Theorising a framework for contemporary health literacies in schools

While schools are mandated to teach health education, there is considerable disjunction between government and community expectations, definitions of health literacy, and what schools are currently teaching. Health literacy in the health sector tends to be dominated by a pathogenic approach, where the health of a person is generally referenced against states of illness. In this paper we argue for a salutogenic approach to health literacies. Further, we utilise mainstream literacy theories and models to propose a robust framework for health literacy in schools that accounts for the complexity of health and well being in contemporary society.

Teacher reporting questionnaire : Queensland Government Schools

This instrument was used in the project entitled Teachers Reporting Child Sexual Abuse: Towards Evidence-based Reform of Law, Policy and Practice (ARC DP0664847)

Teacher reporting questionnaire : Queensland Non-Government Schools

This instrument was used in the project named Teachers Reporting Child Sexual Abuse: Towards Evidence-based Reform of Law, Policy and Practice (ARC DP0664847)

Teacher reporting questionnaire : New South Wales Non-Government Schools

This instrument was used in the project named Teachers Reporting Child Sexual Abuse: Towards Evidence-based Reform of Law, Policy and Practice (ARC DP0664847)

The power of historical causal components involved in engaging at risk youth at three alternative schools

This article addresses the causal powers associated with the social phenomena of alternative schooling for youth at risk. It stems from a doctoral thesis, Alternative Schooling Programs for At Risk Youth – Three Case Studies which addresses wider issues integral to alternative schooling: youth at risk, alternative schooling models, and literacy. This article explores one aspect of alternative schooling: the historical causal factors involved in the establishment and continuance of three alternative case study models in Queensland, Australia. By adhering to Bhaskar’s transformational model of social activity (TMSA) , social structures and individuals will be analytically distinguished to uncover their separate causal powers and how these have effected the establishment and continuance of three alternative schools.

Investigating pre-service teachers’ perceptions of their preparedness to teach

The experiences of transition to the teaching profession have a significant impact on a teachers’ potential length of career, feelings of professional efficacy and the quality of performance in the classroom (Gore & Thomas, 2003). While the transition to practice is characterized by much expectation and excitement, it also a time of stress and uncertainty for many beginning teachers. As such, it is important to investigate this period of transition for beginning teachers. This paper explores graduate teachers perceptions of their personal ‘preparedness to teach’. The group is graduating from one Australian university, and the data is captured at the end of their teacher preparation programs,before they take up positions in schools. These graduating pre-service teachers are from one year graduate entry programs that include individual programs of early years, middle years and senior years. The key findings indicate that this group of graduating pre-service teachers are already engaged in some level of reflective practice and are actively seeking further professional learning to improve the practical aspects of their classroom teaching.

The association between objectively measured neighborhood features and walking in middle-aged adults

Purpose: To explore the role of the neighborhood environment in supporting walking Design: Cross sectional study of 10,286 residents of 200 neighborhoods. Participants were selected using a stratified two-stage cluster design. Data were collected by mail survey (68.5% response rate). Setting: The Brisbane City Local Government Area, Australia, 2007. Subjects: Brisbane residents aged 40 to 65 years. Measures Environmental: street connectivity, residential density, hilliness, tree coverage, bikeways, and street lights within a one kilometer circular buffer from each resident’s home; and network distance to nearest river or coast, public transport, shop, and park. Walking: minutes in the previous week categorized as < 30 minutes, ≥ 30 < 90 minutes, ≥ 90 < 150 minutes, ≥ 150 < 300 minutes, and ≥ 300 minutes. Analysis: The association between each neighborhood characteristic and walking was examined using multilevel multinomial logistic regression and the model parameters were estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation. Results: After adjustment for individual factors, the likelihood of walking for more than 300 minutes (relative to <30 minutes) was highest in areas with the most connectivity (OR=1.93, 99% CI 1.32-2.80), the greatest residential density (OR=1.47, 99% CI 1.02-2.12), the least tree coverage (OR=1.69, 99% CI 1.13-2.51), the most bikeways (OR=1.60, 99% CI 1.16-2.21), and the most street lights (OR=1.50, 99% CI 1.07-2.11). The likelihood of walking for more than 300 minutes was also higher among those who lived closest to a river or the coast (OR=2.06, 99% CI 1.41-3.02). Conclusion: The likelihood of meeting (and exceeding) physical activity recommendations on the basis of walking was higher in neighborhoods with greater street connectivity and residential density, more street lights and bikeways, closer proximity to waterways, and less tree coverage. Interventions targeting these neighborhood characteristics may lead to improved environmental quality as well as lower rates of overweight and obesity and associated chromic disease.

