Student evaluations and the impact on curriculum, teaching and assessment

This presentation discusses some of the major pressures on universities to frame curriculum around employability skills and professional requirements. Recent evaluation of Australian university courses by graduates suggests that many institutions remain perplexed as to how to do this. The presentation suggests that the student evaluations do not necessarily indicate poor curriculum development but possibly a lack of making skill development more overt through teaching and assessment. The main objective of this presentation is to outline and describe a project on how curriculum needs to and can respond to professional needs and what this may entail for the way in which traditional professional courses are taught and assessed. The presentation seeks to involve participants in identifying and discussing options for the teaching and assessment of skills and possible options for how these skills can be progressively developed throughout a course of study.

Curriculum frameworks : who (or what) is framing whom?

Various theorists and educators over the years have produced their preferred knowledge groupings or frameworks. Most well-known ones include those produced by Hirst (1974) and Phenix (1964).

Curriculum frameworks were advocated by many educators in the 1990s as an important springboard and focus for teachers in terms of curriculum planning. It was argued that they would be a stimulus for evoking creative ideas and activities. Yet, they are also a major tool for control and direction.

The use of curriculum frameworks were very evident in Australia in April 1991 when eight learning areas were created by the Australian Education Council (AEC) and planned for use in all states and territories. These eight learning areas, or key learning areas (KLA's) have largely endured in all states and territories even though the ambitious plans for national statements and profiles did not survive.

This paper provides a stock-take on the current uses, benefits and problems in using KLA's as curriculum frameworks in Australia. There are many different contextual factors operating, which affect their use and effectiveness. Disjunctions can occur between major players at federal and state levels which provide different and often conflicting points of leverage. It is timely to analyse their impact on curriculum planning and implementation in Australia.

Mapping drug calculation skills in an undergraduate nursing curriculum

The ability to calculate drug dosages correctly is an essential skill for registered nurses to possess. Performing drug calculations accurately is not a skill that new graduates have the luxury of developing over time. Drug errors are in many instances directly related to either the administration of an incorrect dose or incorrect infusion rate (Gladstone, 1995) caused by calculation errors. A strategy for implementing drug calculation skills into our new under graduate nursing curriculum was initiated to assist students in developing proficiency in drug calculations. The aim of this program is to promote the development of calculation skills in undergraduate nursing students, rather than simply assessing their skills.

The global corporate curriculum and the young cyberflâneur as global citizen

Contents: Introduction: youth, mobility, and identity / Nadine Dolby and Fazal Rizvi -- New times, new identities -- The global corporate curriculum and the young cyberfleneur as global citizen / Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen -- Shoot the elephant: antagonistic identities, neo-marxist nostalgia, and the remorselessly vanishing past / Cameron McCarthy and Jennifer Logue -- New textual worlds: young people and computer games / Catherine Beavis -- Diasporic youth: rethinking borders and boundaries in the new modernity -- Consuming difference: stylish hybridity, diasporic identity, and the politics of culture / Michael Giardina -- Diasporan moves: African Canadian youth and identity formation / Jennifer Kelly -- Popular culture and recognition: narratives of youth and Latinidad / Angharad Valdivia -- Mobile students in liquid modernity: negotiating the politics of transnational identities / Parlo Singh and Catherine Doherty -- Youth and the global context: transforming us where we live -- The children of liberalization: youth agency and globalization in India / Ritty Lukose -- Youth cultures of consumption in Johannesburg / Sarah Nuttall -- Identities for neoliberal times: constructing enterprising selves in an American suburb / Peter Demerath and Jill Lynch -- Disciplining "Generation M": the paradox of creating a "local" national identity in an era of "global" flows / Aaron Koh -- Marginalization, identity formation, and empowerment: youth's struggles for self and social justice / David Quijada.

Paying attention to texts : literacy, culture and curriculum

In his paper in English in Australia in 2002, Bill Green called for a literacy project of our own, and for the need to think again, and think newly about the place of literary literacy within contemporary curriculum. But what does literary literacy mean in curriculum that recognises a wide diversity of texts and literacies? If literature and close attention to the aesthetic and imaginative dimensions remain important, what kinds of texts should we value, and how should we attend to them? This article considers how such matters might be taken up with multimodal texts of different kinds.

