Comparing the ethical predisposition of university students in five English-speaking countries : an examination of 14 questionable business practices

Recent years have seen intense scrutiny focused on the reported ethical breaches of enterprises across the globe. At the forefront of the accompanying criticism are the actions of giant American firms such as WorldCom, Arthur Anderson, and Enron. However, such deviations from acceptable standards of conduct have not been confined to the American market. Australia endured its era of “corporate excess” in the 1980s [Milton-Smith, 1997]. As a result, a spate of ethics-based research was undertaken in the early 1990s. More recently, China has been identified as a major venue for behavior deemed to be unacceptable, even unsafe. Issues such as counterfeit fashion items, software, and automobile parts have been a concern for several years [Gonzalez, 2007]. Perhaps more disconcerting are the recent recalls of children’s products, many of which were produced for leading toy companies such as Mattel and Fisher-Price, because of the use of dangerous lead-based paint. As one might anticipate, news reports and consumer protection agencies have been quick to condemn any action that falls within the “controversial” category. Indeed, many segments of society characterize such actions as unethical behavior. One result of this increased level of concern is the higher level of attention given to ethics in higher education programs. Even accreditation bodies such as AACSB have virtually mandated the integration of ethics into the curriculum. As a consequence, academicians have ramped up their ethics-based research agendas.

Homework for refugee middle school students with backgrounds marked by low levels of engagement with English school literacy

Homework presents many challenges for refugees from Africa who are arriving in Australian schools with histories of little, no or severely interrupted schooling. This is evident in the emergence of school- and community-based homework help, clubs and tutoring programs for the students. The aim of this article is to describe the homework support options accessed by eight students from Burundi, Rwanda, Eritrea and Sudan who participated in a study of pedagogy for middle school-aged African refugees, and the views on homework of their parents and teachers. The article shows some tensions between family and school expectations and the dilemmas that arise for teachers in a broader context of public concern about and official policy statement on excessive and repetitive homework. It is argued that application of policy guidelines needs to account for disadvantages that potentially accrue to students who cannot design their own independent study programs. Further, it is suggested that integration of skills and meaning-based pedagogy inherent in recent approaches to literacy education has potential for ensuring that students receive the forms of homework they require.

Integrating engineering education in the middle school mathematics curriculum

Many nations are experiencing a decline in the number of graduating engineers, an overall poor preparedness for engineering studies in tertiary institutions, and a lack of diversity in the field. Given the increasing importance of mathematics, science, engineering, and technology in our world, it is imperative that we foster an interest and drive to participate in engineering from an early age. This discuission paper argues for the intergration of engineering education within the elementary and middle school mathematics curricula. In doing so, we offer a definition of engineering education and address its core goals; consider some perceptions of engineering and engineering education held by teachers and students; and offer one approach to promoting engineering education within the elementary and middle school mathematics curriculum, namely through mathematical modeling.

Integrating Engineering Experiences within the Elementary Mathematics Curriculum

Engineering education for elementary school students is a new and increasingly important domain of research by mathematics, science, technology, and engineering educators. Recent research has raised questions about the context of engineering problems that are meaningful, engaging, and inspiring for young students. In the present study an environmental engineering activity was implemented in two classes of 11-year-old students in Cyprus. The problem required students to use the data to develop a procedure for selecting among alternative countries from which to buy water. Students created a range of models that adequately solved the problem although not all models took into account all of the data provided. The models varied in the number of problem factors taken into consideration and also in the different approaches adopted in dealing with the problem factors. At least two groups of students integrated into their models the environmental aspect of the problem (energy consumption, water pollution) and further refined their models. Results provide evidence that engineering model-eliciting activities can be successfully integrated in the elementary mathematics curriculum. These activities provide rich opportunities for students to deal with engineering contexts and to apply their learning in mathematics and science to solving real-world engineering problems.

