Managing curriculum change and ‘ontological uncertainty’ in tertiary education

Curriculum reform at institutional level is a challenging endeavour. Those charged with leading this process will encounter both enthusiasm and multiple obstacles to teacher engagement including the particularly complex issue of confronting existing teacher identities. At Unitec Institute of Technology (Unitec), the ‘Living Curriculum’ initiative focused on whole-of-institution curriculum renewal and, in the process, acknowledged and addressed teacher beliefs and practices that variously supported and contested both the initiative itself and the professional development offerings that accompanied it. The related research project identified factors and processes that unsettle teachers, rendering them ‘insecure’, and strategies that have proven effective in supporting teachers through significant change in conceptions of curriculum, teaching and learning.     

Is the School Composition Effect Real?: A Discussion With Evidence From the UK PISA Data

The school composition effect has attracted attention from researchers who believe that progress towards equality of educational opportunity is compromised by the existence of schools with “unbalanced” social rolls. Evidence for 2 central hypotheses in the “mix” theory is tested by an analysis of UK PISA data. It is suggested that the school composition effect is sometimes an artefact of statistical procedures and caused by “unmeasured” within-SES school selection for noncognitive dispositions and variable family resources within social classes. Some implications for the debate into the origins of social differences in education and the limits of “effective schooling” are discussed.     

PERSPECTIVES ON THE INSTRUCTION OF BIOLOGICAL AGING COURSES

Courses in biological aging are becoming increasingly common and necessary in college curricula for several reasons. At the same time, there is a lack of guidance for instructors regarding necessary content in such a course, which is in part perpetuated by uncertainty about the background of students who need this instruction and a lack of consistency in the content and style of human aging textbooks. In this article, the authors, as instructors who have taught undergraduate level human biological aging courses for many years, describe the areas of study and needs of students likely to enroll in such a course and also detail strategies and organizational methods found to be advantagous in teaching this material in a coherent and understandable manner to a largely nonscience major student cohort. Strategies discussed include alteration of course content, decompartmentalization of topics, relation of biological topics to social science reference points, and contrasting “universal” and pathological age‐related changes. Also included is an outline of the content and order of subjects that the authors have found through experience to be successful in the instruction of a biological aging course.     

The writer is at the center of the scholarship: Partnering me‐search and research

Ever suffer from writer's blahs? Read on to learn from Robert J. Nash and DeMethra LaSha Bradley how to inject the vigor of personal narrative into the rigor of traditional research.     

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