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

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

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

The chemical composition of a regular halo globular cluster: NGC 5897

We report for the first time on the chemical composition of the halo cluster NGC 5897 (R=12.5 kpc), based on chemical abundance ratios for 27 alpha-, iron-peak, and neutron-capture elements in seven red giants. From our high-resolution, high signal-to-noise spectra obtained with the Magellan/MIKE spectrograph, we find a mean iron abundance from the neutral species of [Fe/H] = -2.04 +/- 0.01 (stat.) +/- 0.15 (sys.), which is more metal-poor than implied by previous photometric and low-resolution spectroscopic studies. NGC 5897 is alpha-enhanced (to 0.34 +/- 0.01 dex) and shows Fe-peak element ratios typical of other (metal-poor) halo globular clusters (GCs) with no overall, significant abundance spreads in iron nor in any other heavy element. Like other GCs, NGC 5897 shows a clear Na-O anti-correlation, where we find a prominent primordial population of stars with enhanced O abundances and ~Solar Na/Fe ratios, while two stars are Na-rich, providing chemical proof of the presence of multiple populations in this cluster. Comparison of the heavy element abundances with the Solar-scaled values and the metal poor GC M15 from the literature confirms that NGC 5897 has experienced only little contribution from s-process nucleosynthesis. One star of the first generation stands out in that it shows very low La and Eu abundances. Overall, NGC 5897 is a well-behaved GC showing archetypical correlations and element-patterns, with little room for surprises in our data. We suggest that its lower metallicity could explain the unusually long periods of RR Lyr that were found in NGC 5897.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

Enhancing preschoolers reasoning skills : an intervention to optimise the use of justificatory speech acts during peer interaction

It has long been acknowledged that justificatory speech is linked with both social and cognitive development. Yet many studies suggest that pre-school children might lack the ability or experience to produce such discourse in routine interaction. In contrast, researchers such as Eisenberg and Garvey (1981) have found evidence of pre-schoolers' justifications in conflictual play contexts. Although this has positive implications for child development, the conflictual context may sit uneasily with parents' and teachers' expectations. It is encouraging therefore that McWilliam (1999) has demonstrated that pre-schoolers can produce justificatory dialogue in both conflictual and nonconflictual situations, even if occurrence in the latter context is less frequent. Based on this, the aim of the present study was to encourage pre-schoolers' production of justificatory discourse during peer exchanges in a non-conflictual context. Twenty-two dyads from a state-run nursery were subject to verbal modelling of either justificatory speech (experimental condition) or a more commonly used alternative (control condition) in daily ten-minute sessions over five consecutive days. All interactions were videorecorded for subsequent coding and analysis. Results showed that both 'why' questions and 'justifications' were significantly higher in the experimental condition, indicating that pre-schoolers' explanatory speech can be effectively enhanced by a cooperative intervention programme