Student equity’s starring role in Australian higher education: not yet centre field

The field of Australian higher education has changed, is changing and is about to change, repositioned in relation to other “fields of power”. It is a sector now well defined by its institutional groupings and by their relative claims to selectivity and exclusivity, with every suggestion of their differentiation growing. The potential of a “joined-up” tertiary education system, of vocational education and training (VET) and universities, has the potential to further rework these relations within Australian higher education, as will lifting the volume caps on university student enrolments. Moreover, Australian universities now compete within an international higher education marketplace, ranked by THES and Shanghai Jiao Tiong league tables. “Catchment areas” and knowledge production have become global. In sum, Australian universities (and agents within them) are positioned differently in the field. And being so variously and variably placed, institutions and agents have different stances available to them, including the positions they can take on student equity. In this paper I begin from the premise that our current stance on equity has been out-positioned, as much by a changing higher education field as by entrenched representations of social groups across regions, institutions, disciplines and degrees. In taking a new stance on equity, the paper is also concerned with the positioning in the field of a new national research centre with a focus on student equity in higher education. In particular, the paper asks what stance this new centre can take on student equity that will resonate on a national and even international scale. And, given a global field of higher education, what definitions of equity and propositions for policy and practice can it offer? What will work in the pursuit of equity?     

The UGC's Research Rankings Exercise

The UGC's ranking of research strengths was part of a wider, radical revision of university funding. Inevitably, the exercise aroused much hostile academic criticism which stemmed from both science-based and arts-based sources: this has focused specifically on the methodology employed, the secrecy surrounding it, and the denial of appellate provision. Additional criticisms made here are: (i) the techniques devised were inadequate for the task; and (ii) that they represented a mechanistic approach to an essentially organic problem. Although the UGC exercise was deeply flawed, evaluation per se seems to have been generally accepted, however reluctantly. The exercise is unlikely to be repeated in the same form since it has been overtaken by events. Proposals for contract funding and a three-tier university system suggest that assessments will be of a different kind in future.     

Measuring sports class learning climates: The development of the Sports Class Environment Scale

The development and validation of a new and unique learning climate instrument, the Sports Class Environment Scale (SCES), was the focus of this study. We began with a consolidation of the dimensions and items of the Perceived Motivational Climate in Sport Questionnaire–2 and the Classroom Environment Scale. Field-testing of the SCES involved 204 competitive gymnasts from six metropolitan and four regional competitive gymnastics clubs in Queensland, Australia. Exploratory factor analysis provided a revised SCES with five scales labelled Task Involvement & Improvement, Ego Involvement & Mistakes, Coach–Athlete Communication, Effort, Order & Organisation, and Affiliation. Using scales of the revised SCES as dependent variables, multivariate analyses of variance were conducted to compare club types, genders and competitive levels. Effective measurement of sports class learning climates using the SCES could lead to a greater understanding of effective sports classes, and of coach and athlete behaviours in those classes, and provide a first step in monitoring sports class learning climates.     

Activist dispositions for social justice in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts of schooling

This article advances current conceptions of teacher activism through an exploration of the social justice dispositions of teachers in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts of schooling. We interrogate the practices of teachers in a government school, with a high proportion of refugee students and students from low socio-economic backgrounds, in a high-fees, multi-campus independent school, and in a disadvantaged Systemic Catholic school to illustrate how Bourdieu’s notion of dispositions (which are constitutive of the habitus) and Fraser’s distinction between affirmative and transformative justice are together productive of four types of teacher activism. Specifically, we show that activist dispositions can be characterised as either affirmative or transformative in stance and as either internally or externally focused in relation to the education field. We argue that the social, cultural and material conditions of schools are linked to teachers’ activist dispositions and conclude with the challenge for redressing educational inequalities by fostering a transformative activism in teachers’ practices.     

Improving and Maintaining Torque Accuracy in Aerospace Manufacturing: A Case Study

Needs assessment is a systematic and systemic process intended to identify and define gaps between current performance and desired performance. Needs assessments are most beneficial if they address issues that affect successful accomplishment of operational or tactical processes as well as outcomes that allow an organization to meet its overall strategic goals. A team of graduate students took on a needs assessment project to ascertain the causes of declining accuracy in a key task in an aerospace manufacturing process. The project encountered numerous barriers within the client organization, but the team systematically applied human performance technology methods in multiple stages to gather and analyze the available data. The end result was a set of identified root causes and recommended interventions focused on improving performance.