http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/services/Feed ${session.getAttribute("locale")} 5 http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:8844 This analysis is set in the context of Immanuel Wallerstein’s work on the structures of knowledge, in particular the place of the social sciences past and present, and the potential contribution of a more integrated approach (historical social science) to the broader political project of building a more democratic, equal and just world-system. Our analysis finds that knowledge in the social science subjects tended to be treated in only a mildly problematic way, with moderate outcomes in terms of its connection to students’ lives and cultural backgrounds, and its authentic application, despite substantial attention to such characteristics of curriculum content, evident in the evolution of the History curriculum. Further we find that outcomes on these measures are substantially stronger in primary rather than secondary classrooms. We conclude by arguing that social science teachers’ meaningful engagement with the Quality Teaching framework, as part of a significant, system-wide pedagogical reform initiative, is contingent on their re-thinking the nature of their subject knowledge and its treatment in their teaching. Further, we argue that seen through the lens of Wallerstein’s world-systems theorising, this strengthens the case for the type of pedagogical work reported here to support curricular reforms in the social sciences and contribute to students’ complex understandings of their world. 2013-03-01T04:30:04.875Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:9068 In the analysis of assessment tasks, significantly higher scores were found on all three dimensions of QT in the Physical Education assessment tasks than in any of the other subjects. These relatively high quality tasks are illustrated in the paper with task and student work samples. Possible explanations for these results that are explored in the paper are (1) qualities and capacities of the teachers themselves who, in Australia, unlike some other countries, enter universities with some of the highest university entrance scores of any students (including engineering and medical students), and/or (2) that they are used to challenging work themselves as learners and thus have higher expectations than some teachers for the work students can produce; (3) the PE syllabuses which are organised around key concepts and deep understanding; (4) the subject matter itself, especially in easily achieving Significance in the relation of topics covered to students' lives and hence close alignment with the QT model (affirmed through content analysis of tasks) (5) the richer or more comprehensive nature of the tasks given in PE which tend to be project-based and designed to be completed over several lessons or weeks. On the other hand, scores for classroom practice were lower in PE on Intellectual Quality than in any other subject (significantly different only for some), they were the highest in Quality Learning Environment, and in the middle for Significance. Possible explanations for these ratings of classroom practice include - (1) the lower Intellectual Quality of practical lessons versus theory lessons (test this by separating the data where possible); (2) the organisational strengths of PE teachers and the more relaxed relationships of PE teachers with their students which have been documented in the literature that might account for the high scores in Quality Learning Environment; and (3) Significance scores that are affected by the differences between practical and theory lessons. These explanations are explored with reference to the qualitative accounts of lessons and with reference to the interview data gathered from teachers in the study. Comparisons with other analyses of PE curriculum are made. 2013-03-01T04:23:15.318Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:8532 In this chapter, drawing on events in New South Wales, we expose flaws in the underlying rationality of the standards agenda, point out some of its contradictions, and outline issues that need to be taken into account if the agenda is to have any educational benefit. The issues addressed range across structural, procedural and, most importantly, substantive matters. We argue that, on the one hand, the techniques of surveillance and compliance involved in the processes associated with these kinds of standards clearly employ the same techniques of power identified in Foucauldian analyses of governmentality. 2012-07-11T23:20:02.546Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:9884 Many debates about schooling are often very predictable. Perhaps one of the most predictable debates comes up around the question of the outcomes of schooling: in public policy debates about school accountability, in private lounge room conversations among parents about what they want from schools for their children. Very quickly in these conversations someone will point out that schooling is meant to provide many more things than just “academic” outcomes. Politicians, like President Obama (and George W. Bush before him), will make the case that schooling needs to promote the kind of innovative thinking and spirit needed to advance the nation, economically and socially. Parents are likely to have some sense of the kind of values and character they hope their children might garner from schools (even if that is an antiauthoritarian, resistant disposition). No one really expects to settle these debates, and many debaters are likely to accept Linda McNeil’s view that significant results of learning are not measurable. But even with that common wisdom in mind, somewhere along the track education researchers may well be asked just what we know about schooling for outcomes beyond the traditional measured academic outcomes. 