Geographic range size, life history and rates of diversification in Australian mammals

What causes species richness to vary among different groups of organisms? Two hypotheses are that large geographical ranges and fast life history either reduce extinction rates or raise speciation rates, elevating a clade's rate of diversification. Here we present a comparative analysis of these hypotheses using data on the phylogenetic relationships, geographical ranges and life history of the terrestrial mammal fauna of Australia. By comparing species richness patterns to null models, we show that species are distributed nonrandomly among genera. Using sister-clade comparisons to control for clade age, we then find that faster diversification is significantly associated with larger geographical ranges and larger litters, but there is no evidence for an effect of body size or age at first breeding on diversification rates. We believe the most likely explanation for these patterns is that larger litters and geographical ranges increase diversification rates because they buffer species from extinction. We also discuss the possibility that positive effects of litter size and range size on diversification rates result from elevated speciation rates.

Aligning school reform and teacher education reform in the middle years: An Australian case study

This paper discusses the development of a new Bachelor of Education (Middle Years of Schooling) at The University of Queensland. The middle years of schooling have increasingly been the focus of education reform initiatives in Australia, but this has not been accompanied by significant increases in the number of teacher education institutions offering specialised middle schooling-level teacher preparation programmes. Considering the rapidly changing social and economic context and the emergent state of middle schooling in Australia, the programme represented a conceptual and practical opportunity and challenge for The University of Queensland team. Working collaboratively, the team sought to design a teacher education preservice programme that was both responsive and generative: that is, responsive to local school contexts and to current educational research and reform at national and international levels; and generative of cutting-edge theories and practices associated with middle schooling, teachers' work, and teacher education. This paper focuses on one component of the Middle Years of Schooling Teacher Education programme at The University of Queensland; namely, the practicum. We first present the underlying principles of the practicum programme and then examine "dilemmas" that emerged early in the practicum. These issues and tensions were associated with the ideals of "middle years" philosophy and the pragmatics of school reform associated with that new approach. In this paper, and within this context, we explore what it means to be both responsive and generative, and describe how we as teacher educators negotiated between the extremes these terms implied.