Theories of Mathematics Education : Seeking New Frontiers

This inaugural book in the new series Advances in Mathematics Education is the most up to date, comprehensive and avant garde treatment of Theories of Mathematics Education which use two highly acclaimed ZDM special issues on theories of mathematics education (issue 6/2005 and issue 1/2006), as a point of departure. Historically grounded in the Theories of Mathematics Education (TME group) revived by the book editors at the 29th Annual PME meeting in Melbourne and using the unique style of preface-chapter-commentary, this volume consist of contributions from leading thinkers in mathematics education who have worked on theory building. This book is as much summative and synthetic as well as forward-looking by highlighting theories from psychology, philosophy and social sciences that continue to influence theory building. In addition a significant portion of the book includes newer developments in areas within mathematics education such as complexity theory, neurosciences, modeling, critical theory, feminist theory, social justice theory and networking theories. The 19 parts, 17 prefaces and 23 commentaries synergize the efforts of over 50 contributing authors scattered across the globe that are active in the ongoing work on theory development in mathematics education.

Politicizing mathematics education : has politics gone too far? Or not far enough?

In this chapter we tackle increasingly sensitive questions in mathematics education, those that have polarized the community into distinct schools of thought as well as impacted reform efforts.

Youth media production and technology skills acquisition : opportunities for agency

This chapter explores youth media production involving video games within a formal media education context. It investigates the possibilities for agency in student production contexts where emphasis is on the acquisition of technological skills. It explores alternatives to the well-established approach to media education that aims to develop students’ critical reading capacities as a means to agency. The chapter discusses some of the implications of the differences between youth production with ‘older’ technologies like video and new forms like multimedia production. It also discusses theories of agency as they relate to media education and the challenges of considering agency in relation to new media production. Post structuralist concepts are introduced and used as the basis to explore opportunities for agency in the context of students designing and producing aspects of video games. The chapter argues that the creative and experimental work students undertake while using software to make games artefacts opens up possibilities for agency.

Literacy education in the context of globalisation

This review chapter provides an overview of English language literacy education in the contexts of cultural and economic globalisation. Drawing case study examples of India and China, the authors outline three complementary models: the development paradigm, the hegemony paradigm and the new literacies paradigm. The analysis focuses on effects of the spread of English on vernacular languages and the non-synchronous issues raised by digital production cultures. Noting the difficulties of education systems in contending with new literacies - it argues for the reframing of transnational relations, global material conditions and new communications technologies as the objects of critical literacy education.

Navigating iScapes : Australian youth constructing identities and social relations in a network society

This paper extends Appadurai’s notion of “scapes” to delineate what we see as “iScapes”. We contend that iScapes captures the way online technologies shape interactions that invariably filter into offline contexts, giving shape and meaning to human actions and motivations. By drawing on research on high school students’ online activities we examine the flow of iScapes they inhabit in the process of constructing identities and forming social relations.

Making literacy policy and practice with a difference : generational change, professionalisation and literate futures

This article has been edited from a transcript of the keynote address to the combined ALEA/MTE National Conference, Hobart, Tasmania, August 2001. In this talk Allan reflects on some of the difficulties facing makers of literacy policy in 'New Times'. His reflections are informed by some important research that is having an impact· on literacy teaching in Australia and he raises various issues, ranging from what he sees as a 'dumbing down' of curriculum, to addressing the needs of'at risk' students, to issues of lifelong education in a rapidly changing world.

Healthy children, healthy planet : the case for transformative education in schools and early childhood from an Australian perspective

Climate change is an urgent global public health issue with substantial predicted impacts in the coming decades. Concurrently, global burden of disease studies highlight problems such as obesity, mental health problems and a range of other chronic diseases, many of which have origins in childhood. There is a unique opportunity to engage children in both health promotion and education for sustainability during their school years to help ameliorate both environmental and health issues. Evidence exists for the most effective ways to do this, through education that is empowering, action orientated and relevant to children’s day to day interests and concerns, and by tailoring such education to different educational sectors. The aim of this discussion paper is to argue the case for sustainability education in schools that links with health promotion and that adopts a practical approach to engaging children in these important public health and environmental issues. We describe two internationally implemented whole-school reform movements, Health Promoting Schools (HPS) and Sustainable Schools (SS) which seek to operationalise transformative educational processes. Drawing on international evidence and Australian case examples, we contend that children’s active involvement in such processes is not only educationally engaging and rewarding, it also contributes to human and environmental resilience and health. Further, school settings can play an important ecological public health role, incubating and amplifying the socially transformative changes urgently required to create pathways to healthy, just and sustainable human futures, on a viable planet.

