‘Knowing Your Students’ in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classroom

The population movement of globalization brings greater cultural and linguistic diversity (CALD) to communities and education systems. To address the growing diversity in school classrooms, beginning teachers need an expanded set of skills and attitudes to support effective learning. It is an expectation today that teachers know their students and how the students learn. It follows that lecturers and tutors should also know something of the cultural and linguistic profile of their pre-service teacher education students. This article reports a study in a university which examined its teacher education practice in this light. It assessed the curriculum provision of material related to cultural and linguistic diversity, the profile of the CALD characteristics of the undergraduate cohort, and attitudes and perceptions of the students, to teaching in a CALD classroom. The article considers initiatives that the teacher education program could introduce, to expand pre-service teacher capacities

Capitalism and Earth System Governance: An Ecological Marxist Approach

Growing recognition of the Anthropocene era has led to a chorus of calls for Earth System Governance (ESG). Advocates argue that humanity's newfound sociotechnical powers require institutional transformations at all scales of governance to wield these powers with wisdom and foresight. Critics, on the other hand, fear that these initiatives embody a technocratic impulse that aims to subject the planet to expert management without addressing the political-economic roots of the earth system crisis. This article proposes a more affirmative engagement with existing approaches to ESG while also building on these critiques. While advocates of ESG typically ignore the capitalistic roots of the earth system crisis and propose tepid reforms that risk authoritarian expressions, their critics also have yet to systematically consider the potential for more democratic and postcapitalist forms of ESG. In response, I propose an ecological Marxist approach based on a structural analysis of capitalism as the primary driver of the earth system crisis and an "ecosocialist" vision of ESG that subordinates the market to democratic planning at multiple scales. I argue that an ecological Marxist perspective is needed to foreground the structural political-economic constraints on earth system stability, though existing approaches to ESG can in turn inform ecosocialist strategies for global institutional design and democratization

Has anyone read the reading? : using assessment to promote academic literacies and learning cultures

This paper reports on the theoretical and political rationale for an assessment strategy designed to support the development of academic literacies and learning cultures amongst undergraduate and postgraduate education students in one metropolitan and one regional university in Australia. The 'Critical Review' is an integrated assessment task that aims to promote a student culture of learning preparedness, critical thinking, scholarly writing and educational ethics by equipping students with both content-specific knowledges and generalisable skills and orientations to academic learning. The Critical Review is both formative and summative in purpose, with primary emphasis given to its usefulness to individual students across a diversity of learning environments and assessment modalities, as well as its importance to enhancing institutional learning cultures. The flexibility of the assessment design is readily incorporated into a range of course structures, and adapts readily to studies in a variety of disciplinary fields.12 page(s

Introduction

4 page(s

Partnerships in education : building, business and globalization

Partnerships arrangements in education have emerged over the past twenty years or so as a dominant, but often unrecognized feature, in Australia and in many other parts of the world. An obvious illustration of this can be shown in architecture. School buildings, for example, are a readily identifiable feature of most metropolitan and rural town landscapes. In Australia, government authorities have undertaken the construction of the majority of schools where the buildings have been designed by government employed architects and the work supervised by ministerial departments. However, in recent times the financing, construction and operating of schools has been managed by public-private partnership (PPP) arrangements. In New South Wales (NSW) these partnerships are referred to as Privately Financed Projects (PFP) and all new government schools built since 2001 have used these arrangements. However, partnerships in education are not limited to the construction of buildings. At both State and federal levels of government partnerships with the community and business have been promoted to address concerns ranging from fund-raising, improving literacy and numeracy, to finding work after students leave school. Using policy documents and reports, this paper examines the emergence of partnerships as means of financing, constructing and running schools, and in the delivery of certain programs. The paper also explores the global nature of this initiative and the roles of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and World Bank. In particular, the role of the OECD in promoting a form of governance call New Public Management (NPM) will be considered. The research finds that by adopting global standards of financing and governance, and by entering into partnership arrangements, education authorities in Australia shifted responsibility for schools to corporate entities. This has resulted in the loss of both assets and control