2012-02-01T01:10:05.077Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:2332 Much is made of teacher learning as a corrective to the ills of our education systems. Recruitment and accreditation schemes, codification of standards for accomplished practice, teacher education reform, and professional development initiatives are just some of the ways in which teacher learning is being addressed. Teacher learning is of particular importance when the concern is promoting a form of teaching that emphasises high standards of intellectual quality as explicated in models like 'Productive Pedagogy (PP).' In this paper, we report outcomes from a study designed to address the fundamental question of whether it is possible to change teaching to more closely match such standards. In the study reported here, PP was used to assist inservice teachers to improve their teaching. Drawing on data from coded observations of the participants' teaching before and after professional development activities, as well as interviews about their experience of learning and applying PP, some principles for enhancing both professional development programs and preservice teacher education will be elaborated. A comparison of the results gained in this study with those gained in related studies is used to elaborate arguments to refine the potential use of PP in teacher learning. 2011-11-10T04:30:03.374Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:1807 In this paper, we explore Productive Pedagogy (PP) as a framework for enhancing teacher education. Reporting results from a study involving student teachers’ application of the four principles of PP during an internship, we consider whether PP brings a firmer knowledge base to their work. Based on our analysis of the data, we argue for a more fundamental reorganisation of teacher education to fully integrate PP, if the framework is to have a significant and lasting impact on graduates’ teaching. Such a shift requires a reassessment of teacher education priorities to focus more on the substance and purposes of teaching. 2011-11-10T04:30:03.095Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:2782 In this paper we report results from a pilot study involving preservice teacher education students' application of the dimensions of 'Productive Pedagogy' (PP) in their teaching, during their internship. Using data from observations of the preservice students' teaching and from interviews about their experience of applying PP, following their participation in a single semester elective subject, some principles for the incorporation of PP into teacher education are suggested. The paper begins with an overview of the concept of Productive Pedagogy, current research into its use by practising teachers, and arguments for PP as a framework for preservice teacher education. Next, we provide an analysis of the data, and elaborate arguments to refine the potential use of PP as a framework for teacher education. While the elective subject model is seen to have had some positive impact on preservice students' teaching, it is argued that a more fundamental reorganisation of teacher education is required if preservice teachers are to incorporate PP into their personal approaches to teaching. Given a particular concern about the low levels of intellectual quality produced by these student teachers, we argue for a qualitative shift in teacher education away from a focus on teaching methods and strategies, and towards the substance and purposes of teaching. 2011-11-10T04:30:02.164Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:2334 This paper presents SIPA's initial, cross-sectional, analysis of the relationship between pedagogy and student outcomes, when measured in terms of the Quality Teaching model and in-class student performance respectively. Following the school effects tradition, the analysis is based on multi-level modelling in which students' prior achievement, socio-economic status, gender, race and NESB status are taken as background variables. Measures for pedagogy are based on classroom observations and task coding of the three dimensions of pedagogy defined in the Quality Teaching model, Intellectual Quality, Quality Learning Environment and Significance and the Authentic Pedagogy constructs on which the Quality Teaching model was based. The outcome variable in this modelling is Newmann and Associates' (1996) Authentic Achievement scale, applied to student work samples gathered from observed classes. This is the first quantitative analysis of the efficacy of the Quality Teaching model for predicting student outcomes and has implications for the viability of the model and its predecessors. In essence this is a replication and expansion of the work reported by Newmann, Marks and Gamoran (1996), Newmann, Lopez & Bryk (1998) and Newmann, Bryk, & Nagaoka (2001). As such, it offers the first rigorous test of the cross-national transportability of Authentic Pedagogy. 2011-11-10T04:20:04.756Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:5855 In this paper we analyse teachers' understandings of their subject specialisation's content knowledge, and the relationship between these understandings, the subject discipline more broadly, and their pedagogical practice measured using the QT framework. We begin by reporting the measured quality of pedagogy received by student cohorts in History and Geography classes, as part of the HSIE (Human Society in Its Environment) Key Learning Area in NSW public schools, and the conceptions of subject knowledge within these outcomes. In this analysis we find that, compared to other subjects in this study, knowledge in the HSIE subjects tended to be treated in only a mildly problematic way, with moderate outcomes in terms of its connection to students lives and cultural backgrounds, and its authentic application. Comparing primary and secondary contexts, we find that HSIE knowledge is treated more problematically, with more direct significance for students, in primary classes. These findings go against initial expectations in which the dominant conventions of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences emphasise its socially constructed nature in particular historical, political and socio-economic contexts (Wallerstein, 2004; 1996). Analysing qualitative data from researchers' narratives of observed lessons, and interviews with teachers, we then elaborate teachers' understanding of their subject content knowledge, and how this relates to the historical development of the discipline and the measured treatment of knowledge in their pedagogical practice. In this analysis we argue that ongoing tensions in the subject discipline between nomothetic and idiographic approaches, coupled with detailed and prescriptive curricula and teachers' apparent disposition towards covering prescribed content, accounts for their treatment of their subject knowledge. Further, through some detailed analysis of cases at the extremes, we argue that teachers' meaningful engagement with the QT framework, as part of a significant, system-wide pedagogical reform initiative, is contingent on their re-thinking the nature of their subject knowledge and its treatment in their teaching. 