Move it, use it : university-school collaboration for learning to teach physical education in primary schools

Reports of increasing numbers of obese Australian children and adolescents have raised the alarm to be proactive in reducing this so called epidemic. It has evoked a call for greater emphasis on teaching physical education in schools, as a measure for attaining fitness not only with obese students but for all students. This paper emphasises how preservice teachers need to be a key target for implementing physical education (PE) reform in schools, as many primary teachers will be generalists and may not be confident enough to implement PE effectively. Through a review of existing literature, teaching practices essential for the effective promotion and implementation of PE were identified under six broad categories: personal-professional skills development, addressing system requirements, pedagogical practices, managing student behaviour, providing feedback to students, and reflecting on practice. Subsequently, the development of these practices in preservice teachers is considered in the context of a university-school collaboration where preservice teachers taught physical education to primary school students for one day per week over a four week period. These authentic teaching experiences provided the preservice teachers with vital opportunities to put theory into practice and interact with “real-world” students. Self-evaluative data from 38 of these preservice teachers, in the form of a five-part Likert scale survey and extended response survey, demonstrated that they were able to develop the majority of the essential teaching practices identified by literature. In particular, the preservice teachers developed self efficacy, enthusiasm, and motivation for teaching PE, facets which are often found to be lacking in generalist primary teachers and yet are essential if children’s perceptions and habits regarding physical activity are to be changed.

Organizational rhetoric in the prospectuses of elite private schools: unpacking strategies of persuasion

The way in which private schools use rhetoric in their communications offers important insights into how these organizational sites persuade audiences and leverage marketplace advantage in the context of contemporary educational platforms. Through systemic analysis of rhetorical strategies employed in 65 ‘elite’ school prospectuses in Australia, this paper contributes to understandings of the ways schools’ communications draw on broader cultural politics in order to shape meanings and interactions among organizational actors. We identify six strategies consistently used by schools to this end: identification, juxtapositioning, bolstering or self-promotion, partial reporting, self-expansion, and reframing or reversal. We argue that, in the context of marketization and privatization discourses in twenty-first-century western education, these strategies attempt to subvert potentially threatening discourses, in the process actively reproducing broader economic and social privilege and inequalities.

Contextualising the teaching and learning of measurement in Torres Strait Islander schools

This paper reports on a mathematics project conducted with six Torres Strait Islander schools and communities by the research team at the YuMi Deadly Centre at QUT. Data collected is from a small focus group of six teachers and two teacher aides. We investigated how measurement is taught and learned by students, their teachers and teacher aides in the community schools. A key focus of the project was that the teaching and learning of measurement be contextualised to the students’ culture, community and home languages. A significant finding from the project was that the teachers had differing levels of knowledge and understanding about how to contextualise measurement to support student learning. For example, an Indigenous teacher identified that mathematics and the environment are relational, that is, they are not discrete and in isolation from one another, rather they mesh together, thus affording the articulation and interchange among and between mathematics and Torres Strait Islander culture.

The SurfAid International Schools Program : opportunities for HPE and senior health education

SurfAid International is a humanitarian organisation that has been delivering a range of evidence based health promotion initiatives, primarily for people living on Nias and the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia since 2000. The SurfAid Schools Program launched in 2007, providing opportunities for the development of global awareness, cultural knowledge, empathy and active citizenship among students living in Australia, New Zealand, North America and the United Kingdom. This session will commence with an overview of the work of SurfAid International and resources provided by the SurfAid International Schools Program. The social justice orientation of the Queensland Health Education Senior Syllabus and the HPE Essential Learnings will be reviewed along with a consideration for affective learning through attitudes and values. Participants will be given time to consider how units with a health of specific populations focus could be conceptualised, developed and managed. Opportunities for co-curricular applications will also be discussed.

Identity development in career-changing beginning teachers : a qualitative study of professional scientists becoming school teachers

This qualitative study provides a critical case to analyse the identity development of professionals who already have a strong sense of identity as scientists and have decided to relinquish their professional careers to become teachers. The study followed a group of professionals who undertook a one-year teacher education course and were assigned to secondary and middle-years schools on graduation. Their experiences were examined through the lens of self-determination theory, which posits that autonomy, confidence and relationships are important in achieving job satisfaction. The findings indicated that those teachers who were able to achieve this sense of autonomy and confidence, and had established strong relationships with colleagues generated a positive professional identity as a teacher. The failure to establish supportive relationships was a decisive event that challenged their capacity to develop a strong sense of identity as a teacher.

