Young children enacting governance : child’s play?

Schools, homes and communities are increasingly perceived as risky spaces for children. This concern is a driving force behind many forms of governance imposed upon Australian children by well-meaning adults. Children are more and more the subjects of both overt and covert regulation by teachers and other adults in school contexts. Are children, though, passive in this process of governance? It is this issue that is the focus of this paper. In order to respond to the question of how young children enact governance in their everyday lives, video-recorded episodes of naturally occurring interactions among children in a preparatory classroom were captured. These data were then transcribed and analysed using the methods of conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. This paper shows a number of strategies that the children used when enacting governance within their peer cultures in the classroom. It focuses specifically on how adult and child-formulated rules and social orders of the classroom were drawn upon and developed in order to control and govern during the interaction. This paper illustrates that children are not passive in enacting governance, but actively and competently enact governance through their peer cultures. These findings are significant for educators to consider, as they help to develop an understanding of the complex social orders that children are continually constructing in the early childhood classroom.

A University Support Model for eResearch

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is faced with a rapidly growing research agenda built upon a strategic research capacity-building program. This presentation will outline the results of a project that has recently investigated QUT’s research support requirements and which has developed a model for the support of eResearch across the university. QUT’s research building strategy has produced growth at the faculty level and within its research institutes. This increased research activity is pushing the need for university-wide eResearch platforms capable of providing infrastructure and support in areas such as collaboration, data, networking, authentication and authorisation, workflows and the grid. One of the driving forces behind the investigation is data-centric nature of modern research. It is now critical that researchers have access to supported infrastructure that allows the collection, analysis, aggregation and sharing of large data volumes for exploration and mining in order to gain new insights and to generate new knowledge. However, recent surveys into current research data management practices by the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) and by QUT itself, has revealed serious shortcomings in areas such as research data management, especially its long term maintenance for reuse and authoritative evidence of research findings. While these internal university pressures are building, at the same time there are external pressures that are magnifying them. For example, recent compliance guidelines from bodies such as the ARC, and NHMRC and Universities Australia indicate that institutions need to provide facilities for the safe and secure storage of research data along with a surrounding set of policies, on its retention, ownership and accessibility. The newly formed Australian National Data Service (ANDS) is developing strategies and guidelines for research data management and research institutions are a central focus, responsible for managing and storing institutional data on platforms that can be federated nationally and internationally for wider use. For some time QUT has recognised the importance of eResearch and has been active in a number of related areas: ePrints to digitally publish research papers, grid computing portals and workflows, institutional-wide provisioning and authentication systems, and legal protocols for copyright management. QUT also has two widely recognised centres focused on fundamental research into eResearch itself: The OAK LAW project (Open Access to Knowledge) which focuses upon legal issues relating eResearch and the Microsoft QUT eResearch Centre whose goal is to accelerate scientific research discovery, through new smart software. In order to better harness all of these resources and improve research outcomes, the university recently established a project to investigate how it might better organise the support of eResearch. This presentation will outline the project outcomes, which include a flexible and sustainable eResearch support service model addressing short and longer term research needs, identification of resource requirements required to establish and sustain the service, and the development of research data management policies and implementation plans.

Teamwork resources to support students and teachers at QUT

The educational advantage of students working cooperatively in teams has been acknowledged in the higher education sector as being profitable in the world of work and other post-university experiences.

The Student Success Project : Helping students at-risk of failing or leaving a unit - a work in progress

In Semester 1 2007, a Monitoring Student Engagement study, conducted as part of the Enhancing Transition at Queensland University of Technology (ET@QUT) Project and extending earlier work in the Project by Arora (2006), aimed at mapping the processes and resources used at that time to identify, monitor and manage students in their first year who were at risk of leaving QUT (Shaw, 2007). This identified a lack of documentation of the processes and resources used and revealed an ad-hoc rather than holistic and systematic approach to monitoring student engagement. One of Shaw’s recommendations was to: “To introduce a centralised case management approach to student engagement” (p. 14). That provided the genesis for the Student Success Project that is being reported on here. The aim of the Student Success Project is to trial, evaluate and ultimately establish holistic and systematic ways of helping students who appear to be at-risk of failing or withdrawing from a unit to persist and succeed. Students are profiled as being at-risk if they are absent from more than 2 tutorials in a row without contacting their tutor or if they fail to submit their first assignment. A Project Officer makes personal contact with these students to suggest ways they can get further assistance depending on their situation.