Barriers to continuing medical education in Australian prevocational doctors

To determine perceived barriers to continuing education for Australian hospital-based prevocational doctors, a cross sectional cohort survey was distributed to medical administrators for secondary redistribution to 2607 prevocational doctors from August 2003 to October 2004. Four hundred and seventy valid questionnaires (18.1%) were returned. Only seven per cent (33/470) did not identify any barriers to continuing education. Barriers identified the most were lack of time (85% [371/437]), clinical commitment (65% [284/437]), resistance from registrars (13% [57/437]) and resistance from consultant staff (10% [44/437]). Other barriers included workload issues (27% [27/98]), teaching program inadequacies (26% [25/98]), lack of protected time for education (17% [17/98]), motivational issues (11% [10/98]) and geographic remoteness (10% [10/98]). Australian graduates (87%) identified lack of time more frequently than international medical graduates (77%) (P=0.036). Perceived barriers did not differ significantly between doctors of differing postgraduate years.

Self-rated preparedness of Australian prevocational hospital doctors for emergencies

Objective: To determine perceived preparedness of Australian hospital-based prevocational doctors for resuscitation skills and management of emergencies, and to identify differences between doctors who perceive themselves well prepared and those who perceive themselves poorly prepared for emergencies, in demographics and exposure to desired learning methods.

Methods: Questionnaire consisting of a mix of graded Likert scales and free-text answers distributed to 36 Australian hospitals for secondary distribution to hospital medical officers.

Results: From 2607 questionnaires posted, 470 (18.1%) were returned. Thirty-one per cent (95% confidence interval [CI] 26–35%) felt well prepared for resuscitation and management of emergencies, 41% (CI 37–45%) felt adequately prepared and 28% (CI 24–32%) felt they were not well prepared. Those who felt well prepared reported that they had experienced more exposure to a range of educational methods, including consultant contact, supervisor feedback, clinical skills, high fidelity simulator sessions and unit meetings. Well-prepared and poorly prepared doctors had similar opinions of the usefulness of various learning methods, but the poorly prepared group more frequently expressed a desire for increased exposure to contact with registrars and consultants, clinical skills sessions and hospital and unit meetings. There were no differences in gender, age or country of origin (Australia vs international medical graduates) between those who felt well or poorly prepared.

Conclusions: Many prevocational hospital doctors feel inadequately prepared for the management of emergencies. Perceived preparedness is associated with more exposure to particular educational activities. Increasing exposure to learning of emergencies in undergraduate and prevocational years could reduce the number of junior doctors who feel poorly prepared for emergencies.

Travelling pedagogies : curriculum for a global world

Travel can interrupt and disrupt ways of seeing and understanding the world. For teachers, their experience of travel is often overlooked as a resource to be utilised in the classroom and school. This paper explores the impact of travel on teachers’ work through analysis of two teachers’ experiences of an educational study tour. The impact of this travel can be seen through revised curriculum, teachers’ increased knowledge and altered customs. A discussion of this impact is through the social imaginary. The central argument is that teachers’ travel experiences are an undervalued resource with potential to shape a global education and improve classroom effectiveness. It concludes with speculation about the possibilities for enrichment of classroom practices through travel experiences both as personal growth and curriculum renewal that responds to education for a changing world.

Unfixing knowledges : queering the literacy curriculum

In the literacy classroom, students have few opportunities to use their literacy practices to contest narratives of race, class, gender and sexuality. Instead, extensive time is spent completing literacy activities associated with what “good” readers and writers do. Students’ literacy practices are often formulaic, repetitive, and serve classroom management strategies producing a mythic narrative of good literacy teaching. This paper introduces a queer literacy curriculum that poses pedagogy as a series of questions: What does being taught, what does knowledge do to students? How does knowledge become understood in the relationship between teacher/text and student? (Lusted, 1986) It emphasizes developing critical analyses of heterosexism, heteronormativity and normativity with the goal of helping students understand binary categories are not givens, rather social constructions we are often forced to perform (Butler, 1990) through available discourses. The paper highlights an interruption into the literacy curriculum where, through collective memory work, students investigated, analysed and contested the usually-not-noticed ways a small understanding of heterosexuality has come to structure their lives.

Kerry Freedman's Teaching visual culture : curriculum, aesthetics and the social life of Art

Teaching Visual Culture: Curriculum, Aesthetics and the Social Life of Art, Kerry Freedman (2003) New York: Teachers College Press & Reston: National Art Education Association, xiv + 187 pp., ISBN 0-8077-4372-0 (hbk £29.95)

This critical review has two principal goals. First of all, it will briefly summarize how Kerry Freedman’s ambitious eight-chapter monograph initially sets in train a number of key themes, all of which are aimed at enlarging if not transforming visual arts practice. Secondly, it will critically disclose a small set of pivotal assumptions which call any uncritical support for visual culture as the panacea for arts education into question. More particularly, we shall conclude, the logical underpinnings of Teaching Visual Culture are open to serious doubt in at least two respects.