Spatial literacies, design texts and emergent pedagogies in purposeful literacy curriculum

There has recently been an emphasis within literacy studies on both the spatial dimensions of social practices (Leander & Sheehy, 2004) and the importance of incorporating design and multiple modes of meaning-making into contemporary understandings of literacy (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996). Kress (2003) in particular has outlined the potential implications of the cultural shift from the dominance of writing, based on a logic of time and sequence in time, to the dominance of the mode of the image, based on a logic of space. However, the widespread re-design of curriculum and pedagogy by classroom teachers to allow students to capitalise on the various affordances of different modes of meaning-making – including the spatial – remains in an emergent stage. We report on a project in which university researchers’ expertise in architecture, literacy and communications enabled two teachers in one school to expand the forms of literacy that primary school children engaged in. Starting from the school community’s concerns about an urban renewal project in their neighbourhood, we worked together to develop a curriculum of spatial literacies with real-world goals and outcomes.

Teachers' work and pedagogy in an era of accountability

A great deal of educational policy proceeds as though teachers are malleable and ever-responsive to change. Some argue they are positioned as technicians who simply implement policy. However, how teachers go about their work and respond to reform agendas may be contingent upon many factors that are both biographical in nature and workplace related. In this paper we discuss the work of middle school teachers in low-socioeconomic communities from their perspectives. Referring to reflective interviews, meeting transcripts and an electronic reporting template, we examine how teacher participants in a school reform project describe their work - what they emphasise and what they down-play or omit. Using Foucaultian approaches to critical discourse analysis and insights from Dorothy Smith's (2005) Institutional Ethnography, we consider the 'discursive economy' (Carlson, 2005) in teachers' reported experiences of their everyday practices in northern suburbs schools in South Australia in which a democratic progressive discourse exists alongside corporate and disciplinary discourses.

Adventure as the metaphoric basis for constructing a narrative to defuse a collective critical incident

This article describes an exercise in collective narrative practice, built around the metaphor of adventure. This metaphor helped to scaffold the development of stories of personal agency for a group of Australian primary school children whose teachers were afraid they might be traumatised by events which occurred during a school excursion. During the excursion, the group of 110 Year 5 and 6 school children had their accommodation broken into on two separate occasions and various belongings stolen. The very brief period made available for ‘debriefing’ was used to introduce the metaphor of adventure, and open up space for the children to begin constructing a story in which they were ‘powerful’, as an alternative to the story of powerlessness and victimhood in which they were initially caught up.

Teachers' and education students' perceptions of and reactions to children with and without the diagnostic label 'ADHD'

Thirty-four elementary school teachers and 32 education students from Canada rated their reactions towards vignettes describing children who met attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptom criteria that included or did not include the label “ADHD.” “ADHD”-labeled vignettes elicited greater perceptions of the child's impairment as well as more negative emotions and less confidence in the participants, although it also increased participants' willingness to implement treatment interventions. Ratings were similar to vignettes of boys versus girls; however, important differences in ratings between teachers and education students emerged and are discussed. Finally, we investigated the degree to which teachers' professional backgrounds influenced bias based on the label “ADHD.” Training specific to ADHD consistently predicted label bias, whereas teachers' experience working with children with ADHD did not.

O'Neill Building Nudgee College

This project involved the complete refurbishment and extension of a 1980’s two-storey domestic brick building, previously used as a Boarding House (Class 3), into Middle School facilities (Class 9b) on a heritage listed site at Nudgee College secondary school, Brisbane. The building now accommodates 12 technologically advanced classrooms, computer lab and learning support rooms, tuckshop, art room, mini library/reading/stage area, dedicated work areas for science and large projects with access to water on both floors, staff facilities and an undercover play area suitable for assemblies and presentations. The project was based on a Reggio Emilia approach, in which the organisation of the physical environment is referred to as the child’s third teacher, creating opportunities for complex, varied, sustained and changing relationships between people and ideas. Classrooms open to a communal centre piazza and are integrated with the rest of the school and the school with the surrounding community. In order to achieve this linkage of the building with the overall masterplan of the site, a key strategy of the internal planning was to orientate teaching areas around a well defined active circulation space that breaks out of the building form to legibly define the new access points to the building and connect up to the pathway network of the campus. The width of the building allowed for classrooms and a generous corridor that has become ‘breakout’ teaching areas for art, IT, and small group activities. Large sliding glass walls allow teachers to maintain supervision of students across all areas and allow maximum light penetration through small domestic window openings into the deep and low-height spaces. The building was also designed with an effort to uphold cultural characteristics from the Edmund Rice Education Charter (2004). Coherent planning is accompanied by a quality fit-out, creating a vibrant and memorable environment in which to deliver the upper primary curriculum. Consistent with the Reggio Emilia approach, materials, expressive of the school’s colours, are used in a contemporary, adventurous manner to create panels of colour useful for massing and defining the ‘breakout’ teaching areas and paths of travel, and storage elements are detailed and arranged to draw attention to their aesthetic features. Modifications were difficult due to the random placement of load bearing walls, minimum ceiling heights, the general standard of finishes and new fire and energy requirements, however the reuse of this building was assessed to be up to 30% cheaper than an equivalent new building, The fit out integrates information technology and services at a level not usually found in primary school facilities. This has been achieved within the existing building fabric through thoughtful detailing and co-ordination with allied disciplines.

