Effective models of employment-based training

Australia needs highly skilled workers to sustain a healthy economy. Current employment-based training models have limitations in meeting the demands for highly skilled labour supply. The research explored current and emerging models of employment-based training to propose more effective models at higher VET qualifications that can maintain a balance between institution and work-based learning.

Action research for contexts of change and inequality

Undoubtedly, the past half-century has witnessed an escalation of changes in the social, political, economic and educational structures in many societies around the world. Some have seen change as a challenge and hope while, for many others, it is a source of concern and worry. Some have adopted change with gusto, while for many it is something to be resisted. Some say we live in a world and times with an increasing awareness that “times are changing”, while for some “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

Teachers reporting suspected child sexual abuse : results of a three-state study

Over 3000 cases of child sexual abuse are identified every year in Australia, but the real incidence is higher still. As a strategy to identify child sexual abuse, Australian States and Territories have enacted legislation requiring members of selected professions, including teachers, to report suspected cases. In addition, policy-based reporting obligations have been developed by professions, including the teaching profession. These legislative and industry-based developments have occurred in a context of growing awareness of the incidence and consequences of child sexual abuse. Teachers have frequent contact and close relationships with children, and possess expertise in monitoring changes in children’s behaviour. Accordingly, teachers are seen as being well-placed to detect and report suspected child sexual abuse. To date, however, there has been little empirical research into the operation of these reporting duties. The extent of teachers’ awareness of their duties to report child sexual abuse is unknown. Further, there is little evidence about teachers’ past reporting practice. Teachers’ duties to report sexual abuse, especially those in legislation, differ between States, and it is not known whether or how these differences affect reporting practice. This article presents results from the first large-scale Australian survey of teachers in three States with different reporting laws: New South Wales, Queensland, and Western Australia. The results indicate levels of teacher knowledge of reporting duties, reveal evidence about past reporting practice, and provide insights into anticipated future reporting practice and legal compliance. The findings have implications for reform of legislation and policy, training of teachers about the reporting of child sexual abuse, and enhancement of child protection.

A brief philosophical examination of ADHD

Concerns have been raised over ADHD from within a range of different disciplines, concerns which are not only voiced from within the hard sciences themselves, but also from within the social sciences. This paper will add the discipline of philosophy to that number, arguing that an analysis of two traditionally philosophical topics - namely "truth" and "free-will" - allows us a new and unsettling perspective on conduct disorders like ADHD. More specifically, it will be argued that ADHD not only fails to meet its own ontological and epistemological standards as an 'objective' pathology, but it also constitutes one more element in what has already become a significant undermining of a crucial component of social life: moral responsibility.

Modernity and the 'failure' of crime control

Rather than understanding the recurrent failure of various attempts at crime control as unfortunate and undesirable aberrations, all too familiar glitches an otherwise uninterrupted teleological march to a better society, such failures are instead positioned as part of the fabric of late modernity itself. That is, society changes not according to a predetermined logic along neatly defined and clearly reasoned tracks, rather it hurtles from crisis to crisis, from failure to failure, and it is the regulation of that failure which produces new initiatives and new forms of governance. Utilising the example of the modern prison, this chapter contends that too great an emphasis upon this institution’s ‘failure’ results not only in a neglect of the many other functions that it serves in the regulation of difference, but also, and more generally, it results in an underestimation of the importance of failure in providing new impetus for social transformation.

Youth cultures, style and education

If our only sources of information were the newspapers and the television, the available evidence would suggest that youth is a terrible problem. Not only would we be convinced that most crime is committed by the social category of youth, but that young people are running out of control, that the streets are no longer safe, that all manner of standards are dropping, that the schools are in chaos, and that, as a consequence of these facts, society faces ruin. Fortunately, there is a considerable body of academic literature which rebuts these assertions, and via a more rigorous and objective analysis of society, it has sought to explain the practices, cultures and circumstances through and by which contemporary youth is formed.

'The seven things all men love in bed' : young women's magazines and the governance of femininity

Rather than passing judgment of the content of young women’s magazines, it will be argued instead that such texts actually exist as manuals of self-formation, manuals which enroll young women to do specific kinds of work on themselves. In doing so, they form an effective link between the governmental imperatives aimed at constructing particular personas – such as the sexually responsible young girl - and the actual practices whereby these imperatives are operationalised.

The logic of ADHD : a brief review of fallacious reasoning

This paper has two central purposes: the first is to survey some of the more important examples of fallacious argument, and the second is to examine the frequent use of these fallacies in support of the psychological construct: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The paper divides 12 familiar fallacies into three different categories—material, psychological and logical—and contends that advocates of ADHD often seem to employ these fallacies to support their position. It is suggested that all researchers, whether into ADHD or otherwise, need to pay much closer attention to the construction of their arguments if they are not to make truth claims unsupported by satisfactory evidence, form or logic.