Managing dynamic public sector networks : effectiveness, performance, and a methodological framework in the field of national security

Networks are increasing in number and in importance across the security field as a means of providing inter-agency coordination. Based on a large qualitative study of networks in the field of national security in Australia, this article aims to advance our knowledge of the internal properties of public sector networks in the field of national security and the conditions shaping their performance. It puts forward a multi-level theoretical framework involving five interdependent levels of analysis—structural, cultural, policy, technological, and relational—which aims to account for the internal properties of networks and examines each of these levels in relation to public sector networks in the field of national security. Using detailed interviews with senior members of security, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies, the article aims to highlight the potential lessons this framework has for strategically organizing and managing dynamic networks within and beyond the field of national security.

Nano-precipitation : preparation and application in the field of pharmacy

Over the last 30 years, nanoparticle-based medicine has received tremendous attention due to its advances with smart therapeutics and less toxicity. Few nanomedicine products have been approved for commercial use in the clinic (such as Doxil®, Ambraxane®…). Nanomedicine research is still at its early stage and the preparation of nanoparticles must be carefully considered. Systems involving further increased supersaturation, either via solvent evaporation, temperature reduction or anti-solvent mixture, were suggested to be capable of inducing nanoprecipitation (NPT). Since this technique is straight-forward, fast and easy to duplicate in practice, it is highly preferred and recommended. In this review, the process of NTP was described and discussed in detail. Factors that affect the encapsulation efficiency, the nanoparticle size, the morphology and the stability of nanoparticles prepared by NTP were described. This process is one of the most preferable processes for preparing solid nano-protein due to their elegant techniques that preserve the bioactivity of proteins. Although the production of nanoparticles by this process has not been applied in the pharmaceutical industry due to the organic solvent issue, the production equipment for large-scale has been marketed.

Equity considerations for open educational resources in the glocalization of education

Open educational resources (OER) have become new buzzwords in the glocalization of education. While OER are often espoused as enabling educational equity, the reality is not always the case. Looking only at the positives of new educational methods can mask perpetuating challenges, which makes the open aspect of OER a misnomer. Taking an alternative stance, this article critically evaluates the broader notion of OER through the lens of equity. It contends that while equity reasons often underpin the provision of OER, challenges continue to be experienced by some in accessing open digital materials for learning. This article explores some of these issues and argues that equity considerations are fundamental in OER design.

Invested truth in World Bank education policy: The exclusion of educators' perspectives in the future of education

The objective of the paper is to critically review the positioning of teachers in the World Bank's Education Sector Strategy 2020. The review is framed through the lens of Habermas' communicative action theory (CAT) to show how teachers' truth, rightfulness and truthfulness are obfuscated in the new policy. Habermas centres notions of democratization and participation as key requirements for representative systems. However, as the new strategy takes shapes, what is more apparent is the further marginalization of educators and education scholars from education reforms. The review suggests that education and teachers' work is becoming further embedded in broader social and economic systems. This is despite extensive consultations that are a feature of the new strategy and its development. The paper raises questions about the work of teachers and their place within education systems whose development is influenced by agencies such as the World Bank. As more of the analytical and intellectual tasks associated with education and teachings are being taken over agencies and organisations, t...

Middle-class school choice in urban spaces: the economics of public schooling and globalized education reform

Middle-class School Choice in Urban Spaces examines government-funded public schools from a range of perspectives and scholarship in order to examine the historical, political and economic conditions of public schooling within a globalized, post-welfare context. In this book, Rowe argues that post-welfare policy conditions are detrimental to government-funded public schools, as they engender consistent pressure in rearticulating the public school in alignment with the market, produce tensions in serving the more historical conceptualizations of public schooling, and are preoccupied by contemporary profit-driven concerns.Chapters focus on public schooling from different global perspectives, with examples from Chile and the US, to examine how various social movements encapsulate ideologies around public schooling. Rowe also draws upon a rich, five-year ethnographic study of campaigns lobbying the Victorian State Government in Australia for a brand-new, local-specific public school. Critical attention is paid to the public school as a means to achieve empowerment and overcome discrimination, and both a local and global lens are used to identify how parents choose the public school, the values they attach to it, and the strategies they use to obtain it. Also considered, however, are how quality gaps, distances and differences between public schools threaten to undermine the democracy of education as a means for individuals to be socially mobile and escape poverty.This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of global social movements and activism around public education. As such, it will be of key interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the field of education, specifically those working on school choice, class and identity, as well as educational geography.

