Pre-service teachers' pedagogical relationships and experiences of embedding Indigenous Australian knowledge in teaching practicum

This paper argues from the standpoint that embedding Indigenous knowledge and perspectives in Australian curricula occurs within a space of tension, ‘the cultural interface’ (Nakata, 2002), in negotiation and contestation with other dominant knowledge systems. In this interface, Indigenous knowledge (IK) is in a state of constancy and flux, invisible and simultaneously pronounced depending on the teaching and learning contexts. More often than not, IK competes for validity and is vexed by questions of racial and cultural authenticity, and therefore struggles to be located centrally in educational systems, curricula and pedagogies. Interrogating normative western notions of what constitutes authentic or legitimate knowledge is critical to teaching Indigenous studies and embedding IK. The inclusion (and exclusion) of IK at the interface is central to developing curriculum that allows teachers to test and prod, create new knowledge and teaching approaches. From this perspective, we explore Indigenous Australian pre-service teachers’ experiences of pedagogical relationships within the teaching habitus of Australian classrooms. Our study is engaged with the strategic transgressions of praxis. We contend that tensions that participant Indigenous Australian pre-service teachers experience mirror the broader (and unresolved) political status of Indigenous people and thus where and why IK is strategically deployed as ‘new’ or ‘old knowledge within Australian liberal democratic systems of curriculum and schooling. It is significant to discuss the formation and transformation of the pedagogical cultural identity of the teaching profession within which Indigenous and non-Indigenous pre-service teachers are employed.

Orthopaedics and Trauma Queensland Annual Report 2011

Orthopaedics and Trauma Queensland, a Centre for Research and Education in Musculoskeletal Disorders, is an internationally recognised research group that is developing into an international leader in research and education. It provides a stimulus for research, education and clinical application within the international orthopaedic and trauma communities. Orthopaedics and Trauma Queensland develops and promotes the innovative use of engineering and technology, in collaboration with surgeons, to provide new techniques, materials, procedures and medical devices. Its integration with clinical practice and strong links with hospitals ensure that the research will be translated into practical outcomes for patients. The group undertakes clinical practice in orthopaedics and trauma and applies core engineering skills to challenges in medicine. The research is built on a strong foundation of knowledge in biomedical engineering, and incorporates expertise in cell biology, mathematical modelling, human anatomy and physiology and clinical medicine in orthopaedics and trauma. New knowledge is being developed and applied to the full range of orthopaedic diseases and injuries, such as knee and hip replacements, fractures and spinal deformities.

The 7pm Project

The Making Connections: Innovations in Learning and Teaching Forum, jointly hosted by the Division of Technology, Information and Learning Support (TILS) and the Learning and Teaching Unit (LTU), was held on 20 June. The forum provided a snapshot of innovative practice across QUT, as well as an overview of services supporting innovation. Past events have attracted sizeable audiences and informal feedback has been very positive and encouraging. The objective of the forum is to give an opportunity to academic teaching staff to share their innovative practice with their peers, and it is planned that more events will be held to allow for further sharing of ideas. The program for the June 2012 forum included the following presentations: Ms Lindy Osborne: The 7pm Project Dr Ana Pavasovic: A multifaceted approach to teaching a first year unit Mr Paul Willis: Out of our comfort zone: How can Collaborate engage students in inclusive teaching practices Dr Kelly Zuniga: Can you draw what I see? Recasting the ‘crit’ to engage a larger classroom audience Dr Peter Bell, Dr Mark Lauchs, Amy Henderson and Edward Robinson: Crime Club: Lightbulb moments Dr Deboarh Peach: Improving student engagement through the integration of blended delivery approaches in WIL. Lindy Osborne Biography: As an early career academic, Lindy Osborne draws upon professional experience as a registered architect to offer students pioneering curricula that are firmly grounded in real-world practice. Since commencing her academic career in 2008, she has purposefully reconceptualised the delivery of Architectural Design, Technology, Professional Practice and Research subjects, using innovative digital technology and empowering students to direct their own learning. Lindy is cognisant of the impact that the physical learning environment has on students, and seeks to actively modify it to support students by enabling powerful enactive learning. Using technology embedded flexible learning spaces and innovative simulated office practice pedagogy,students actively learn in an authentic environment, redressing the structural and cyclical factors that have resulted in a lack of workplace learning opportunities. Lindy’s creative integration of interdisciplinary opportunities, popular culture, social media and Web-2.0 technologies connects with students on their level, while they develop critical professional skills both inside and perhaps more importantly outside, the formal classroom environment.

