Developing enterprise curriculum: Building on rock, not sand

Entrepreneurial education is the process of providing individuals with the ability to recognise commercial opportunities and the insight, self-esteem, knowledge and skills to act on them. It includes instruction in opportunity recognition, commercialising a concept, marshalling resources in the face of risk, and initiating a business venture. It also includes instruction in traditional business disciplines such as management, marketing, information systems and finance. The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and introduction of a new program in Entrepreneurship at the University of Tasmania. Rather than adopt a traditional business school (passive learning) approach, within this program the method and responsibility of learning has largely been reversed through the process of student centred learning. This method of learning represents a challenging departure from the traditional mainstream teaching practices. In considering the benefits achievable from this teaching method, this paper also considers the difficulties in transferring increased responsibility to students to manage their futures.

Hebrew College collection, 1928-1996

Louis Hurwich, then superintendent of the Bureau of Jewish Education of Boston, founded Hebrew Teacher’s College in 1921. Hurwich was concerned about Jewish teachers leaving the field of Jewish education for other professions and sought an educational system that promoted Hebrew literacy at all levels. Hebrew Teacher’s College was also responsible for maintaining Hebrew High School (Prozdor), located at 14 Crawford Street in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Those students who graduated from the high school could matriculate to Hebrew Teacher’s College without having to take an exam. In 1943, the high school offered Talmud classes in addition to its regular curriculum, with studies in the Bible, Hebrew, Jewish History, and codes and customs. In 2002, the College moved to its current location in Newton, Massachusetts. One year later, it opened its Rabbinical School. This collection contains brochures, catalogs, commencement addresses, event fliers, invitations, pamphlets and publications.

Understandings of higher education curriculum in Vietnam

The Vietnamese higher education context is characterised by state control including the state’s development of curriculum frameworks and materials. Institutional autonomy has been ratified by the government, however, in practice universities seem to have little control over curriculum. In order for universities to develop more ownership of curriculum, it is necessary to explore the foundational understandings of curriculum held by stakeholders. Thus, this paper explores the understandings of curriculum expressed by a group of senior staff, academics and students at a Vietnamese university. We found a diversity of understandings that tended to be product-focused, teacher-focused and textbook-driven. We propose that our findings can be used as a starting point for developing more innovative and student-focused understandings of curriculum.

Bridging the gap: Curriculum practices in community language schools and their challenges

This study investigated curriculum practices in Queensland community language schools and how these practices are supported by government policy. The conceptual framework drew on theories of ethnolinguistic vitality and curriculum dimensions. The research design involved case studies of two community language schools of different sizes, using classroom observation and interviews. Cross–case analysis revealed contrasting curriculum practices determined by student enrolments, and different capacities to access and benefit from what policy support was available. This study offers some implications and possibilities to better support quality curriculum practices in community language schools.

Curriculum frames for two different groups of teachers in Indonesia

This paper reports on a study conducted in Indonesia at a time when two curricular reforms were underway. School-based curriculum was being implemented to allow Indonesian teachers more autonomy to develop curriculum to suit their local school community and its needs. Alongside this, the second concurrent reform introducing Character Education was more strongly prescriptive, requiring all teachers, including those working in language education, to address a particular set of stipulated values across all classes. The Indonesian schooling sector employs teachers at two different levels of professional status: civil servant teachers working in the higher status public sector and non-civil servant teachers who teach in the private Islamic Schools. Each level received different professional learning opportunities to prepare for the reforms. This study is interested in whether and how EFL teachers of different status exercised degrees of professionalism as they recontextualised these reforms in their classes. Nine teachers were interviewed and three of their classes were observed. This study found that the group of teachers with more professional learning could cope better with the weaker framing of school-based curriculum, while teachers with less professional learning reported disengagement with the reforms.

Formalising the vernacular: Social media skills in higher education

This paper discusses the issue of social media skills using a literacy framework. Firstly, it argues that social media skills are a form of vernacular, or ‘everyday’, literacy and articulates the issues associated with trying to formalise these skills within the curriculum. Secondly, it calls for greater explicit attention to social media skills within higher education, by arguing that social media literacies are a part of new literacies. It evaluates QUT’s “Create a Better Online You” suite of social media resources in light of this framework, and discusses the role of libraries in addressing social media skills.