LEGO robotics : an authentic problem solving tool?

With the current curriculum focus on correlating classroom problem solving lessons to real-world contexts, are LEGO robotics an effective problem solving tool? This present study was designed to investigate this question and to ascertain what problem solving strategies primary students engaged with when working with LEGO robotics and whether the students were able to effectively relate their problem solving strategies to real-world contexts. The qualitative study involved 23 Grade 6 students participating in robotics activities at a Brisbane primary school. The study included data collected from researcher observations of student problem solving discussions, collected software programs, and data from a student completed questionnaire. Results from the study indicated that the robotic activities assisted students to reflect on the problem solving decisions they made. The study also highlighted that the students were able to relate their problem solving strategies to real-world contexts. The study demonstrated that while LEGO robotics can be considered useful problem solving tools in the classroom, careful teacher scaffolding needs to be implemented in regards to correlating LEGO with authentic problem solving. Further research in regards to how teachers can best embed realworld contexts into effective robotics lessons is recommended.

Teachers' knowledge for social education : perspectives from the middle years of schooling

Social education in Australia is a divisive educational issue. The last decade has been marked by the controversial integrated social studies curriculum, Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE) where history, geography and environmental studies were integrated with civics and citizenship. The introduction of a compulsory K-10 Australian Curriculum from 2011, however, marks the return to history and geography and the abandonment of SOSE. Curriculum reform aside, what do teachers think is essential knowledge for middle years social education? The paper reports on a phenomenographical exploration of thirty-one middle school teachers’ conceptions of essential knowledge for SOSE. Framed by Shulman’s (1986, 1987) theoretical framework of the knowledge base for teaching, the research identified seven qualitatively different ways of understanding essential knowledge for social education. The study indicates a professional practice-based theorisation of social education that justifies attention to discipline-based knowledge and teacher identity in the middle years.

Australian shows

This book is a reader for primary school students, stage 27-30 (fluent), incorporating mathematics themes. There is a fictional narrative, entitled "A Day at the Show", that describes the activities of Tess and Alex when visiting their local show. A non-fiction exposition, entitled "Supporting Australian Shows", explains more about Australian shows and why we should support them. Accompanying the book is a "building comprehension card" to assist teachers in their classroom use of the reader.

The flying doctors

This book is a reader for primary school students, stage 24-26 (fluent), incorporating mathematics themes. There is a fictional narrative, entitled "A Flying Visit", that describes Tess' and Alex's encounter with the Flying Doctor. A non-fiction recount, entitled "Fundraising for the Flying Doctors", describes the activities of a class group in raising money for the Flying Doctors. Accompanying the book is a "building comprehension card" to assist teachers in their classroom use of the reader.

Contextualizing a university-school STEM education collaboration : distributed and self-activated leadership for project outcomes

Implementing educational reform requires partnerships, and university-school collaborations in the form of investigative and experimental projects can aim to determine the practicalities of reform. However, there are funded projects that do not achieve intended outcomes. In the context of a new reform initiative in education, namely, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, this article explores the management of a government-funded project. In a university school partnership for STEM education, how can leadership be distributed for achieving project outcomes? Participants included university personnel from different STEM areas, school teachers and school executives. Data collected included observations, interviews, resource materials, and video and photographic images. Findings indicated that leadership roles were distributed and selfactivated by project partners according to their areas of expertise and proximal activeness to the project phases, that is: (1) establishing partnerships; (2) planning and collaboration; (3) project implementation; and (4) project evaluation and further initiatives. Leadership can be intentional and unintentional within project phases, and understanding how leadership can be distributed and selfactivated more purposefully may aid in generating more expedient project outcomes.