Future directions and perspectives for problem solving research and curriculum development

Since the 1960s, numerous studies on problem solving have revealed the complexity of the domain and the difficulty in translating research findings into practice. The literature suggests that the impact of problem solving research on the mathematics curriculum has been limited. Furthermore, our accumulation of knowledge on the teaching of problem solving is lagging. In this first discussion paper we initially present a sketch of 50 years of research on mathematical problem solving. We then consider some factors that have held back problem solving research over the past decades and offer some directions for how we might advance the field. We stress the urgent need to take into account the nature of problem solving in various arenas of today’s world and to accordingly modernize our perspectives on the teaching and learning of problem solving and of mathematical content through problem solving. Substantive theory development is also long overdue—we show how new perspectives on the development of problem solving expertise can contribute to theory development in guiding the design of worthwhile learning activities. In particular, we explore a models and modeling perspective as an alternative to existing views on problem solving.

Integrating engineering education within the elementary and middle school mathematics curriculum

Many nations are experiencing a decline in the number of graduating engineers, an overall poor preparedness for engineering studies in tertiary institutions, and a lack of diversity in the field. Given the increasing importance of mathematics, science, engineering, and technology in our world, it is imperative that we foster an interest and drive to participate in engineering from an early age. This discussion paper argues for the integration of engineering education within the elementary and middle school mathematics curricula. In doing so, we offer a definition of engineering education and address its core goals; consider some perceptions of engineering and engineering education held by teachers and students; and offer one approach to promoting engineering education within the elementary and middle school mathematics curriculum, namely through mathematical modeling.

Using picture books in the Secondary English classroom

This Chapter explores how teachers can use children's picture books in the Secondary English classroom.

Presentations in English : find your voice as a presenter

With estimates of more than thirty million given each day, presentations have become an integral part of modern society. They can signify the difference between gaining or losing a job, or being successful or unsuccessful at university and a future career. Presentations in English, combining a 128-page book and DVD, is an innovative and complete course aimed specifically at non-native speakers of English.

The trouble with English

So much has been made over the crisis in English literature as field, as corpus, and as canon in recent years, that some of it undoubtedly has spilled over into English education. This has been the case in predominantly English-speaking Anglo-American and Commonwealth nations, as well as in those postcolonial states where English remains the medium of instruction and lingua franca of economic and cultural elites. Yet to attribute the pressures for change in pedagogic practice to academic paradigm shift per se would prop up the shaky axiom that English education is forever caught in some kind of perverse evolutionary time-lag, parasitic of university literary studies. I, too, believe that English education has reached a crucial moment in its history, but that this moment is contingent upon the changing demographics, cultural knowledges, and practices of economic globalization.

Comprehension as social and intellectual practice : rebuilding curriculum in low socioeconomic and cultural minority schools

This article reframes the concept of comprehension as a social and intellectual practice. It reviews current approaches to reading instruction for linguistically and culturally diverse and low socioeconomic students, noting an emphasis on comprehension as autonomous skills. The Four Resources model (Freebody & Luke, 1990) is used to make the case for the integration of comprehension instruction with an emphasis on student cultural and community knowledge, and substantive intellectual and sociocultural content in elementary school curricula. Illustrations are drawn from research underway on the teaching of literacy in primary schools in low SES communities.

Teaching English as an additional language in senior high school : critical discourses in critical times

This paper presents a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of four policy documents currently offering ‘sets of possibilities’ for the teaching of English as an additional or second language (hereafter EAL/ESL) in senior classrooms in Queensland, Australia. The aim is to identify the ways in which each document re-presents the notion of critical literacy. Leximancer software, and Fairclough’s textually-oriented discourse analysis method (2001, 2003) are used to interrogate the relevant sections of the documents for the ways in which they re-present (sic) and construct the discourses around critical language study. This paper presents the description, interpretation and explanation of the discourses in these documents which constitute part of a larger project in which teacher interviews and classroom teaching are also investigated for the ways in which ‘the critical’ is constructed and contested in knowledge and practice.