Early childhood education for sustainability : why it matters, what it is, and how whole centre action research and systems thinking can help

The global financial crisis, global pandemics, global warming and peak oil are indicative of a world facing major environmental, social and economic problems. At the same time, world population continues to rise and global inequalities deepen. Children are the most vulnerable to the impacts of unsustainable living with specific harms arising because of their physical and cognitive vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, children do not have to be victims in the face of these challenges. Education, including early childhood education, has an important role to in building resilience and capabilities in children that equip them as active and informed citizens now and in the future and who are capable of contributing to healthy and sustainable ways of living. Drawing on educational change literature, action research, education for sustainability, health promotion and systems theory, this paper outlines three strategies that can help reorient early childhood education towards sustainability. One strategy is the adoption of whole centre approaches to sustainability and education for sustainability. This means working across the whole of a centre’s operations – curriculum and pedagogy, physical and social environments, its partnerships and community connections. The second strategy – applied in conjunction with the first – is the use of action research to investigate the early childhood setting and to create the desired changes. The third strategy is the adoption of systems thinking as a way of leveraging support and momentum for change so that education for sustainability goes beyond the initiatives of individual teachers and centres, and becomes a systems-wide imperative.

Literacy and religion : the textual politics and practice of Seventh-day Adventism

This book explores the interrelation of literacy and religion as practiced by Western Christians in, first, historical contexts and, second, in one contemporary church setting. Using both a case study and a Foucauldian theoretical framework, the book provides a sustained analysis of the reciprocal discursive construction of literacy, religiosity and identity in one Seventh-day Adventist Church community of Northern Australia. Critical linguistic and discourse analytic theory is used to disclose processes of theological (church), familial (home) and educational (school) normalisation of community members into regulated ways of hearing and speaking, reading and writing, being and believing. Detailed analyses of spoken and written texts taken from institutional and local community settings show how textual religion is an exemplary technology of the self, a politics constituted by canonical texts, interpretive norms, textual practices, ritualised events and sociopolitical protocols that, ultimately, are turned in upon the self. The purpose of these analyses is to show how, across denominational difference in belief (tradition) and practice, particular versions of self and society are constructed through economies of truth from text, enabling and constraining what can and cannot be spoken and enacted by believers.

The politics of literacy in David Almond and Dave McKean’s "The Savage" (2008)

Competency in language and literacy are central to contemporary debates about education in Anglophone nations around the world. This paper suggests that such debates are informing not just educational policy but children’s literature itself as can be seen in Almond and McKean’s The Savage. This hybrid text combines prose and graphic narrative and narration in order to tell the story of Blue, a young British boy negotiating his identity in the aftermath of his father's death. While foregrounding a narrative of ideal masculinity, The Savage enacts and privileges a formal and thematic ideal of literacy as index of individual agency and development. Almond and McKean produce a politicised understanding of language and literacy that simultaneously positions The Savage in a textual tradition of socio-culturally disenfranchised youth, and intervenes in that tradition to (perhaps ironically) affirm the very conditions previously critiqued by that very tradition. Where earlier authors such as Barry Hines sought to challenge normative accounts of language and literacy in order to indict educational policy and praxes, Almond and McKean work to naturalise the very logics of education and agency by which their protagonist has been disenfranchised. In doing so, The Savage exemplifies current approaches to education which claim to value social and cultural diversity while imposing national standardised testing predicated on assumptions about the legitimacy of uniform standards and definitions of literacy.

From the cathedral to the classroom : the emergence of new discourses on religious education

