Beyond compliance: ACE and the disability standards for education in 2005.

The Disability Standards for Education 2005 make it unlawful for an education authority to discriminate against a person on the grounds of the person's disability, and providers of adult and community education (ACE) are specifically noted as education authorities in the Standards. Most ACE providers, working as they do from a community development basis, would consider themselves to be non-discriminatory. The devil, nevertheless, is in the detail, and it is one particular detail of the Standards that this article considers – Part 7: Standards for student support services. Research has indicated that this is an area with which ACE providers are likely to have problems. This article looks firstly at the place of people with a disability in ACE, and then at some of the provisions of the Standards as they relate to student support. Evidence to support the discussion is taken from three research projects into ACE provision for people with a disability. These studies are outlined before the author moves on to some of the issues indicated in the research. Further, some suggestions are made for compliance, and the need for ACE providers to go beyond compliance and consider advocacy to support the inclusion of people with a disability into ACE.

Futures in education

Futures education (FE) in a rapidly changing world is critical if young people are to be empowered to be proactive rather than reactive about the future. Research into young people's images and ideas of the future lead to the disturbing conclusion that, for many, the future is a depressing and fearful place where they feel hopeless and disempowered. On the other hand, as Richard Slaughter writes, 'young people are passionately interested in their own futures, and that of the society in which they live. They universally 'jump at the chance to study something with such intrinsic interest that also intersects with their own life interests in so many ways'. FE explicitly attempts to build on this interest and counter these fears by offering a profound and empowering set of learning strategies and ideas that can help people think and act critically and creatively about the future, without necessarily trying to predict it. Futures educators have, over the past decades, developed useful tools, ideas and a language for use with students of all ages to enable them to develop foresight literacy. Most of us tend to view the future as somehow beyond the present and rarely consider how decisions and choices made today profoundly affect not just one fixed future but any number of futures. The underlying goal of FE is to move from the idea of a single, pre-determined future to that of many possible futures, so that students begin to see that they can determine the future, that they need not be reactive and that they are not powerless. How does one do that? Ideas include, but are not limited to: timelines and Y-diagrams, futures wheels and mind maps, and 'Preferable, possible and probable' futures - a.k.a. the 3Ps. Current Australian curricula present education about the future in various implicit or explicit guises. A plethora of statements and curriculum outcomes mention the future, but essentially take 'it' for granted, and are uninformed by FE literature, language, ideas or tools. Science, the humanities and technology tend to be the main areas where such an implicit futures focus can be found. It also appears in documents about vocational education, civics and lifelong learning. Explicit FE is, as Beare and Slaughter put it, still the missing dimension in education. Explicit FE attempts to develop futures literacy, and draws widely upon futures studies literature for processes and content. FE provides such a wide range of ideas and tools that it can be incorporated into education in any number of ways. Programs in two very different schools, one primary and one secondary, are described in this article to provide examples of some of these ways. The first school, Kimberley Park State Primary School in Brisbane, operates with multi-age classrooms based on a 'thinking curriculum' developed around four organisers: change, perspectives, interconnectedness and sustainability. The second school, St John's Grammar School in Adelaide, is an independent school where FE operates as an integrated approach in Year Seven, as a separate one-semester subject in Year Nine and in separate subjects at other levels. Teachers both at Kimberley Park and St John's are very positive about FE. They say it promotes valuable and authentic learning, assists students to realise they have choices that matter and helps them see that the future need not be all doom and gloom. Because students are interested in the Big Questions, as one teacher put it, FE provides a perfect opportunity to address them, and to consider values that are fundamental for them and the future of the planet. Like any innovation, the long-term success of FE in schools depends on an embedding process so that the innovation does not depend on the enthusiasm and energy of a few individuals, only to disappear when they move on. It requires strong leadership, teacher knowledge, support and enthusiasm, and the support and understanding of the wider school community.

(W)reading, wrangling and the rhythm of the text: enhancing the education of young boys with game-based learning

W)reading, wrangling and the rhythm of the text: enhancing the education of young boys with game-based learning Connecting curriculum content to young people's engagement with texts outside of the classroom is increasingly recognised as a method of providing challenging learning environments (Beavis 1999). The introduction of games-based learning in areas such as literacy provides young people with a structural and conceptual framework with which many, particularly young males, may be familiar...

Shifting to more authentic language and literacy activity in the middle years

This paper reports on the shifts in literacy teaching and learning that occurred at a Melbourne primary school, one of twelve schools that took part in a large research project undertaken by staff at Deakin University funded by the Victorian Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs: Middle Years Literacy Research Project. The project focused on literacy teaching, learning, and assessment of students in the middle years of schooling. Through close collaboration between the researcher and teachers at the school, significant changes were made to the language and literacy program. These changes reflected current language theory and extended the school's focus on independent learning to the area of literacy. The development of more authentic ways of assessing student learning grew out of the work in the project as teachers sought assessment practices that were consistent with their philosophy of teaching and learning. With a focus on developing authentic literacy practices, teachers developed new ways of tracking and reporting student achievement.

