Professional Educator Volume 2 Number 3 September 2003
When the word 'national' gets a hearing in public debate about education, you're likely to hear talk of a national curriculum. That happened last month, with further talk about a national institute of teachers and school leaders for next year. There was even more talk about higher education. The Commonwealth Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson appeared to get the national ball, suggesting we need consistency across states and territories in terms of the curriculum and starting ages. That's nothing new. The Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs met in Perth in mid-July with the executive summary of Curriculum Provision in the Australian States and Territories already on the table. The MCEETYA meeting agreed to pursue consistency on some parts of the curriculum and on starting ages. All that national activity might obscure some already existing national characteristics in Australian school education. From the angle of professional educators, the drive to national professional standards for teachers with input across the board is clearly leading to some common and consistent approaches across all states and territories. From the perspective of international results, like the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), you start to see a national education system in comparison with other national systems, at least for fifteen-year olds. According to Literacy Skills for the World of Tomorrow, a recent report based on PISA data co-published by the OECD and UNESCO, Australian fifteen-year olds were in the top four nations in terms of reading proficiency. So do we have, or should we have, a national curriculum? Your answer depends on whether you believe there are features unique to each of our states and territories that should be preserved in the curriculum. That leads to some interesting answers. Cut from school education to higher education reform and your answers get even more interesting. While there are several components being thrashed in the higher education stoush between the Commonwealth government and opposition, one that deserves attention revolves around the way universities might best respond to local and regional needs. The Coalition's policy seems to promote local and regional flexibility, while Labor's looks more like a national one. You're talking about a national education system? Which one?
For further information on articles, please check the links.
The Profession
New program for new times - Pre-service teacher education at QUT
by Ian Macpherson and Tania Aspland
The Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology has engaged in a process of reconceptualising its pre-service teacher education programs; and 2003 has seen the implementation of the first year of the new four-year Bachelor of Education program.
The process of reconceptualisation led initially to a vision statement, which reads in part:
The vision of this reconceptualised course is to graduate pre-service teacher education students who are:
- life long learners who possess a strong knowledge of the content and discourses of the disciplines from which their projected teaching areas are derived, and who will be able to contribute to the framing of new knowledge communities and areas of inquiry
- high level thinkers, capable of understanding the complex knowledges that shape the work of educators, particularly in reference to how students engage in high quality learning, and
- educators who actively reflect upon and investigate the dynamic socio-cultural and socio-political constructs in which their work is embedded.
The course is designed to graduate beginning teachers and educators who are well respected in their field through their professional work, commitment to learning, expertise in current curriculum knowledge and leadership, refined repertoire of pedagogical practices, skills in knowledge facilitation and the construction of diverse, culturally-responsive learning environments that best facilitate enhanced learning for a variety of learners....
Links: www.education.qut.edu.au/newbed
Teaching and Learning
Data club - Supporting schools to use data
by Helen Wildy
In 2000 the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (then called the Commonwealth Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs or DETYA) supported a pilot partnership between Edith Cowan University and the Western Australia Department of Education and Training. The pilot project, called Developing schools' capacity to performance judgments, sought to identify and document best practice in supporting teachers and parents to make judgements about performance in relation to benchmark standards within the National Literacy and Numeracy Plan. Very early in its history, it became known as the Data Club. Subsequently, the Data Club was funded solely by the WA Department of Education and in 2003 the project has been retained, managed and funded, within the department....
Teaching and Learning
Teaching students how to think
by Jan Hales
Ask students what they value in their learning and they identify problem solving skills, team work and research capacity. Add an interest in complex social, environmental and technological problems and you've defined the key ingredients behind the success of a onetime gifted program, Future Problem Solving (FPS), that's now operating cross-curricular in Australian classrooms and having a significant impact on student learning. FPS offers a challenge and a focus for students, not only enriching their fields of knowledge and honing their higher order thinking and research skills, but also encouraging them to develop a sense of responsibility for the future world where they will be expected to take leadership roles. It helps them to develop cooperative working relationships with others in team situations, and gives them the confidence and capacity to realise that they are able to influence the world of the future....
Links: www.fpsp.org.au
Teaching and Learning
Fostering generic skills
by Kaye Bowman and Hugh Guthrie
In 2002 the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) and the Business Council of Australia (BCA) completed a major project, Employability skills for the future, which describe generic and transferable skills and a set of related attributes that employers consider employees need to work effectively. This is not the first attempt at this: generic skills first came to prominence in the 1980s. The seven Mayer key competencies, developed in the early 1990s, have been built on in this latest list of generic employability skills proposed by the ACCI and BCA.
There has also been strong international interest in generic skills, known by other names like key skills, core skills, essential skills, key competencies, necessary skills, and transferable skills as well as employability skills. In Australia, and in the vocational education sector in particular, the focus in the future will be on the ACCI and BCA list of employability skills.
So what are they? The ACCI/BCA work identified eight: communication; teamwork; problem solving; self-management; planning and organising; technology; learning and initiative and enterprise. They are complemented by a set of attributes, including loyalty, honesty and integrity, enthusiasm, reliability, personal presentation, common sense, adaptability and ability to deal with pressure. These skills and attributes are very much employment and workplace focussed, but many argue they are important in life too, as they develop throughout a person's life and in multiple settings, including educational contexts and in work, community and family life....
Links: www.ncver.edu.au/generic.htm
Innovation
Talking about picture books
by Jane Torr
It is widely accepted that shared reading is important for children's subsequent language and literacy development. Children's early learning occurs in the context of the home and the community. According to the New South Wales Curriculum Framework for Children's Services (DoCS, 2002), in order to provide effective and high quality children's services, 'it is crucial that children's experience in their family and the family's perspectives on the child are taken into account.' Several large studies have shown that language varies according to social background, and that certain patterns of talk are highly valued in school contexts. The 1996 National School English Literacy Survey (DETYA) found that Year Three children whose parents were in professional and managerial occupations were far more likely to meet basic performance standards in literacy than were the children of unskilled manual workers and Indigenous children.