Optimising meritocratic advantage with the International Baccalaureate Diploma in Australian schools

This paper explores two of the tensions Tarc (2009) identifies in the history of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma: firstly between its design for meritocratic competition and its internationalist vision; and secondly between the IB as a global commodity and its localised interpretations. Using data from three case studies of Australian schools offering both the IB Diploma and the local government curriculum, and student responses to an online survey across 26 such schools, the analysis shows how choices behind the IB’s growing popularity foreground strategies for optimising meritocratic competition. Framed through Bourdieu’s concepts of field and ‘rules of the game’, the analysis shows how students act on their own comparative analyses of each curriculum to optimise their chances to access desirable university pathways within the local rules of the game for university placement. Schools are shown to offer the IB Diploma to recruit and retain academically ambitious students by pooling their relative advantage in different local ecologies. Students are shown to carefully evaluate the benefits and costs of the IB choice. The conclusion reflects on how the choice of the IB Diploma for meritocratic advantage by some might change conditions for others not choosing it.

Addressing quality teaching in hard to staff settings : the Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools Project

This Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools (ETDS) project sets out to design a new model of Australian teacher education responding to recent demands for quality education in low SES and disadvantaged schools. The project moves teacher education from the ‘missionary’ (Larabee, 2010) or deficit (Comber and Kamler 2004; Flessa, 2007) approaches, towards a focus on notions of quality and academic excellence. Rice (2008, p.1) argues for a need to place more of the “very best teachers into the most challenging schools”, yet the problem is not merely one of training more teachers, for disadvantaged schools already receive disproportionate numbers of beginning teachers (Connell, 1994; Vickers & Ferfolja, 2006). Rather, Grossman and Loeb (2010, p. 245) argue the problem centers on the common practice of “[p]lacing the least experienced teachers with the most needy students”. This paper reports on the first year trial of the project. The ETDS project is at present, the only mainstream Australian teacher education model that targets cohorts of academically high achieving pre-service teachers with the overt aim of preparing graduates of the program to teach in disadvantaged schools. At the end of its first year, the ETDS program graduated 20 new teachers, each of whom had over the previous 18 months engaged with a specialized curriculum and carefully monitored/scaffolded practicum placements in disadvantaged schools around Brisbane, Australia.

Middle school social sciences : exploring teachers’ conceptions of essential knowledge

This study examines teachers’ conceptions of essential knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, commonly referred to as "social education", in the middle years of schooling. Social education has long been a highly contested area of the curriculum in Australia. In Queensland, social education comprises the integrated learning area of Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE). However, the new Australian Curriculum marks a return to discipline-based study of history and geography. This phenomenographic study addresses a perceived lack of understanding in the current research literature in Australia of the nature of middle school teachers’ professional knowledge for teaching the social sciences. Teachers are conceptualised in this study as curriculum makers in the classroom and, as such, their conceptions of essential knowledge are significant. Shulman’s (1986, 1987) theory of teachers’ knowledge forms the theoretical foundation of the study, which is contextualised in Federal and State education policies and the literature on the middle phase of schooling. Transcripts of interviews conducted with a group of thirty-one Queensland middle school teachers of SOSE were subjected to phenomenographic analysis, revealing seven qualitatively different categories of description. Essential aspects of knowledge for social education emerging from the study were: (1) discipline-based knowledge; (2) curriculum knowledge; (3) knowledge derived from teaching experience; (4) knowledge of middle years learners; (5) knowledge of integration; (6) knowledge of current affairs; and (7) knowledge invested in teacher identity. The three dimensions of variation that linked and differentiated the categories were: (1) content; (2) inquiry learning; and (3) teacher autonomy. These findings are presented as an outcome space where the categories are grouped as knowledge of the learning area, knowledge of contexts and knowledge of self as teacher. The results of the study suggest that social education teachers’ identity and knowledge of self are critical aspects of their knowledge as curriculum makers. The results illustrate that the professional and personal domains intersect, extending Shulman’s (1986, 1987) original theorisation of teachers’ knowledge into the personal arena. Further, middle years teachers’ conceptions of essential knowledge reveal a practice-based theorisation of knowledge for social education that fits the goals of middle schooling. The research concludes that attention to teacher identity in teacher education and in-service professional development has considerable potential to grow teachers’ knowledge in the social sciences and enhance their capacity for school-based curriculum leadership.