion and action in relation to the implementation of bullying policies.     

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.