Orienting preservice teachers towards gifted education : School university partnerships

Addressing the needs of gifted students is predicated on an understanding of many factors not least the nature of giftedness, appropriate curriculum design and specialist pedagogical practices. Knowledge needs to be acquired in context. Preservice teacher education programs tend to focus on pedagogical practices and present preservice teachers with content related to inclusive philosophies, strategies for teaching, and assessment techniques. Many preservice teachers do not have an awareness of the nature of giftedness or understandings around models of curriculum advocated for gifted education, despite practicum experiences and university education. This paper presents two case studies that describe interventions constructed through partnerships with schools to raise awareness of the nature of giftedness and provide concrete experiences for preservice teachers’ interactions with gifted students. It will report strategies through which preservice teachers become engaged with gifted students in regular classrooms. Qualitative and quantitative evidence will be presented on the effectiveness of these models.

An Interview with Sylvère Lotringer, Jean Baudrillard Chair at the European Graduate School and Professor Emeritus of French Literature and Philosophy at Columbia University, on the Architectural Contribution to Semiotext(e), Schizoculture, and the Early Deleuze and Guattari Scene at Columbia University

An Interview with Sylvère Lotringer, Jean Baudrillard Chair at the European Graduate School and Professor Emeritus of French Literature and Philosophy at Columbia University, on the Architectural Contribution to Semiotext(e), Schizoculture, and the Early Deleuze and Guattari Scene at Columbia University, which took place at the Department of French, Columbia University, New York City, July 2003. This interview exists as an audio cassette tape recording.

An Interview with John Rajchman, Department of Art History, Columbia University, on Architecture, Deleuze and Foucault

An Interview with John Rajchman, Department of Art History, Columbia University, on Architecture, Deleuze and Foucault at his apartment, Riverside Drive, New York City, February 10, 2003.

'Too high in human terms' : the costs of high security imprisonment. Review of Imprisoning Resistance by Bree Carlton and Intractable by Bernie Matthews.

The article discusses the issues of resistance; that is resistance by prisoners to the various manifestations of power operating in high security prisons, as well as that of attempted shifts in the regime from physical to psychological control. Other topics highlighted include legitimacy and 'official discourse', mourning and the construction of 'ungrievable lives' and the importance of finding a way out of the cycle of violence, which high security regimes perpetuate.

The Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service : process corruption and the limits of judicial reflexivity

This paper will offer an examination of the Reports of the Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service (Interim Report February 1996; Interim Report: Immediate Measures November 1996; Final Report Vol I: Corruption; Final Report Vol II: Reform; Final Report Vol III: Appendices May 1997) excluding the Report on Paedophilia, August 1997. The examination will be confined essentially to one question: to what extent do the published Reports consider the part played by the judiciary, prosecutors and lawyers, in the construction of a form of criminal justice revealed by the Commission itself, to be disfigured by serious process corruption? The examination will be conducted by way of a chronological trawl through the Reports of the Commission in an attempt to identify all references to the role of the judiciary, prosecutors and lawyers. The adequacy of any such treatment will then be considered. In order to set the scene a brief and generalised overview of the Wood Commission will be offered together with the Commission's definition of process corruption.

University Students Depression Inventory : measurement model and psychometric properties

Depression is a serious condition that impacts the academic success and emotional well-being of the university students globally. Keeping in view the debilitating nature of this condition, the present study examined the stability of the factor structure and psychometric properties of the University Student Depression Inventory (USDI; Khawaja and Bryden, 2006). There is a need to translate and validate the scale for Persian speaking students, who live in Iran, its neighboring countries and in many other Western countries. The scale was translated into the Persian language and was used as part of a battery consisting of the scales measuring suicide, depression, stress, happiness and academic achievement. The battery was administered to 359 undergraduate students, and an additional 150 students who had been referred to the mental health center of the University of Tehran as clinical sample. Confirmatory factor analysis upheld the original three-factor structure. The results exhibited internal consistency, test-retest reliability, convergent, and divergent validity, and discriminant validity. There were gender differences and male had higher mean scores on Lethargy, Cognitive\emotion, and Academic motivation subscales than female students. Findings supported the Persian version of the USDI for cross-cultural use as a valid and reliable measure in the diagnosis of depression.

