Picturing Australian history: visual texts in nonfiction for children

Time is one of the most prominent themes in the relatively young genre of children's literature, for the young, like adults, want to know about the past. The historical novel of the West grew out of Romanticism, with its exploration of the inner world of feeling, and it grew to full vigor in the era of imperialism and the exploration of the physical world. From the end of the 18th century, children's books flourished, partly in response to these cultural and political influences. After Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, literary works began to grapple with skepticism about the nature of time itself. This book explores how children's writers have presented the theme and concept of time past. While the book looks primarily at literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, it considers a broad range of historical material treated in works from that period. Included are discussions of such topics as Joan of Arc in children's literature, the legacy of Robinson Crusoe, colonial and postcolonial children's literature, the Holocaust, and the supernatural. International in scope, the volume examines history and collective memory in Portuguese children's fiction, Australian history in picture books, Norwegian children's literature, and literary treatments of the great Irish famine. So too, the expert contributors are from diverse countries and backgrounds.

Mathematical knowledge of some entrants to a pre-service education course

Standards for teaching emphasise the need for teachers to have deep content knowledge. To assess the mathematical knowledge of students enrolling in its B.Ed. program, the University of New England has introduced a mathematics diagnostic test. This work is the first stage of an ongoing research project into the numeracy needs of students entering the B.Ed. program. The test is a pen-andpaper test that replaces previous on-line, multiple-choice tests. This paper reports on the test results, discusses some common errors made by students and outlines the future direction of the research.

Towering over all : the Italianate villa in the colonial landscape

The Picturesque aesthetic emerged in the later 18th century, uniting the Sublime and the Beautiful and had its roots in the paintings of Claude Lorrain. In Britain, and in Australia, it came to link art, literature and landscape with architecture. The Picturesque aesthetic informed much of colonial culture which was achieved, in part, through the production and dissemination of architectural pattern books catering for the aspirations of the rising middle classes. This was against a background of political change including democratic reform. The Italianate villa, codified and promoted in such pattern books, was a particularly successful synthesis of style, form and function. The first Italianate villa in England, Cronkhill (1803) by John Nash contains all the ingredients which were essential to the model and had a deeper meaning. Deepdene (from 1807) by Thomas Hope gave the model further impetus. The works of Charles Barry and others in a second generation confirmed the model's acceptability. In Britain, its public status peaked with Osborne House (from 1845), Queen Victoria's Italianate villa on the Isle of Wight, Robert Kerr used a vignette of Osborne House on the title page of his sophisticated and influential pattern book, The Gentleman's House (1864,1871). It was one of many books, including those of J.C, Loudon and AJ. Downing, current in colonial Victoria. The latter authors and horticulturists were themselves villa dwellers with libraries and orchards, two criteria for the true villa lifestyle. Situation and a sense of retreat were the two further criteria for the villa lifestyle. As the new colony of Victoria blossomed between 1851 and 1891, the Italianate villa, its garden setting and its landscape siting captured the tenor of the times. Melbourne, the capital was a rich manufacturing metropolis with a productive hinterland and international markets. The people enjoyed a prosperity and lifestyle which they wished to display. Those who had a position in society were keen to demonstrate and protect it. Those with aspirations attempted to provide the evidence necessary for such acceptance, The model matured and became ubiquitous. Its evolution can be traced through a series of increasingly complicated rural and suburban examples, a process which modernist historians have dismissed as a decadent decline. These villas, in fact, demonstrate an increasingly sophisticated retreat by merchants from ‘the Town’ and by graziers from ‘the Country’. In both town and country, the towers of villas mark territory newly acquired. The same claim was often made in humbler situations. Government House, Melbourne (from 1871), a splendid Italianate villa and arguably finer than Osborne House, was set in a cultivated landscape and towered above all It incorporated the four criteria and, in addition, claimed its domain, focused authority and established the colony's social status. It symbolised ancient notions of democracy and idealism but with a modem appreciation for the informal and domestic. Government House in Melbourne is the epitome of the Italianate villa in the colonial landscape and is the climax of the Picturesque aesthetic in Victoria.

