Planning research and educational partnerships with Indigenous communities : practice, realities and lessons

Increasingly planning practice and research are having to engage with Indigenous communities in Australia to empower and position their knowledge in planning strategies and arguments. But also to act as articulators of their cultural knowledge, landscape aspirations and responsibilities and the need to ensure that they are directly consulted in projects that impact upon their ‘country’ generally and specifically. This need has changed rapidly over the last 25 years because of land title claim legal precedents, state and Commonwealth legislative changes, and policy shifts to address reconciliation and the consequences of the fore-going precedents and enactments. While planning instruments and their policies have shifted, as well as research grant expectations and obligations, many of these Western protocols do not recognise and sympathetically deal with the cultural and practical realities of Indigenous community management dynamics, consultation practices and procedures, and cultural events much of which are placing considerable strain upon communities who do not have the human and financial resources to manage, respond, co-operate and inform in the same manner expected of non-Indigenous communities in Australia. This paper reviews several planning formal research, contract research and educational engagements and case studies between the authors and various Indigenous communities, and highlights key issues, myths and flaws in the way Western planning and research expectations are imposed upon Indigenous communities that often thwart the quality and uncertainty of planning outcomes for which the clients, research agencies, and government entities were seeking to create.

Tensions in home–school partnerships : the different perspectives of teachers and parents of students with learning barriers

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of learning partnerships between teachers and parents of students with learning barriers. The aim was to investigate the beliefs and understandings of parents and teacher participants around roles in partnerships, so as to identify operational processes that support effective collaboration. The study was based on the premise that home–school partnerships have been established as a positive influence on the education of students with learning barriers but tensions exist within these partnerships in practice. In the study it was posited that some tensions stemmed from differences in role understandings between parent and teacher. Data revealed key themes emerging from the case studies. Findings indicated that parents and teachers believed that involvement and partnerships are integral to supporting the learning of students with learning barriers. However, differences emerged as to how teachers and parents constructed and interpreted involvement and operational processes supporting partnerships, and the significance each group placed on different aspects of collaboration between parent and teacher.

Building effective school-university partnerships for a quality teacher workforce : a Victorian led initiative

‘Building effective school-university partnerships for a quality teacher workforce: A Victorian led initiative’ project, (‘BESUP’), funded by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development from 2010 – 2011, was conducted by the research team from the School of Education, Deakin University in collaboration with key personnel in two ‘clusters’ of schools located in the Maroondah Education Coalition and in Keysborough/Noble Park.

The overall aim of this project was to examine a pilot model of effective school-university partnership that engages pre-service and in-service teachers and researchers in the co-production of professional knowledge and practice. The model of a university-school partnership that was investigated in the research project was developed as part of the Master of Teaching, a 16 credit pre-service postgraduate course in the School of Education that had the first intake of pre-service teachers in March, 2010. In the design and implementation of the Master of Teaching course, the School of Education set out to create a new relationship between key stakeholders in the preparation of the next generation of teachers. A commitment to doing the professional experience component differently was central to the conceptualization of the new course. To this end, three new professional experience curriculum units were designed with the placements ‘embedded’ into the units themselves.

The research questions that shaped the BESUP research project are:
• What are the design features of an effective school-university partnership model?
• What are the features of cross-generational (pre-service, in-service) models of quality supervision, mentoring and support in a school-university partnership model?
• What are the conditions for an effective professional development program for teachers and academic staff to support professional experience within school-university partnerships?

That the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development funded this research is evidence of the system’s awareness of and concern for investigating ways forward that will provide the next generation of teachers with strong links between the learning experiences undertaken in the university component of their pre-service teacher education and the professional experience component located in schools. The report suggests the significance of ongoing professional conversations and new ways of engaging in professional learning among all of the partners.

A study of voluntary disclosure of listed Chinese firms - a stakeholder perspective

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to investigate stakeholder power changes and their impact on firms' disclosure decisions in the Chinese stock market. Using legitimacy theory and stakeholder theory, the paper identifies newly emerged stakeholder groups for listed Chinese firms during three distinguished periods of the development of the Chinese stock market.

Design/methodology/approach – Panel data analysis was undertaken over a period from 1995-2006 with an aim to examine the influence of stakeholder power changes on voluntary disclosures made by 297 listed firms in their 12 years of annual reports. A voluntary disclosure checklist has been used for hand-collecting data from annual reports.

Findings – The finding shows that different stakeholder groups exert different degrees of influence on firms' decision-making in respect of information disclosure during different stages of the development of the Chinese stock market.

Research limitations/implications – The impact of a stakeholder power changes on corporate disclosure has not been well addressed and how listed Chinese firms respond to these changes is still a significant gap in the Chinese corporate disclosure literature. In this study, the paper uses proxies to represent each stakeholder group, discuss power changes of each group and predict the impact of power changes on firms' voluntary disclosure.