From "Secondary Punishment" to "Supermax" : the human costs of high-security regimes in Australia

“Supermax” prisons, conceived by the United States in the early 1980s, are typically reserved for convicted political criminals such as terrorists and spies and for other inmates who are considered to pose a serious ongoing threat to the wider community, to the security of correctional institutions, or to the safety of other inmates. Prisoners are usually restricted to their cells for up to twenty-three hours a day and typically have minimal contact with other inmates and correctional staff. Not only does the Federal Bureau of Prisons operate one of these facilities, but almost every state has either a supermax wing or stand-alone supermax prison. The Globalization of Supermax Prisons examines why nine advanced industrialized countries have adopted the supermax prototype, paying particular attention to the economic, social, and political processes that have affected each state. Featuring essays that look at the U.S.-run prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanemo, this collection seeks to determine if the American model is the basis for the establishment of these facilities and considers such issues as the support or opposition to the building of a supermax and why opposition efforts failed; the allegation of human rights abuses within these prisons; and the extent to which the decision to build a supermax was influenced by developments in the United States. Additionally, contributors address such domestic matters as the role of crime rates, media sensationalism, and terrorism in each country’s decision to build a supermax prison.

The Limited Benefit of Prison in Controlling Crime : On the Threshold of a Political Shift

In 2012 the New Zealand government spent $3.4 billion, or nearly $800 per person, on responses to crime via the justice system. Research shows that much of this spending does little to reduce the changes of re-offending. Relatively little money is spent on victims, the rehabilitation of offenders or to support the families of offenders. This book is based on papers presented at the Costs of Crime forum held by the Institute of Policy Studies in February 2011. It presents lessons from what is happening in Australia, Britain and the United States and focuses on how best to manage crime, respond to victims, and reduce offending in a cost-effective manner in a New Zealand context. It is clear that strategies are needed that are based on better research and a more informed approach to policy development. Such strategies must assist victims constructively while also reducing offending. Using public resources to lock as many people in our prisons as possible cannot be justified by the evidence and is fiscally unsustainable; nor does such an approach make society safer. To reduce the costs of crime we need to reinvest resources in effective strategies to build positive futures for those at risk and the communities needed to sustain them.

The Global Financial Crisis : Neo-Liberalism, Social Democracy, and Criminology

This chapter begins with a discussion of the economic, political, and social context of the recent global financial crisis, which casts into relief current boundaries of criminology, permeated and made fluid in criminology's recent cultural turn. This cultural turn has reinvigorated criminology, providing new objects of analysis and rich and thick descriptions of the relationship between criminal justice and the conditions of life in ‘late modernity’. Yet in comparison with certain older traditions that sought to articulate criminal justice issues with a wider politics of contestation around political economies and social welfare policies of different polities, many of the current leading culturalist accounts tend in their globalized convergences to produce a strangely decontextualized picture in which we are all subject to the zeitgeist of a unitary ‘late modernity’ which does not differ between, for example, social democratic and neo-liberal polities, let alone allow for the widespread persistence of the pre-modern. It is argued that that contrary to this globalizing trend there are signs within criminology that life is being breathed back into social democratic and penal welfare concerns, habitus, and practices. The chapter discusses three of these signs: the emergence of neo-liberalism as a subject of criminology; a developing comparative penology which recognizes differences in the political economies of capitalist states and evinces a renewed interest in inequality; and a nascent revolt against the ‘generative grammar’, ‘pathological disciplinarities’, and ‘imaginary penalities’ of neoliberal managerialism.