Electoral behaviour in the 2010 Australian federal election

All elections are unique, but the Australian federal election of 2010 was unusual for many reasons. It came in the wake of the unprecedented ousting of the Prime Minister who had led the Australian Labor Party to a landslide victory, after eleven years in opposition, at the previous election in 2007. In a move that to many would have been unthinkable, Kevin Rudd’s increasing unpopularity within his own parliamentary party finally took its toll and in late June he was replaced by his deputy, Julia Gillard. Thus the second unusual feature of the election was that it was contested by Australia’s first female prime minister. The third unusual feature was that the election almost saw a first-term government, with a comfortable majority, defeated. Instead it resulted in a hung parliament, for the first time since 1940, and Labor scraped back into power as a minority government, supported by three independents and the first member of the Australian Greens ever to be elected to the House of Representatives. The Coalition Liberal and National opposition parties themselves had a leader of only eight months standing, Tony Abbott, whose ascension to the position had surprised more than a few. This was the context for an investigation of voting behaviour in the 2010 election....

Performance in the spotlight : exploring psychology in the performing arts

Sport and exercise psychologists are often sought after to apply their knowledge, skills and experience from a sporting context into other performance-related industries and endeavours. Over the past two decades, this has noticeably expanded out from a natural progression into the performing arts with other ‘typical’ performers (e.g., dancers, actors, musicians, singers) through to people who work in high pressure environments that consist of clear performance outputs and requirements that are usually linked to high impact consequences for non-achievement (e.g., lawyers, surgeons, executives, military personnel, safety professionals). Whilst these areas of application continue to increase in popularity and performance psychology is more readily recognised as an important factor in people performance across industries, the use of psychology within the performing arts continues to deepen and solidify its value as an essential and critical factor for success. This article focuses on the contribution of psychology to the performing arts that I have observed over more than 20 years – obtained through a variety of roles primarily within the dance sector including as performer, educator, health professional, researcher, commentator and senior leader.

Wicked futures : metadesign, resilience and transformative classrooms

This paper presents an Australian case study entitled “Designing Futures”. It examines a six month multidisciplinary design program offered by a large co-educational, inner-city state school in Queensland in 2011. The program extended an already successful and innovative school-based design curriculum and involved students in Philosophy, Science, Mathematics and English classes, as well those in Art and Design. Additionally, there were 5 full-day workshops where students combined a wide range of skills to brainstorm, design and create sustainable solutions. The design thinking used in this program was based on the concepts of metadesign, design activism and design futuring. “Designing Futures” linked over 700 middle and secondary school students and staff with nine designers-in-residence from diverse disciplines, including bio-ethics. The program aimed to empower students from highly diverse cultural and social backgrounds to engage in authentic, participatory design processes, prepare them for future social and environmental challenges, and increase personal and community resilience. The research results will inform ongoing program development and research in K-12 design education, both within the school and in conjunction with university and community partnerships in Queensland.

Problem solving in the primary school (K-2)

This article focuses on problem solving activities in a first grade classroom in a typical small community and school in Indiana. But, the teacher and the activities in this class were not at all typical of what goes on in most comparable classrooms; and, the issues that will be addressed are relevant and important for students from kindergarten through college. Can children really solve problems that involve concepts (or skills) that they have not yet been taught? Can children really create important mathematical concepts on their own – without a lot of guidance from teachers? What is the relationship between problem solving abilities and the mastery of skills that are widely regarded as being “prerequisites” to such tasks?Can primary school children (whose toolkits of skills are limited) engage productively in authentic simulations of “real life” problem solving situations? Can three-person teams of primary school children really work together collaboratively, and remain intensely engaged, on problem solving activities that require more than an hour to complete? Are the kinds of learning and problem solving experiences that are recommended (for example) in the USA’s Common Core State Curriculum Standards really representative of the kind that even young children encounter beyond school in the 21st century? … This article offers an existence proof showing why our answers to these questions are: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And: No. … Even though the evidence we present is only intended to demonstrate what’s possible, not what’s likely to occur under any circumstances, there is no reason to expect that the things that our children accomplished could not be accomplished by average ability children in other schools and classrooms.

