Assuming responsibility : teachers taking charge of their professional development

The paper reports on some of the findings of an extensive study undertaken in Victoria as part of a national Science, ICT and Mathematics Education in Rural and Regional Australia (SiMERR) project. One of the significant findings of the study was the extent to which teachers in the schools where the study data were collected took responsibility for many aspects of their own professional development. This was not at the expense of, but rather was in addition to, their involvement in school- and region-based professional development activity. The study also identifies some of the challenges faced, mostly related to the location of their schools in a rural or regional setting.

Narrative and portfolio approaches to teacher professional standards

This paper analyses various uses of narrative in the exploration of teacher identity. It highlights the way many contemporary education writers use terminology such as ‘storying lives’ and ‘storied landscapes’ to describe teacher processes of reflection on practice. In this paper the authors discuss some recent approaches to narrative that incorporate or suggest systematic uses of narrative theory (Conle 2003, Kamler, 2001, Richardson, 2003). Consideration is also given to the links between critical ethnography and narrative in order to critique the use of teacher portfolios, as in a recent Australian initiative for the appraisal of beginning teachers. The authors conclude with an argument for the rehabilitation and refinement of narrative theory in the ‘writing’ of teacher identity.

Professional artists in Vietnam : intellectual property rights, economic and cultural sustainability

The article outlines the legal context for Vietnamese artists that is not discussed in other literature, including the scarcity of data on the art market, the reasons for failure to enforce intellectual property (IP) rights and legal contracts, and the rapid growth of private-sector art dealing that makes an examination of the legal context so essential. The author's field research in Vietnam since 2003 is linked to analyses of Vietnam's art market and to civil codes and other international agreements that determine professional artists’ IP rights. This illustrates the reasons why IP rights have not been enforced or arbitrated in Vietnam. The author includes a discussion of the importance of enforcing IP law for the maintenance of artists’ incomes and careers, the development of a national art market, and for innovation and cultural sustainability in Vietnam.

Introducing a learning repository using a blended professional development approach

This paper outlines the professional development program used to introduce a learning repository at Deakin University. Providing appropriate, timely and effective professional development programs to support academic and other staff is one of the objectives of the Deakin University Teaching and Learning Functional Plan 2008. Our blended program combines web-based and face-to-face training with a wide variety of resources to support staff. Issues noted in the literature relating to the introduction and use of learning repositories informed the planning and development of our program. Challenges and issues we experienced at Deakin are also outlined.

Professional standards for physical education teachers' professional development : technology for performance?

Background: The widespread and diverse models of professional standards for teaching raise questions with respect to the need to provide teachers with a pathway for continuing professional development balanced with the public nature of surveillance and accountability that may accompany standards. Ways of understanding technologies of power in relation to standards for
teaching gives us a new language and, in turn, new questions about the standards agenda in the physical education profession.
Purpose: To analyse how one health and physical education (HPE) teacher worked with Education Queensland’s (EQ) professional standards for teaching within the broader context of teacher professional development and renewal.
Participants and setting: An experienced HPE teacher working in an urban secondary school was the ‘case’ for this article. Tim was the only experienced HPE teacher within the larger pilot study of 220 selected teachers from the volunteer pool across the state.
Data collection: The case-study data comprised two in-depth interviews conducted by the first author, field notes from workshops (first author), teacher diaries and work samples, notes from focus groups of which Tim was a member, and electronic communications with peers by Tim
during the course of the evaluation.
Findings: Tim was supportive of the teaching standards while they did not have a strong evaluative dimension associated with technologies of power. He found the self-regulation associated with his reflective practices professionally rewarding rather than being formalised within a prescribed
professional development framework.
Conclusion: Tim’s positive response to the professional standards for teaching was typical of the broader pilot cohort. The concept of governmentality provided a useful framework to help map how the standards for teaching were received, regardless of teacher specialisation or experience.
We suggest that it is not until the standards regimes are talked about within the discourses of
power (e.g. codification for career progression, certification for professional development imperatives) that we can understand patterns of acceptance and resistance by teachers to policies
that seek to shape their performance.

Professional standards for teachers : a case study of professional learning

This paper analyses the current Australian policy and research context in relation to developing quality teachers. Like other countries, many educational authorities in Australia are developing professional standards for teachers and the evaluation of teachers against those standards as a
mechanism for ensuring and extending the quality of teaching in schools. A key policy consideration involves the use of professional standards as tools for extending professional learning and/or for credentialing and appraisal. This paper considers these uses of standards by drawing on an evaluation of Education Queensland’s Professional Standards for Teachers pilot.
The pilot focused on using a set of standards as a framework for professional learning. Teachers’ perspectives on the standards and their intended use, their engagement with the standards during the pilot and the nature of professional learning associated with that engagement are discussed in light of current policy debates about professional standards.

Changing teacher professional learning : transitioning from train - the trainer to participatory action research

Diffusion-adoption professional learning models which position teachers ascompliant technicians of policy and practices are limited in their long term effects on teacher professionalism. In contrast, co-researching models of professional learning hold the potential to engage teachers and researchers in explorations of mutual concern which impact on professionalism and contribute to development of both theory and practice.

This article describes professional learning within the context of an Australian state department of education during a period of reform. The contextual influences and design of a collaborative, film-driven participatory action research design which explored teacher learning and application of multiliteracies theory are explored. A spiral of cycles of action research incorporated engagentent with multiliteracies theory and collaborative planning; filming of teacher classroom 'action' and reflective interviews; collaborative observation of and reflection on the resultant filmic artefacts.

The filmic artefacts offered rich multimodal examples of teaching practices,
incorporatíng visual, audio, gestural and spatial classroom information, far beyond the purely linguistic recounts and descriptions which characterise many professional development workshops. Incorporation of collaborative filmic research techniques enabled multimodal observation of teaching practices across a number of sites, with observation unrestricted by temporal or physical parameters.