Education higher degree research students writing for publication

Higher Degree Research (HDR) student publications are increasingly valued by students, by professional communities and by research institutions. Peer-reviewed publications form the HDR student writer's publication track record and increase competitiveness in employment and research funding opportunities. These publications also make the results of HDR student research available to the community in accessible formats. HDR student publications are also valued by universities because they provide evidence of institutional research activity within a field and attract a return on research performance. However, although publications are important to multiple stakeholders, many Education HDR students do not publish the results of their research. Hence, an investigation of Education HDR graduates who submitted work for publication during their candidacy was undertaken. This multiple, explanatory case study investigated six recent Education HDR graduates who had submitted work to peer-reviewed outlets during their candidacy. The conceptual framework supported an analysis of the development of Education HDR student writing using Alexander's (2003, 2004) Model of Domain Learning which focuses on expertise, and Lave and Wenger's (1991) situated learning within a community of practice. Within this framework, the study investigated how these graduates were able to submit or publish their research despite their relative lack of writing expertise. Case data were gathered through interviews and from graduate publication records. Contextual data were collected through graduate interviews, from Faculty and university documents, and through interviews with two Education HDR supervisors. Directed content analysis was applied to all data to ascertain the support available in the research training environment. Thematic analysis of graduate and supervisor interviews was then undertaken to reveal further information on training opportunities accessed by the HDR graduates. Pattern matching of all interview transcripts provided information on how the HDR graduates developed writing expertise. Finally, explanation building was used to determine causal links between the training accessed by the graduates and their writing expertise. The results demonstrated that Education HDR graduates developed publications and some level of expertise simultaneously within communities of practice. Students were largely supported by supervisors who played a critical role. They facilitated communities of practice and largely mediated HDR engagement in other training opportunities. However, supervisor support alone did not ensure that the HDR graduates developed writing expertise. Graduates who appeared to develop the most expertise, and produce a number of publications reported experiencing both a sustained period of engagement within one community of practice, and participation in multiple communities of practice. The implications for the MDL theory, as applied to academic writing, suggests that communities of practice can assist learners to progress from initial contact with a new domain of interest through to competence. The implications for research training include the suggestion that supervisors as potentially crucial supporters of HDR student writing for publication should themselves be active publishers. Also, Faculty or university sponsorship of communities of practice focussed on HDR student writing for publication could provide effective support for the development of HDR student writing expertise and potentially increase the number of their peer-reviewed publications.

‘We’ve always cooked kangaroo. We still cook kangaroo. Although sometimes we use cookbooks now’ : Aboriginal Australians and cookbooks

Aboriginal Australians have a long history of eating native animals and plants. Food preparation techniques were handed down through the generations, without any need for cookbooks. But colonisation changed the diets of Aboriginal Australians, introducing us to a processed diet high in salt, sugar and fat, and causing a wide range of diet-related health problems. Over the years, many Aboriginal Australians lost their connections to traditional food preparation practices. In this paper, the authors provide a brief overview of Aboriginal food history and describe a newly-emerging focus on reintroducing native foods. They describe the work of an Aboriginal chef, Dale Chapman, who is actively promoting native foods and creating a native-Western food fusion. Chapman has developed native food recipes and a cookbook, in an effort to make native foods accessible to all Australians. She promotes a future when native foods are part of the identity of all Australians – both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal.

Establishing Aboriginal health research priorities in Victoria

The Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO) conducted a research project to find out the impact of social determinants such as education, employment, income, racism and housing on the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal peoples. Forums and workshops were conducted to establish future research outcomes and priorities. The project will help in developing localised and community-oriented solutions to Aboriginal health issues.

Redefining excellence : a strategic policy framework for community engagement and higher education

This report provides a current overview and analysis of the role of universities in local community development in the State of Victoria. Drawing on successful programs of community engagement in Victoria, Australia, Europe, Africa, and North America, the report proposes policy strategies for fostering community development for Victorian Higher Education through effective community engagement programs.

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

Towards globo sapiens : transforming learners in higher education

Global and local studies show that the present growth-based approach to development is unsustainable. If we are serious about surviving the 21st century we will need graduates who are not simply 'globally portable' or even 'globally competent', but also wise global citizens, Globo sapiens. This book contributes to what educators need to know, do and be in order to support transformative learning. The book is based on work with large, socially and culturally diverse, first-year engineering students at an Australian university of technology. It shows that reflective journals, with appropriate planning and support, can be one pillar of a transformative pedagogy which can encourage significant and even transformative attitude change in relation to gender, culture and the environment. It also offers evidence of improved communication skills and other tangible changes to counter common criticisms that such work is "airy-fairy" and irrelevant. The author combines communication theory with critical futures thinking to provide layered understandings of how transformative learning affected students' thinking, learning and behaviour. So the book is both a case-study and a detailed response to the personal and professional challenges that educators all over the world will face as they try to guide students in sustainable directions. It will be useful to teachers in higher education, especially those interested in internationalisation of the curriculum, transformative learning and values change for sustainable futures.

Technological talespinning : new media and higher education in the USA : an examination of technological determinism

This thesis examines the theory of technological determinism, which espouses the view that technological change drives social change, through an analysis of the impact of new media on higher education models in the United States of America. In so doing, it explores the impacts of new media technologies on higher education, in particular, and society in general. The thesis reviews the theoretical shape of the discourse surrounding new media technologies before narrowing in on utopian claims about the impact of new media technologies on education. It tests these claims through a specific case study of higher education in the USA. The study investigates whether 'new' media technologies (eg the Internet) are resulting in new forms of higher education in the USA and whether the blurring of information and entertainment technologies has caused a similar blurring in education and entertainment providers. It uses primary data gathered by the author in a series of interviews with key education, industry and media representatives in North America in 1997. Chapter 2 looks at the literature and history surrounding several topics central to the thesis - the discourses of technological determinism, the history of technology use and adoption in education, and impacts of new media technologies on education. Chapter 3 presents the findings of the American case study on the relationship between media and higher education and Chapter 4 concludes and synthesises the investigation.