Operationalising first year curriculum principles

This project builds on the First Year Curriculum Project that was carried out at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in 2006-2007 (QUT, 2007). One of the objectives of that project was “to develop principles for the Course Development processes that capture good design in first year curriculum practice” (p. 1) and this was achieved through the development of a set of broad organising principles for first year curriculum design—the First Year Curriculum Principles (FYCPs) (Kift, 2008).

The evolution of a community of practice at the Queensland University of Technology for lecturers involved in large first year units

Communities of practice (CoPs) may be defined as groups of people who are mutually bound by what they do together (Wenger, 1998, p. 2), that is, they “form to share what they know, to learn from one another regarding some aspects of their work and to provide a social context for that work” (Nickols, 2000, para. 1). They are “emergent” in that the shape and membership emerges in the process of activity (Lees, 2005, p. 7). People in CoPs share their knowledge and experiences freely with the purpose of finding inventive ways to approach new problems (Wenger & Snyder, 2000, p. 2). They can be seen as “shared histories of learning” (Wenger, 1998, p. 86). For some time, QUT staff have been involved in a number of initiatives aimed at sharing ideas and resources for teaching first year students such as the Coordinators of Large First Year Units Working Party. To harness these initiatives and maximise their influence, the leaders of the Transitions In Project (TIP)1 decided to form a CoP around the design, assessment and management of large first year units.

A holistic approach to the support and engagement of first year students : a retention strategy

Institutions should enact holistic approaches that address students’ personal, social and academic engagement in the early weeks of first year to facilitate retention (Nelson, Kift & Clarke, 2008). This holistic approach is central to the FYE program at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which was established to maximise learning engagement and hence positively influence the retention of commencing students. The program aims to • engage students in their learning through an intentionally designed and enacted curriculum (Kift, 2008) • facilitate timely access to life and learning support • promote a sense of belonging to the discipline, cohort and profession. The FYE program’s aims are achieved by strategic alliances between academic and professional staff across the institution.

A holistic approach to the support and engagement of first year students : a retention strategy.

Institutions should enact holistic approaches that address students’ personal, social and academic engagement in the early weeks of first year to facilitate retention (Nelson, Kift & Clarke, 2008). This holistic approach is central to the FYE program at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which was established to maximise learning engagement and hence positively influence the retention of commencing students.

How well are Australian children doing in the first year of school?

Background: The transition to school is a sensitive period for children in relation to school success. In the early school years, children need to develop positive attitudes to school and have experiences that promote academic, behavioural and social competence. When children begin school there are higher expectations of responsibility and independence and in the year one class, there are more explicit academic goals for literacy and numeracy and more formal instruction. Most importantly, children’s early attitudes to learning and learning styles have an impact on later educational outcomes. Method: Data were drawn from The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). LSAC is a cross-sequential cohort study funded by the Australian Government. In these analyses, Wave 2 (2006) data for 2499 children in the Kindergarten Cohort were used. Children, at Wave 2, were in the first year of formal school. They had a mean age of 6.9 years (SD= 0.26). Measures included a 6-item measure of Approaches to Learning (task persistence, independence) and the Academic Rating Scales for language and literacy and mathematical thinking. Teachers rated their relationships with children on the short form of the STRS. Results: Girls were rated by their teachers as doing better than boys on Language and literacy, Approaches to learning; and they had a better relationship with their teacher. Children from an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island (ATSI) background were rated as doing less well on Language and Literacy and Mathematical thinking and on their Approaches to learning. Children from high Socio Economic Position families are doing better on teacher rated Language and Literacy, Mathematical thinking, Approaches to learning and they had a better relationship with their teacher. Conclusions: Findings highlight the importance of key demographic variables in understanding children’s early school success.