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.

What's the difference and where is the evidence? Investigating student teachers learning about literacy in a school based vs university based experience

This paper is in response to increasing national and international interest in the role of university teacher education programs in preparing pre-service  teachers in the area of early years literacy. The most effective manner to  facilitate this learning in teacher education is however not known and much debate exists about the merits of university-based versus school-based  approaches. It is within this context that the authors of this paper conducted a study that investigated student teachers learning about literacy through two different approaches both with distinctive design features. The first approach offered student teachers a school based experience, adopting a two hour micro-teaching model in a preparatory classroom; the other, a mainstream university based approach where students attended a tutorial for two hours. These two approaches were then compared for factors that student teachers articulated through a written survey. In analysing the data, two main findings emerged; firstly from the student teachers’ perspective, choice of approach resulted in improved learning and secondly, from the researchers’ perspective that student teachers placed in the school based approach emerged with a deeper understanding of the complexity of literacy teaching in general.

Assume the position: reconfiguring the spatial in the pre-service education classroom

Current understandings of the practice of education locate pedagogy in the public domain through the articulation of the personal domain (Pinar, 2004). Critical literacy has provided teachers and teacher educators with a means of transforming subjectivity and relocating the personal through writing (Kamler, 2001). The emphasis in a critical literacy approach on the spoken and written word sits comfortably in the academic discourse of tertiary education, although it's engagement with the personal meets with some resistance. However, to engage the personal through arts based approaches meets far greater resistance. When used as the medium for core educational studies it provokes passionate responses of both dissent and accord. The authors argue the possibilities for an arts based pedagogy in pre-service education which provides a space for learning outside the accepted academic discourse and which supports the possibilities of imaging and knowing the positioned teacher. This research (dis)locates (Laclau, 1990; Edwards and Usher, 1997) the spatial configuration of the tertiary education classroom: reconfiguring the physical, positional, and epistemological.

Education and the colonial construction of whiteness

European imperialism spawned settlements of invasive white communities throughout Asia and Africa. Stoler and Cooper (1997: 27) argue these evolving colonial societies became subject to what amounts to an extended bourgeois project such that "we can not understand the construction of whiteness without exploring its class dimensions". If in terms of that project, nineteenth-century metropolitan society was deemed vulnerable to the ravages of a brutish and unruly working class, these white colonial outposts, whether constituted as settler colonies or colonies of exploitation, were even more vulnerable to the more insidious danger of miscegenation. Racial intermingling became simultaneously an issue of class and race. Imperialism therefore added a further dimension to the on-going detinition of "bourgeois-ness": the discourse of whiteness transforming a national discourse into a discourse on civilisation.

In focusing on education as the colonial authorities' response to what they perceived of as the danger of mixed parentage, this article develops a comparative framework that links coloniai settlements in Asia and Australia. It examines the discourse surrounding miscegenation, education and the "rising generation" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Dutch East Indies British India, French Indo China and (British) Australia. In so doing, I demonstrate the universality of a linked discourse of whiteness and class across Imperial Asia.

The changing face of literacy policy in Victoria

In the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, literacy has undergone a fundamental change in the shift from page to screen as the dominant basis for communication. In a communications environment characterised by multimodality - integration of modes of linguistic, visual, audio, gestural and spatial modes of meaning - young people require a broadened repertoire of literacy capacities.
Educational authorities with responsibility for literacy policy have responded in terms of curriculum, and assessment advice within a context of rapidly changing forms of multimodal communication. This paper details the early twenty-first century response of one educational authoríty, the Department of Education, Victoria, in reviewing early years literacy curriculum and assessment in light of the rapid developments in digital communications.

It takes more than breadcrumbs to learn generic skills : collaborating to improve information literacy

The effective teaching and learning of generic skills is becoming an important component of undergraduate education with the introduction of graduate attribute programmes in some Australian universities. Research shows that contextualised learning of these skills is important, but is a discipline-specific context sufficient to ensure student success in acquiring these skills? This paper studies the effectiveness of information skills
learning by a group of undergraduates using Brookfield’s concept of critical reflection and Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ). Most students reported positive experiences where the learning environment encouraged a deep approach to learning and negative experiences where that environment encouraged a surface approach. To ensure that students’ approach to
learning is appropriate for achieving the level of information literacy required of graduates, the study recommends the integration of information skills learning into course curricula through the close collaboration of academic and library staff.