Payoff, capital and teachers : education policies of the 90s

Although education remains in the flux of change, reviewing the trends in educational reforms in the last decade provides opportunity to learn from the past with a view to improving the educational strategies guiding reforms in the future. As globalisation has become more consolidated in education policy, investigating how particular ideas about globalisation inhabited policy and established over time, presents ways of addressing and challenging the assumptions about education and globalization in the 90s and the fall out from these ideas. Using evidence based policy research, this paper explores how educational policies from OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank coalesced with certain notions of globalisation that strategically guided educational reforms. An analysis of education-globalisation nexus in the policies of OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank evidences the distinct character and agenda of each agency. By focusing on textual evidence, in a range of education policy from the 90s, the paper discusses how policy consolidated particular ideas about globalization and presented ‘simple’ recipes for educational change. When reviewing the 90s, the relationship between education and global change shows that OECD policy emphasized education as a social and individual payoff, World Bank policy focused on education creating certainty enabling the free flow of capital, and UNESCO policy problematised globalization and focused on the importance of teachers as a way to create stability in education during the paradoxical times.

Building professional capital : New Zealand social workers and continuing education

In a qualitative study of the engagement of New Zealand social workers in continuing professional education the construct "professional capital", a form of symbolic capital, explains complex links between perceived status within institutional settings and the aspirations of practitioners. Strategies for developing greater engagement in scholarship and research are recommended.

Janet Lady Clarke (1851-1909) 'Leader in the good work'

This thesis is a biographical study which examines the life and career of Janet Lady Clarke. As a leader of women's philanthrophic, health, educational and political organisations in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Victoria, she promoted new ideas within a conservative colonial society. Her legacies remain an integral part of Victoria's cultural heritage.

Critical multicultural teacher education

This thesis examined how best to prepare teachers to work in bicultural and multicultural New Zealand. Drawing on life history interviews with teacher education students, it identified key areas for reform, including closer examination of practices in multicultural education and greater acknowledgement of the cultural background of teachers themselves.

History researcher development and research capacity in Australia and New Zealand

 This article presents data and discussion on history researcher development and research capacities in Australia and New Zealand, as evidenced in analysis of history PhD theses’ topics. The article is based on two independent studies of history PhD thesis topics, using a standard discipline coding system. It shows some marked differences in the Australian and New Zealand volumes and distributions of history PhDs, especially for PhDs conducted on non-local/national topics. These differences reflect national researcher development, research capacities and interests, in particular local, national and international histories, and have implications for the globalisation of scholarship. Thesis topics are used as a proxy for the graduate’s research capacity within that topic. However, as PhD examiners have attested to the significance and originality of the thesis, this is taken as robust. The longitudinal nature of the research suggests that subsequent years’ data and analysis would provide rich information on changes to history research capacity. Other comparative (i.e. international) studies would provide interesting analyses of history research capacity. There are practical implications for history departments in universities, history associations, and government (PhD policy, and history researcher development and research capacity in areas such as foreign affairs). There are social implications for local and community history in the knowledge produced in the theses, and in the development of local research capacity. The work in this article is the first to collate and analyse such thesis data either in Australia or New Zealand. The comparative analyses of the two datasets are also original.

The social work bursary in England : impact of funding arrangments upon social work education and the future workforce

The financial support available to students on social work qualifying programmes appears to be a neglected topic in published social work research. This article draws on a literature review and secondary data analysis of an existing dataset to discuss what is known about this topic and specifically considers the impact of a financial incentive to undertake social work qualifying education in England, the social work bursary. In the context of major changes to the funding of higher education in England, it suggests that the introduction of the social work bursary has helped increase the number of students enrolling on social work qualifying programmes in England and supported some students whose personal and financial circumstances might have prevented them from undertaking social work qualifying education. While students report their appreciation of financial assistance in the form of the bursary, many have additional needs in the form of support for children and other dependants, and for help in defraying the costs of travel while undertaking practice placements. The paper concludes that attention needs to be paid to the specific needs of social work students when considering the impact of changes to funding higher education.

Seeing like PISA: a cautionary tale about the performativity of international assessments

PISA is an extremely influential large-scale assessment, and its ‘policy lessons’ are being incorporated in a range of nations all over the world. In this paper I argue that not only is PISA influencing policies and practices, but also that ‘seeing like PISA’ is becoming a widespread phenomenon. Globally, education administration is now characterized by an intense focus onoutput measurement, a highly competitive environment heightened by national and international rankings, and an economic and instrumentalist approach to education and education reform. Using James Scott’s account of 18th Century German forestry practices as a parable, this paper suggests that ‘seeing like PISA’ could have far reaching and damaging effects. The paper proposes the following: first, understanding PISA as a ‘project of legibility’ enhances our appreciation of its purposes and possibilities. Second, PISA is much more than a ‘representation’ of existing conditions, but is creating new conditions – in other words, it is not descriptive but performative; and, finally, ‘seeing like PISA’ is bringing about deep-rooted changes, and it is likely that the effects will be very long-term. Some of these effects may only manifest themselves in the next fifteen or twenty years; and, by then, the possibilities of redressing some of the ill effects may be very limited.