The impact of outcomes-driven curriculum reform on teacher perspectives of professional practice

This thesis is the result of an investigation of a Queensland example of curriculum reform based on outcomes, a type of reform common to many parts of the world during the last decade. The purpose of the investigation was to determine the impact of outcomes on teacher perspectives of professional practice. The focus was chosen to permit investigation not only of changes in behaviour resulting from the reform but also of teachers' attitudes and beliefs developed during implementation. The study is based on qualitative methodology, chosen because of its suitability for the investigation of attitudes and perspectives. The study exploits the researcher's opportunities for prolonged, direct contact with groups of teachers through the selection of an over-arching ethnography approach, an approach designed to capture the holistic nature of the reform and to contextualise the data within a broad perspective. The selection of grounded theory as a basis for data analysis reflects the open nature of this inquiry and demonstrates the study's constructivist assumptions about the production of knowledge. The study also constitutes a multi-site case study by virtue of the choice of three individual school sites as objects to be studied and to form the basis of the report. Three primary school sites administered by Brisbane Catholic Education were chosen as the focus of data collection. Data were collected from three school sites as teachers engaged in the first year of implementation of Student Performance Standards, the Queensland version of English outcomes based on the current English syllabus. Teachers' experience of outcomes-driven curriculum reform was studied by means of group interviews conducted at individual school sites over a period of fourteen months, researcher observations and the collection of artefacts such as report cards. Analysis of data followed grounded theory guidelines based on a system of coding. Though classification systems were not generated prior to data analysis, the labelling of categories called on standard, non-idiosyncratic terminology and analytic frames and concepts from existing literature wherever practicable in order to permit possible comparisons with other related research. Data from school sites were examined individually and then combined to determine teacher understandings of the reform, changes that have been made to practice and teacher responses to these changes in terms of their perspectives of professionalism. Teachers in the study understood the reform as primarily an accountability mechanism. Though teachers demonstrated some acceptance of the intentions of the reform, their responses to its conceptualisation, supporting documentation and implications for changing work practices were generally characterised by reduced confidence, anger and frustration. Though the impact of outcomes-based curriculum reform must be interpreted through the inter-relationships of a broad range of elements which comprise teachers' work and their attitudes towards their work, it is proposed that the substantive findings of the study can be understood in terms of four broad themes. First, when the conceptual design of outcomes did not serve teachers' accountability requirements and outcomes were perceived to be expressed in unfamiliar technical language, most teachers in the study lost faith in the value of the reform and lost confidence in their own abilities to understand or implement it. Second, this reduction of confidence was intensified when the scope of outcomes was outside the scope of the teachers' existing curriculum and assessment planning and teachers were confronted with the necessity to include aspects of syllabuses or school programs which they had previously omitted because of a lack of understanding or appreciation. The corollary was that outcomes promoted greater syllabus fidelity when frameworks were closely aligned. Third, other benefits the teachers associated with outcomes included the development of whole school curriculum resources and greater opportunity for teacher collaboration, particularly among schools. The teachers, however, considered a wide range of factors when determining the overall impact of the reform, and perceived a number of them in terms of the costs of implementation. These included the emergence of ethical dilemmas concerning relationships with students, colleagues and parents, reduced individual autonomy, particularly with regard to the selection of valued curriculum content and intensification of workload with the capacity to erode the relationships with students which teachers strongly associated with the rewards of their profession. Finally, in banding together at the school level to resist aspects of implementation, some teachers showed growing awareness of a collective authority capable of being exercised in response to top-down reform. These findings imply that Student Performance Standards require review and, additional implementation resourcing to support teachers through times of reduced confidence in their own abilities. Outcomes prove an effective means of high-fidelity syllabus implementation, and, provided they are expressed in an accessible way and aligned with syllabus frameworks and terminology, should be considered for inclusion in future syllabuses across a range of learning areas. The study also identifies a range of unintended consequences of outcomes-based curriculum and acknowledges the complexity of relationships among all the aspects of teachers' work. It also notes that the impact of reform on teacher perspectives of professional practice may alter teacher-teacher and school-system relationships in ways that have the potential to influence the effectiveness of future curriculum reform.