Language, power and ruling relations in vocational education and training

This thesis uses institutional ethnography to explore the text-based regulatory framework of the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. Training Packages are national competency standards used to assess local workplace practice. The Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF) is a national compliance framework used to audit local learning and assessment practice. These texts operate in a ‘symbiotic relationship’ to achieve a policy goal of national consistency. The researcher explicates the social relations of VET starting from her disquiet as a practitioner. The thesis argues that Training Packages and the AQTF socially organise the content and delivery of local learning and assessment activities. VET practitioners struggle to use these texts to support good practice, and their hidden work maintains an unstable VET system. Yet the extralocal mode of ruling offers no room to challenge VET policy. The thesis explicates three themes. Interview data is used to explore the contrast between the institutional language of Training Packages and the vernacular of workplaces in which these texts are activated. Many practitioners and participants simply do not understand Training Package competency standards. Using these texts to judge employee performance shifts the policing of workplace practice from local sites to external VET authorities. A second theme emerges as the analysis explores why VET practitioners use this excluding language in their work with participants. Interview data reveals that local training organisations achieve different readings as they engage with ruling VET texts. Some organisations use the national texts as broad frameworks, allowing practitioners to create spaces for meaningful learning. Other organisations adopt a narrow and rule-bound reading of national texts, displacing practitioners’ authority over their own practice. A third theme is explored through examination of a sequence of VET texts. The review and redevelopment of the mandatory qualifications for VET practitioners identified the language of the competency standards as a significant accessibility issue. These concerns were reshaped and subsumed in an official response that established the use of this language as a compulsory assessable requirement and a language and literacy benchmark. The thesis presents a new understanding of VET as a regulatory framework established through multiple levels of ruling texts that connect local sites to national government agendas. While some individual practitioners are able to navigate through this system, there is an urgent need for practitioners as a profession to challenge national hegemony.

Information skills and the distance education student : an exploratory study into the approaches of Southern Cross University distance educators to the information needs of external students

This study unites the concepts of self-directed learning and information literacy in the external higher education environment. It asserts that many attempts by librarians at building better working relationships with distance educators have failed because the approaches of distance educators to the information needs of students are not adequately addressed. This exploratory and qualitatively based study examines the approaches of ten distance educators at Southern Cross University (SCU) to the information needs of their external students. It then makes recommendations based on these interviews which aim to improve relationships and co-operation between libraries and distance educators and to promote self-directed learning approaches by external students.

Doctoral research and scholarly communication : candidates, supervisors and information literacy

This study investigates information literacy and scholarly communication within the processes of doctoral research and supervision at a distance. Both doctoral candidates and supervisors acknowledge information literacy deficiencies and it is suggested that disintermediation and the proliferation of information may contribute to those deficiencies. Further to this, the influence of pedagogic continuity—particularly in relation to the information seeking behaviour of candidates—is investigated, as is the concomitant aspect of how doctoral researchers practise scholarly communication. The well-documented and enduring problem for candidates of isolation from the research cultures of their universities is also scrutinised. The contentious issue of more formally involving librarians in the doctoral process is also considered, from the perspective of candidates and supervisors. Superimposed upon these topical and timely issues is the theoretical framework of adult learning theory, in particular the tenets of andragogy. The pedagogical-andragogical orientation of candidates and supervisors is established, demonstrating both the differences and similarities between candidates and supervisors, as are a number of independent variables, including a comparison of on-campus and off-campus candidates. Other independent variables include age, gender, DETYA (Department of Education, Training & Youth Affairs) category, enrolment type, stage of candidature, employment and status, type of doctorate, and English/non-English speaking background. The research methodology uses qualitative and quantitative techniques encompassing both data and methodological triangulation. The study uses two sets of questionnaires and a series of in-depth interviews with a sample of on-campus and off-campus doctoral candidates and supervisors from four Australian universities. Major findings include NESB candidates being more pedagogical than their ESB counterparts, and candidates and supervisors from the Sciences are more pedagogical than those from Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, or Education. Candidates make a transition from a more dependent and pedagogically oriented approach to learning towards more of an independent and andragogical orientation over the duration of their candidature. However, over tune both on-campus and off-campus candidates become more isolated from the research cultures of their universities, and less happy with support received from their supervisors in relation to their literature reviews. Ill The study found large discrepancies in perception between the support supervisors believed they gave to candidates in relation to the literature review, and the support candidates believed they received. Information seeking becomes easier over time, but candidates face a dilemma with the proliferation of information, suggesting that disintermediation has exacerbated the challenges of evaluation and organisation of information. The concept of pedagogic continuity was recognised by supervisors and especially candidates, both negative and positive influences. The findings are critically analysed and synthesised using the metaphor of a scholarly 'Club' of which obtaining a doctorate is a rite of passage. Recommendations are made for changes in professional practice, and topics that may warrant further research are suggested.