Successful outcomes in vocational education and training courses : how pedagogy and expectations influence achievement

This paper reports on a four year Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project titled Skilling Indigenous Queensland, conducted in regional areas of Queensland, Australia from 2009 to 2013. The project sought to investigate vocational education, training (VET) and teaching, Indigenous learners’ needs, employer cultural and expectations and community culture and expectations to identify best practice in numeracy teaching for Indigenous VET learners. Specifically it focused on ways to enhance the teaching and learning of courses and the associated mathematics in such courses to benefit learners and increase their future opportunities of employment. To date thirty-nine teachers/trainers/teacher aides and two hundred and thirty-one students consented to participate in the project. Nine VET courses were nominated to be the focus on the study. This paper focuses on questionnaire and interview responses from four trainers, two teacher aides and six students. In recent years a considerable amount of funding has been allocated to increasing Indigenous Peoples’ participation in education and employment. This increased funding is predicated on the assumption that it will make a difference and contribute to closing the education gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians (Council of Australia Governments, 2009). The central tenet is that access to education for Indigenous People will create substantial social and economic benefits for regional and remote Indigenous People. The project’s aim is to address some of the issues associated with the gap. To achieve the aims, the project adopted a mixed methods design aimed at benefitting research participants and included: participatory collaborative action research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988) and, community research (Smith, 1999). Participatory collaborative action research refers to a is a “collective, self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social and educational practices” (Kemmis et al., 1988, p. 5). Community research is described as an approach that “conveys a much more intimate, human and self-defined space” (p. 127). Community research relies on and validates the community’s own definitions. As the project is informed by the social at a community level, it is described as “community action research or emancipatory research” (Smith, 1999, p. 127). It seeks to demonstrate benefit to the community, making positive differences in the lives of Indigenous People and communities. The data collection techniques included survey questionnaires, video recording of teaching and learning processes, teacher reflective video analysis of teaching, observations, semi-structured interviews and student numeracy testing. As a result of these processes, the findings indicate that VET course teachers work hard to adopt contextualising strategies to their teaching, however this process is not always straight forward because of the perceptions of how mathematics has been taught and learned historically. Further teachers, trainers and students have high expectations of one another with the view to successful outcomes from the courses.

Psychology students’ beliefs about integrating Complementary and Alternative Therapy (CAT) into their future psychology practice

We investigated whether belief-based differences exist between students who have strong and weak intentions to integrate complementary and alternative therapy (CAT) into future psychology practice by recommending CAT or specific CAT practitioners to clients. A cross-sectional methodology was used. Psychology undergraduate students (N = 106) participated in a paper-based questionnaire design to explore their underlying beliefs related to CAT integration. The study was undertaken at a major university in Queensland, Australia. The theory of planned behaviour belief-based framework guided the study. Multivariate analyses of variance examined the influence of behavioural, normative, and control beliefs on the strong and weak intention groups. A multiple regression analysis investigated the relative importance of these belief sets for predicting intentions. We found that clear differences emerged between strong and weak intenders on behavioural and normative beliefs, but not control beliefs. Strong intenders perceived the positive outcomes of integrating CAT, such as being able to offer clients a more holistic practice and having confidence in the practitioners/practices, as more likely to occur than weak intenders, and perceived the negative outcome of compromising my professional practice as less likely. Strong in-tenders were more likely than weak intenders to perceive that a range of important referents (e.g., clients) would think they should integrate CAT. Results of the regression analysis revealed the same pattern of results in that behavioural and normative beliefs, but not control beliefs, significantly predicted intentions. The findings from this study can be used to inform policy and educational initiatives that aim to encourage CAT use in psychology practice.

Preparing citizens for a complex world : the grand challenge of teaching socio-scientific issues in science education

The dawn of the twenty-first century encouraged a number of scientific and technological organisations to identify what they saw as ‘Grand Challenges and Opportunities’. Issues of environment and health featured very prominently in these quite short lists, as can be seen from a sample of these challenges in Table 1. Indeed, the first two lists of challenges in Table 1 were identified as for the environment and for health, respectively.

Retention and graduation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in initial teacher education : a review of the literature

While the need to increase numbers of Indigenous teachers has been highlighted for many years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers are still significantly underrepresented in Australia making up less that 1% of teachers in schools. Nationally, little has changed since the 1980s when Hughes and Wilmot (1992) called for ‘1000 Indigenous teachers by 1990’. This paper reports on an initial literature review of teacher education as related to the preparation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Alongside the scholarly literature, the review to date includes analysis of over twenty policy documents and government reports as well as web-based descriptions of historical and current models of Indigenous teacher education including both mainstream Education programs and cohort-based and community models. While the literature provides examples of successful models of Indigenous teacher education it also illuminates the longstanding and interrelated factors that continue to impact on the success or failure of teacher education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders

