Big Picture Education Australia: Experiences of students, parents/carers & teachers

Too many young Australians, especially those from disadvantaged circumstances, are not benefiting from the rewards of education and training. For others, there is a growing sense of frustration and alienation about the kind of education they receive, and from their point of view school is boring, irrelevant and disconnected from the world they know. For many, there is a lack of personal connectedness and meaning as their own needs, desires, aspirations and interests are denied in large high school settings where the focus is on subjects, timetables, discipline, didactic teaching, examinations, and classroom-based learning. These historically persistent and protracted problems have preoccupied policymakers, researchers and school reformers for the past sixty years or more. Whilst hardly new, the issue of student (dis)engagement is an increasingly urgent public policy matter not only in terms of economics - cost, productivity, global competitiveness, innovation and human capital, but also social cohesion, mental health and wellbeing, social justice, and democracy itself. At a time when young people face an increasingly volatile and uncertain future due to the impact of globalisation, deindustrialisation, technology, and job insecurity, schools are under pressure to resolve some complex social, economic and political problems not always of their own making. Ironically, schools are often perceived to be a part of the problem and also the solution. Against this broader backdrop, this report attempts to identify, map and describe the experiences of students, their parents/carers and teachers attending schools in a range of sites across Australia adopting an interest-based approach to learning. The intent is to illuminate the experiences of these participants and, from their vantage point, better understand how this approach might address questions of student engagement, school reform, school leadership, curriculum, organisation, assessment and school-community relationships

Thermal fracture mechanisms in ceramic thermal barrier coatings

Ceramic thermal barrier coatings represent an attractive method of increasing the high temperature limits for systems such as diesel engines, gas turbines and aircraft engines. However, the dissimilarities between ceramics and metal, as well as the severe temperature gradients applied in such systems, cause thermal stresses which can lead to cracking and ultimately spalling of the coating. This paper reviews the research which considers initiation of surface cracks, interfacial edge cracks and the effect of a transient thermal load on interface cracks. The results of controlled experiments together with analytical models are presented. The implications of these findings to the differences between diesel engines and gas turbines are discussed. The importance of such work for determining the proper design criteria for thermal barrier coatings is underlined

Promising practices: What students, parents and teachers say about learning in a Big Picture context

This report identifies the key findings from a research project into the early implementation (the first 20 months) of the Big Picture Education (BPE) design for learning and school 1 in five different schools in Western Australia. The aim was to understand better how student engagement for learning and aspirations develop in a Big Picture context. These findings are reported more extensively in a series of Research Briefs, Combined Reports and papers. 2 Our goal in this document is to bring the findings together into the one summary report