The Vulnerable Child as Pedagogical Subject of Risk Management

This paper seeks to examine the ways in which the idea of the child as high vulnerable to risk is constituting new pedagogical subjects, ie, the teacher/caregiver as a professional risk-manager, and the child as a risk-management ‘case’. It does so by indicating how an expanded notion of the duty of care has reconstituted the child as a work-in-progress case rather than 'the concrete subject of [educational] intervention' (Castel, 1991: 288). It examines how the new teacher as a risk-conscious professional caregiver both needs and comes to acquire a new intimacy with the child not as a fleshly body but as a case of risk minimisation

Against Professional Development

This paper raises questions about the sort of knowledge which has come to count as professional development knowledge. The author interrogates the curriculum and pedagogy of academic professional development programs in Australian universities, drawing parallels with Third World development programs. She argues that professional development knowledge is privileged over disciplinary knowledge in setting lifelong learning agendas for academics, and notes some problematic consequences of this for academics engaged in professional development programs

W(h)ither Practitioner Research?

The purpose of this paper is to understand better the possibilities for practitioner research as a mode of educational inquiry that is yet to be legitimated within the academy. The paper maps the current state of play, and then moves on to consider what might yet be done to optimise its potential to contribute to rigorous new thinking about educational practice. Its exploration proceeds in 3 parts: first, it seeks to account for the ambivalent status of practitioner research in the larger context of the modern university; second, it moves on from this account to argue both the value and the limitations of practitioner research as a contemporary mode of knowledge production in education; and finally, it suggests ways that practitioner research might be less de-limited in terms of its capacities to produce knowledge that is useful to a wider range of stakeholders

Educating the creative workforce: New directions for 21st Century schooling

This article sets out reasons for arguing that creativity is not garnish to the roast of industry or of education—i.e. the reasoning behind Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's insistence that creativity is not only about elites but involves everyone. This article investigates three key domains—scholarship, commerce and learning—to argue the importance of moving creativity from the margins of formal education to its centre. First, the article elaborates the scholarly work being done to bring definitional clarity to the concept of creativity, moving it from the realm of mystery, serendipity and individual genius to a definitional field that is more amenable to analysis. It then provides evidence about the extent to which creative capacity is being understood to be a powerful economic driver, not simply the province of the arts and the hobbyist. Finally, it examines new learning theory and its implications for formal education, noting both the possibilities and pitfalls in preparing young people for creative workforce futures

Cognitive playfulness, creative capacity and generation 'C' learners

This paper draws on an ongoing doctoral study of student engagement with new digital media technologies in a formal schooling environment to demonstrate the importance of playfulness as a learning disposition. The study shows that cognitive playfulness mobilises productive engagement with learning innovations in the context of a traditional learning culture. Specifically, the paper discusses findings that emerge from a quantitative study into the level of student engagement with, and usage of, one chool's digital innovation in the form of a new Student Media Centre (SMC). The study analysed how different student learning dispositions influence the extent to which students engage with new digital technologies in the context of their otherwise traditional schooling. What emerges from the study is the interesting finding that cognitive playfulness, defined as 'the learner's dexterity and agility in terms of intellectual curiosity and imagination/creativity', is a key factor in predicting students' valuing of the opportunities that Web 2.0 open-source digital learning affords. In presenting an empirical validation of this finding, the paper contributes new knowledge to the problematic relationship between student-led digitally-enhanced learning and formal academic schooling

Digital or Diligent? Web 2.0's challenge to formal schooling

This paper explores the tensions that arise for young people as both 'digital kids' and 'diligent students'. It does so by drawing on a study conducted in an elite private school, where the tensions between 'going digital' and 'being diligent' are exacerbated by the high value the school places on academic achievement, and on learning through digital innovation. At the school under study, high levels of intellectual and technological resourcing bring with them an equally high level of expectation to excel in traditional academic tasks and high-stakes assessment. The students, under constant pressure to perform well in standardised tests, need to make decisions about the extent to which they take up school-sanctioned digitally enhanced learning opportunities that do not explicitly address academic performance. The paper examines this conundrum by investigating student preparedness to engage with a new learning innovation – a student-led media centre – in the context of the traditional pedagogical culture that is relatively untouched by such digital innovation. The paper presents an analysis of findings from a survey of 481 students in the school. The survey results were subjected to quantitative regression tree modelling to flesh out how different student learning dispositions, social and technological factors influence the extent to which students engage with a specific digital learning opportunity in the form of the Web 2.0 Student Media Centre (SMC) designed to engage the senior school community in flexible digital-networked learning. What emerges from the study is that peer support, perceived ease of use and usefulness, learning goals and cognitive playfulness are significant predictors of the choices that students make to negotiate the fundamental tensions of being digital and/or diligent. In scrutinising the tensions around a digital or a diligent student identity in this way, the paper contributes new empirical evidence to understanding the problematic relationship between student-led learning using new digital media tools and formal schooling

Aligning curriculum, pedagogy and assessment for building creative capacity in undergraduate students

Teaching-for-creativity is rarely an explicit objective of the learning and assessment process. In Europe, collaborative research projects have been recently set up to address this lack of acknowledgment or explicitness. Australian universities lag behind in this respect. However, Australian HEIs are now showing increasing commitment to creative capacity building as an outcome of undergraduate teaching

Building Creative Capacity Building in University Graduates: What we can learn from boids and voids

This paper draws on recent computing and social organizational research to open up new possibilities for constructing learning environments that optimise opportunities for university students (and, indeed, their teachers) to work as members of dynamic creative teams. Given that the challenge of setting up a learning environment that fosters such a complex mix of relational dynamics is not a simple matter of ensuring that people feel good about themselves, the paper canvasses two areas of research that can be usefully bought together to provide principles on which to build learning environment for ‘high flying’ creatives. The first is research that synthesises computer animation and biological behaviour to understand how ‘birds of a feather flock together’. ‘Flocking together’ allows birds (boids are the computer animated variety) to fly higher and exhibit greater scheduling and routing capabilities than each bird can do alone. The means by which this extra capacity is achieved can tell us a lot about how we might do better in a team environment than we can alone. The second is the sociological research that inquires into how good ideas get picked up and moved about in organizations, that is, how a novel idea, produced in one specialist cluster, can be transported across ‘holes’ (voids) in the organization to and integrated with the work of different, even unrelated, clusters of specialists. Insights from these two different domains of research – one focusing on the ‘micro’ dynamics of a team of a few people, and the other focusing on the macro dynamics of working across teams, are combined to develop principles for building a learning environment that can optimize creative high flying

Monitoring student creative capacity: using network visualisation to evaluate pedagogical practice

This paper explores how research in the fields of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Business can be applied to monitoring the development of student creative capacity

Understanding the management of doctoral studies in Australia as risk management

This paper discusses and analyses theoretical explanations of risk and risk management in terms of the management of doctoral studies. It deals with the ways in which Government policy, together with contemporary approaches to the bureaucratisation of risk management and the development and imposition of rationalities of risk, are shaping the practices of universities concerning the selection, supervision, support and assessment of doctoral candidates. In particular, the impact of the Research Training Scheme on doctoral studies is discussed as a particular context in which the institutionalisation of risk management occurs.<br /