A socially just rationale for an Australian curriculum? : a critical thematic policy analysis of political speeches in education (2007-2010)

In late 2007, newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd placed education reform on centre stage as a key policy in the Labor Party's agenda for social reform in Australia. A major policy strategy within this 'Education Revolution' was the development of a national curriculum, the Australian Curriculum Within this political context, this study is an investigation into how social justice and equity have been used in political speeches to justify the need for, and the nature of, Australia's first official national curriculum. The aim is to provide understandings into what is said or not said; who is included or excluded, represented or misrepresented; for what purpose; and for whose benefit. The study investigates political speeches made by Education Ministers between 2008 and 201 0; that is, from the inception of the Australian Curriculum to the release of the Phase 1 F - 10 draft curriculum documents in English, mathematics, science and history. Curriculum development is defined here as an ongoing process of complex conversations. To contextualise the process of curriculum development within Australia, the thesis commences with an initial review of curriculum development in this nation over the past three decades. It then frames this review within contemporary curriculum theory; in particular it calls upon the work of William Pinar and the key notions of currere and reconceptualised curriculum. This contextualisation work is then used as a foundation to examine how social justice and equity have been represented in political speeches delivered by the respective Education Ministers Julia Gillard and Peter Garrett at key junctures of Australian Curriculum document releases. A critical thematic policy analysis is the approach used to examine selected official speech transcripts released by the ministerial media centre through the DEEWR website. This approach provides a way to enable insights and understandings of representations of social justice and equity issues in the policy agenda. Broader social implications are also discussed. The project develops an analytic framework that enables an investigation into the framing of social justice and equity issues such as inclusion, equality, quality education, sharing of resources and access to learning opportunities in political speeches aligned with the development of the Australian Curriculum Through this analysis, the study adopts a focus on constructions of educationally disadvantaged students and how the solutions of 'fixing' teachers and providing the 'right' curriculum are presented as resolutions to the perceived problem. In this way, it aims to work towards offering insights into political justifications for a national curriculum in Australia from a social justice perspective.

Party 25

Party 25 involved the conception and public launch of a radically new form of political party during that year’s Australian general election. The entire project was also intentioned as a conceptual artwork. Party 25 avoided conventional party-political approaches and was neither a protest group nor an advocacy organisation, but rather a new form of political association that confronted what we understood as the debilitating limits and impotence of contemporary parliamentary democracies in transitioning our societies towards ecological sustainability.----- Party 25 was based on responding to one fundamental question which all of its policies served - “how does humanity get to the 25th century?” By basing itself on a dramatically long-term approach uncommon within conventional politics it raised the proposition that humanity does not have an assured future. Party25 therefore shaped its agendas around the idea that any future now lies in human hands and so how humanity treats the ecologies on which it depends innately determines the quality of the inseparable relationship between its being, and the being of the biophysical world.----- The project was conceived through a number of discussion papers, workshops and creative works and was launched publicly at the Judith Wright Centre Brisbane accompanied by a full length showing of evocative imagery, text and sound, a series of speeches and the launch of a succinct web presence. Through the website and this party launch a community of interested participants and creative practitioners was sought who then would form the basis of a nascent community of change.

Airwaves: 100 years of radio

Music composition using prominent broadcast speeches across the whole twentieth century in commemoration of the centenary of Marconi's first transatlantic radio transmission. The work is based on creating music from the found objects of melody derived from spoken intonation. Recordings of the speeches are accompanied throughout by live instrumental music.

Room for improvement : hotel giant resorts to Six Sigma to improve operations

Six Sigma provides a framework for quality improvement and business excellence. Introduced in the 1980s in manufacturing, the concept of Six Sigma has gained popularity in service organizations. After initial success in healthcare and banking, Six Sigma has gradually gained traction in other types of service industries, including hotels and lodging. Starwood Hotels and Resorts was the first hospitality giant to embrace Six Sigma. In 2001, Starwood adopted the method to develop innovative, customer-focused solutions and to transfer these solutions throughout the global organization. To analyze Starwood's use of Six Sigma, the authors collected data from articles, interviews, presentations and speeches published in magazines, newspapers and Web sites. This provided details to corroborate information, and they also made inferences from these sources. Financial metrics can explain the success of Six Sigma in any organization. There was no shortage of examples of Starwood's success resulting from Six Sigma project metrics uncovered during the research.

