Multimodal approaches to reflective teaching and assessment in higher education

Reflection is not a new concept in the teaching of higher education and is often an important component of many disciplinary courses. Despite this, past research shows that whilst there are examples of rich reflective strategies used in some areas of higher education, most approaches to and conceptualisations of reflective learning and assessment have been perfunctory and inconsistent. In many disciplinary areas reflection is often assessed as a written activity ‘tagged onto’ assessment practices. In creative disciplines however, reflective practice is an integral and cumulative form of learning and is often expressed in ways other than in the written form. This paper will present three case studies of reflective practice in the area of Creative Industries in higher education – Dance, Fashion and Music. It will discuss the ways in which higher education teachers and students use multi-modal approaches to expressing knowledge and reflective practice in context. The paper will argue that unless students are encouraged to participate in deep reflective disciplinary discourse via multi-modes then reflection will remain superficial in the higher education context.

Making sense of mass education

Making Sense of Mass Education provides a comprehensive analysis of the field of mass education. The book presents new assessment of traditional issues associated with education – class, race, gender, discrimination and equity –to dispel myths and assumptions about the classroom. It examines the complex relationship between the media, popular culture and schooling, and places the expectations surrounding the modern teacher within ethical, legal and historical contexts. The book blurs some of the disciplinary boundaries within the field of education, drawing upon sociology, cultural studies, history, philosophy, ethics and jurisprudence to provide stronger analyses. The book reframes the sociology of education as a complex mosaic of cultural practices, forces and innovations. Engaging and contemporary, it is an invaluable resource for teacher education students, and anyone interested in a better understanding of mass education.

Media education, collaboration and industry : a case study of what a group of year 10 and 11 students value in a community of practice

This case study incorporated an analysis of a group of young people as media producers and placed young people’s perspectives of their media education learning at the core of the analysis. Communities of practice social learning theory provided an effective conceptual framework for investigating the nature of the participants’ involvement in a secondary school and creative industry partnership. The analysis of the data in this study indicated that the participants valued their learning by imagining, actively participating and belonging to a media education community of practice. By enabling young people to work directly with creative industries this school and industry partnership provided students with what they saw as valuable first-hand experience of professional expertise, that contributed to students’ understanding of their own and others’ identities.

Educational accountability tests, social and legal inclusion approaches to discrimination for students with disability : a national case study from Australia

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability (CRPD) promotes equal and full participation by children in education. Equity of educational access for all students, including students with disability, free from discrimination, is the first stated national goal of Australian education (MCEETYA 2008). Australian federal disability discrimination law, the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA), follows the Convention, with the federal Disability Standards for Education 2005 (DSE) enacting specific requirements for education. This article discusses equity of processes for inclusion of students with disability in Australian educational accountability testing, including international tests in which many countries participate. The conclusion drawn is that equitable inclusion of students with disability in current Australian educational accountability testing in not occurring from a social perspective and is not in principle compliant with law. However, given the reluctance of courts to intervene in education matters and the uncertainty of an outcome in any court consideration, the discussion shows that equitable inclusion in accountability systems is available through policy change rather than expensive, and possibly unsuccessful, legal challenges.

Re-imagining STEM : peer scaffolding ICT in initial teacher education

In this paper, we report on how peer scaffolding was used to effect change in tertiary teaching practice and academic disposition in the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Science teaching and learning. We present a small-scale case study investigating the practice of one of this paper’s authors. It is told through two salient episodes which narratively describe the scaffolding used to support a teaching experiment. This was made possible through the national Teaching Teachers for the Future Project (2011-2012) which aimed to enhance the technological pedagogical capability of pre-service teachers across Australia. The outcome was a demonstrable shift in the academic’s disposition towards the use and benefits of ICT in teaching science and an increase in skills and confidence for both the academic and his students. This study and its outcomes fit within the contemporary push to “re-imagine” the teaching of Science, and more broadly of STEM, in schools.