Grey St. Xchange 2.0 by QUT

Partnerships between universities and public institutions such as this offer the beginning of a long term relationship to actively influence public policy, procedures and new ways to engage the many diverse communities to be integral in shaping the environments in which they live. It offers an opportunity to apply authentic positioning of research theories and build new methodologies for consulting, analysing and implementing innovation. SBC, as an established corporation offers a unique precinct to research and develop models with its different offers of tourism, leisure and neighbourhood. The Parklands and Little Stanley Street are well advanced in the goals however Grey Street, which connects the precinct to the greater surrounds, has been a complex issue that is now ready to be addressed. This project offers the ability to be of real worth at this critical time of development with the history of the past development combined with the desire for future visioning to be realised over the next 5 years. QUT has the unique opportunity to be part of this future.

A model for enhancing assessment and teaching practice at the coalface : Insights from a Fellow-In-Residence engagement program

Australian universities are currently engaging with new governmental policies and regulations that require them to demonstrate enhanced quality and accountability in teaching and research. The development of national academic standards for learning outcomes in higher education is one such instance of this drive for excellence. These discipline-specific standards articulate the minimum, or Threshold Learning Outcomes, to be addressed by higher education institutions so that graduating students can demonstrate their achievement to their institutions, accreditation agencies, and industry recruiters. This impacts not only on the design of Engineering courses (with particular emphasis on pedagogy and assessment), but also on the preparation of academics to engage with these standards and implement them in their day-to-day teaching practice on a micro level. This imperative for enhanced quality and accountability in teaching is also significant at a meso level, for according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, about 25 per cent of teachers in Australian universities are aged 55 and above and more than 54 per cent are aged 45 and above (ABS, 2006). A number of institutions have undertaken recruitment drives to regenerate and enrich their academic workforce by appointing capacity-building research professors and increasing the numbers of early- and mid-career academics. This nationally driven agenda for quality and accountability in teaching permeates also the micro level of engineering education, since the demand for enhanced academic standards and learning outcomes requires both a strong advocacy for a shift to an authentic, collaborative, outcomes-focused education and the mechanisms to support academics in transforming their professional thinking and practice. Outcomes-focused education means giving greater attention to the ways in which the curriculum design, pedagogy, assessment approaches and teaching activities can most effectively make a positive, verifiable difference to students’ learning. Such education is authentic when it is couched firmly in the realities of learning environments, student and academic staff characteristics, and trustworthy educational research. That education will be richer and more efficient when staff works collaboratively, contributing their knowledge, experience and skills to achieve learning outcomes based on agreed objectives. We know that the school or departmental levels of universities are the most effective loci of changes in approaches to teaching and learning practices in higher education (Knight & Trowler, 2000). Heads of Schools are being increasingly entrusted with more responsibilities - in addition to setting strategic directions and managing the operational and sometimes financial aspects of their school, they are also expected to lead the development and delivery of the teaching, research and other academic activities. Guiding and mentoring individuals and groups of academics is one critical aspect of the Head of School’s role. Yet they do not always have the resources or support to help them mentor staff, especially the more junior academics. In summary, the international trend in undergraduate engineering course accreditation towards the demonstration of attainment of graduate attributes poses new challenges in addressing academic staff development needs and the assessment of learning. This paper will give some insights into the conceptual design, implementation and empirical effectiveness to date, of a Fellow-In-Residence Engagement (FIRE) program. The program is proposed as a model for achieving better engagement of academics with contemporary issues and effectively enhancing their teaching and assessment practices. It will also report on the program’s collaborative approach to working with Heads of Schools to better support academics, especially early-career ones, by utilizing formal and informal mentoring. Further, the paper will discuss possible factors that may assist the achievement of the intended outcomes of such a model, and will examine its contributions to engendering an outcomes-focussed thinking in engineering education.

