Planning mobile futures: the border artistry of International Baccalaureate Diploma choosers

This paper reports on a study of students choosing the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma over state‐based curricula in Australian schools. The IB Diploma was initially designed as a matriculation certificate to facilitate international mobility. While first envisaged as a lifestyle agenda for cultural elites, such mobility is now widespread with more people living ‘beyond the nation’ through choice or circumstance. Beck and others highlight how the capacity to cross national borders offers a competitive edge with which to strategically pursue economic and cultural capital. Beck’s ‘border artistes’ are those who use national borders to their individual advantage through reflexive strategy. The study explored the rationales and strategy behind the choice of the IB Diploma curriculum expressed by students in a focus group interview and an online survey. This paper reports on their imagined transnational routes and mobile orientations, and how a localised curriculum limits their imagined mobile futures.     

The Analysis of Student Expository Writing in Mathematics

The use of writing as a learning activity in mathematics has been the subject of many publications. However, little evidence has been presented to support the claims that writing enhances learning in mathematics. One difficulty in such research has been the lack of a detailed method for analysing the writing products of students. In the present study, a scheme for coding the parts of written mathematical presentations was developed. At the grade 8 level at which the study was conducted, a limited style of expository writing was found to predominate. The writing was shown to closely resemble the style of the typical mathematics textbook used by the students.