Localised, student-centred curriculum construction : a case study of making Chinese learnable for Australian primary school students

With the turn to ‘zhōng wén rè - 中文热’ (Chinese fever), Chinese is now the most commonly spoken second language in Australia. There has been a concomitant growth in interest in the learning of the Chinese language in local schools. However, it has been reported that there exist huge difficulties and challenges in making Chinese learnable for the predominantly Englishspeaking learners in Australia. The high dropout rate from Chinese language courses presents evidence of this. Consequently, this case study has been conducted in a local public school of New South Wales through the Australia-China educational partnership program entitled ROSETE. Specifically, the purpose of this case study is to draw on the local students’ social practices, undertaken in English, for establishing what to teach in the Chinese language classroom. The aim is to construct an appropriately learnable curriculum which will assist to enrich students’ learning of Chinese. In doing so, this study focuses on local students’ daily recurring sociolinguistic activities and their funds of knowledge in the school-based community through addressing and answering the overarching research question: how can the use of students’ sociolinguistic activities and funds of knowledge contribute to curriculum construction to enrich the learning of the Chinese language? Guided by this question, the study initially investigates particular forms of local students’ daily sociolinguistic activities, performed in English at school, then utilises them as the learning content sources. In effect, it gives priority to mobilising students’ knowledge base in order to adapt their preferred instruction strategies to make them suitable for the local educational milieu. Furthermore, it is suggested that this process of generating Chinese learning materials can and should be adjusted, and then applied to more broadly to emergent second language learners of Chinese around the world, in accordance with their diversified cultural and educational environments. The case study suggests that local students’ potential translanguaging capabilities between English and Chinese are evolving and becoming powerful due in part to the effort exerted by their engagement in this form of situated learning practice. Thus, not only can Chinese be made learnable, but a specific localised vocabulary can become the base for more extensive language learning

Bayesian Surprise in Indoor Environments

This paper proposes a novel method to identify unexpected structures in 2D floor plans using the concept of Bayesian Surprise. Taking into account that a person's expectation is an important aspect of the perception of space, we exploit the theory of Bayesian Surprise to robustly model expectation and thus surprise in the context of building structures. We use Isovist Analysis, which is a popular space syntax technique, to turn qualitative object attributes into quantitative environmental information. Since isovists are location-specific patterns of visibility, a sequence of isovists describes the spatial perception during a movement along multiple points in space. We then use Bayesian Surprise in a feature space consisting of these isovist readings. To demonstrate the suitability of our approach, we take "snapshots" of an agent's local environment to provide a short list of images that characterize a traversed trajectory through a 2D indoor environment. Those fingerprints represent surprising regions of a tour, characterize the traversed map and enable indoor LBS to focus more on important regions. Given this idea, we propose to use "surprise" as a new dimension of context in indoor location-based services (LBS). Agents of LBS, such as mobile robots or non-player characters in computer games, may use the context surprise to focus more on important regions of a map for a better use or understanding of the floor plan.Comment: 10 pages, 16 figure

Take It To The Bank: How Land Banks Are Strengthening America's Neighborhoods

This report scans the land banking field nationally and reports on the scope and state of this movement. It also includes insights and recommendations for land bank practitioners, based on Community Progress staff members' many collective years of experience working with land banks across the country. There is no land bank model kit. There are, however, common attributes of effective and successful land banks that current and future land bank staff, practitioners, governments, and partner organizations can adopt. This report is intended to help shorten the learning curve

To Improve Quality: A Plan for Improving Wofford College

A Plan for Improving Wofford College, submitted to the Wofford College Board of Trusteeshttps://digitalcommons.wofford.edu/collegebooks/1001/thumbnail.jp