Nambour : the model rural school

This paper examines the Rural Schools of Queensland. Starting with Nambour in 1917, the scheme incorporated thirty schools, and operated for over forty years. The rhetoric of the day was that boys and girls from the senior classes of primary school would be provided with elementary instruction of a practical character. In reality, the subjects taught were specifically tailored to provide farm skills to children in rural centres engaged in farming, dairying or fruit growing. Linked to each Rural School was a number of smaller surrounding schools, students from which travelled to the Rural School for special agricultural or domestic instruction. Through this action, the Queensland Department of Public Instruction left no doubt it intended to provide educational support for agrarian change and development within the state; in effect, they had set in motion the creation of a Queensland yeoman class. The Department’s intention was to arrest or reverse the trend toward urbanisation — whilst increasing agricultural productivity — through the making of a farmer born of the land and accepting of the new scientific advances in agriculture.

Learning and teaching reflection : developing capacities for lifelong learning

Reflection is an essential part of being an effective learner and working as a productive teacher. It enables the learner or teacher to deliberate about the factors that lead to successful learning and teaching for them and/or their students, in a particular place and for a specific purpose, so they can make reasoned and effective choices. This chapter introduces important frameworks that cover a century of thinking around reflection in education, and illustrates how preservice teachers can use these ideas across three phases. First, becoming a reflective learner as a university student to enhance learning and assessment outcomes; second, becoming a reflective teacher to improve classroom teaching and learning outcomes; and third, developing the reflective capacities of primary students so they can enhance their skills for lifelong learning.

The political economy of food in schools : the case of Queensland State education

Food in schools is typically understood from a biomedical perspective. At practical, ideational and material levels, whether addressed pedagogically or bureaucratically, food in schools is generally considered from a natural sciences perspective. This perspective manifests as the bioenergetic principle of energy in versus energy out and appears in policy focused on issues such as obesity and physical activity. Despite the considerable literature on the sociology of food and eating, little is understood about food in schools from a sociological perspective. This oversight of one of the most fundamental requirements of the human condition--namely, food--should be of concern for educators. Investigating food through a political economy lens means understanding food in schools as part of broader economic, political, social and cultural conditions. Hence, a political economy of food and schooling is concerned with the formation of ideas about food relative to political, economic, and cultural ideologies in social practice. From a critical sociology study of food messages students receive in the primary school curriculum, this paper reports on some of the official food messages of an Australian state's education policy, as a case to highlight the current political economy of food in Australia. It examines the role of the corporate food industry in the formation of Australian food policy and how that policy created artefacts infused with competing messages. The paper highlights how food and nutrition policy moved from solely a health concern to incorporate an economic dimension and links that shift with the quality of food available in Queensland schools.

Mid-Career professionals in STEM transiting to school teaching : barriers at the border

In many countries there is a shortage of quality teachers in areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Additional to the low levels of recruitment is an extraordinary high attrition rate with some 50% of beginning teachers leaving the profession within five years. One solution implemented in several countries has been to encourage mid-career professionals in the area of STEM to become school teachers. These professionals are said to bring to teaching enthusiasm, knowledge and a passion for their subject which will impact engagement and learning by students. However, these career-changers have constructed professional identities and are accustomed to working within a culture of collaboration and inquiry. In contrast, school cultures are quite different and often teaching is a lonely solitary affair with little opportunity for collegial relationships aimed at knowledge building in the context of teaching. Crossing from a culture of STEM to a culture of schools and teaching can be challenging. This study was conducted with 13 teachers who were followed for three years. However, this paper reports on the experiences of one teacher with an engineering background crossing the boundaries from practising STEM to Teaching STEM.

The rural school experiment : creating a Queensland yeoman

Using historical narrative and extensive archival research, this thesis portrays the story of the twentieth century Queensland Rural Schools. The initiative started at Nambour Primary School in 1917, and extended over the next four decades to encompass thirty primary schools that functioned as centralized institutions training children in agricultural science, domestic science, and manual trade training. The Rural Schools formed the foundation of a systemised approach to agricultural education intended to facilitate the State’s closer settlement ideology. The purpose of the Rural Schools was to mitigate urbanisation, circumvent foreign incursion and increase Queensland’s productivity by turning boys into farmers, or the tradesmen required to support them, and girls into the homemakers that these farmers needed as wives and mothers for the next generation. Effectively Queensland took rural boys and girls and created a new yeomanry to aid the State’s development.