Advice on a rough draft: The Pickwick papers' ‘Mr. Weller the Elder delivers some critical sentiments respecting literary composition’1

The author discusses a scene from Dickens's The Pickwick papers wherein the novelist describes and dramatises an inexperienced but earnest and determined young man writing a Valentine's letter under the tutelage of a confident yet incompetent tutor, his father. The author, presenting Dickens's marvellous comic scene, compares Sam Weller's difficulties and satisfactions, as well as his weary trailing off, to those of the author's students at a community college in Brooklyn, New York.     

Returns to a specific graduate education

The research on returns (or gains) to graduate-level education is mixed. Some graduate degrees pay off in increased earnings while some graduate degree holders actually receive less salary than their BS/BA counterparts. This study showed that a nontraditional, off-campus, master's degree from the University of Utah did pay off for its graduates. A research project matching master's graduates with nonattendees indicated significant gains for the graduates with respect to salary, promotability, and perceptions of self and job. The study will be used as a pilot for a nationwide research project surveying and interviewing some 400 graduates from Utah's program.He was assisted in the analyses by Art Schnatterly, a Teaching Fellow in Management at the University of Utah.     

What makes a successful transition to school? Views of Australian parents and teachers

This paper reports a survey of 355 parents and 166 teachers of young children starting school in New South Wales, Australia. Parents and teachers were asked to rate a list of 20 items in answer to the question 'How important are the following for deciding whether a child has had a successful first two terms of school?' The results are presented in relation to individual items as well as broad categories, with comparisons between the perceptions of teachers and parents. Overall, teachers placed most emphasis on the areas of children's adjustment to the school context and their dispositions or feelings about being at school. Less emphasis was attributed to areas such as knowledge. Parents were more likely than teachers to focus on knowledge, as well as children's dispositions. Implications are drawn for collaborative interaction between parents and teachers as children start school.     

A descriptive study of community college teachers’ attitudes toward online learning

The data gathered provided valuable insights into the attitudes of teachers in relation to distance education. Most of the participants of the survey felt that with adequate training, technology could be a valuable tool in education. The confidence of the respondents in their own computer skills was rather high, although it was apparent that this confidence did not cover the application of their computer skills to the development of online instruction. None of the respondents currently use a course Web site, and most had little interest in doing so. There was also a strong feeling that there was little support from administration, which made the incentives for providing online instruction low. The survey also raised additional questions such as what type of incentives would be required to make distance education a desirable option for a teacher, or whether they would be interested in receiving training on preparing distance course materials. Further research into possible correlation between the subject matter taught and feelings towards online instruction would be beneficial.     

Content-driven Faculty Development in Community College Early Childhood Education Programs

Community colleges are key providers of early childhood teacher and paraprofessional education, and their programs include content knowledge that helps future educators work effectively with young children with and without disabilities in inclusive environments. In this article, we describe the Advancing Community College Efforts in Paraprofessional Training (ACCEPT) Project, a multi-year collaboration to infuse special education content into four North Carolina early childhood workforce education associate degree programs. The goals of the project included creating a climate that fostered and encouraged ongoing community college and university faculty collaboration around the planning, delivery, and assessment of special education content infused within multiple early childhood program courses. Project objectives are presented within the framework employed by Murray (1995, 1998, 1999, 2000) that includes climate, structure, connections with rewards, faculty ownership, colleague support, and perceived value by administrators. Implications for practice include the importance of content, project standards, and faculty ownership.     

Accountability and Control: a sociological account of secondary school assessment in Queensland

This paper analyses sociologically the current form of school‐based secondary assessment in Queensland which is criterion‐referenced to Year 10 and a hybrid criterion/norm referenced form at the end of Year 12. Habermas’ arguments are used to suggest that this assessment pattern will give the state potentially greater ‘steering capacity’ over education by ‘rationalising’ it — the ‘scientisation of schooling’. This form of assessment fits within the accountability discourse of the economically parsimonious 1980s while meeting selection demands. However, the approach does meet some educational demands. The paper also reflects upon the role of the state and expert knowledge in policy formulation.

     

Author Index

Authors Index

Author index     

Policy mobilities and methodology: a proposition for inventive methods in education policy studies

ABSTRACT

The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘policy mobilities’ can be applied, and are in fact required, to examine and research the networked and relational, or ‘topological’, nature of globalised education policy, which cuts across the new spaces of policymaking and new modes of global educational governance. In this paper, we examine the methodological issues pertaining to the study of the movement of policy. Informed by contemporary methodological thinking around social network analysis and the ethnographic notion of ‘following the policy’, we discuss the limitations of these approaches to adequately address presence in policy network analysis, and the problem of representing speed and intensity of policy mobility, even while these attempt to solve the problem of relationality and territoriality. We conclude that the methodologies of policy mobility are inexorably intertwined with the (constantly) changing phenomena under examination, and hence require what Lury and Wakeford describe as ‘inventive methods’.     

Reflections on developing an offshore,action research/learning-based Ph.D. program

In this paper, the authors describe their experience of establishing an action research/learning-based doctoral program in Singapore by an Australian university, which was designed to help managers get academic accreditation while solving workplace problems. The program was designed by four managers working in Singapore and their supervisors. These managers had completed a Ph.D. program using action learning/action research in their workplace under the supervision of Australian academics. The paper describes the various challenges faced by the candidates, supervisors and administrators in developing and implementing the new program.