Movie lessons for new learning

In 2004 the Australia Council of Deans of Education (ACDE) released a report entitled 'New teaching, new learning: A vision for Australian education'. This report was prepared on behalf of the ACDE by Mary Kalantzis and Andrew Harvey, respectively the President and Executive Officer of the ACDE. The argument put forward in the report is that education is implicated “in the realms of work, citizenship and identity … that learning is pivotal to its success, and that teaching is the central profession in the knowledge economy” (p. 5). However, developments in technological, commercial and other realms deem it necessary to reconsider the practices of, and the relationship between, teaching and learning. New Learning basically recommends that teachers concentrate on creating a productive learning environment and adopt teaching strategies that encourage students to take greater responsibility for their learning. The ACDE has thus called on educators to dramatically rethink “education systems, the nature of knowledge and the role that educators need to play” (p. 91). This invitation to reconceptualise teaching and learning also raises questions about what models of practice that may already exist and how these examples are popularly accepted. In popular culture the ‘urban school’ genre of movies portrays some teachers as individuals who are able to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds and succeed in teaching students for whom others have given up, and do so with positive results. These portrayals of ‘hero’ teachers have sometimes been dismissed as Hollywood fantasies designed to appeal to middle-class beliefs about the limitations imposed by bureaucracies, the power of the individual and the relative ease of overcoming what have become entrenched educational problems if a little creativity and persistence are applied (see Bulman, 2005). The urban school genre therefore was useful to explore using a basic discourse analytic approach for examples of teaching ‘success’ and evidence of teaching strategies that were consistent with the new learning approach. This paper examines the idea of ‘New Learning’ in relation to three urban school movies to ascertain whether the strategies depicted were consistent with the vision put forward by the ACDE. The three films considered Stand & deliver (Menendez, 1988), Dangerous minds (Smith, 1995) and Freedom writers (LaGravenese, 2006), were all set in Los Angeles public schools and respectively show events from 1982, 1989 and 1992. Interestingly, each of the movies also made some claim to being based on true story to some degree. In these movies instances of classroom interaction were analysed to determine the pedagogic strategies used by the teachers concerned. It was found that the first two films showed behaviourist teaching techniques, though the teachers were shown to be benevolent and caring. However, the more recent film, while portraying the teacher as a caring individualist, the film also contained examples of learning and teaching consistent with the new learning approach. In particular, the third film provided a strong example how narrative techniques can be used with students to good effect.15 page(s

Collaborative digital projects : PBL in pre-service teacher education

This symposium paper discusses an assessment task, the Current Issue Collaboration (CIC), used with pre-service teacher education students. The task employed a Project-Based Learning (PBL) approach where students, in groups of three or four, collaborated in the creation and presentation of a digital artefact. The term ‘digital artefact’ was intended to be vague to promote discussion about what it might be that would be created. The design of the task was influenced by the notion of twenty-first century skills, and scholarship on PBL and Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL). Partnerships for 21st Century Skills (P21) promoted the idea that Critical thinking and problem solving, Collaboration, Creativity and Communication should be considered the key learning outcomes that teachers should aim to develop in the students that they teach. This framework was later adopted by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and is now used across America (AACTE & P21, 2010). Subsequently, the Australian federal Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations has also recognised that in education “the priority is moving towards higher-order skills that assist individuals to be more flexible, adaptable, creative, innovative and productive” (Ithica Group, 2012, p. 10). The assessment task was devised and used in a compulsory, sociology of education unit at Macquarie University. For some time the unit has emphasised scholarly approaches to using academic literature via a Critical Review task (see Saltmarsh & Saltmarsh, 2008) and aspects of written communication in other tasks. It was hoped that the inclusion of the CIC task would allow creativity, collaboration and verbal communication to also be incorporated into the learning environment of the unit. The ability to create, and to inspire creativity in others, to collaborate, and to communicate confidently in various forms are vital skills for teachers, especially in primary schools. However, research has shown that these capacities are ones in which teachers feel themselves to be ill-equipped (Ardzejewska, McMaugh, & Coutts, 2010)

Collaborative learner biographies : or, discovering you had created a project-based learning task without realizing it

10 page(s

Researching and writing university essays

While there are numerous handbooks on essay writing, few seem to address many of the practical questions that students as[sic], such as: Can i use the word "I"? Am I allowed to reference lectures? Perhaps these questions emerge because students have not taken the time to look, or because they are not aware that such a text might exist and where it might be found. But it also might be that the available material still does not explain why the conventions exist but rather provides a set of rules to be followed. These notes will endeavor to provide an explanation for the "rules" and some strategies for preparing essays.10 page(s

Movie lessons : cultural politics and the visible practices of schooling

24 page(s