Craft, process and art : teaching and learning music composition in higher education

This paper explores models of teaching and learning music composition in higher education. It analyses the pedagogical approaches apparent in the literature on teaching and learning composition in schools and universities, and introduces a teaching model as: learning from the masters; mastery of techniques; exploring ideas; and developing voice. It then presents a learning model developed from a qualitative study into students’ experiences of learning composition at university as: craft, process and art. The relationship between the students’ experiences and the pedagogical model is examined. Finally, the implications for composition curricula in higher education are presented.

Psychometric validation of the growth and empowerment measure (GEM) applied with Indigenous Australians

Objective: Empowerment is a complex process of psychological, social, organizational and structural change. It allows individuals and groups to achieve positive growth and effectively address the social and psychological impacts of historical oppression, marginalization and disadvantage. The Growth and Empowerment Measure (GEM) was developed to measure change in dimensions of empowerment as defi ned and described by Aboriginal Australians who participated in the Family Well Being programme.---------- Method: The GEM has two components: a 14-item Emotional Empowerment Scale (EES14) and 12 Scenarios (12S). It is accompanied by the Kessler 6 Psychological Distress Scale (K6), supplemented by two questions assessing frequency of happy and angry feelings. For validation, the measure was applied with 184 Indigenous Australian participants involved in personal and/or organizational social health activities.---------- Results: Psychometric analyses of the new instruments support their validity and reliability and indicate two-component structures for both the EES (Self-capacity; Inner peace) and the 12S (Healing and enabling growth, Connection and purpose). Strong correlations were observed across the scales and subscales. Participants who scored higher on the newly developed scales showed lower distress on the K6, particularly when the two additional questions were included. However, exploratory factor analyses demonstrated that GEM subscales are separable from the Kessler distress measure.---------- Conclusion: The GEM shows promise in enabling measurement and enhancing understanding of both process and outcome of psychological and social empowerment within an Australian Indigenous context.

The role of academic community in higher learning : Alternatives to a drive-thru education

The purpose of our paper is to illustrate the fundamental importance of developing academic community among first year students. We argue that a sense of academic community is of fundamental importance in combating the effects of the neo-liberal economic discourse on higher education, and that the values of higher education are incongruent with those of economic rationalism. The discursive commodification of the student, and of education itself, works against the formation of community, both within the university environment and in the wider society. We argue that, at present, the dominant discourse shaping the social practice of higher education is that of neo-liberal economics. Community values stand in opposition to the dominant discourse, and are integral to the long-term survival of a socially critical and socially responsive society. We conclude that the importance of establishing a sense of academic community during the first year of university is justified by its ultimate value to society.

Theorising a model for teaching and assessing reflective learning in higher education

The importance of reflection in higher education, and across disciplinary fields is widely recognised; it is generally included in university graduate attributes, professional standards and program objectives. Furthermore, reflection is commonly embedded into assessment requirements in higher education subjects, often without necessary scaffolding or clear expectations for students. Despite the rhetoric around the importance of reflection for ongoing learning, there is scant literature on any systematic, developmental approach to teaching reflective learning across higher education programs/courses. Given that professional or academic reflection is not intuitive, and requires specific pedagogic intervention to do well, a program/course-wide approach is essential. This paper draws on current literature to theorise a new, transferable and customisable model for teaching and assessing reflective learning across higher education, which foregrounds and explains the pedagogic field of higher education as a multi-dimensional space. We argue that explicit and strategic pedagogic intervention, supported by dynamic resources, is necessary for successful, broad-scale approaches to reflection in higher education.

Multimodal and monomodal discourses of marketization in higher education : power, ideology, and the absence of the image

The ubiquity of multimodality in hypermedia environments is undeniable. Bezemer and Kress (2008) have argued that writing has been displaced by image as the central mode for representation. Given the current technical affordances of digital technology and user-friendly interfaces that enable the ease of multimodal design, the conspicuous absence of images in certain domains of cyberspace is deserving of critical analysis. In this presentation, I examine the politics of discourses implicit within hypertextual spaces, drawing textual examples from a higher education website. I critically examine the role of writing and other modes of production used in what Fairclough (1993) refers to as discourses of marketisation in higher education, tracing four pervasive discourses of teaching and learning in the current economy: i) materialization, ii) personalization, iii) technologisation, and iv) commodification (Fairclough, 1999). Each of these arguments is supported by the critical analysis of multimodal texts. The first is a podcast highlighting the new architectonic features of a university learning space. The second is a podcast and transcript of a university Open Day interview with prospective students. The third is a time-lapse video showing the construction of a new science and engineering precinct. These three multimodal texts contrast a final web-based text that exhibits a predominance of writing and the powerful absence or silencing of the image. I connect the weightiness of words and the function of monomodality in the commodification of discourses, and its resistance to the multimodal affordances of web-based technologies, and how this is used to establish particular sets of subject positions and ideologies through which readers are constrained to occupy. Applying principles of critical language study by theorists that include Fairclough, Kress, Lemke, and others whose semiotic analysis of texts focuses on the connections between language, power, and ideology, I demonstrate how the denial of image and the privileging of written words in the multimodality of cyberspace is an ideological effect to accentuate the dominance of the institution.