“The pay is not worth it but it is excellent PD”: Australian teachers’ perspectives on doing large-scale marking

Anecdotally, teachers take up opportunities to mark large-scale assessments because they are told by colleagues that it is \u27good PD\u27. Assertions about the value of marking are passed along with little question. However, research into the benefits of participating as a marker in large-scale marking has not been conducted in the Australian context. This paper reports the results of an online survey of Australian teachers (N=43) about their participation in large-scale marking in order to examine whether the research that has been conducted internationally is likely to be generalisable to Australia. The responses to the survey are described and then compared with four main areas of benefit identified in the literature. It found that Australian teachers\u27 views of large-scale marking are similar to those of their international colleagues, and that teachers report a broad and varied range of benefits. Additionally, it was found that survey respondents identified a range of costs and drawbacks of marking that have not been reported in the literature, but that in spite of these the respondents would still recommend the experience to other teachers

The viability of simulated large-scale marking as professional development for preservice teachers

Judging the quality of student work is a core skill of a proficient teacher. This professional competency is often utilised by organisations that run large-scale marking operations when they recruit teachers as markers. These organisations and the teachers themselves often claim that large-scale marking is valuable professional development. This research aimed to determine whether professional learning outcomes similar to those reported by experienced teachers can be achieved for preservice teachers through participation in a live simulation of a large-scale marking operation. The research was conducted in three phases: an online survey of Australian teachers to establish that reports of benefit from other contexts are generalisable to Australia; a simulated marking experience for 22 preservice teachers at Edith Cowan University; and finally, follow-up interviews with seven of those participants after their first semester of teaching to establish to what extent their perceptions of the marking experience had changed. The research collected qualitative data through interviews and an online survey. Additionally, there was quantitative data collected during the marking simulation in the form of scores, and these were analysed with simple descriptive statistics, linear correlation, and a many-facet Rasch analysis to examine the severity or harshness of the novice markers. The analysis of the scoring was not done to examine the skill of the markers, but rather to evaluate the quality of the marker training in the simulation. It was found that the markers scored reliably, and so it was inferred that the simulation training was probably similar to authentic marker training. The research found that the benefits described by the simulation participants largely centred on increased confidence in marking and gaining experience of marking. These main benefits and several minor ones broadly aligned with benefits published in the literature. The perception of value in the simulated marking experience did not diminish after the preservice teachers had begun their work as teachers, and several reported using processes or concepts from the experience in their professional work. The research concluded that simulated marking sessions have applications in preservice teacher education. There were strong recommendations from participants that a practical marking experience such as the simulation become a mandatory part of initial teacher education courses

Fluorite: Illinois state mineral

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Circulation and transformation of Atlantic and Arctic water masses in climate models

Ocean heat transport and associated heat loss to the atmosphere contributes significantly to the anomalously mild climate of northwestern Europe and its variability. In this thesis, the circulation and transformation of water masses in the northern North Atlantic and the Nordic Seas have been assessed and explored in state-of-the-art climate models. A most important aspect of model evaluation is to identify the degree of realism in model climatology and variability, e.g., for model improvement or in order to assess the potential for decadal-scale climate prediction. A main approach for assessing simulated ocean circulations herein is water mass analysis as routinely applied in observational oceanography. Air-sea exchange and water mass transformation at northern high latitudes are accordingly related to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The variable overturning of the Bergen Climate Model (BCM) – the core model system in this thesis – is found to reflect decadal variability in dense water formation in the Labrador Sea and in the oceanic heat transport into the Nordic Seas, the overall constraint on the northernmost water mass transformation. The simulated AMOC is strongly interconnected with the horizontal Subpolar Gyre circulation. Decadal variability of BCM’s Subpolar Gyre, as its AMOC, can partly be explained as a response to distinct patterns of atmospheric variability. The intercomparison of BCM with two other climate models finds the model pathways for the North Atlantic Current and the model sea-ice covers to differ substantially, and hence their oceanic poleward transport of heat, their air-sea exchange, and consequent northern water mass transformation to be very different

Activist ESD Pedagogies and the End of Critique: An Edu/Poetic Attempt to Bring in the Missing Child—Becoming Child

The idea of this article is to interrogate what I conceive of as an onto-epistemic acceleration and knowledge production spoken by life. Immanent knowledge practices for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Love, care, learning, and collective responsibility transmigrating throughout the aeons of time. It is an attempt to write planetary differential Activist Pedagogies and Life Sciences: experimentations and explorations of putting parts of components together, reaching into the future, playing toward an interest. It is a nonlinear, mannerist, and poetic approach to education, learning and play, research, and pedagogical practices of critique. An approach and style possibilizing and opening up for affective becomings in which ongoing processes are vitalist parts of ontological change. I work with thinkable categories as they disappear, collaboratively linked to a natural web of human and more-than-human agents. It implies a de-facto end of critique or a normalizing of judgment and/or our assessment practices: a Deleuzian clinical practice. Counting myself in and staying accountable to my immanent situatedness, to the child. Processes seen as zero points in action only graspable in hindsight, hence always unpredictable. Affective processes bring concepts into play and seek to continue keeping them in play. Concepts are thus always performative and methodological, inherently experimental, and open to yet-unknown territories of thought. I speak of happenings in language. Thinking with, through, and beyond concepts involves developing conceptual foci while also, and at the same time, designing for debate. I ask, how to continue not knowing what is right or wrong even in times of crisis?publishedVersio

Democratic Ontologies of Knowledge: Importance Should Be a Given and My Ethical Task Is to Intensify It

In this paper, I interrogate ethical and political implications of autoethnography as activism and way of academic life. I indirectly ask, what might democratic ontologies of knowledge produce in Higher Education. I focus on a – more than – refusing to be hemmed – wild – Denzinian performance of autoethnographical writing, the theory of liminality of Victor Turner and the speculative philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari. Liminal moments involve breach, crisis, redress, reintegration, or schism, and is here offered as instances of critical pedagogies in action. And, as I see this, moments of intensities of importance making epistemic authoritarianism in HE visible and painfully affective, keeping me curious, calling me to arms. I write with a teacher trainer mystory on a backcloth of a goal-oriented PISA-infused western liberal mass-educational system and welfare state focussed on participation and autonomy. What do we think education can do?publishedVersio

Digital slow: Brahmanisms, zetetic wild sciences, and pedagogics

Our digital society and education systems are produced and simultaneously constrained within powerful political discourses. Brahmanisation (Piketty, 2019) of left-wing parties and policies is an example of this preventing substantial and conflictual but productive transformation, hence leaving the educational field in stasis. This article is a critique of discursive productions of policies and offers a view of digitalisation and/or education collectively produced through zetetic or curious wild science, productive doubts and Slow scholarships, ultimately turning inquiry into our systems’ signature pedagogics and/as change: inquiry as pedagogy as change. The focus is the becoming-child infused with immanent life, our educational institutions and policies turned into spaces for exploring and experimenting with new ways of minded mattered living, and making possible the realisation of post-structural and more-than-human concepts such as the disintegration of subjectivity. All concepts are seen as critical, hence simultaneously performative and methodological, as critical engagements oriented towards inclusion, sensed democracy.publishedVersio