In 2009, Religious Education is a designated key learning area in Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Brisbane and, indeed, across Australia. Over the years, though, different conceptualisations of the nature and purpose of religious education have led to the construction of different approaches to the classroom teaching of religion. By investigating the development of religious education policy in the Archdiocese of Brisbane from 1984 to 2003, the study seeks to trace the emergence of new discourses on religious education. The study understands religious education to refer to a lifelong process that occurs through a variety of forms (Moran, 1989). In Catholic schools, it refers both to co-curricula activities, such as retreats and school liturgies, and the classroom teaching of religion. It is the policy framework for the classroom teaching of religion that this study explores. The research was undertaken using a policy case study approach to gain a detailed understanding of how new conceptualisations of religious education emerged at a particular site of policy production, in this case, the Archdiocese of Brisbane. The study draws upon Yeatman’s (1998) description of policy as occurring “when social actors think about what they are doing and why in relation to different and alternative possible futures” (p. 19) and views policy as consisting of more than texts themselves. Policy texts result from struggles over meaning (Taylor, 2004) in which specific discourses are mobilised to support particular views. The study has a particular interest in the analysis of Brisbane religious education policy texts, the discursive practices that surrounded them, and the contexts in which they arose. Policy texts are conceptualised in the study as representing “temporary settlements” (Gale, 1999). Such settlements are asymmetrical, temporary and dependent on context: asymmetrical in that dominant actors are favoured; temporary because dominant actors are always under challenge by other actors in the policy arena; and context - dependent because new situations require new settlements. To investigate the official policy documents, the study used Critical Discourse Analysis (hereafter referred to as CDA) as a research tool that affords the opportunity for researchers to map and chart the emergence of new discourses within the policy arena. As developed by Fairclough (2001), CDA is a three-dimensional application of critical analysis to language. In the Brisbane religious education arena, policy texts formed a genre chain (Fairclough, 2004; Taylor, 2004) which was a focus of the study. There are two features of texts that form genre chains: texts are systematically linked to one another; and, systematic relations of recontextualisation exist between the texts. Fairclough’s (2005) concepts of “imaginary space” and “frameworks for action” (p. 65) within the policy arena were applied to the Brisbane policy arena to investigate the relationship between policy statements and subsequent guidelines documents. Five key findings emerged from the study. First, application of CDA to policy documents revealed that a fundamental reconceptualisation of the nature and purpose of classroom religious education in Catholic schools occurred in the Brisbane policy arena over the last twenty-five years. Second, a disjuncture existed between catechetical discourses that continued to shape religious education policy statements, and educational discourses that increasingly shaped guidelines documents. Third, recontextualisation between policy documents was evident and dependent on the particular context in which religious education occurred. Fourth, at subsequent links in the chain, actors created their own “imaginary space”, thereby altering orders of discourse within the policy arena, with different actors being either foregrounded or marginalised. Fifth, intertextuality was more evident in the later links in the genre chain (i.e. 1994 policy statement and 1997 guidelines document) than in earlier documents. On the basis of the findings of the study, six recommendations are made. First, the institutional Church should carefully consider the contribution that the Catholic school can make to the overall pastoral mission of the diocese in twenty-first century Australia. Second, policymakers should articulate a nuanced understanding of the relationship between catechesis and education with regard to the religion classroom. Third, there should be greater awareness of the connections among policies relating to Catholic schools – especially the connection between enrolment policy and religious education policy. Fourth, there should be greater consistency between policy documents. Fifth, policy documents should be helpful for those to whom they are directed (i.e. Catholic schools, teachers). Sixth, “imaginary space” (Fairclough, 2005) in policy documents needs to be constructed in a way that allows for multiple “frameworks for action” (Fairclough, 2005) through recontextualisation. The findings of this study are significant in a number of ways. For religious educators, the study highlights the need to develop a shared understanding of the nature and purpose of classroom religious education. It argues that this understanding must take into account the multifaith nature of Australian society and the changing social composition of Catholic schools themselves. Greater recognition should be given to the contribution that religious studies courses such as Study of Religion make to the overall religious development of a person. In view of the social composition of Catholic schools, there is also an issue of ecclesiological significance concerning the conceptualisation of the relationship between the institutional Catholic Church and Catholic schools. Finally, the study is of significance because of its application of CDA to religious education policy documents. Use of CDA reveals the foregrounding, marginalising, or excluding of various actors in the policy arena.

A national framework for disaster health education in Australia

INTRODUCTION: Recent events have heightened awareness of disaster health issues and the need to prepare the health workforce to plan for and respond to major incidents. This has been reinforced at an international level by the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine, which has proposed an international educational framework. ----------- OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper is to outline the development of a national educational framework for disaster health in Australia. ----------- METHODS: The framework was developed on the basis of the literature and the previous experience of members of a National Collaborative for Disaster Health Education and Research. The Collaborative was brought together in a series of workshops and teleconferences, utilizing a modified Delphi technique to finalize the content at each level of the framework and to assign a value to the inclusion of that content at the various levels. ----------- FRAMEWORK: The framework identifies seven educational levels along with educational outcomes for each level. The framework also identifies the recommended contents at each level and assigns a rating of depth for each component. The framework is not intended as a detailed curriculum, but rather as a guide for educationalists to develop specific programs at each level. ----------- CONCLUSIONS: This educational framework will provide an infrastructure around which future educational programs in Disaster Health in Australia may be designed and delivered. It will permit improved articulation for students between the various levels and greater consistency between programs so that operational responders may have a consistent language and operational approach to the management of major events.

Education and learning for the elderly : why, how, what

This paper is concerned with the general issues of ageing, learning, and education for the elderly. It also examines the more specific issues of why, how and what elders want to learn. The world's population is ageing rapidly. For example, it is estimated that by 2020 20% of the population in the USA will be 65 years old and over. It is predicted that 24% of the Hong Kong population will be over 65 years old by 2025 (Bartlett & Phillips, 1995). The phenomenon has been described in colorful terms as the "silver tsunami" (Pew Report, 2001 cited in Summer, 2007). Ageing has an impact on all aspects of human life including the social, economic, cultural and political domains. Understanding and providing for ageing is, therefoer, an important issue for the twenty-first century. The World Health Organisation ([WHO], 2002) has proposed a model of active ageing based on optimizing opportunities for health, particulation, and security in order to enhance quality of life for people as they age. The focus in this paper is on the education and learning aspect of participation as people age.