Transforming teacher–family relationships: shifting roles and perceptions of home visits through the Funds of Knowledge approach

Education has embraced the idea of an ‘asset approach’ to working with families and children, creating a focus on developing collaborative relationships with families by building on what they bring to the table. In this paper we explore what happened when early childhood teachers entered homes to learn from families and identify their Funds of Knowledge. The findings show how issues of power and perception surfaced when teachers attempted to shift their role from that of teacher to learner. In analyzing teachers’ experience before, during, and after ethnographic home visits we saw their general desire to adopt an asset-based mentality. However, the hegemonic structure of schooling, previous experiences, and traditional teachers’ roles shaped their experience with the Funds of Knowledge framework. We end by discussing the implications for teachers and teacher educators who are interested in using home visits to develop an asset approach to their work with families.     

Contextual Influences on Integration in Australia: Overview of a Report to the Commonwealth Schools Commission. Part I.

Integration of students with special needs has emerged as a significant challenge to education practice in Australia, as elsewhere in the world community. To date, however, little information is available regarding the implementation of integration policy which, in many cases, is still evolving. This paper presents findings of a study sponsored by the Commonwealth Schools Commission at the request of the Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development, Centre for Education Research and Innovation (OECD/CERI) and describes the current context within which integration in Australia occurs. Reference is made to the philosophical, legislative, and policy bases, administrative organization, and funding structures from which the implementation of policy is proceeding. Differences between States, as well as issues of common interest are identified.     

Effectiveness,Difference and Sociological Research

This article addresses Making the Difference (Connell et al., 1982) as a research project, in the specific context of Australian education and Australian sociology. It argues that the form of its research and writing have been as influential as the argument itself, and illustrates these themes by comparing that project of the early 1980s with two more recent Australian projects of the late 1990s. It is suggested that Making the Difference was successful in illustrating class and culturally based inequalities in the form of Australian schooling, and in illuminating some gendered processes of that schooling, but that its proposal for an 'organic working class curriculum' was difficult and utopian in conception, and quickly overtaken by broader interests in school 'effectiveness', and political moves to 'third way' policies rather than class war. It is argued that the Queensland New Basics project illustrates some of the lessons of engagement and communication offered by Making the Difference , and also the pragmatism of this new political context; and that the longitudinal 12 to 18 Project attempted to build on insights about class and gender of the earlier work, but with attention to some of the limitations of the type of focus on class of that work.     

‘Powerful knowledge’ curriculum theories and the case of physics

A stream of debate (including a previous special issue of this journal (25(1) 2014)) has made claims not just for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ as the framing underpinning of the school curriculum, but that subjects associated with disciplinary and disciplined knowledge forms have a particular power and that these characteristics are important to preserve in curriculum frameworks. This paper draws on a major Australian research project studying school and university physics in the context of these arguments to revisit the issue of the ‘discipline’ of physics and the curriculum logics for physics. Given that disciplines are social in origin and changing and expanding over time, can school curriculum be logically derived from the discipline to which they relate? Are questions about student engagement only questions about pedagogy and not curriculum? Does a focus on disciplinary knowledge mean that the role of school in forming identities and values is avoidable as a significant feature of what the curriculum does? The findings from the project are used both to illustrate and test these questions, and to challenge some over-simple assumptions about the verticality of this form of knowledge for education purposes.     

Globalization and science education: The implications of science in the new economy

Science has seen considerable change in recent decades with the emergence of a new economic and sociopolitical contract between science, the nation, state, and private commercial interests. Generally regarded as having been precipitated by globalization, these changes in the sciences are beginning to be documented by a range of commentators. Clearly, science's changing forms hold profound implications for the development of science education. As there is little science education scholarship exploring the implications sciences' altering forms, this paper attempts to investigate the relationship at more depth. Detailing this relationship is important because it can help formulate new questions, and methods for their investigation, relevant to the work of science education in the newly global world. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 617–633, 2008     

Conceptualisations of literacy and literacy practices for children with severe learning difficulties

Literacy is traditionally narrowly conceptualised as a set of skills related to accessing and generating written or printed text. For children designated as having severe learning difficulties (SLD), who are unlikely to develop these ‘conventional’ literacy skills, such a conception implies their semi‐literacy or nonliteracy. Although conceptions of multimodal literacy and multiliteracies have rarely been applied to this group, broader understandings of literacy that include a range of activities, modes and media provide greater opportunities for including these learners in literacy practices. Drawing upon our research with teachers of this group of children and young people, we illustrate these literacy practices. We note, however, that such practices are often haphazard, not coherently thought through, and that there is much confusion regarding any distinction between communication and literacy. We argue for literacy as a specific form of communication, but conclude that broader models of literacies should be utilised to guide and support practitioners in developing interactive practice and in making reasoned and principled approaches and decisions about literacy practices, routes and progression for children with SLD.