The present study was designed to explore how pre-school children who differ in terms of maternal education respond to and interpret the images and written text in one informational and one narrative picture book. The fact that picture books are complex works of literature where the written texts and illustrations together combine to construct the overall meanings of the book allows for multiple interpretations and personal associations to be stimulated in the reader. Adult input and scaffolding are essential for children's emergent literacy understandings; however, it is also important to consider how children themselves spontaneously respond to and interpret picture books....
Innovation
Virtual schools
by Glenn Russell
Virtual schools differ from their bricks-and-mortar counterparts. They usually allow a separation in time and place between the student and the teacher, and learning involves the use of online computers. There are several different types of virtual schools, and one way to understand them is to determine if students are expected to work entirely from home or other places outside a conventional school. An example of the 'out-of-school' variety is Florida Virtual High School in the United States....
Interview
Participation
by Adrian Marron
In 2003, whether you're in a school or a TAFE Institute in a rural or metropolitan area, you need to be aware of the diversity of your learners, the complexity of your community, the many threads running through it. That's the view of Adrian Marron, Director of the Wodonga Institute of TAFE and recently awarded fellow of the Australian College of Educators. As professionals, Marron says, educators need to pull all those threads together. 'You and your institution need to be informed about your community and at the same time provide leadership so that you and your community are not silent.'...
National Perspective
The national perspective
by Steve Holden
'National' seems to be the word in vogue at the moment, with a national curriculum and a national institute of teachers and school leaders on the agenda. The Commonwealth Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson appeared to get the ball rolling in July by announcing he's keen to see a single, national education system, with consistency across the states and territories in terms of the curriculum and starting ages. Anna Bligh, Queensland's Education Minister, responded with a call for 'consistency, not uniformity' in the curriculum nationwide....
July also saw the Commonwealth government putting up an initial $20 million to establish a National Institute for Quality Teaching and School Leadership to commence next year. The Institute, to be based in Canberra, indicates Commonwealth recognition of the significance of teachers and school leaders in maintaining and improving the quality of education...
July was also the month for the ACE National Conference on Queeensland's Sunshine Coast. The conference brought together educators from across the nation, with keynotes by Barry Jones, AO, Chair of the Victorian Innovation Commission, Professor Kerry Kennedy, Head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Hong Kong Institute of Education, and Stephanie Young, Senior Director, Scottish Enterprise, Glasgow, Scotland...
Most papers from the ACE national conference can be accessed at www.austcolled.com.au/
National Perspective
What's 'national' in the 'national curriculum'?
by Maurice Wenn
Every now and then, somebody resurrects the perennial argument about the tensions between the states and territories and the Commonwealth as to who 'controls' the national agenda in school education. With the emerging debate around a 'national curriculum,' or more correctly nationally consistent curriculum outcomes, one prediction is a 'Commonwealth take-over' of states' and territories' decision-making in school education. Maurice Wenn asks how feasible or soundly based is such a view, and what we mean by 'national' anyway?....
Resource Reviews
Growing Good Catholic Girls - Education and convent life in Australia
Reviewed by David Loader
Growing Good Catholic Girls for me conjured up images of personal stories. So I gathered the book, lit a log fire and settled in a cosy chair to enjoy what I thought might be intimate revelations. My school days were not happy ones and I have had reason to seek help to understand them....
The Be Real Game
Reviewed by Helen Boal
Everton Park State High School was one of the fortunate schools in Queensland to be selected as part of the national pilot for The Be Real Game career-exploration and life skills program. I say fortunate because it exposed our students to a 'vehicle' that provided them with the opportunity to make better-informed decisions about their future career pathways...
WebLaw
Reviewed by Steve Holden
This new website provides instant access to almost 2,000 Australian legal internet resources, from legislation and decisions by courts and tribunals to journal publications and policy papers. Suppose you're a New South Wales P{rincipal and you want to get some detail on child protection legislation. This site gets you quickly to 'Children and the law', drilling down without effort to the Child Protection (Offenders Registration) Act 2000 (NSW) and the Child Protection (Prohibited Employment) Act 1998 (NSW)....
Issues in Education
School exclusions
by Andrew Knott
The students had been suspended from attending the school 'for possession and consumption of a suspected illegal substance,' namely cannabis. It was said this had been consumed over the course of a significant part of a school day inside the confines of a part of the school premises, in fact a school farm situated a little distance from the school - connected with it and screened by an area of rainforest. After information had been received by the Principal of the school, an investigation was carried out by the Principal and the Deputy Principal. They visited the site and noted that it had recently been occupied. A bong was also discovered. A number of students were interviewed who said they were present when cannabis was smoked, and identified the plaintiffs as those who had done so. The plaintiffs were interviewed and denied that they had been smoking any illegal substance. None of the plaintiffs were found to be in possession of any drugs.
Each of the students was suspended from attending the school for eleven days commencing on 5 June 2003. Each of them was advised of that suspension by a letter dated 4 June 2003.
On 6 June 2003, the students sought an ex-parte - that is, in the absence of the other party - interlocutory - that is, until the main hearing - injunction to restrain the NSW Department of School Education from enforcing the suspensions. An interim injunction was granted and lasted until 12 June 2003, until the application could be heard....
Links:
www.weblaw.edu.au
www.austlii.edu.au
www.victorialaw.org.au and go to Legal Links
www.lawfoundation.net.au and go to Helpful Links
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