Working Together to Build a Birth-to-College Approach to Public Education

In 2009, the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute (UEI) and the Ounce of Prevention Fund (the Ounce) embarked on an effort to form a partnership whose vision is to "...build a model of public education for children and their families that begins at birth and creates success in school, and life." UEI designed and operates four public charter school campuses offering families a pathway to college for their children that begins with prekindergarten (preK) and continues through high school. The Ounce created and operates the Educare School, which prepares at risk children from birth to age five for success in school. The partnership will initially demonstrate what it means when children begin their education early with Educare, enter UEI's charter campuses for elementary, middle and high school, advance to college, and persist to graduation. Ultimately, the partnership plans to harness and share the academic expertise and real-world experience of members of both organizations. The goal is to collaboratively and continuously align and create instructional practices, and academic and social supports, to demonstrate a new model of public education that seamlessly and successfully prepares children for college, beginning at birth. In the United States, early childhood education (ECE) is not publicly mandated. All children in the U.S. receive public schooling that generally begins with kindergarten. As a result, many children do not have access to sufficient learning opportunities early in life, and may start kindergarten at a disadvantage. Given that K-12 attempts at closing the achievement gap are costly and generally ineffective, calls are being made to prevent the achievement gap from ever occurring. This requires intervention at a very young age, since differences in achievement based on income level can be seen as young as nine months and become larger by kindergarten. Even children who have been exposed to high quality ECE can experience a "fade" of those benefits upon entering K-12, depending on the quality of elementary school. For many children, the achievement gap begins to widen once again. In the city of Chicago, high school graduation rates hover around 50 percent. Of those students who graduate, only 35 percent go on to attend four-year colleges and universities. The numbers grow even smaller for children who are African American, Latino, or low-income. The achievement gap that opens in early childhood tends to widen throughout K-12, and many children who start with a disadvantage at kindergarten never graduate from high school. If they do, they are unlikely to attend and graduate from college. Higher education levels are related to higher incomes, lower levels of unemployment, and other positive outcomes. In order to be competitive in a world where a college degree is increasingly important, the United States must ensure that children graduate high school and are prepared to graduate from college. Preventing an achievement gap and ensuring that the fade of benefits from high-quality ECE does not occur in elementary school, while at the same time raising the bar to "college for all," requires collaboration between the worlds of ECE and K-12. In the United States, however, there exists a structural divide between the two fields. Despite the fact that they share similar goals for educating children, policies, standards, and funding streams contribute to a "disconnect." The partnership's goals are to effect change in public education by creating a demonstration model of birth-to-grade 12 education that prepares students for success in college and life. In order to accomplish this, the two organizations will work together to share expertise, and align and co-create practices, to ensure the best possible chance for success for students. The partnership first needed to be established, strengthened, and trusted by key players from each organization -- this was not a simple task. UEI and the Ounce began this effort by developing a roadmap that includes a shared vision and mission, core values, and goals and activities of the partnership. We focus here on the formation of the shared vision and mission, a document that represents the goals and aspirations of the partnership between the two organizations. In the service of creating this document, a working group comprised of educators, administrators, researchers, and teacher leaders from each organization was formed. The working group used an iterative process, where they revised, questioned, and adjusted the roadmap during a series of ten three-hour meetings that took place over the course of nine months and were facilitated by a specialist. Working group members' testimonies about their experiences participating in the group are referenced in this study. We will also review iterations of the shared vision and mission as they changed over time

The Richmond Maker Museum: The Evolution of Process

The Richmond Maker Museum is a working museum design, offering an inside look at past achievements, juxtaposed with the unlimited future possibilities of an evolving, active maker culture. It is a dynamic place designed to allow makers to showcase skills, take risks, engage the public, and grow their craft in real time. The museum displays finished pieces, introduces makers, demonstrates the processes they employ in their work, and invites the community to meet the artisans who, through skill, ingenuity, and hard work, make the artifacts on display. This type of educational museum experience does not currently exist on this scale in Richmond. While other local museums invite visiting artists and offer lectures, the Richmond Maker Museum takes interaction to a new level, introducing visitors to the routines and procedures of each artisan’s daily practice. Maker culture is a tightly woven network of craftsmen—woodworkers, metalworkers, glassblowers, etc. It celebrates traditional fabrication techniques, while also introducing modern technologies such as laser cutting and three-dimensional printing. The social and educational aspects of the maker movement have created a revolution, revitalizing public appreciation for the role of the maker and the importance of craftsmanship

An ethnographic investigation into the relationship between mental models and the implementation of total quality management