The Politics and Legality of Prisoner Disenfranchisement in Australian Federal Elections

To remove the right of prisoners to vote does many things. … It signals that whatever the prisoner says is not of interest to those at the top, that you are not interested in talking to them or even listening to them, that you want to exclude them and that you have no interest in knowing about them. INTRODUCTION In June 2006, Australia passed legislation disenfranchising all prisoners serving full-time custodial sentences from voting in federal elections. This followed a succession of changes dating from 1983 that alternately extended and restricted the prisoner franchise. In 1989 and 1995, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) federal government prepared draft legislation removing any restrictions on prisoner voting rights in federal elections; the measures were defeated and withdrawn. With the 2006 legislation, the Howard Coalition government (composed of the Liberal and National parties) successfully achieved the total disenfranchisement it first sought in 1998. This chapter examines the politics and legality of the 2006 disenfranchisement. This will be approached, first, by briefly outlining the key provisions of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, offering a short legislative history of prisoner franchise, and examining some of the key constitutional issues. Second, the 2006 disenfranchisement introduced in the Electoral and Referendum (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Act 2006 will be examined in greater detail, particularly in terms of the manner in which it was achieved and the arguments that were mobilized both in support of and against the change.

The tertiary debate : a case study analysis of factors considered when applying for university entry by traditional age school leavers in Brisbane

Many interacting factors contribute to a student's choice of a university. This study takes a systems perspective of the choice and develops a Bayesian Network to represent and quantify these factors and their interactions. The systems model is illustrated through a small study of traditional school leavers in Australia, and highlights similarities and differences between universities' perceptions of student choices, students' perceptions of factors that they should consider and how students really make choices. The study shows the range of information that can be gained from this approach, including identification of important factors and scenario assessment.

Searching for a social democratic narrative in criminal justice

Paul Keating recently noted that what the Rudd Government lacked was an overall narrative or story. I would like to argue that Paul Keating is correct and suggest a narrative: that of retrieving and defending aspects of our social democratic heritage from some of the damaging effects wrought by neo-liberalism. Moreover I want to argue that criminal justice policy needs to be seen as a part of this broader narrative, which requires it being prised from its current site, where it is wedged firmly in the narrative of law and order.

Students' engagement with Facebook in a university undergraduate policing unit

Web 2.0 technologies are increasingly being used to support teaching in higher education courses. However, preliminary research has shown that students are using such technologies primarily for social purposes, rather than as a means of further engaging with academic content. This study examines a cohort of tertiary students' use of a Facebook page, which was created for a second year university policing unit at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Results from content analysis of the Facebook "wall" and a survey of student users and non-users showed that although students only demonstrated very little active engagement with academic content posted on the site (that is, they were reluctant to interact with unit materials in a way that would leave a digital trace), they reported that Facebook had increased their ability to engage with and critically analyse the unit content. In alignment with other research in this area, students also reported the usefulness of the Facebook page for increasing communication with their peers and with the teaching staff. This paper concludes by offering a number of best practice guidelines for the use of Facebook in tertiary education.

Should I stay or should I go? The challenges and opportunities of moving between university systems

The scientific job market has evolved to a truly globalized market. This is epitomized not only by the English language being the de facto scientific language but also by the increasing share of native language journals that are being offered in multiple languages or have or will fully converted to English (such as, for example, the BISE journal in 2015). Similarly, a plethora of exchange programs exists that allow students and academic staff to visit other institutions and exchange knowledge, ideas, and learning opportunities. While student migration across scientific institutions is an established phenomenon (Gribble, 2008) with ample structures, policies, and schemes such as ERASMUS1 in place, academic staff migration between countries is still a challenge, even if exchange programs exist (Enders, 1998). One reason may be that different career paths, varying teaching loads and different evaluation schemes for what constitutes scientific excellence are notable. This also influences the decision of where to start and continue an academic career. While the university systems themselves have been examined previously (Galliers and Whitley, 2007; Lyytinen et al., 2007) and while there is knowledge about career requirements in different university systems (Dennis et al., 2006; Dean et al., 2011; Loos et al., 2013; Recker, 2013), we still do not know much about individual and contextual decisions of academics that either consider or execute a migration between university systems.

Transitioning from vocational education and training to university : strengthening information literacy through collaboration

"Students transitioning from vocational education and training (VET) to university can experience a number of challenges. This small research project explored the information literacy needs of VET and university students and how they differ. Students studying early childhood related VET and university courses reported differences in how and where they searched for information in their studies. These differences reflect the more practical focus of VET compared with the more academic and theoretical approach of university. The author proposes a framework of support that could be provided to transitioning students to enable them to develop the necessary information literacy skills for university study."--publisher website