Hot topic detection in news blogs from the perspective of W2T

News blog hot topics are important for the information recommendation service and marketing. However, information overload and personalized management make the information arrangement more difficult. Moreover, what influences the formation and development of blog hot topics is seldom paid attention to. In order to correctly detect news blog hot topics, the paper first analyzes the development of topics in a new perspective based on W2T (Wisdom Web of Things) methodology. Namely, the characteristics of blog users, context of topic propagation and information granularity are unified to analyze the related problems. Some factors such as the user behavior pattern, network opinion and opinion leader are subsequently identified to be important for the development of topics. Then the topic model based on the view of event reports is constructed. At last, hot topics are identified by the duration, topic novelty, degree of topic growth and degree of user attention. The experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible and effective.

School culture matters

Schools today are subjected to a vast array of accountability measures including professional standards and high-stakes testing, to name but two. These measures and the implementation of new curricula inevitably result in change and put pressure on schools and teachers to perform. During these times of change, a positive school culture can make a difference for all school stakeholders: staff, students and parents. As a school leader, what can you do to ensure a positive school culture is maintained in your school environment during these changing times?

The new normativity : the innovation imperative

At a quite fundamental level, the very way in which Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) may envisage its future usually captured in the semantic shift from PSB to Public Service Media (PSM) is at stake when considering the recent history of public value discourse and the public value test. The core Reithian PSB idea assumed that public value would be created through the application of core principles of universality of availability and appeal, provision for minorities, education of the public, distance from vested interests, quality programming standards, program maker independence, and fostering of national culture and the public sphere. On the other hand, the philosophical import of the public value test is that potentially any excursion into the provision of new media services needs to be justified ex ante. In this era of New Public Management, greater transparency and accountability, and the proposition that resources for public value deliverables be contestable and not sequestered in public sector institutions, what might be the new Archimedean point around which a contemporised normativity for PSM be built? This paper will argue for the innovation imperative as an organising principle for contemporary PSM. This may appear counterintuitive, as it is precisely PSB’s predilection for innovating in new media services (in online, mobile, and social media) that has produced the constraining apparatus of the ex ante/public value/Drei-Stufen-Test in Europe, based on principles of competitive neutrality and transparency in the application of public funds for defined and limited public benefit. However, I argue that a commitment to innovation can define as complementary to, rather than as competitive ‘crowding out’, the new products and services that PSM can, and should, be delivering into a post-scarcity, superabundant all-media marketplace. The evidence presented in this paper for this argument is derived mostly from analysis of PSM in the Australian media ecology. While no PSB outside Europe is subject to a formal public value test, the crowding out arguments are certainly run in Australia, particularly by powerful commercial interests for whom free news is a threat to monetising quality news journalism. Take right wing opinion leader, herself a former ABC Board member, Judith Sloan: ‘… the recent expansive nature of the ABC – all those television stations, radio stations and online offerings – is actually squeezing activity that would otherwise be undertaken by the private sector. From partly correcting market failure, the ABC is now causing it. We are now dealing with a case of unfair competition and wasted taxpayer funds’ (The Drum, 1 August http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2818220.html). But I argue that the crowding out argument is difficult to sustain in Australia because of the PSB’s non-dominant position and the fact that much of innovation generated by the two PSBs, the ABC and the SBS, has not been imitated by or competed for by the commercials. The paper will bring cases forward, such as SBS’ Go Back to Where you Came From (2011) as an example of product innovation, and a case study of process and organisational innovation which also has resulted in specific product and service innovation – the ABC’s Innovation Unit. In summary, at least some of the old Reithian dicta, along with spectrum scarcity and market failure arguments, have faded or are fading. Contemporary PSM need to justify their role in the system, and to society, in terms of innovation.