Includes bibliography.The objective of my project was to find the reasons why the Quality Improvement Process (QIP) which started enthusiastically in Old Mutual in 1987, has lost momentum. Its initial implementation was characterised by success, but later, certain shortcomings became evident. In brief, the initial success of Crosby's QIP programme was attributable to its organised implementation throughout the organisation. It created a general awareness of key quality principles and gave a common understanding of a uniform language and standards throughout the organisation. However, after some years, senior management realised that this process was too simplistic, and that more was needed. A 'second phase' was implemented. This phase built onto the foundations laid by the QIP and focused on achieving client-orientated improvements in all business processes within the organisation. But this phase gradually lost momentum, as it failed to take into account the fact that lasting and continuous improvement in an organisation requires fundamental changes in almost every facet or part of the organisational whole. These fundamental changes include changes to the organisational structure, its management practices, its work processes and systems , changes in the way that managers view the organisation (that is, their mental models) and not merely a focus on process improvement within the organisation. The hypothesis propounded in this thesis would attempt to prove or disprove a component of the aforementioned, namely that a certain dominant mental model, that is, a belief of how the organisation works, is needed amongst the management of an organisation to bring about genuine improvements. This hypothesis propounds that a high-performing organisation would exhibit a strong correlation between the mental model implied by quality improvement and the organisation's managers' dominant mental model of how their organisation works

Locating mathematics within post-16 vocational education in England

The political importance of mathematics in post-16 education is clear. Far less clear is how mathematics does and should relate to vocational education. Successive mathematics curricula (e.g. core skills, key skills) have been developed in England with vocational learners in mind. Meanwhile, general mathematics qualifications remain largely disconnected from vocational learning. Following a brief historical survey of mathematics within vocational education, the paper presents findings from a nested case study of student groups in three large Further Education colleges in England. The primary unit of analysis herein is student groups learning Functional Mathematics in two vocational areas: construction and hairdressing. We show how approaches to organising teaching, developing connected curricula and classroom pedagogy tend to isolate or integrate mathematics from/with the vocational experience. Integrated approaches are shown to impact positively on student engagement and attitudes to learning mathematics. The paper concludes by discussing the potential impact of academic qualifications displacing vocationally relevant mathematics

The Survival of Small Businesses in Northeastern Florida After a Natural Disaster

Many small business owners lack strategies needed to prevent permanent business closure in the wake of extreme natural disaster situations. After a natural disaster, small businesses suffer financial losses in millions of dollars related to damage and destruction that disrupt their lives, families, and communities. This multiple case study explored strategies that 5 small business owners in northeastern Florida used to avoid permanent business closure in the aftermath of a natural disaster. The theory of planned behavior and vested interest theory were the conceptual frameworks used in this multiple case study. In-depth interviews with purposively selected small business owners were supplemented with a review of documentation from archival records. Yin\u27s 5-step analysis guided the coding process of participants\u27 responses, and member checking was used to validate the transcribed data. The major themes of the study revealed the owners\u27 strategies relating to flood barriers, maintaining adequate insurance coverage, damage and destruction aftermath, and experience with natural disasters. This study\u27s implications for social change include contributing to social stability and continuing economic growth by benefitting small business owners without a natural disaster plan or a plan that needs updating, new small business owners, and community organizations. This study may benefit small businesses by providing lessons learned on how to survive natural disasters

Decision Makers\u27 Thinking During the Design and Implementation of a K-5 High-Computer-Access (HCA) Program

As present trends in education indicate, learning with technology is increasingly being considered as a means of instructional delivery for K-1 2 learners. Educational leaders must be informed of how to provide the experiences, skills, and knowledge required of the learners for whom they are responsible. This qualitative study examined the conceptualization of a school district\u27s attempt to design and implement a high-computer-access (HCA) program. Research methodologies included interview, observation, and analysis of related documents. The results comprised the thinking of the HCA program designers and how they viewed learning theory and effective instruction principles in relationship to the HCA environments they were creating. The findings from this study indicated that designing and implementing an HCA program into a school district involves several issues. These issues were organized into the following themes: (a) goals and assumptions; (b) appropriation; (c) transformative teaching; (d) child-centered instruction; and (e) logistics. The goals and assumptions theme addressed the participants\u27 thinking about the organization\u27s and the designers\u27 goals that evolved during the design phase. The appropriations theme encompassed the use of computer as a learning and teaching tool. Reported changes in instructional planning and delivery are represented in the transformative teaching theme. The child-centered instruction theme resulted from participants\u27 numerous references to learning theory. The fifth theme, logistics, included the procurement, maintenance, and knowledge acquisition inherent in HCA environments. Further investigation of these themes may assist educational leaders who would choose to implement HCA environments into their schools