Forms, Foci and Forces: The Need for Overseas Pre-Service Teacher Professional Experiences

This paper represents the first analytic foray into a “narrative inquiry” that focused on collecting data centered on understanding the impact of an overseas professional teaching experience on twenty pre-service teachers. Research in this paradigm seeks to explore the breadth and depth of individual’s ‘lived experience’. A key axiomatic position regarding data collection and data analysis in a ‘lived experience’ project is that the human condition is grounded in the nature and nuances of the narratives we each tell ourselves. These narratives are deeply hermeneutic in nature and are contextually situated, cyclical, transient, multi-voiced and are constantly being reframed

Accounting Students and Their Writing Skills: Inside-Outside Autoethnographic Reflection

This paper seeks to report on the findings of a qualitative research project that sought to illuminate one cohort of accounting students understanding and approach to writing. The first in a planned series of projects, this particular research instance used the paradigmatic framework of an authoethnographic bricolage as a reflexive tool so as to gain entrée into this cohort’s awareness. What emerged from this ‘inside-outside’ methodology or ‘research into self’, ‘research through self’ and ‘research on self’ was the apparent tension between the requirements of tertiary writing and the ‘contexts of culture’ and ‘context of situation’ of the accounting cohort. This tension appears to have arisen as these students’ previous contexts of education were grounded in didactic teaching and learning with the possibility that critical thinking and reading-writing connections were absent. Thus, these students were unable to make semiotic transfers between the various forms of genres and registers required by a university class, and possibly the requirements of twenty-first century accountancy. It would appear that while proficient in the technicalities required by pre-service accountants, as they had never experienced a learning environment that required meta-awareness and meta-cognitive interactions, they focused only on surface features of writing, as opposed to using writing as a means of ‘rendering and connecting thought’

Forms, Foci, and Forces - The Need for Overseas Pre-service Teacher Professional Experiences

This article represents the first analytic foray into a “narrative inquiry” that focused on collecting data centered on understanding the impact of an overseas professional teaching experience on 20 pre-service teachers

Reactions, Reflections and Responsibility: A \u27Responsive Evaluation\u27 of an Emerging Blended eLearning Subject

This paper discusses the findings of a qualitative investigation that sought to illuminate the perceived benefits of undertaking a blended learning subject at one tertiary institution. While there are several studies detailing the benefits of online learning, this study focussed on the student’s perceptions. What emerged from the analysis process were a series of themes related to the notion of authentic learning. Key processes of this perceived optimal learning site and space were the elements of group and individual reflection, and risk taking. Thus a heightened sense of ownership was developed. While the students believed that this form of tertiary learning had a ‘goodness of fit’ with how they used the Internet in their everyday lives, it would appear that they also required more explicit foci and instructions. Hence there is a need for further refinement and research in order to develop greater optimal learning spaces

Reactions, Reflections, and Responsibility: A Responsive Evaluation of an Emerging Blended E-learning Subject

In the decade since Schrum and Hong’s comment that “online learning has rapidly become a popular method of edu - cation for traditional and non-traditional students,” this approach to tertiary learning has morphed through several generational forms and platforms to the point where it has become firmly entrenched in the Australian tertiary landscape. As a broad generalization, e-learning, online, or flexible learning in many universities represents a spectrum of “information communications technology” (hereafter referred to as ICT) usage that ranges from little or no actual real-time interaction or “face-to-face” contact with associated viewing linkages such as YouTube through to teaching attempts at fully interactive programs. However, despite the numerous studies purporting the benefits of this form of study, a few voices have argued that this rapid shift has been “accepted uncritically.” Of late, there has also been a gathering chorus of research which suggests that the research base has been skewed, as it has not fully taken into account the understandings of the front-line users: the students themselves. This leads to the rationale of this article that what actually constitutes authentic “flexible learning,” its actual efficacy, and effects remain unclear. Emerging out of the context of standard online delivery is the notion of “blended learning” or “mixed mode learning.” In this learning mode, the ideal is that students retain some of the benefits of constant face-to-face interaction with peers and tutors, as well as the flexibility and less-restrictive nature of learning through technological access. However, blended learning in the Australian context has itself become situated across an ICT spectrum that ranges from the “provision of twoway communication so that the student may benefit from or even initiate dialogue” to the attempt at quasi-virtual situations of the “ClassSim” project

Pre-Service Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Overseas Professional Experience: Implications for Professional Practice

