A model for principals' STEM leadership capability

In this paper we develop a model for the capabilities required by principals for effective Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) leadership. The model underpinned a large national cross-sectional research and development project across Australian states in both primary and secondary schools. This model is developed via synthesis of research literature across leadership and STEM education. The model consists of five dimensions of principals' STEM capability: (1) STEM discipline-specific and integrated knowledge and practices; (2) contexts; (3) dispositions; (4) tools; and (5) critical orientation. These dimensions represent distinct, but interrelated, capacities required by principals to establish and maintain positive STEM learning cultures within schools. Elaborations have been provided, in the form of capabilities, for each of these dimensions. The model has the potential for shaping principals' STEM leadership development trajectories and structuring targeted professional learning programmes for principals, teachers and other members of the school community.     

Cultural Curating and the Practices of Light: Speculating Diffractively

Drawing inspiration from New Materialist philosopher Karen Barad's challenge to read “diffractively” by experimenting with different patterns of relationality, this article sets out a course of speculative inquiry inspired by the contemporary fascination with digital light‐based installations. Taking the UN's designation of 2015 as the “International Year of Light and Light‐based Technologies” as its point of departure, a subset of mediated environments are identified that transcend the distinction between physical and digital; materiality and immateriality; invisibility and presence. Employing new technologies to create deeply sensorial and highly participatory forms of aesthetic engagement, the selected examples offer a compelling indication of the post‐digital aesthetics that arise from the interrelationship of art, design and computation. Its investigation is structured as a montage of two parts: following an introduction that surveys an illustrative sub‐set of contemporary digital light‐based art works drawn from the 2014 INST‐INT conference, the second half of this text will speculate upon the “dynamic‐constructive” relationship between digital media and the form‐making processes associated with “practices of light” (Cubitt 2014 ). The implications of “post‐screen media” for curatorial practice is explored in relation to the mediating function played by modes of exhibition and other program architectures.     

Participatory action research as pedagogy: investigating social and ecological justice learning within a teacher education program

A research collective comprised of teacher candidates, graduate students, and faculty set out to investigate the role and impact of social and ecological justice learning in a teacher education program. Amidst the tensions, negotiations, and articulations of the research design, the collective came to recognize the spaces of participatory action research as sites of growth and efficacy toward justice learning. And, each began to perceive themselves as both impacted by educational structures and as agents enacting their own visions of professional practice. These outcomes are discussed in the context of the growing body of participatory action research, emphasizing the dynamic learning precipitated within the intersections of the research collective. The empirical analysis, involving survey and interview data, brought to bear the rarity of events participants (teacher candidates) recognized as invoking meaningful social and ecological justice learning, and goes some way to describe such learning in terms of embodied experience. The paper closes with a selection of testimonials provided by members of the research collective, offering personal accounts of what was gained through participating in the research process.     

Sparsity and Independence: Balancing Two Objectives in Optimization for Source Separation with Application to fMRI Analysis

Because of its wide applicability in various disciplines, blind source separation (BSS), has been an active area of research. For a given dataset, BSS provides useful decompositions under minimum assumptions typically by making use of statistical properties—types of diversity—of the data. Two popular types of diversity that have proven useful for many applications are statistical independence and sparsity. Although many methods have been proposed for the solution of the BSS problem that take either the statistical independence or the sparsity of the data into account, there is no unified method that can take into account both types of diversity simultaneously. In this work, we provide a mathematical framework that enables direct control over the influence of these two types of diversity and apply the proposed framework to the development of an effective ICA algorithm that can jointly exploit independence and sparsity. In addition, due to its importance in biomedical applications, we propose a new model reproducibility framework for the evaluation of the proposed algorithm. Using simulated functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, we study the trade-offs between the use of sparsity versus independence in terms of the separation accuracy and reproducibility of the algorithm and provide guidance on how to balance these two objectives in real world applications where the ground truth is not available.