We’ve had the Redfern Park Speech and The Apology: What’s next?

What really changed for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people between Paul Keating’s Redfern Park Speech (Keating 1992) and Kevin Rudd’s Apology to the stolen generations (Rudd 2008)? What will change between the Apology and the next speech of an Australian Prime Minister? The two speeches were intricately linked, and they were both personal and political. But do they really signify change at the political level? This paper reflects my attempt to turn the gaze away from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and back to where the speeches originated: the Australian Labor Party (ALP). I question whether the changes foreshadowed in the two speeches – including changes by the Australian public and within Australian society – are evident in the internal mechanisms of the ALP. I also seek to understand why non-Indigenous women seem to have given in to the existing ways of the ALP instead of challenging the status quo which keeps Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples marginalised. I believe that, without a thorough examination and a change in the ALP’s practices, the domination and subjugation of Indigenous peoples will continue – within the Party, through the Australian political process and, therefore, through governments.

Parliamentary committees are important in developing policy: evidence from a Queensland case study

Abstract This paper uses a case study to identify the impact of a Queensland parliamentary committee on policy. In 2003, the Travelsafe Committee undertook two inquiries investigating young driver and rider issues. In 2007, the Queensland Parliament passed legislation that provided the power to make regulations that changed the graduated driver licensing laws in Queensland. The analysis of the second reading speeches for this bill suggests that parliamentary committees can help set the agenda for government policy. The role of the Travelsafe Committee in this process was recognised by both government and non-government members of Parliament and by those that had been, or were currently, members of the committee and by those that had no membership experience of the Travelsafe Committee prior to the debate of the legislation. This paper suggests that in order for committees to successfully participate in policy work they need to have strong ideas, work to a consistently high standard and the chair needs to be dedicated to the work of the committee. This case study indicates the importance of parliamentary committees in the policy work of a parliament.

Contemporary take on deconstructed Medea : a review

THEATRE: The New Dead: Medea Material. By Heiner Muller. Stella Electrika in association with La Boite Theatre Company, Brisbane, November 19. THERE has been a lot of intensity in independent theatre in Brisbane during the past year, as companies, production houses and producers have begun building new programs and platforms to support an expansion of pathways within the local theatre ecology. Audiences have been exposed to works signalling the diversity of what Brisbane theatre makers want to see on stage, from productions of new local and international pieces to new devised works, and the results of residencies and development programs. La Boite Theatre Company closes its inaugural indie season with a work that places it at the contemporary, experimental end of the spectrum. The New Dead: Medea Material is emerging director Kat Henry's interpretation of Heiner Muller's 1981 text Despoiled Shore Medea Material Landscape with Argonauts. Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar. End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar. Muller is known for his radical adaptations of historical dramas, from the Greeks to Shakespeare, and for deconstructed texts in which the characters - in this case, Medea - violently reject the familial, cultural and political roles society has laid out for them. Muller's combination of deconstructed characters, disconnected poetic language and constant references to aspects of popular culture and the Cold War politics he sought to abjure make his texts challenging to realise. The poetry entices but the density, together with the increasing distance of the Cold War politics in the texts, leaves contemporary directors with clear decisions to make about how to adapt these open texts. In The New Dead: Medea Material, Henry works with some interesting imagery and conceptual territory. Lucinda Shaw as Medea, Guy Webster as Jason and Kimie Tsukakoshi as King Creon's daughter Glauce, the woman for whom Jason forsakes his wife Medea, each reference different aspects of contemporary culture. Medea is a bitter, drunken, satin-gowned diva with bite; Jason - first seen lounging in front of the television with a beer in an image reminiscent of Sarah Kane's in-yer-face characterisation of Hippolytus in Phaedra's Love - has something of the rock star about him; and Glauce is a roller-skating, karaoke-singing, pole-dancing young temptress. The production is given a contemporary tone, dominated by Medea's twisted love and loss, rather than by any commentary on her circumstances. Its strength is the aesthetic Henry creates, supported by live electro-pop music, a band stage that stands as a metaphor for Jason's sea voyage, and multimedia that inserts images of the story unfolding beyond these characters' speeches as sorts of subconscious flashes. While Tsukakoshi is engaging throughout, there are moments when Shaw and Webster's performances - particularly in the songs - are diminished by a lack of clarity. The result is a piece that, while slightly lacking in its realisation at times, undoubtedly flags Henry's facility as an emerging director and what she wants to bring to the Brisbane theatre scene.