Reforms in Australia about the education of future teachers has placed a high degree of emphasis on the development of knowledge and skills that are necessary for practitioners who will ply their trade in culturally rich and diverse classrooms (Ramsey, 2000). There is now a broad consensus from key stakeholders (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2012) that pre-service teachers need to be provided with a range of opportunities that are grounded in classroom practices including exposure to teaching students overseas. The aim of the study that is reported here is to better understand the skills and knowledge that pre-service teachers need in order to function in and gain from their overseas professional experiences (OSPEX). In this study, we compared a cohort of pre-service teachers’ perceptions of OSPEX before and after their completed their professional experiences in Fiji. Results indicate that pre-service teachers need to be better prepared locally before attempting an OSPEX visit

Short Term Travel to the Holy Land: Questions of Potency, Pilgrimage, and Potential

There has been a significant impact on the two participants who took part in this research project. There is no doubt that this short-term travel to the Holy Land has resulted in transformative learning where both individuals experienced contextualizing through a visual perspective, which has enhanced and contributed to a deeper meaningful understanding of their personal and spiritual journey. The results show that the impact has been positive and that planning, group membership, and active engagement through reading and journaling have made this trip unlike any other. This study although limited to two related individuals from the same faith does present short-term travel to the Holy Land as a positive transformative learning experience with lasting impacts

Resonance with the Spiritual: Undergraduate Frames of Thinking in a Digital Age

This work unpacks the findings of a qualitative ‘inside-outside’ research project that sought to understand and compare the perceptions of spirituality as understood & experienced by 100 undergraduate students in one Israeli tertiary institution. The respondents represented the overall current Israeli cultural perspectives, albeit a younger framework of thinking. In regard to the overall research background in which this study is located there is growing recognition in the field that “substantial numbers of undergraduate students appear to express a strong interest in spiritual matters” (Astin and Astin 2004: 5). However, with relatively few exceptions, this interest would appear to rarely met with any degree of satisfaction, conclusion or connectivity (Nash & Murray 2010; Astin, Astin, & Lindholm 2011) finding instead higher education has been primarily about “intellectual knowledge—the rational world of theory and ideas” (Tisdel 2002:x). Indeed Flanagan (2007:7) bluntly states, “the one sector of education seemingly exempt from these concerns with spirituality is higher education.” While there is a relatively larger body of research focussing on religiosity in the tertiary sphere and all of its components, even the most cursory review of this literature reveals that beyond the quantitative work of Astin, Astin and Lindholm (2011) there is a great deal of comment but relatively little focussed research (Hyde 2011). However, it would appear that perhaps one of the key inhibitors in this particular research arena has been the ongoing debate in regard to precisely what spirituality is (Subiondo 2011:31). This debate too has become an area of intense focus (Hyde 2008), with a gathering consensus that due to the subjective nature of the spiritual experience, nailing down this concept has proven to be extremely difficult. Insisting that understanding the precise nature of spirituality is an imperative, Hyde (2011: 235) also suggests that overall “little empirical research has emanated which explores this.” As for a cross-cultural understanding of tertiary students’ perceptions in general, and Israel in particular, an initial literature review reveals only one quantitative research agenda has been published. What emerged from this research agenda was a framework of viewing spirituality as a ‘core of being’. Surprisingly, this perspective was generally situated within a new age frame of perception for all the cultural groups represented, and stood in direct contrast to the socio-religious belief structures of previous generations

A Nexus of Eyes: The Praxis of Chaplaincy in One Faith Based Educational System Through Emerging Emic Perspectives

Internationally chaplaincy as a whole, and school based chaplaincy in particular, is morphing into new forms within emerging national uncertainties, and cultural diversity. Drawing on their work in Ireland, King and Norman (2009) believe that the role of school chaplains everywhere needs to be carefully realigned and rethought. This paper seeks in part to address this situation, unpacking the initial ‘emic-journey’ of a three year multi-case study research agenda that seeks to holistically investigate how key stakeholders in three faith based schools understand the role and practice of school chaplains. In this instance, the stakeholders included administrators, chaplains and students. The multi-case study approach and the stratified sets of respondents were deemed to be the best ‘goodness of fit’ as Parekh’s (2000) axiom clearly states an understanding that one group’s place within an organisation needs to be considered not in isolation, but as intersecting forces that act as a “locus of identity.