Co-constructors of data,co-constructors of meaning: Teacher professional development in an age of accountability

This research examines how engaging teachers in collaboratively constructing situated assessments enhances teacher professional development, fosters meaningful shifts to practice, and supports productive conceptions of accountability. We conducted case studies of six teachers engaged as partners in investigating new approaches to assessing and fostering literacy. Findings suggested that supporting teachers to generate, interpret, and act upon assessment data within instructional change cycles assisted them in monitoring student performance, grounding instructional decisions in data, and enacting changes to practice. We also document how collaboratively constructing assessments with teachers supported conceptions of accountability considered meaningful by individuals adopting differing socio-political perspectives.     

The Development of a Discipline: some reflections on the development of comparative education as seen through the pages of Compare

The development of the concept and scope of comparative education is traced from a scrutiny of the origins of CESE and BCIES to the merger of BCIES with the new BACIE. A succession of editors of Compare, all of these being significant contributors to the practice of comparative education, have modified and shaped the concept into a recognised university discipline. The notion of ‘applied comparative education’ is considered in reviewing the suggestion that comparative education is research based, whereas international education makes practical use of comparative data. An illustration is given of how a new school was brought into being in which ‘applied comparative education’ was a pioneer feature through the six house units linked with different areas of the world.     

Globally mobile middle class lives in government secondary schools

ABSTRACT

Schooling has long been studied for its role in class formation and reproduction, Australian government secondary schools have also traditionally been associated with ‘the local’ and with ‘nation building’. Some schools might now also be engaged with ideas of the ‘the global’ not only through policy practices and priorities, but also through the social dynamics of migration and movement. In globalizing times neither class formation nor schooling can be thought of simply in national terms. They are connected to globalizing forces yet cannot be divorced from their national specificity. We suggest that within Australia recent and historical emphases on skilled migration are pivotal to considering local connections to global middle class circuits. We argue for new approaches to studying the school experiences of global middle-class families and students, through a focus on transnational connectivities, generational dynamics, family and social life, rather than on more ‘culturalist’ approaches and national comparisons.     

Michael Sadler and the German Connection

Abstract

The peoples of Germany and their culture were a major preoccupation of Michael Sadler from his first visits to eastern Germany in the 1890s to his ultimate analysis of the Nazi‐zeit in 1940. Whilst holding the post of first Director of the Office of Special Inquiries and Reports (1895‐1903) he organised the publication of 11 massive volumes of reports and it is significant that papers dealing with German themes are numerous. Volume IX in 1902 is devoted to Education in Germany. In 1907 he published the results of his study of continuation schools and the pioneering of his friend Georg Kerschensteiner and in 1908 he edited the report of an international enquiry into Moral Education with a keynote essay by another of his German friends Professor Rudolf Eucken. The quintessence of all this pre‐war study is contained in an address on England's Debt to German Education which Sadler gave in Frankfurt‐am‐Main in 1912 when he suggested eight lessons that could be learnt from the German experience. Throughout the first world war Sadler wrote and spoke much about parallel movements in German and English education. Between the first and second world wars he watched apprehensively the emergence of Nazism. In his diary of November 1940 he attempted to identify seven tendencies of the 1930s which, had the Nazi leadership not been so powerful in curbing public opinion and ensuring totalitarian control, would have proved constructive and made a contribution towards unifying Europe economically andpolitically.