Re-imagining STEM : peer scaffolding ICT in Initial Teacher Education

In this paper, we report on how peer scaffolding was used to effect change in tertiary teaching practice and academic disposition in the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Science teaching and learning. We present a small-scale case study investigating the practice of one of this paper’s authors. It is told through two salient episodes which narratively describe the scaffolding used to support a teaching experiment. This was made possible through the national Teaching Teachers for the Future Project (2011-2012) which aimed to enhance the technological pedagogical capability of pre-service teachers across Australia. The outcome was a demonstrable shift in the academic’s disposition towards the use and benefits of ICT in teaching science and an increase in skills and confidence for both the academic and his students. This study and its outcomes fit within the contemporary push to “re-imagine” the teaching of Science, and more broadly of STEM, in schools.

Successful outcomes in vocational education and training courses : how pedagogy and expectations influence achievement

This paper reports on a four year Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project titled Skilling Indigenous Queensland, conducted in regional areas of Queensland, Australia from 2009 to 2013. The project sought to investigate vocational education, training (VET) and teaching, Indigenous learners’ needs, employer cultural and expectations and community culture and expectations to identify best practice in numeracy teaching for Indigenous VET learners. Specifically it focused on ways to enhance the teaching and learning of courses and the associated mathematics in such courses to benefit learners and increase their future opportunities of employment. To date thirty-nine teachers/trainers/teacher aides and two hundred and thirty-one students consented to participate in the project. Nine VET courses were nominated to be the focus on the study. This paper focuses on questionnaire and interview responses from four trainers, two teacher aides and six students. In recent years a considerable amount of funding has been allocated to increasing Indigenous Peoples’ participation in education and employment. This increased funding is predicated on the assumption that it will make a difference and contribute to closing the education gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians (Council of Australia Governments, 2009). The central tenet is that access to education for Indigenous People will create substantial social and economic benefits for regional and remote Indigenous People. The project’s aim is to address some of the issues associated with the gap. To achieve the aims, the project adopted a mixed methods design aimed at benefitting research participants and included: participatory collaborative action research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988) and, community research (Smith, 1999). Participatory collaborative action research refers to a is a “collective, self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social and educational practices” (Kemmis et al., 1988, p. 5). Community research is described as an approach that “conveys a much more intimate, human and self-defined space” (p. 127). Community research relies on and validates the community’s own definitions. As the project is informed by the social at a community level, it is described as “community action research or emancipatory research” (Smith, 1999, p. 127). It seeks to demonstrate benefit to the community, making positive differences in the lives of Indigenous People and communities. The data collection techniques included survey questionnaires, video recording of teaching and learning processes, teacher reflective video analysis of teaching, observations, semi-structured interviews and student numeracy testing. As a result of these processes, the findings indicate that VET course teachers work hard to adopt contextualising strategies to their teaching, however this process is not always straight forward because of the perceptions of how mathematics has been taught and learned historically. Further teachers, trainers and students have high expectations of one another with the view to successful outcomes from the courses.

Retention and graduation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in initial teacher education : a review of the literature

While the need to increase numbers of Indigenous teachers has been highlighted for many years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers are still significantly underrepresented in Australia making up less that 1% of teachers in schools. Nationally, little has changed since the 1980s when Hughes and Wilmot (1992) called for ‘1000 Indigenous teachers by 1990’. This paper reports on an initial literature review of teacher education as related to the preparation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Alongside the scholarly literature, the review to date includes analysis of over twenty policy documents and government reports as well as web-based descriptions of historical and current models of Indigenous teacher education including both mainstream Education programs and cohort-based and community models. While the literature provides examples of successful models of Indigenous teacher education it also illuminates the longstanding and interrelated factors that continue to impact on the success or failure of teacher education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders

The political economy of food in schools : the case of Queensland State education