Scaffold percolative efficiency : in vitro evaluation of the structural criterion for electrospun mats

Fibrous scaffolds of engineered structures can be chosen as promising porous environments when an approved criterion validates their applicability for a specific medical purpose. For such biomaterials, this paper sought to investigate various structural characteristics in order to determine whether they are appropriate descriptors. A number of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) scaffolds were electrospun; each of which possessed a distinguished architecture when their material and processing conditions were altered. Subsequent culture of mouse fibroblast cells (L929) was carried out to evaluate the cells viability on each scaffold after their attachment for 24 h and proliferation for 48 and 72 h. The scaffolds’ porosity, pores number, pores size and distribution were quantified and none could establish a relationship with the viability results. Virtual reconstruction of the mats introduced an authentic criterion, “Scaffold Percolative Efficiency” (SPE), with which the above descriptors were addressed collectively. It was hypothesized to be able to quantify the efficacy of fibrous scaffolds by considering the integration of porosity and interconnectivity of the pores. There was a correlation of 80% as a good agreement between the SPE values and the spectrophotometer absorbance of viable cells; a viability of more than 350% in comparison to that of the controls.

Extracting news blog hot topics based on the W2T methodology

Although topic detection and tracking techniques have made great progress, most of the researchers seldom pay more attention to the following two aspects. First, the construction of a topic model does not take the characteristics of different topics into consideration. Second, the factors that determine the formation and development of hot topics are not further analyzed. In order to correctly extract news blog hot topics, the paper views the above problems in a new perspective based on the W2T (Wisdom Web of Things) methodology, in which the characteristics of blog users, context of topic propagation and information granularity are investigated in a unified way. The motivations and features of blog users are first analyzed to understand the characteristics of news blog topics. Then the context of topic propagation is decomposed into the blog community, topic network and opinion network, respectively. Some important factors such as the user behavior pattern, opinion leader and network opinion are identified to track the development trends of news blog topics. Moreover, a blog hot topic detection algorithm is proposed, in which news blog hot topics are identified by measuring the duration, topic novelty, attention degree of users and topic growth. Experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible and effective. These results are also useful for further studying the formation mechanism of opinion leaders in blogspace.

The relationship between anti-mullerian hormone in women receiving fertility assessments and age at menopause in subfertile women : evidence from large population studies

Context: Anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) concentration reflects ovarian aging and is argued to be a useful predictor of age at menopause (AMP). It is hypothesized that AMH falling below a critical threshold corresponds to follicle depletion, which results in menopause. With this threshold, theoretical predictions of AMP can be made. Comparisons of such predictions with observed AMP from population studies support the role for AMH as a forecaster of menopause. Objective: The objective of the study was to investigate whether previous relationships between AMH and AMP are valid using a much larger data set. Setting: AMH was measured in 27 563 women attending fertility clinics. Study Design: From these data a model of age-related AMH change was constructed using a robust regression analysis. Data on AMP from subfertile women were obtained from the population-based Prospect-European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (Prospect- EPIC) cohort (n � 2249). By constructing a probability distribution of age at which AMH falls below a critical threshold and fitting this to Prospect-EPIC menopausal age data using maximum likelihood, such a threshold was estimated. Main Outcome: The main outcome was conformity between observed and predicted AMP. Results: To get a distribution of AMH-predicted AMP that fit the Prospect-EPIC data, we found the critical AMH threshold should vary among women in such a way that women with low age-specific AMH would have lower thresholds, whereas women with high age-specific AMH would have higher thresholds (mean 0.075 ng/mL; interquartile range 0.038–0.15 ng/mL). Such a varying AMH threshold for menopause is a novel and biologically plausible finding. AMH became undetectable (�0.2 ng/mL) approximately 5 years before the occurrence of menopause, in line with a previous report. Conclusions: The conformity of the observed and predicted distributions of AMP supports the hypothesis that declining population averages of AMH are associated with menopause, making AMH an excellent candidate biomarker for AMP prediction. Further research will help establish the accuracy of AMH levels to predict AMP within individuals.