Supporting families: a nurturing teacher education strategy in Nauru

There has been little recent documentation concerning Pacific family support for family members locally involved in university study in their Pacific home country and how such responses affect both parties. Some studies dealing with family support for student family members, including Pacific families residing in the USA, have been published. A New Zealand Ministry of Education report on Pasifika students’ educational success rates raised the need for effective family support contexts. Another study researched the family support negotiation patterns of mature-age part-time students in Australia, Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea. Only one University of the South Pacific research focused on Pacific family and community expectations of family members studying and residing with their families in their Pacific home countries. This Nauru-based study describes mixed support responses from Nauruan families towards their teacher education student family members and Nauru Department of Education student engagement and well-being development strategies.     

Adolescent males in New Zealand school choirs: the contradictory business of being in the gender vanguard

School choirs have been stigmatised for adolescent males in New Zealand, resulting in constraints in involvement, bullying, and threat to gender identity. In other national contexts, boys who sing in choirs have experienced a negative stereotype associated with accusations of inferior masculinity, yet little research has probed whether such forces are at play for their New Zealand counterparts. The current study was conducted with a sample of adolescent male school choir members in New Zealand (a country where essentialist gender attitudes have existed). Adolescent male choristers’ perceptions of the gender stereotype, its moderation by cultural context, and how the stigmatised choral domain was negotiated, were explored within a framework of critical masculinities. Such a stereotype and wider implications for gendered structures found in society at large were confirmed. Personal and school-based factors enabling the male choristers’ endurance in a domain that rendered their construction of masculinity subordinate, are discussed.     

Enabling international student families: new empiricisms and posthumanist entanglements in higher education

ABSTRACT

This paper presents research on movements involved in the lives of international university students and their accompanying family members. Located in the framing of new empiricisms and new materialisms, a posthumanist approach is offered as a way to move beyond the limitations of a focus on the educational mobilities of individualised self-contained student subjects. The research this paper draws on engages a diffractive visual methodology involving interview encounters with women who each moved from Iran to Australia together with their partner and children. A materialist feminist approach enables the consideration of how a variety of entangled movements and animated affects shape the lives of international student families. The utility of this approach becomes the inspiration for thinking through the concept of ‘intra-active becoming in movement’. This brings a refreshed set of practices for designing higher education experiences for international students that resists the divisiveness of binary oppositions in Western thought.     

Personality traits in effective clinical teachers

This study looks at the teaching effectiveness of clinical instructors in a professional college of optometry from the viewpoint of students, colleagues, and the teachers themselves. It was asked whether certain measurable personal qualities could differentiate highly rated teachers from their less effective peers. It was found that teachers given high ratings on their clinical teaching effectiveness were distinguished by a constellation of measurable personality traits including self-confidence, assertiveness, personal and intellectual drive, tolerance, and a liking for personal interaction. These traits appear to be common ingredients which contribute to high quality teaching in clinical settings such as that encountered in a health profession school like optometry.     

Levels of use of Interactive Whiteboard technology in the primary mathematics classroom

Despite the availability of Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) technology in a large number of Australian primary schools, many teachers focus only on technical issues as opposed to pedagogical engagement in an attempt to incorporate the technology. Previous research suggests that the technology is being used for sophisticated transmission-style teaching as opposed to constructivist approaches. This article presents findings of a project that considered the implementation of IWB technology in three Victorian primary mathematics classrooms (5 to 12 years of age). The study analysed the teaching strategies adopted by three teachers as they embarked on the use of IWB technology as an integral component of mathematical activities with the support of professional development. Teacher use of IWB technology in the primary mathematics classroom was aligned against Beauchamp’s generic transitional framework for viewing the development of teacher use of IWB technology. Through this alignment, a transitional framework emerged which is specific to the introduction of IWB technology in the mathematics classroom.     

Students as learners through the eyes of their teachers in Rwandan higher education

In this study, we aim to explore and thematically analyze higher education teachers’ notions about the most important problems related to students’ learning, including the teachers’ notions about the approaches to learning adopted by students. The study was carried out in Rwanda with 25 university teachers engaged in group interviews. Inspired by the concepts of metaphors for learning and approaches to learning, five main categories of students’ learning problems were identified: dependence, physical and economic resources, experience of a deep approach to learning, reading culture, and previous preparation for higher education. These problems are interrelated and point to the need to understand study levels in education systems as interdependent.     

Teaching Students to Infer Meaning Through Material Culture

Social studies students can learn to glean historical information from the study of material culture through active engagement as curators. Teachers can guide students through a pre-survey of helpful reading materials and then through selecting items of personal significance to them: creating labels that objectively describe the chosen items as to origin, composition, background, and provenance; exchanging the created sets of file cards; examining the cards received in the exchange; inferring factual information about the owner of the selected items; and sharing deductions with the class. From this exercise, students will have a chance to learn how historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists use critical thinking in their work, how much can be learned from material culture, and how missteps can result from overtheorizing.     

Greek primary school children’s representations of the urban environment as seen through their drawings

In the present study, we explore aspects of Greek primary school children’s representations about the urban environment through the use of drawings and their relation to sustainability. For that purpose, 104 children, aged 9–12 (4th and 6th grades), were asked to make two drawings of their town: one as it is now and another as they would like it to be. Drawings were analysed using pre-defined categories of urban sustainability and were statistically analysed using SPSS. Results revealed a serious gap in knowledge regarding energy and aspects of local development tied to sustainability in the current and future state of the children’s towns. Although the most popular characteristics in the children’s drawings were associated with the environment, the majority of children illustrated issues related to society. Evidence indicated an age-related progression of representations related to sustainability in the urban environment, at least concerning the topics of natural environment, infrastructure and the realization of problems caused by air pollution and municipal waste generation.