Food in schools is typically understood from a biomedical perspective. At practical, ideational and material levels, whether addressed pedagogically or bureaucratically, food in schools is generally considered from a natural sciences perspective. This perspective manifests as the bioenergetic principle of energy in versus energy out and appears in policy focused on issues such as obesity and physical activity. Despite the considerable literature on the sociology of food and eating, little is understood about food in schools from a sociological perspective. This oversight of one of the most fundamental requirements of the human condition--namely, food--should be of concern for educators. Investigating food through a political economy lens means understanding food in schools as part of broader economic, political, social and cultural conditions. Hence, a political economy of food and schooling is concerned with the formation of ideas about food relative to political, economic, and cultural ideologies in social practice. From a critical sociology study of food messages students receive in the primary school curriculum, this paper reports on some of the official food messages of an Australian state's education policy, as a case to highlight the current political economy of food in Australia. It examines the role of the corporate food industry in the formation of Australian food policy and how that policy created artefacts infused with competing messages. The paper highlights how food and nutrition policy moved from solely a health concern to incorporate an economic dimension and links that shift with the quality of food available in Queensland schools.

The minority report : disproportionate representation in Australia’s largest education system

The overrepresentation of students from minority ethnic groups in separate special education settings has been extensively documented in North America, yet little research exists for Australian school systems. To address this gap, we systematically analyzed 13 years of enrolment data from the state of New South Wales. Stark differences are seen in patterns of enrolment between Indigenous students, students from a Language Background Other than English (LBOTE), and non-Indigenous English speaking students. Moreover, these differences are increasing. While enrollments of Indigenous students in separate settings increased faster across time than did enrollments of Indigenous students in mainstream, enrollments of LBOTE students in mainstream increased faster than did enrollments of LBOTE students in separate settings.

ICT in vocational education and training: a view of information and communication technology in vocational education in New Zealand

This report looks at opportunities in relation to what is either already available or starting to take off in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). ICT focuses on the entire system of information, communication, processes and knowledge within an organisation. It focuses on how technology can be implemented to serve the information and communication needs of people and organisations. An ICT system involves a combination of work practices, information, people and a range of technologies and applications organised to make the business or organisation fully functional and efficient, and to accomplish goals in an organisation. Our focus is on vocational, workbased education in New Zealand. It is not about eLearning, although we briefly touch on the topic. We provide a background on vocational education in New Zealand, cover what we consider to be key trends impacting workbased, vocational education and training (VET), and offer practical suggestions for leveraging better value from ICT initiatives across the main activities of an Industry Training Organisation (ITO). We use a learning value chain approach to demonstrate the main functions ITOs engage in and also use this approach as the basis for developing and prioritising an ICT strategy. Much of what we consider in this report is applicable to the wider tertiary education sector as it relates to life-long learning. We consider ICT as an enabler that: a) connects education businesses (all types including tertiary education institutions) to learners, their career decisions and their learning, and as well, b) enables those same businesses to run more efficiently. We suggest that these two sets of activities are considered as interconnected parts of the same education or training business ICT strategy.

Sex discrimination and non-random sampling in the Australian labour market

Historically a significant gap between male and female wages has existed in the Australian labour market. Indeed this wage differential was institutionalised in the 1912 arbitration decision which determined that the basic female wage would be set at between 54 and 66 per cent of the male wage. More recently however, the 1969 and 1972 Equal Pay Cases determined that male/female wage relativities should be based upon the premise of equal pay for work of equal value. It is important to note that the mere observation that average wages differ between males and females is not sine qua non evidence of sex discrimination. Economists restrict the definition of wage discrimination to cases where two distinct groups receive different average remuneration for reasons unrelated to differences in productivity characteristics. This paper extends previous studies of wage discrimination in Australia (Chapman and Mulvey, 1986; Haig, 1982) by correcting the estimated male/female wage differential for the existence of non-random sampling. Previous Australian estimates of male/female human capital basedwage specifications together with estimates of the corresponding wage differential all suffer from a failure to address this issue. If the sample of females observed to be working does not represent a random sample then the estimates of the male/female wage differential will be both biased and inconsistent.