Post: 9/11: hidden pedagogy: the positional forces of pedagogy in Victoria, Australia

This qualitative study charts the lived narratives of twelve participants, six teachers and six students from urban and rural Victoria, Australia. The study examines in detail the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’. 9/11 has become accepted shorthand for September 11th 2001, in which terrorist attacks took place in the United States of America. The attacks heralded a ‘post- 9/11 world, [in which] threats are defined more by the fault lines within societies than by the territorial boundaries between them’ (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, 2011, p. 361). The study is embedded in the values that have come to the fore in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the ideological shifts that have occurred globally. These values and ideologies are reflected via issues of culture and consumption. In education this is particularly visible through pedagogy. The research employs a multimethodological (Esteban-Guitart, 2012) form of inquiry through the use of bricolage (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004) which is comprised at the intersectional points of critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2008b), public pedagogy (Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010b) and cultural studies (Hall, Hobson, Lowe, & Willis, 1992). This study adopts a critical ontological perspective, and is grounded in qualitative research approaches (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). The methods of photo elicitation, artefact analysis, video observation and semi-structured interviews are used to critically examine the ways in which teacher and student identities are shaped by the pedagogies of contemporary schooling, and how they form common sense understandings of the world and themselves, charting possibilities between accepted common sense beliefs and 21st century neoliberal capitalism. The research is presented through a prototypical form of literary journalism and intertextuality which examines the interrelationship between teaching and social worlds exposing the hidden influence of enculturation and addressing the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’

A gallery walk: 'drawing out' understandings of collaborative self-study in teacher education

The Collaborative Reflective Experience and Practice in Education (CREPE) Research Group formed mid 2014 as a group of eight teacher educators interested in working collaboratively to improve our teaching practice through self-study methodology. Located at distance across the three campuses of Deakin University in Victoria, Australia and from the disciplines of mathematics, science, visual arts, performing arts, and curriculum and pedagogy, we aimed to better understand, improve, and share our practices as teacher-educators. While a few of us had engaged in self-study previously, all were comfortable with observing some kind of professional reflective/reflexive practice. We shared the intention of engaging in the scholarship (teaching practice and research) of self-study methodology via community of practice approaches, focusing on our collaborative (overarching) research as well as engaging in focused research simultaneously. It is our efforts towards collaborative research that are the subject of this chapter.

Rhetoric and reality: critical perspectives on education in a 3D virtual world

The emergence of any new educational technology is often accompanied by inflated expectations about its potential for transforming pedagogical practice and improving student learning outcomes. A critique of the rhetoric accompanying the evolution of 3D virtual world education reveals a similar pattern, with the initial hype based more on rhetoric than research demonstrating the extent to which rhetoric matches reality. Addressed are the perceived gaps in the literature through a critique of the rhetoric evident throughout the evolution of the application of virtual worlds in education and the reality based on the reported experiences of experts in the field of educational technology, who are all members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group. The experiences reported highlight a range of effective virtual world collaborative and communicative teaching experiences conducted in members' institutions. Perspectives vary from those whose reality is the actuation of the initial rhetoric in the early years of virtual world education, to those whose reality is fraught with challenges that belie the rhetoric. Although there are concerns over institutional resistance, restrictions, and outdated processes on the one-hand, and excitement over the rapid emergence of innovation on the other, the prevailing reality seems to be that virtual world education is both persistent and sustainable. Explored are critical perspectives on the rhetoric and reality on the educational uptake and use of virtual worlds in higher education, providing an overview of the current and future directions for learning in virtual worlds.

Conversation Circles as a Teaching Strategy: An Experience to Reflect on and Implement in Higher Education

The experience approached in this paper aims at reflecting, reasoning, planning and implementing the “Conversation Circles” as a teaching strategy in the PF-4237 course “Theory of Education: Multiculturalism and Education” of the Latin American Doctoral Program in Education, University of Costa Rica. This training experience, based on the communicative action theory, intended to integrate the assistance of the teacher, the confrontation to otherness and the building of knowledge, skills and social attitudes in higher education.

Task profiling : A task-Based approach to measuring the integration of ICT in the classroom

The measurement of ICT (information and communication technology) integration is emerging as an area of research interest with such systems as Education Queensland including it in their recently released list of research priorities. Studies to trial differing integration measurement instruments have taken place within Australia in the last few years, particularly Western Australia (Trinidad, Clarkson, & Newhouse, 2004; Trinidad, Newhouse & Clarkson, 2005), Tasmania (Fitzallen 2005) and Queensland (Finger, Proctor, & Watson, 2005). This paper will add to these investigations by describing an alternate and original methodological approach which was trialled in a small-scale pilot study conducted jointly by Queensland Catholic Education Commission (QCEC) and the Centre of Learning Innovation, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in late 2005. The methodology described is based on tasks which, through a process of profiling, can be seen to be artefacts which embody the internal and external factors enabling and constraining ICT integration.