Professional Educator Volume 3 Number 4 October 2004

Editorial

October 29 marks World Teachers Day, and when that day comes around you can be sure it will be a more somber occasion than usual. Teachers and their students in schools across the globe are likely to mark the occasion with an acknowledgement of the terrible loss of hundreds of lives – children, teachers and parents – killed when the three-day siege at Beslan’s No 1 school in North Ossetia, Russia, ended in bloodshed. Teachers the world over have felt a special anguish at this terrible event. More than 1,000 children and adults were at the school to celebrate the beginning of the new school year when a heavilyarmed gang of more than thirty people, believed to be Chechen separatists, took them hostage, forcing everyone into the school gym, then shooting at them when, on the third day of the crisis, the hostages ran for their lives after a series of blasts
within the gym brought the roof down.

Many educators will recall incidents like the shootings at Dunblane Primary School, Scotland, when on 13 March 1996 a man killed a teacher and sixteen kindergarten children before shooting himself, or the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, when on 20 April 1999 two student gunmen killed thirteen teachers and students and wounded twenty-one others before they turned the guns on themselves, or the shootings at Monash University in Melbourne when on 21 October 2002 a student shot and killed two fellow students and injured five others – teachers and students. Many will recall other incidents, perhaps smaller in scale, where teachers, students and others in educational institutions have faced violent crises. Many are affected directly and indirectly. For some, violence in schools is traumatic and debilitating, for others, a crucible from which emerges previously undiscovered qualities of courage and generosity. If we find demons in such tragedies, we also find heroes. Hopefully, we also find much in between, for no crisis is a simple matter. Even so, many of the heroes in the crises that affect educational institutions are teachers who, in different ways, cope – and are expected to cope – with the event and its aftermath.

If teachers and students face critical violence in our educational institutions, they also face chronic violence, a fact brought home by Forgotten Australians, the report of the Senate Community Affairs References Committee tabled at the same time that the Beslan crisis was coming to its tragic end. Forgotten Australians completes the ‘trilogy’ of reports on the institutional care, or ‘poorly provided care’ and abuse, of children that began with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s 1997 Bringing Them Home – the ‘Stolen Generation’ – inquiry into the separation of Indigenous children from their families, and the Senate’s 2001 Lost Innocents inquiry into British and Irish child migrants who were abused in Australian institutions.

Forgotten Australians shows how many Australian church and government institutions – schools, hostels, orphanages, group cottage homes, homes for children with disabilities, juvenile detention centres and foster care organisations – were complicit in the sexual, physical and mental abuse of generations of children. Addressing the Senate the committee chair, Queensland Senator Jan McLucas called the report a blueprint for governments and nongovernment institutions to deal with the legacy of ‘poorly provided care.’

Whether the violence in our educational institutions is critical or chronic, as educators we now find ourselves with the responsibility to address it and to support those in our midst, our professional colleagues and our students, close to home and across the world. On World Teachers Day there will be many to remember, not just in Beslan, but especially in Beslan.

The Profession

Making schools better

Steve Holden

While there’s a lot of talk at education conferences, the real business is often unspoken. Steve Holden went to ‘Making Schools Better,’ a ‘summit conference on the performance, management and funding of Australian schools’ co-hosted by the Melbourne Institute and the Australian in late August, to find out what’s going wrong - or is that right? – in the nation’s schools…

Research

Harry Potter and the Data from the Gatehouse

Glenn Bowes

With sales of more than 170 million copies in more than fifty languages and three box office hits, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books have had a huge impact on children’s literature – and on the lives of many children and young people. Glenn Bowes looks at more than one interesting lesson in the Harry Potter phenomenon…

Second-chance education - Reconnecting schools and early school leavers

Tom Karmel

Vocational education and training reconnects early school leavers with education, but more program and policy development is required, as Tom Karmel explains...

Interview

Doing something different

Steve Holden

Australia’s schooling system is in crisis or is one of the best in the world or – somewhere in between – it’s a ‘high performance, low equity’ system, compared with other OECD countries. It’s no surprise to find so much disagreement so close to home. Talk for any length of time with Frank Crowther, the Dean of Education and recently appointed Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Southern Queensland and a passionate advocate for the teaching profession, and you’ll find plenty of disagreement, turning on one thing about which everyone seems to agree: teachers matter…

National Perspective

by Steve Holden

Hundreds of children, teachers and parents were killed when the three-day siege at Beslan’s No 1 School in North Ossetia, Russia, ended in bloodshed. Authorities struggled to determine the death toll, initially estimated at 335, with 200 people missing. Nearly 400 were hospitalised…

E-Learning

That won't work in my classroom - Are new thods of teaching and learning in higher education worth it?

Student-centred, collaborative, networked learning means taking an interactive pedagogical approach. Many in higher education say ‘I need really sophisticated systems and need to be highly skilled with technology to create that interactivity.’ Not so, say Ainslie Ellis and Margaret Bearman…

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? The journey to ICT integration

‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How much longer?’ This plea can be heard from teachers throughout the world. While the pioneers of information and communication technology (ICT) integration beam at the thought of what’s next, the middle and late adopters shudder and wonder if and when they are going to get there, wherever ‘there’ is. Different attitudes to ICT integration can be attributed to the teachers’ personal confidence in using ICTs. Petrea Redmond and Katie Brown chart the ICT integration journey of teachers from ten Queensland primary schools...

Teaching and Learning

Kids behaving badly, or responsibly? Helping teachers help students to act responsibly

No matter how things change in education, one thing remains the same: teachers continue to rate behaviour management as a number one concern. Ray Lewis looks at the relationship between the responsible behaviour of students in classrooms and their teachers’ discipline strategies...

Issues

Boys love learning

by Deb Hartman

Despite the doom and gloom about boys in schools, some innovative school and community partnerships are working well to support boys in learning. Deborah Harman explains how males are having a positive impact in schools, and women and girls are right there with them...

Resource Reviews

Beyond the Great Divide: Single sex or coeducation?

by Judith Gill

Reviewed by Graeme Townsend

After having taught a boys' single sex class in a coeducational school for three years, I've come to the same conclusion as Gill. The gender mis, in itself is not of major importance. Whether the teacher is male or female is irrelevant...

Creating a Positive School Culture: How principals and teachers can solve problems together

by Marie-Nathalie Beaudoin and Maureen Taylor

Reviewed by David Loader

One of the strengths of the book is its ability to help readers appreciate perspectives that are different to their own. So teachers can learn about why principals respond as they do and principals can learn more about the pressures upon the classroom teacher...