Democratising the literary experience: metafiction in the novels of Agusta Wibisono

This paper is a study of the intersection of text, context and presentation in Agusta Wibisono's two novels based on the wayang shadow puppet theatre of Central Java, Balada Narasoma (The Ballad of Narasoma) (1990) and Balada Cinta Abimanyu dan Lady Sundari (The Ballad of the Love of Abimanyu and Lady Sundari) (1990). It should be observed from the outset that in the field of modern Indonesian literary studies Agusta Wibisono is a virtually unknown figure, and in Indonesia his two novels are long out of print and now extremely hard to find. The publishing house responsible for the novels' initial print run, Pustakakarya Grafikatama, is now defunct. Adding to the enigma surrounding this man, Agusta Wibisono is in fact a pseudonym for a writer and a pilot in the Indonesian airforce, Mohammad Agus Suhadi.

Effectiveness and efficiency in the treatment of gambling disorder : reflections on the Dodo Bird Conjecture

In the field of research into the treatment of problem gambling, researchers have been attempting to identify the treatment pathways that are effective in remediating gambling disorder among people seeking help. In spite of these efforts, research results remain equivocal in relation to which components of the various treatment options are effective, echoing the familiar claim that all psychotherapy treatments are effective, the Dodo Bird Conjecture.This recent tendency towards the revival of the Dodo Bird Conjecture in the field of gambling research is due to factors ranging from a continuing lack of clarity about the effective components of treatments, subjective therapist effects and the lack of validated repeated measures of outcome to assess changes in self-reported data on gambling urge: anxiety, depression and changes in the 'gambling disorder' diagnosis over time.

Hybridity, globalisation and literacy education in the context of New York City

Although multiliteracies have been well theorised in recent years, few studies have researched the practical aspects of developing a curriculum of multiliteracies. This article examines multiliteracies as a crossdisciplinary curriculum practice, drawing on data from a 3-year study in an urban middle school. The data show possibilities for students to engage in critique and to move toward designing multimodal texts. Using Bourdieusian concepts of social capital and academic field, we explore the struggles around learning to inhabit certain school discourses.

A fish out of water? Legal practitioner - practitioner teacher? Bourdieu, the legal field and the scholarship of teaching in practical legal training

It is surprising to discover during early doctoral research that there is a paucity of Australian scholarship using Bourdieu’s theoretical tools in the field of law, and in the sub-field of post-graduate pre-admission practical legal training. This article introduces Bourdieu’s conceptions of habitus, field, categories of capital, symbolic violence, and misrecognition. It describes how Bourdieu applied these tools to identify structural hostility between legal academics and practitioners, and the struggles for control in the field of law. Review of three North American studies that used Bourdieu’s theories follows, involving law students’ habitus in transition, class stratification in legal education, and gender stratification in law firm partnerships. Drawing on three internally connected ‘moments’ necessary to use Bourdieu’s tools, together with four critical questions concerning teachers’ engagement with the scholarship of teaching, this article identifies new questions for investigation. These questions will frame further research to discover whether the objective structures of the practical legal training field and the habitus of legal practitioners constrains them to act as ‘fish out of water’ in the context of a scholarship of teaching.