Originality/value – The paper identifies the new content of the “social contract” between listed firms and Chinese society and identifies various stakeholder groups of listed Chinese firms in the context of a new “social contract”. The paper predicts that voluntary corporate disclosure is the result of stakeholder pressures and firms use voluntary disclosure as one of their strategies to manage the firm-stakeholder relationship.

Are voluntary wheel running and open-field behavior correlated in mice? Different answers from comparative and artificial selection approaches

Voluntary wheel running and open-field behavior are probably the two most widely used measures of locomotion in laboratory rodents. We tested whether these two behaviors are correlated in mice using two approaches: the phylogenetic comparative method using inbred strains of mice and an ongoing artificial selection experiment on voluntary wheel running. After taking into account the measurement error and phylogenetic relationships among inbred strains, we obtained a significant positive correlation between distance run on wheels and distance moved in the open-field for both sexes. Thigmotaxis was negatively correlated with distance run on wheels in females but not in males. By contrast, mice from four replicate lines bred for high wheel running did not differ in either distance covered or thigmotaxis in the open field as compared with mice from four non-selected control lines. Overall, results obtained in the selection experiment were generally opposite to those observed among inbred strains. Possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed.

The role of effective partnerships in an Australian place-based intervention to reduce race-based discrimination

Localities Embracing and Accepting Diversity (LEAD) is an ongoing place-based pilot program aimed at improving health outcomes among Aboriginal and migrant communities through increased social and economic participation. Specifically, LEAD works with mainstream organizations to prevent race-based discrimination from occurring. The partnership model of LEAD was designed to create a community intervention that was evidence-based, effective, and flexible enough to respond to local contexts and needs. LEAD's complex organizational and partnership model, in combination with an innovative approach to reducing race-based discrimination, has necessitated the use of new language and communication strategies to build genuinely collaborative partnerships. Allocating sufficient time to develop strategies aligned with this new way of doing business has been critical. However, preliminary data indicate that a varied set of partners has been integral to supporting the widespread influence of the emerging LEAD findings across partner networks in a number of different sectors.

Arts education partnerships in Australia: spaces and places for teaching and learning

The arts over the centuries have continued to pervade, direct and define our societies. In Australia, they are seen as an important and influential mechanism of pedagogies. In arts education students explore and express their identity and build understanding of their worlds through learning by doing and social interaction. This long-established position is endorsed by contemporary arts education pedagogies that encourage students to look, listen, learn, think, and work as artists in new places and spaces. The forthcoming Australian Curriculum: The Arts (dance, drama, media arts, music, and visual arts) will require consideration of the students’ own cultures and the cultures of their communities, region, and the wider world. Interaction between the students and the wider arts community are central to this approach. Using narrative inquiry, reflective practice, and document analysis as our methodologies, we describe ways of seeing, knowing, and learning between artists, students, schools, education authorities, and universities in the Australian state of Victoria. The authors contend that collaborative partnerships take many forms and provide opportunities for exploration of pedagogies that foster strong relationships between arts education and the arts industry.

Changes in injury-related hospital emergency department presentations associated with the imposition of regulatory versus voluntary licensing conditions on licensed venues in two cities

Introduction and Aims
Regulatory and collaborative intervention strategies have been developed to reduce the harms associated with alcohol consumption on licensed venues around the world, but there remains little research evidence regarding their comparative effectiveness. This paper describes concurrent changes in the number of night-time injury-related hospital emergency department presentations in two cities that implemented either a collaborative voluntary approach to reducing harms associated with licensed premises (Geelong) or a regulatory approach (Newcastle).

Design and Methods
This paper reports findings from Dealing with Alcohol-Related problems in the Night-Time Economy project. Data were drawn from injury-specific International Classification of Disease, 10th Revision codes for injuries (S and T codes) presenting during high-alcohol risk times (midnight—5.59 am, Saturday and Sunday mornings) at the emergency departments in Geelong Hospital and Newcastle (John Hunter Hospital and the Calvary Mater Hospital), before and after the introduction of licensing conditions between the years of 2005 and 2011. Time-series, seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average analyses were conducted on the data obtained from patients' medical records.

Results
Significant reductions in injury-related presentations during high-alcohol risk times were found for Newcastle since the imposition of regulatory licensing conditions (344 attendances per year, P < 0.001). None of the interventions deployed in Geelong (e.g. identification scanners, police operations, radio networks or closed-circuit television) were associated with reductions in emergency department presentations.

Discussion and Conclusions
The data suggest that mandatory interventions based on trading hours restrictions were associated with reduced emergency department injury presentations in high-alcohol hours than voluntary interventions. [Miller P, Curtis A, Palmer D, Busija L, Tindall J, Droste N, Gillham K, Coomber K, Wiggers J. Changes in injury-related hospital emergency department presentations associated with the imposition of regulatory versus voluntary licensing conditions on licensed venues in two cities. Drug Alcohol Rev 2014]*