The recontextualisation of ‘quality’ in Australian higher education

In the education policy arena, the notion of ‘quality'as a mechanism for increasing accountability to stakeholders has risen to prominence in the 1990s, as part of the micro‐economic reform agenda of many national governments. This study analyses the way in which policy makers in Australian higher education have recontextualised the notions of quality adopted in other countries to reconstruct a uniquely Australian version. Further, the study analyses how this recontextualisation continues from the ministerial level, through the Higher Education Council (HEC), and then the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (CQAHE), to the site of intended policy effect ‐‐ individual universities. A theoretical framework, in part offered by Stephen Ball's policy trajectory studies, is employed to examine the negotiation, resistance and even transformation of the original ministerial quality policy of 1991. A central contention is that the operation of the subsequent 3‐year cycle of quality reviews between 1993 and 1995 provides an example par excellence of a government strategy of ‘steering at a distance’.     

South-south migration and education: the case of people of Haitian descent born in the Dominican Republic

The world is witnessing an era of unprecedented human mobility and much of this movement entails migration between countries in the global south. This article contributes to the development of an important new line of inquiry within the field of comparative and international education: South-South migration and education. In the first section, I review the available literature to sketch the outlines of this phenomenon. I then examine a particular case: schooling for youth of Haitian descent born and living in the Dominican Republic. The qualitative data reveals two important findings: first, despite claims to the contrary, some immigrant children are still being denied access to basic education; second, once enrolled in school, children and youth of Haitian descent, and especially darker-skinned boys, are subject to intense verbal abuse and, in some cases, physical abuse. As I discuss in the conclusion, the case of Haitians in the Dominican Republic raises significant questions regarding south-south migration and education that merit further and, when possible, comparative scrutiny.     

School science achievement: Conditions for equality

Data are presented on the trend in sex differences in science achievement of the total population of 15 year old students in Western Australia over the period 1972‐85 inclusive. Since 1979 the science achievement of boys and girls has been approximately equal. This finding is attributed to the fact that, in Western Australia, at lower secondary school level, boys and girls are exposed to a common science curriculum for a common amount of instructional time. A discussion of the differential course taking hypothesis as an explanation for sex differences in science achievement found in other large‐scale studies is presented. Some evidence of the possible success of intervention strategies aimed at increasing the involvement of girls in science is given.     

Book Reviews

Handwrought Ancestors. By Marion Nicholl Rawson. Illustrated by the author. E. P. Dutton and Company. 366 pp. $5.00.

Brookings. By Hermann Hagedorn. Illustrated. The Macmillan Co. 334 pp. $3.50.

Death Valley Prospectors. By Dane Coolidge. Illustrated. E. P. Dutton and Co. 178 pp. $2.50.

Her Name Was Wallis Warfield. By Edwina H. Wilson. Illustrated. E. P. Dutton and Co. 117 pp. $1.50.

Pascal. By Morris Bishop. Illustrated. Reynal and Hitchcock. 398 pp. $3.50.

The Lives of Talleyrand. By Crane Brinton. Illustrated. W. W. Norton. 316 pp. $3.00.

The Man Who Built San Francisco. By Julian Dana. The Macmillan Company. 397 pp. $3.50.

A Student's History of Education. Revised Edition. By Frank P. Graves. The Macmillan Co. 567 pp. $2.50.

Bibliographies and Summaries in Education to July, 1935. By Walter S. Monroe and Louis Shores. The H. W. Wilson Company. 470 pp. $4.50.

Educational Psychology. Edited by Charles E. Skinner. Prentice Hall. 754 pp. $3.50.

Educational Statistics. By M. E. Broom. American Book Company. 318 pp.

Foundations of Curriculum Building. By John K. Norton and Margaret Alltucker Norton. Ginn and Company. 599 pp. $3.00

Remedial and Corrective Instruction in Reading. By James Maurice McCallister. D. Appleton-Century. 300 pp.

Schools for a Growing Democracy. By James S. Tippett, in Collaboration with the Committee of the Parker School District, Greenville, South Carolina. Ginn and Company. 338 pp. $2.00.