Seriously playful : the uses of networked spoof videos in China

This thesis examines online spoof videos in China. It shows the relationship between user-created content and change and how such videos are impacting on social memory. In the West, we are witnessing two outstanding trends in media. On the one hand, media are turning more "demotic" (Turner, 2006) and "participatory" (Jenkins, 2006), whereby lay audiences use popular media for identity formation, representation and association, reconfiguring the media and cultural landscape, and rendering invalid the old paradigm based on the dichotomy of audience and author, creator and consumer, expert and amateur. On the other hand, in both mainstream media and user-creation online there is a trend towards "silly citizenship", with comedy, send-ups and spoofs that used to reside in the margin propelled to the central stage in both pleasure and politics (Hartley, 2010), as is shown in the rising popularity of the Daily Show, Colbert Report, and spoof videos in elections ,e.g. the 2008 presidential election in US (Gray, Jones, & Thompson, 2009; Tryon, 2008). User generated content—and spoof subcultures—is now much a debated phenomenon in China. However, with different political (one party rule and censorship) and cultural (media regarded mainly as instrument for education and social stabilization instead of a critical fourth estate) configurations, will the social and cultural impacts of the two trends in the West be as the same in China? If not, what will be the specificities in the China context? The project starts with a historical review of popular culture and user-created content in China, before turning to spoof videos and looking at how they are produced and shared, travel and diffused on the Internet, and how the communities and sub-cultures forming and emerging around spoof videos are changing the overall cultural landscape in China. By acting as a participant observer in online video sharing sites and conducting face-to face as well as online interviews, I identify lead users and creators of spoof videos and the social networks emerging around them. I call these lead users "skill hubs" and their networks "liquid communities", foregrounding the fact that their appeal doesn’t come from their amicable personality, but rather from their creative skills; and that the networks surrounding them are in a permanent flux, with members coming and going as they see fit. I argue that the "liquidness" (Bauman, 2000) of these communities is what makes them constantly creative and appealing. Textual analysis of online videos, their comments and derivatives are conducted to tease out the uses that that can be made of spoof videos, namely as phatic communication, as alternative memory and as political engagement. Through these analyses I show that spoof videos constitute not only a space where young generations can engage with each other, communicate their anger and dissatisfaction, fun and hope, and where they participate in socio-cultural and political debates, but also create a space where they can experiment with their new skills, new ideas, and new citizenship. The rise of spoof videos heralds the beginning of a trend in popular culture in contemporary China towards the "canonization of the jester" and the dethroning of the establishment. I also argue that a historical perspective is needed to understand the current surge of use creativity and user activism in China, and that many forms of popular media we experience today have their antecedents in various stages of Chinese history. The entrenched "control-resistance" binary is inadequate in interpreting the rich, flux and multilayered Internet space in China.

Identifying discourses of moderation in higher education

Moderation of student assessment is a critical component of teaching and learning in contemporary universities. Yet, despite this, it tends to be marked by idiosyncratic and sporadic processes informed by liminal understanding. This paper, in the light of forthcoming radical national requirements for the declaration of moderation processes in tertiary curricula in Australia, will present four discourses of moderation we identified in a recent study in a Faculty of Education in a large metropolitan university. The discourses are equity, justification, community building and accountability. Together, they will act as a starting point for academics to review their beliefs and attitudes towards the moderation of student assessment.

A new civics curriculum for Australian schools : is it national education?

In nation states and regions including Australia, Hong Kong, other countries of Asia, the European Economic Community and elsewhere, Civics and Citizenship education (CCE) is a contested concept. The development of The Australian Curriculum is providing a national opportunity for educators to rethink curriculum priorities and to decide on new emphases for learning in Australian schools, but policy documents have emphasized the importance of CCE for all young Australians. In this paper we discuss the notion of citizenship education as ‘national education’ in Australia. We suggest that while the development of CCE in Australia does include elements of ‘national education’, the new curriculum provides an opportunity to frame the civil, political and social components of CC for young Australians in ways that include local, national and global understandings. We argue that CCE should broaden young peoples’ world views and their passion and capacity to express their own identity, so they can be active and engaged citizens in diverse communities that include their own communities, the nation and beyond.

The challenge of generic competences to science education

Since 2000 there has been pressure on education systems for develop in students a number of competences that are described as generic. This pressure stems from studies of the changing nature of work in the Knowledge Society that is now so dominant. The DeSeCo project identified a number of these competences, and listed them under the headings of communicative, analytical and personal. They include thinking, creativity, communication skills, knowing how to learn, working in teams, adapting to change, and problem solving. These competences pose a substantial challenge to the manner in which education as a whole, and science education in particular, has hitherto been generally conceived. It is now common to find their importance acknowledged in new formulation of the curriculum. The paper reviews a number of these curriculum documents and how they have tried to relate these competences to the teaching and learning of Science, a subject with its own very specific content for learning. It will be suggested that the challenge provides an opportunity for a reconstruction of the teaching and learning of science in schools that will increase its effectiveness for more students.