PMI Research and Education Conference 2010

The PMI Research and Education Conference 2010 ended one week ago at the time of this writing. Aside from 3 enlightening keynote speeches, 78 proffered papers were presented. On the basis of the reviewers' assessments, the 10 best papers have been selected to form this special issue...

Just dawn

Commissioned for the It’s Timely exhibition at the Blacktown Arts Centre, Just Dawn is a response to two speeches that former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam delivered in Blacktown in 1972 and 1974. Throughout the video, a series of white words and phrases fade in and out as a virtual camera flies towards an abstract horizon line. The narrative thread of the text is directed towards an unnamed Whitlam through the repeated appearance of the words ‘you said’. As the video progresses, the colours of the animated background slowly brighten to resemble an emerging dawn, and the sound, text and camera movements build in frequency and intensity. As they do so, the once optimistic outlook becomes increasingly unsteady. In these ways, Just Dawn is equal parts homage and lament for the ideological acuity and ambition of Whitlam’s agenda. It explores how Whitlam’s words can become markers for the complexities of both his own specific transformative policies, and the character of the socially progressive movement more broadly.

Effective public speaking for the Australian curriculum

Public speaking has been with us since the great orators of the cultural heritage tradition and is by no means a dying art. There is no substitute for the human voice in real time, and technology-delivered speeches cannot really move an audience in precisely ways that effective, live speaking can. Many teachers go to history to access models such as the great Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, or Winston Churchill’s call to battle. Most of us can recall Kevin Rudd’s historical apology to Indigenous Australia’s stolen generation, and more recently Noel Pearson’s moving eulogy delivered to a mourners at Gough Whitlam’s funeral. We are fortunate now to be able to access speeches from more recent history, closer to home and in our own accents through online repositories. This paper is, in part, written as a guide for pre-service teachers who did not learn this at school, and experienced teachers may also find it useful.

Performing Rural Masculinities : A Case Study of Diggers and Dealers

This chapter examines what Parpart and Zalewski (2008) label 'the man question' in terms of the rural. That is, 'how masculinity comes to be "made" as a continuing process within the social context' of rural places and spaces (Kerfoot and Knights 1993: 662). Our understanding of masculinities as discursively produced, relational, multiple and changing is given empirical force through a case study of the annual resource conference, Diggers and Dealers. The conference, held in the remote mining town of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia since 1992, is today the largest international meeting for the resource sector, attracting over 2000 attendees. Through an analysis of 120 texts related to the conference from 2006 to the present, including media repotis, blogs and conference programs and speeches, we demonstrate how, what is essentially a corporate event, is imported into the rural and constructed through the intersecting discourses of rurality, masculinity and heterosexuality. That is, though the first such meeting may have taken place spontaneously in Kalgoorlie, the delegates, and the 'skimpy' barmaids who serve patrons in their underwear or sometimes topless and are seen as central to the event, are flown into town for the conference. Kalgoorlie, as a working mining community on the edge of the deseti, provides both spectacle and conditions for the enactment of frontier masculinity not possible in the metropole.