The relevance of composing: Children’s spaces for social agency

This chapter addresses the relevance of composing for young children in creating spaces for social agency. It begins with a working definition of agency, outlines forms of agency and what might constrain it. Referring to case studies of particular children, it then goes on to discuss key themes, which illuminate what is possible and what is at stake when children compose. These overlapping themes include identity (sense of self, belonging), positioning (helping, initiating, befriending, “being bright”), voices (made through sound effects, singing, language style, and appropriating from popular culture and digital worlds), play (appropriating, imagining, designing, and creating), and resistance (not participating, staying silent, moving). Two main cases are drawn upon, those of Ta’Von and Gareth, who demonstrate agency in terms of finding spaces of belonging and meaning-making occasions in the classroom and playground. Vignettes from other children are referred to in order to illustrate common themes.

The Situated Cases

In this chapter, we meet the eight children whose documented lives are the heart of this book. The children are spread across 6 continents, so we have some textual traveling to do. We find each child in a local school. There they venture into literacy along official paths negotiated with their teachers and, also, along unofficial paths tied to their desire for peer companionship and social belonging (Corsaro, 2011; Nelson, 2007). We are most interested in their literate productions—their composing, be it with stick and dirt, pencil, crayons, and paper, tablet computer, or chalk and slate. Each child is a unique story, and each story is told by an author with particular interests in the goings-on in school, that is, with a particular angle of vision. All the authors, though, take us into a child’s educational circumstance; they give us a sense of the school’s physical site and its official curricular guidelines. Most importantly, they collectively allow us a global view of children as symbol users and social participants in the official and the unofficial worlds of school. No matter where young children go to school, they are expected to learn to “write” (although writing, as the cases illustrate, does not always mean “composing”)...

Exploring literacy lives: Returning to the field

The challenges of conducting lengthy field work in today’s busy academic world have impacted the types of research that are able to be carried out. In particular, traditional educational ethnography has become problematic for research beyond initial doctoral research programs. This paper analyzes data collected during a return to the field of a study about literate lives, eleven years after the initial data collection. It considers the implications of exploring people’s lives over time.

With the best of intentions: A critical discourse analysis of HPE curriculum materials

Much of physical education curriculum in the developed world and specifically in Australia tends to be guided in principle by syllabus documents that represent, in varying degrees, some form of government education priorities. Through the use of critical discourse analysis we analyze one such syllabus example (an official syllabus document of one of the Australian States) to explore the relationships between the emancipatory/social justice expectations presented in the rubric of and introduction to the official syllabus document, and the language details of learning outcomes that indicate how the expectations might be satisfied. Given the complexity and multilevel pathways of message systems/ideologies we question the efficacy of such documents oriented around social justice principles to genuinely deliver more radical agendas which promote social change and encourage a preparedness to engage in social action leading to a betterment of society.

A comparative study of early childhood curriculum documents focused on education for sustainability in South Korea and Australia

This thesis is about a comparative study of early childhood education (ECE) curriculum documents focused on education for sustainability (EfS) in South Korea and Australia. It examined how the national ECE curriculum documents in two culturally different contexts align with contemporary concepts of sustainability and activist early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) principles. Drawing on systems theory, Korean and Australian ECE curriculum documents were used as the primary sources for this study within the framework of critical document analysis (CDA). This study offers a step forward in developing culturally inclusive/holistic understandings of sustainability and more contextualised/localised approaches to ECEfS.

Development of probabilistic understanding in fourth grade

We analyzed the development of 4th-grade students’ understanding of the transition from experimental relative frequencies of outcomes to theoretical probabilities with a focus on the foundational statistical concepts of variation and expectation. We report students’ initial and changing expectations of the outcomes of tossing one and two coins, how they related the relative frequency from their physical and computersimulated trials to the theoretical probability, and how they created and interpreted theoretical probability models. Findings include students’ progression from an initial apparent equiprobability bias in predicting outcomes of tossing two coins through to representing the outcomes of increasing the number of trials. After observing the decreasing variation from the theoretical probability as the sample size increased, students developed a deeper understanding of the relationship between relative frequency of outcomes and theoretical probability as well as their respective associations with variation and expectation. Students’ final models indicated increasing levels of probabilistic understanding.

Understanding curriculum planning practices that promote equity and excellence for students with disability

This thesis analyses how primary teachers plan from the Australian Curriculum for students with disabilities as part of their curriculum planning to achieve equity and excellence for all. The researcher used an institutional ethnographic approach to create data maps that visually represented how these teachers navigated across thirty-one curriculum organising texts in their individual and classroom planning. By identifying the complexity of the process, types of texts that were most influential, and the everyday/night work of curriculum planning, leaders can strategically plan to support teachers to have high expectations for students with disabilities. Key themes include students with disability, curriculum entitlement and practices that promote equity.