The Foundations of Modern Education. By Elmer Harrison Wilds. Farrar and Rinehart, Inc. 634 pp. $2.75.

The Ideal School. By B. B. Bogoslovsky. The Macmillan Company. 525 pp. $2.50.

The Marks of Examiners. By Sir Philip Harteg, E. C. Rhodes, and Cyril Burt. Macmillan and Company, Ltd. 344 pp. 8s 6d.

The Young Child in the Home. By John E. Anderson. D. Appleton-Century Company. 415 pp. $3.00.

Honourable Estate. By Vera Brittain. The Macmillan Company. 601 pp. $2.50.

Gaily the Troubadour. By Arthur Guiterman. E. P. Dutton and Company. 224 pp. $2.00.

Pamela's Daughters. By Robert Palfrey Utter and Gwendolyn Bridges Needham. The Macmillan Co. 479 pp. $3.50

A History of England. By C. E. Carrington and J. Hampden Jackson. The Macmillan Company. 803 pp. $2.40.

A New American History. By W. E. Woodward. Farrar and Reinhart. 900 pp. $4.00.

From Alley Pond to Rockefeller Center. By Henry Collins Brown. Illustrated. E. P. Dutton and Company. 299 pp. $3.50.

The Philosophy of Santayana. Selections from the Complete Works. Edited by Irwin Edman. Charles Scribner's Sons. 587 pp. $2.50.

Mexican Interlude. By Joseph Henry Jackson. Illustrated. The Macmillan Co. 232 pp. $2.50.

London. By Sidney Dark. Illustrated by Joseph Pennell. The Macmillan Company. 176 pp. $1.39.

Paris. By Sidney Dark. Illustrated by Henry Rushbury. The Macmillan Company. 139 pp. $1.39.

News from Tartary. By Peter Fleming. Illustrated. Charles Scribner's Sons. 381 pp. $3.00.     

Identifying supporters and distracters in the segmented world of the adult learner

This paper examines the results of research into the learning experiences of a group of adult learners in a university preparation programme in a college of Technical and Further Education in Sydney, NSW, Australia. The research was conducted over a three year period by the author as a teacher-researcher and is grounded in the phenomenological work of Schutz, and Berger and Luckmann. Students identified the diverse segments of their complex life-worlds and the salient situated interactions within these segments which support or distract them from learning. What emerges is a representation of the life-world of the adult learner which enables adult educators and students to better understand the complex world of learning in adulthood. An understanding of this world has become increasingly significant as recent economic and social changes have ensured that more adults return to formal education.     

Rethinking work. Time,space and discourse

In this paper, we survey the contemporary movement away from traditional educational forms to the new discourses and practices associated with the term “lifelong learning”. We relate this movement to the sense of crisis which seems to be present in the post‐compulsory and higher education sectors. We locate it in the technological, economic and cultural changes which characterise the postmodern condition and the questioning of the grand narratives which have sustained education in modernity. We examine how these changes are effecting education in terms of trends such as vocationalisation, marketisation, the commodification of knowledge, the individualising of learning and the challenging of the monopoly position of universities. We ask what “education” means when it is not a bounded field and what “learning” means in the more loosely bounded spaces of lifelong learning. We argue that the current situation is both exciting and troubling for educators requiring a redefinition of roles and purposes in a context which is complex and contradictory.     

Collaborative Learning in a Web-mediated Environment: A study of communicative practices

New opportunities for conceptualising, designing and facilitating collaborative learning are rapidly expanding with the technological innovations and proliferation of web-mediated learning and teaching. By enabling social interactions via an electronic medium, web technologies are not only expanding but also transforming the social interaction space of collaborative learning. This paper explores collaborative learning viewed from these social interaction processes. More specifically, the paper applies a Communicative Model of Collaborative Learning to make sense of students' interactions in a management subject taught in a combined face-to-face and web-mediated mode. This model provides a methodological instrument for the analysis of communicative practices in concrete learning processes. By analysing the empirical data from linguistic interactions among students, the paper investigates not only what these interactions mean but also what they produce in a particular learning situation and how they affect learning. In particular, the paper investigates processes of knowledge co-creation that are integral to the development of capabilities for life-long learning.