Persistence is fertile: Pushing methodological potentialities in education research

As more is known about contemporary cultural shifts and the effect this has on the young, research must consider how children operate as global citizens. Children are innocent and vulnerable, but also actively participate in the world; research into early childhood must therefore refine ideas and conceptions and develop research methodologies that see children as superdiverse young citizens. Intergenerational collaborative drawing, which involves adult researchers and children drawing together, is a method that supports superdimensions. A group of researchers tested the method to consider the politics of research, particularly when researcher neutrality and the conventions around gathering ‘unsullied’ data are challenged.

Education, pedagogy and sport for development: Addressing seldom asked questions

This special issue features the growing field of Sport for Development. Importantly few questions have been raised about the educative quality of sport for development programs or the pedagogies by which they are delivered. This seems to be something of an oversight since; by definition development infers some sort of learning or educative process. This introductory paper provides an editorial commentary and summary on the papers included in this issue. We also comment on Sport for Development as a growing field of research and identify what might be some fruitful areas of research direction based on the papers included in the issue. Our reading of the papers suggest that there are important concerns related to pedagogy and educational practices in sport for development projects that stem from a dominance of neoliberal agendas, unintended though this may be. At the same time however, it is apparent that this challenge is being met head on by a growing number of researchers, and reports of this progress can be found in this issue.

The development and preliminary evaluation of an education intervention to prevent driveway run-over incidents

Objective While driveway run-over incidents continue to be a cause of serious injury and deaths among young children in Australia, few empirically evaluated educational interventions have been developed which address these incidents. Addressing this gap, this study describes the development and evaluation of a paper-based driveway safety intervention targeting caregivers of children aged 5 years or younger. Design Cross-sectional survey. Method and setting Informed by previous research, the intervention targeted key caregiver safety behaviours that address driveway risks. To assess the impact of the intervention, 137 Queensland (Australia) caregivers (95.0% women; mean age = 34.97 years) were recruited. After receiving the intervention, changes to a number of outcomes such as caregiver risk perception, safety knowledge and behavioural intentions were measured. Results Findings indicated that the intervention had increased general and specific situational risk awareness and safety knowledge among a substantial proportion of participants. Close to one-quarter of the sample strongly agreed that the intervention had increased these outcomes. In addition, 71.6% of the sample reported that they intended to make changes to their routine in and around the driveway, as a result of reading the intervention material and a further, quarter of the participants strongly agreed that the information provided would be a help both to themselves (26.5%) and other caregivers (33.8%) to keep their children safe in the driveway. Conclusion: While the educational intervention requires further validation, findings from this study suggest that intervention content and format increases driveway safety.

Digital competence and professional development of vocational education and training teachers in Queensland

Teaching with digital technologies is essential to the development of 21st century students’ graduate capabilities. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which Queensland VET teachers engage with digitally-enhanced teaching, or have the capacity to do so. Using a mixed methods approach, this thesis investigated the current digital teaching capacities of VET teachers and how current professional development opportunities are helping to address their learning needs.