Changes, challenges, and successes facing secondary pre-service teacher education in Australia

In December 2008, the Australian Government was presented with a report from a Review of Australian HigherEducation known as the ‘Bradley Review’. The report clearly articulates many challenges that lie ahead; it questions thestructure, organisation and financial position of Australia to effectively compete in the global economy. This paperprovides a succinct discussion of some of the challenges and dilemmas encountered at a metropolitan Australianuniversity in Melbourne within the Faculty of Arts and Education in the School of Education. The courses will bereaccredited in 2016 and has to comply with the new Australian Qualification Framework (AQF), the AustralianTeaching Standards Framework (AITSL) and the Victorian Institute of Teaching (VIT). By employing narrative inquiry,reflective practice and document analysis as methodology, I discuss the Bachelor of Teaching (Secondary)/Bachelor ofArts course (degree), the largest secondary pre-service teacher education course at a university in Melbourne presentingsome strategies and inviting international dialogue in relation to some of the challenges faced regarding increasednumbers of students and lower entrance scores. Limitations of the current course are acknowledged and generalizationscannot be made to other education courses at universities across Australia. However, some new initiatives in the facultyare offered.

The Patient Informatics Consult Service (PICS): an approach for a patient-centered service

The Patient Informatics Consult Service (PICS) at the Eskind Biomedical Library at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) provides patients with consumer-friendly information by using an information prescription mechanism. Clinicians refer patients to the PICS by completing the prescription and noting the patient's condition and any relevant factors. In response, PICS librarians critically appraise and summarize consumer-friendly materials into a targeted information report. Copies of the report are given to both patient and clinician, thus facilitating doctor-patient communication and closing the clinician-librarian feedback loop. Moreover, the prescription form also circumvents many of the usual barriers for patients in locating information, namely, patients' unfamiliarity with medical terminology and lack of knowledge of authoritative sources. PICS librarians capture the time and expertise put into these reports by creating Web-based pathfinders on prescription topics. Pathfinders contain librarian-created disease overviews and links to authoritative resources and seek to minimize the consumer's exposure to unreliable information. Pathfinders also adhere to strict guidelines that act as a model for locating, appraising, and summarizing information for consumers. These mechanisms—the information prescription, research reports, and pathfinders—serve as steps toward the long-term goal of full integration of consumer health information into patient care at VUMC.

Gaining by Giving? Peer Research into Service User and Carer Perceptions of Inclusivity in Higher Education

Service users and carers (SUAC) have made significant contributions to professional training in social work courses in Higher Education (HE) over the past decade in the UK. Such participation has been championed by government, academics and SUAC groups from a range of theoretical and political perspectives. Most research into the effectiveness of SUAC involvement at HE has come from the perspectives of academics and very little SUAC-led research exists. This qualitative peer research was led by two members of the University of Worcester’s SUAC group. Findings were that SUAC perceived their involvement brought benefits to students, staff, the University and the local community. Significant personal benefits such as finding a new support network, increased self-development and greater confidence to manage their own care were identified in ways that suggested that the benefits that can flow from SUAC involvement at HE are perhaps more far-reaching than previously recognised. Barriers to inclusion were less than previously reported in the literature and the humanising effects of SUAC involvement are presented as a partial antidote to an increasingly marketised HE culture.

Promoting cultural understandings through song across the Tasman: pre-service primary teacher education

As tertiary music educators across the Tasman we argue that music, particularly song, is an effective medium for teaching and learning about non-western music when preparing generalist primary Pre-Service Teachers (PSTs). Using ‘voice’ as a portable and accessible vehicle to transmit cultural understandings, we draw on the Zimbabwean proverb ‘if you can speak you can learn to sing and if you can walk you can learn to dance’ to foster music creativity and enhance literacy development and confidence in our PSTs. Using narrative methodology, we share our teaching and learning experience at Deakin University (Australia) and the University of Auckland (New Zealand) where we include African and Māori music respectively as effective ways to promote cultural understandings. In our experience, the teaching of song goes beyond teaching a tune or something that is ‘fun’. Rather, it is as an effective context for developing knowledge, skills and understandings about multiculturalism and the importance and need to be ‘inclusive of others’. PSTs gained socially, linguistically, cultural and emotionally, to name a few. We encourage other music educators at all education levels to be culturally and linguistically inclusive and to explore non-western music as a positive teaching and learning experience.

Toward Self-Organising Service Communities

This paper discusses a framework in which catalog service communities are built, linked for interaction, and constantly monitored and adapted over time. A catalog service community (represented as a peer node in a peer-to-peer network) in our system can be viewed as domain specific data integration mediators representing the domain knowledge and the registry information. The query routing among communities is performed to identify a set of data sources that are relevant to answering a given query. The system monitors the interactions between the communities to discover patterns that may lead to restructuring of the network (e.g., irrelevant peers removed, new relationships created, etc.).

The Impact of Internal Market Orientation on Staff Service Behaviours

The impact of service direction, service training and staff behaviours on perceptions of service delivery are examined. The impact of managerial behaviour in the form of internal market orientation (IMO) on the attitudes of frontline staff towards the firm and its consequent influence on their customer oriented behaviours is also examined. Frontline service staff working in the consumer transport industry were surveyed to provide subjective data about the constructs of interest in this study, and the data were analysed using structural equations modelling employing partial least squares estimation. The data indicate significant relationships between internal market orientation (IMO), the attitudes of the employees to the firm and their consequent behaviour towards customers. Customer orientation, service direction and service training are all identified as antecedents to high levels of service delivery. The study contributes to marketing theory by providing quantitative evidence to support assumptions that internal marketing has an impact on services success. For marketing practitioners, the research findings offer additional information about the management, training and motivation of service staff towards service excellence.