How did we ever arrive at the conclusion that teachers are the problem? A critical reading in the discourses of Australian schooling

A Quality Teacher debate is presented within historical and contemporary contexts, including a political history of Australian schooling over the last 20 or so years. It is argued that there is a crisis of confidence in schooling, which is currently being played out by positioning teachers as the 'problem' and not just the 'solution' to this crisis.

Rhetorical approaches to scientific writing : an English-Polish contrastive study

This article reports an investigation of the rhetorical framework of research papers written by Polish scholars in English and Polish. It specifically targets the structure of introductions to articles in the field of psychology. Notions of linearity and digressiveness, as well as related issues of form and content and reader-writer reciprocity are discussed. The results of the analysis indicate that discoursal organization employed by Polish authors differs from that utilized by Anglo-American scholars. It is argued that styles of academic prose are interconnected with underlying cultural values.

‘On the influence of the scientific societies of New Zealand on the character of the nation’ - Collecting and identity at the Hawke’s Bay Philosophical Institute museum, 1874–1899

This paper explores the collection and collecting activity of the Hawke’s Bay Ph ilosophical Institute of Napier, New Zealand. It examines the development of the Institute’s museum and considers the motivations, intentions and interests of the collectors and their activity within the broader scientific and museum context. The work of two significant collectors is examined in detail: William Colenso, FLS, FRS, missionary, explorer and enthusiastic botanist, who engaged in over fifty years of correspondence and botanical exchange with Sir Joseph Hooker at Kew Gardens; and Augustus Hamilton, the curator of the museum who later became Director of New Zealand’s national collection at the Colonial Museum in Wellington. Through consideration of the Institute’s activities during the period 1874 to 1899, it is proposed that within the collection, the emergence of a distinct local identity can be discerned, during the early colonial period of Hawke’s Bay.

Staking a claim : analysing interventionist discourses of men's family violence

This research analysed behaviour change groupwork intervention as a response to the behaviour of men who perpetrate violence and abuse within the family.

It found incongruences between stated rhetoric and practice, and highlighted tensions between sector-specific language, ambitions to operate within a feminist analysis, professional claims to knowledge and expertise, and the development of standards for professional practice.

A framework for considering cross-cultural exchanges as a way to develop reasoning about environmental socio-scientific issues

This study analyses the evolution of socioscientific reasoning on sustainability, of French and Australian tertiary students exchanging ideas on a digital platform, concerning local (Australian, French) environmental SSIs, and global environmental SSIs. We explore how the exchange of arguments from various disciplinary and cultural perspectives, can promote reasoning about complex problem-situations in the environment. We develop a framework of reasoning, and show how it enables a productive analysis of the nature of the exchanges, and the quality of reasoning. We argue that such a strategy may improve epistemological training on the nature of science, and citizenship.

Teaching the scientific method in the curriculum

 In chemistry education, students not only learn chemical knowledge and skills, but about the culture of chemistry – how scientists think about, and practise, chemistry. Students often learn that science is practised according to the “scientific method”, which is a model of scientific discovery, expounded by science historians and philosophers. The idealised “scientific method” has a number of steps: the collection of information about a phenomenon; the development of a hypothesis to explain those observations; an experiment to test a prediction that arises from the hypothesis, perhaps including more observations and collection of more information; improvement of the hypothesis; and so on.

The problem is that students (and even some science professionals) often do not understand the philosophy behind the scientific method and paradoxically, the scientific method does not seem to apply to most careers in science. The true nature of science is that concepts have been developed though variants of the “scientific method”, and that a process of testing the predictive value of these concepts has lead to advances in that conceptual knowledge. Hence the “scientific method” applies to the development of scientific ideas, not necessarily to the work of all scientists. It is not whether we personally use the scientific method in our day-today work, but how we use, apply, think about and communicate scientific knowledge and skills that makes us chemists.

Travellers’ tales : the expatriate english language teacher in the new global culture

Most of the research into ELT has focused on its linguistic and methodological aspects, which are based on Western scientific traditions. The contributions and experiences of English language teachers themselves, especially their work in overseas contexts, have frequently been overlooked. This volume aims to document the complexity of ELT as 'work' in new global economic and cultural conditions, and to explore how this complexity is realised in the everyday experiences of ELT teachers. The development of ELT from the colonial experience to its current status as a global commodity is explored; ELT is then situated in the discourses of globalisation, specifically within Appadurai's theorisation of global flows of people, images, ideas, technology and money, or scapes. Within this framework, narratives are constructed from the experiences of Native-speaking English teachers. These reveal much about the personal, pedagogical and cultural dimensions of ELT work in non-Centre countries, and will contribute to a greater understanding of the intercultural dimensions of ELT for all those who work in it, and in related educational fields.

Scientific foundations for an IUCN red list of ecosystems

 An understanding of risks to biodiversity is needed for planning action to slow current rates of decline and secure ecosystem services for future human use. Although the IUCN Red List criteria provide an effective assessment protocol for species, a standard global assessment of risks to higher levels of biodiversity is currently limited. In 2008, IUCN initiated development of risk assessment criteria to support a global Red List of ecosystems. We present a new conceptual model for ecosystem risk assessment founded on a synthesis of relevant ecological theories. To support the model, we review key elements of ecosystem definition and introduce the concept of ecosystem collapse, an analogue of species extinction. The model identifies four distributional and functional symptoms of ecosystem risk as a basis for assessment criteria: a) rates of decline in ecosystem distribution; b) restricted distributions with continuing declines or threats; c) rates of environmental (abiotic) degradation; and d) rates of disruption to biotic processes. A fifth criterion, e) quantitative estimates of the risk of ecosystem collapse, enables integrated assessment of multiple processes and provides a conceptual anchor for the other criteria. We present the theoretical rationale for the construction and interpretation of each criterion. The assessment protocol and threat categories mirror those of the IUCN Red List of species. A trial of the protocol on terrestrial, subterranean, freshwater and marine ecosystems from around the world shows that its concepts are workable and its outcomes are robust, that required data are available, and that results are consistent with assessments carried out by local experts and authorities. The new protocol provides a consistent, practical and theoretically grounded framework for establishing a systematic Red List of the world’s ecosystems. This will complement the Red List of species and strengthen global capacity to report on and monitor the status of biodiversity.