Putting "space" on the agenda of sociocultural research in education

The global rescaling of the world, culture, and education has influenced how people experience their situationality, meaning-making, and learning in relation to the Other. This article explores the implications of spatial analysis for rethinking education in new conditions of cultural complexity. The experience of living and learning with difference is conceptualized as an open journey in which the very act of movement across spatial boundaries unlocks the fixity of meanings and identities and, hence, problematizes the spatial logic of bounded learning places. Explicating the tension between fixity and mobility, boundedness and flows, this article deploys the concepts of cultural-semiotic space, scale, and boundary to theorize locations of learning and meaning-making in new times. <br /

Dangerous liaisons - Home-business-school numeracy networks

Using data from an Australian study of home, school and community partnerships, we suggest that commercial tutoring agencies are a community resource which increasingly parents are choosing to supplement their children's numeracy education. Drawing on contemporary activity theory we argue that because home, school and commercial enterprises are overlapping spheres of influence in some children’s learning they can be conceived of as a network of activity systems that interact with each other in some significant ways. However, only when this mutual influence is recognised can we consider the network in terms of partnerships between home, school and community. We challenge the prevailing education ethos in Australia which marginalizes and ignores the growing proliferation of for-profit tutoring businesses. In a context where cultural diversity, changing demographics and democratic choice prevail, the value of for-profit agencies may lie in areas not well met by schools. Tutoring businesses are usually well-equipped, most using the latest information and communications technologies, and offer one-to-one, or small group attention to students thus improving confidence, a large factor in numeracy success. Parents typically report that they employ commercial services because their children have particular needs which they feel are not met adequately in classroom settings. Introduction Australian public education has long been informed by its founding philosophy; that of a free, public and compulsory education for all. However arguably there has never been a time when education in Australia was unambiguously, free, public and compulsory. Private schools were first established and the ‘public’ aspect of education (the dual system) came into being in the second half of the nineteenth century (Society of Australian Genealogists, 2001-2005). As regards compulsory attendance, education as a requirement for those between 6 and 13 years was in place by 1900 but school attendance was not strictly enforced during the early decades of the 20th century (Burke and Spaull, 2002). Since 1966 the school leaving age has been15 years but

Exploring the becoming of pre-service teachers in paired placement models

This chapter draws on the Bakhtinian conceptualisation of ideological becoming to examine the professional becoming of pre-service teachers (PSTs) and their supervising teachers in paired placements as they negotiate unfamiliar situations and tensions. It considers the changing environment of the placement space in Australia by examining findings from survey and interview data with secondary PSTs and their supervising teachers. The findings suggest collaborative teaching in the secondary teaching space was an unfamiliar discourse, with many PSTs perceiving the outcome of a paired placement as limiting their ability to practice their skills in teaching, and with supervising teachers placing limited value on the skills learnt from the experience. The findings illustrated that for paired placements to make a valuable contribution to PST and supervising teachers’ professional becoming it is important to carefully consider the purpose and use of paired placements and in this chapter I suggest strategies for doing so. The chapter concludes by considering the potential of future of alternative models of placement such as paired and group placements and the development of strong school-university partnerships with clusters of schools