ORIGO stepping stones common core mathematics Grade 5 practice book

ORIGO Stepping Stones is written and developed by a team of experts to provide teachers with a world-class elementary math program. Our expert team of authors and consultants are utilizing all available educational research to create a unique program that has never before been available to teachers. The full color Student Practice Book provides practice pages that support previous and current lessons.

Book Review : The Concept of Injustice (Eric Heinze, Routledge, 2013)

Given the level of debate and theorising in Western thought on the topic of justice, it is curious that the concept of injustice has not attracted the same attention. While many schools of thought have sought to address various injustices, most define injustice solely as the opposite of their vision of a just society – it seems they have not been interested in exploring injustice per se. With this as a starting point, Eric Heinze’s The Concept of Injustice addresses this oversight and, by taking injustice itself as an object of analysis, adds a new dimension to these discussions...

Book reviews : "Biosecurity interventions: global health and security in question"

International Relations’ engagement with global health governance has proliferated in the last decade. There are a number of excellent works that seek to understand how the relationship between politics and health shapes and informs people’s lives and governments’ policies. However, the overt securitization of health by the IR field has, Biosecurity interventions argues, remained relatively unproblematized...

Diversity or perversity?: Award-winning children's literature and the Australian curriculum

Two of the three cross-curriculum priorities for the national Australian Curriculum prescribed by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) are focussed on what might be called diversity education: “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and culture”, and "Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia” (ACARA, “Cross”). One need not be versed in complex rhetorical theory to understand that, laudable and legitimate as such priorities are, their existence implies that mainstream education in Australia has been or is characterised by the marginalisation or erasure of Australia's history—the original Indigenous cultures are not only living and vibrant today, but also have tens of thousands of years’ “head start” on Australia’s settler cultures—and of its geography—Australia is, after all, located in some physical proximity to Asia. Some might even suggest that Australia is in Asia. These temporal and spatial “forgettings” constitute a kind of cultural perversity which the cross-curricular priorities both seek to address and serve to reinscribe. Even as ACARA requires Australian school students to engage with Aboriginal and Asian histories, cultures, societies, they imply that such histories, cultures, and societies are “diverse”, that they are not those of the students in Australian classrooms; producing them as objects of study rather than as lived experience. This should not necessarily be surprising. Michael W. Apple has provocatively argued that: “one of the perverse effects of a national curriculum actually will be to ‘legitimise inequality.’ It may in fact help create the illusion that whatever the massive differences in schools, they all have something in common” (18). In the Australian context, attempts to mitigate such perversity are articulated via the selection of literary texts. As educators move to resource ACARA’s cross-curricular priorities, ACARA notes that “Teachers and schools are best placed to make decisions about the selection of texts in their teaching and learning programs that address the content in the Australian Curriculum while also meeting the needs of the students in their classes” (ACARA, “Advice”). This assertion appears on a webpage called “Advice on selection of literary texts” which is notable first and foremost for its total lack of any literary texts being named, and its list of weblinks pointing to lists of texts compiled elsewhere, by other organisations, and in the main, compiled to serve agendas other than the Australian curriculum. One of the major resources referred to by ACARA for literary text selection is the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA). Of course, the CBCA’s annual book awards do not share ACARA’s educational priorities, but do have a history of being drawn upon by schools as a curriculum resource. In this paper, I consider the literary texts which have been prized by the CBCA in recent years attending to their engagements with Aboriginal cultures.

Book Reviews : "Off Limits: a parent’s guide to keeping kids safe from sexual abuse" and "Smart Parenting for Safer Kids"

Two important books on the topic of child sexual abuse prevention were recently published: Off Limits: A Parent’s Guide to Keeping Kids Safe from Sexual Abuse (Wurtele & Berkower, 2010) and Smart Parenting for Safer Kids (Briggs, 2010). The authors of both books are highly credentialed with long experience researching and writing about child sexual abuse prevention. Sandy Wurtele, PhD, is author of landmark child- and parent-focused sexual abuse prevention programs conducted in the USA over the past 30 years. She has published over 80 journal articles and book chapters on this topic. Her co-author, Feather Berkower, MSW, has been conducting workshops for adults on this topic for 25 years. Freda Briggs, PhD, has over 40 years’ experience in child protection in Australia and has also published numerous scholarly works on the topic. She was the inaugural recipient of the Australian Humanitarian Award in 1998, was Senior Australian of the Year in 2000, and was awarded an Order of Australia in 2005.

Book Review : "The Media Gaze: Representations of Diversities in Canada by Augie Fleras". Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2011.

The Media Gaze effectively shatters the assumption that Canada, in all its political correctness, is a cultural mosaic free of discrimination and prejudice. While great strides have been made to reduce blatant racism and sexism in Canadian media, Fleras illustrates how discriminatory and oppressive discourses are still very present in news, television, and film.He brings to light the structural, institutional, and practice-oriented means by which the media is systemically biased toward privileging mainstream audiences while misrepresenting minority groups in the public eye...

Book Review : "Statutory Will Applications : A practical Guide by Richard Williams and Sam McCullough"

The jurisdiction of Australian courts to make wills for those lacking testamentary capacity is relatively new, having been granted by legislation progressively enacted across the various states and territories between 1996 and 2010. Given increasing numbers of statutory will applications since the legislative reform, and a growing body of law, the publication of the specialist work, Statutory Will Applications: A Practical Guide, by Richard Williams and Sam McCullough, is timely and valuable. This work will be of great interest to those who act for individual clients, especially wills and estates practitioners, but also personal injury practitioners acting for incapacitated persons who have been awarded substantial damages.

Book Review : "Statutory will Applications in Australia : A Practical Guide by Richard Williams & Sam McCullough"

Although UK courts have, for many years, had power to make wills for those lacking testamentary capacity, this jurisdiction jurisdiction is relatively new in Australia, having been granted by legislation enacted between 1996 and 2010.

Book review : "Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship by Claire Bishop"

In the years since Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998) was published, a plethora of books (Shannon Jackson’s Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics [2011], Nato Thompson’s Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 [2011], Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art [2004], Pablo Helguera’s Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Material and Techniques Handbook [2011]), conferences and articles have surfaced creating a rich and textured discourse that has responded to, critiqued and reconfigured the proposed social utopias of Bourriaud’s aesthetics. As a touchstone for this emerging discourse, Relational Aesthetics outlines in a contemporary context the plethora of social and process-based art forms that took as their medium the ‘social’. It is, however, Clare Bishop’s book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso), that offers a deeper art historical and theoretically considered rendering of this growing and complicated form of art, and forms a central body of work in this broad constellation of writings about participatory art, or social practice art/socially engaged art (SEA), as it is now commonly known...