Measuring cognitive and dispositional characteristics of creativity in elementary students

This article describes the theoretical underpinning and development of a measurement instrument that provides teachers with a tool to observe the personal creativity characteristics of individual students. The instrument was developed by compiling a list of characteristics derived from the literature to be indicative of the personal characteristics of creative people. The list was then reduced by grouping like characteristics to 9 cognitive and dispositional traits that were considered appropriate for elementary students. The 9-item instrument was then administered in 24 classrooms to 520 Year 6 and Year 7 students. Factor analysis using maximum likelihood extraction with an oblimin rotation revealed a single factor with an eigenvalue greater than 1 and accounting for 63% of the variance. All 9 items on this factor loaded at .72 or greater. The results indicated that the Creativity Checklist has very high internal consistency and is a reliable measurement instrument (a = .93).

‘Live your liberation, don’t lobby for it’ : Australian queer student activists’ perspectives of same-sex marriage

One topic covered in Australian queer university student print media is the legalisation of same-sex marriage. The legalisation of same-sex marriage is currently generating much debate in Western queer communities. Same-sex marriage is legalised in some countries such as, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium. It has been outlawed in Australia and most states in the US. Campaigns continue to reverse these restrictions. Other countries, such as the UK and New Zealand allow same-sex civil unions, providing couples with the rights afforded to married couples. There is a range of research documenting queer communities’ attitudes towards this issue (for example Lannutti 2005; Clarke, Burgoyne and Burns 2006; Yep, Lovaas and Elia 2003; Wolfson 1993; Egan and Sherrill 2005). These studies document broad community views as well as those of community sub-sections. For example, Yip (2004) looks at the views of gay and lesbian Christians on same-sex marriage and Lahey and Alderson (2004) document the experiences of same-sex couples who have gotten married or who are waiting to get married. Philosophical analyses consider the legalisation of same-sex marriage in relation to, for example, liberalism, equal rights, liberation, queer theory, citizenship, history, activism, religious discourse and feminism (Ferguson 2007; Jordan 2005; Josephson 2005; Lipton 2006; Sullivan and Chauncey 2005; Riggs 2007). This paper explores Australian queer university student activist media’s representation of same-sex marriage, and the debates surrounding its legalisation. It examines a selection of queer student media from four metropolitan Australian universities, and the 2003 and 2004 editions of national queer student publication, Querelle. This paper uses discourse analysis of queer student activists’ media representations of marriage to investigate this issue in one specific context – metropolitan Australian universities. This paper thus contributes to the history of queer activism, documenting what one group of young people say about the legalisation of same-sex marriage, and furthers research on queer perspectives of marriage and same-sex relationships.

Development of self-efficacy and expectancy measures for benzodiazepines

This study aimed to develop and assess the reliability and validity of a pair of self-report questionnaires to measure self-efficacy and expectancy associated with benzodiazepine use, the Benzodiazepine Refusal Self- Efficacy Questionnaire (BRSEQ) and the Benzodiazepine Expectancy Questionnaire (BEQ). Internal structure of the questionnaireswas established by principal component analysis (PCA) in a sample of 155 respondents, and verified by confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) in a second independent sample (n=139) using structural equation modeling. The PCA of the BRSEQ resulted in a 16-item, 4-factor scale, and the BEQ formed an 18-item, 2-factor scale. Both scales were internally reliable. CFA confirmed these internal structures and reduced the questionnaires to a 14-item self-efficacy scale and a 12-item expectancy scale. Lower self-efficacy and higher expectancy were moderately associated with higher scores on the SDS-B. The scales provide reliable measures for assessing benzodiazepine self-efficacy and expectancies. Future research will examine the utility of the scales in prospective prediction of benzodiazepine cessation.