Investigating the effectiveness of teacher education for early career teachers in diverse settings: analysis of large-scale survey data

‘As researchers and practitioners in the field of teacher education, we seem ill prepared to respond to critics who question the value of professional education for teachers with evidence of our effectiveness’ (Grossman, 2008, p.13). While there are many small-scale, nuanced case studies that speak about the particularities of specific teacher education practices, large scale, systematic, longitudinal studies that can provide rich and comprehensive data about the effectiveness of teacher education are limited (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005). In Australia, the Studying the Effectiveness of Teacher Education (SETE) project is addressing this gap by investigating the effectiveness of teacher education programs in preparing teachers for the variety of school settings in which they begin their careers. This three-year study utilises large-scale surveys and case studies to construct a deeper understanding of early career teachers’ experiences. It tracks all 2010/2011 teacher education graduates in Queensland and Victoria to investigate the effectiveness of particular characteristics of their teacher education programs in equipping them with the capacity to meet the learning needs of young people in a diverse range of Australian school settings.

This paper will discuss findings from the first of a series of online surveys completed by teacher education graduates in Queensland and Victoria (March-April 2012). Survey data includes teacher demographic information which form independent variables to inform inferential statistical analysis. Beginning teacher responses are mapped against key characteristics of participants' pre-service programs and framed in relation to the key themes of curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, behaviour management, and engagement with school stakeholders and local community. The findings will assist teacher educators design teacher education programs for effective beginning teaching in diverse settings and will also provide an evidentiary basis for policy decisions regarding teacher education and beginning teaching.

Consumer involvement in the tertiary-level education of mental health professionals: a systematic review

A systematic review of the published work on consumer involvement in the education of health professionals was undertaken using the PRISMA guidelines. Searches of the CINAHL, MEDLINE, and PsychINFO electronic databases returned 487 records, and 20 met the inclusion criteria. Further papers were obtained through scanning the reference lists of those articles included from the initial published work search (n = 9) and contacting researchers in the field (n = 1). Thirty papers (representing 28 studies) were included in this review. Findings from three studies indicate that consumer involvement in the education of mental health professionals is limited and variable across professions. Evaluations of consumer involvement in 16 courses suggest that students gain insight into consumers' perspectives of: (i) what life is like for people with mental illness; (ii) mental illness itself; (iii) the experiences of admission to, and treatment within, mental health services; and (iv) how these services could be improved. Some students and educators, however, raised numerous concerns about consumer involvement in education (e.g. whether consumers were pursuing their own agendas, whether consumers' views were representative). Evaluations of consumer involvement in education are limited in that their main focus is on the perceptions of students. The findings of this review suggest that public policy expectations regarding consumer involvement in mental health services appear to be slowly affecting the education of mental health professionals. Future research needs to focus on determining the effect of consumer involvement in education on the behaviours and attitudes of students in healthcare environments.

Widening and expanding participation in Australian higher education: in the absence of sociological imagination

Social inclusion in Australian higher education was high on the agenda of the recent Rudd/Gillard Australian Government. This paper offers an assessment of that agenda, particularly the extent to which it worked in favour of under-represented groups. It argues that the Government’s widening and expansion policies and its equity and aspiration strategies lacked sociological imagination, projecting deficits onto individuals who refused to be taken in by its ambitions for higher education participation. The paper concludes that in the absence of a sociological imagination in government policy, the freedoms of disadvantaged groups continued to be curtailed: not just to choose futures in keeping with their goals but also the freedom to formulate choices.

Risky business: stories from the field of rural community nurses' work in domestic violence.

This paper reports on a descriptive study into family violence in rural Victoria. Focus groups were held in a number of areas across rural Victoria with a total of 24 community nurse participants. The focus groups were audio-taped and the tapes transcribed to enable the clustering of themes. The dominant themes were: picking up cues, helping and helplessness, holding secrets and quiet resistance. Underpinning all these themes however, was the notion of 'risky business'. All nurses in the study gave examples of situations that they encountered; their ways of helping; of working sensitively; of working around a system that is unhelpful; and the ways in which their work while skilled, thoughtful and wise, is also costly in terms of the emotional wounds they carry. Rural nurses work with considerable risk and courage as they engage in the care and support of women experiencing family violence.