2011-11-10T04:10:01.718Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:2333 'Educational Governance, Social Inclusion and Social Exclusion in Australia' (EGSIE-Australia) is the Australian leg of a large international comparative study examining the relationship between relatively recent restructuring of systems of schooling and the classic sociological question of who gets what from schooling. The study draws conceptions of governance and subjectivity developed in relation to Foucault's understanding of governmentality and Bourdieu's analyses of habitus and the State as a bureaucratic field. Conducted in three main stages, EGSIE-Australia included text analyses of selected policy documents, interviews with a national sample of teachers, principals and systems actors, and a series of youth studies, including a large scale survey of Youth. Funded by the ARC, from 1998 to 2000, this study has been conducted in partnership with scholars from nine European countries, in which parallel analyses have been developed. The symposium presents six papers developed within the study, cutting across each of the three main stages of analysis. 2011-11-10T03:50:02.271Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:8098 This essay builds from ongoing development and research work on a model of pedagogy, from New South Wales, Australia, known as the Quality Teaching model. Where international calls for the professional development and certification of teachers rely on mechanisms of credentialing, often with scant direct attention to the acts of teaching, the NSW Quality Teaching model was developed specifically to examine classroom practice and assessment with a shared, generic, analytical framework across subject areas in K-12 settings. The article presents a summary and some elaboration of the Quality Teaching model and then raises the question of just what implications for curriculum lie underneath the push for improving teaching. Using this model, for example, it is clear that many of our long standing curricular debates must be soundly re-cast if the ideals of Quality Teaching are to be taken seriously. Coming from a context where curriculum is designed and governed centrally, in very conventional terms, the curriculum implications of Quality Teaching raise a big challange for international understandings of just what is included in school curricula 2011-07-05T23:30:03.509Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:6290 This article presents a discussion of the technical development and statistical results of one of Australia’s most widely recognised models of pedagogy designed to research school improvement. This is the first public reporting of the statistical results of the productive pedagogy research. Although the modelling of classroom practice from which the productive pedagogy model was drawn clearly supports the hypothesis that pedagogy needs to be seen as multidimensional, not all of the theoretical dimensions outlined in the productive pedagogy model are empirically defensible. Of the four dimensions theoretically proposed, Intellectual Quality, Support Learning Environment, and Connectedness were sufficiently measured for sound empirical examination. Although the notion of there being a dimension of pedagogy related to Recognition of Difference may well have theoretical justification, the productive pedagogy research cannot offer empirical substantiation of hypotheses related to this construct. Consequently, this account of the development of productive pedagogy stands as one example of the risk of professional development interests that run too far ahead of research. 2010-05-20T04:00:03.066Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:6271 As a coda to this collection of important and insightful essays, I would like to offer just one more vision of how the world we inhabit has come to be the way it is. The point of this analysis will be to ask readers to consider just how it is that the dilemmas of injustice, inequality, and terror have come to be so clearly similar around the planet.For all the specificity the essays in this volume rightfully declare, from amidst the detailed interactions which create the racisms, the awful inhumanity that all too many experience, the global structures of power constructed by schooling itself are the foundations of our current struggles. 2010-05-19T05:20:01.114Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:1375 School leaders seeking to improve teaching in their school often apply models of pedagogy that are unclear, unstated or assumed. Vague concepts such as ‘student-centred learning’ or pedagogy based on ‘learning styles’, although very popular, are not supported by coherent theories or a solid evidence base. School leaders need to use a model that defines goals explicitly in order to develop meaningful measures of performance, guard against subjective judgements and expose gaps in the evidence needed for evaluation. While a useful model needs to allow for local conditions, some general qualities apply. The model needs a defensible definition of student learning outcomes. It should challenge the ‘we already do that’ response from teachers yet also make changes seem attainable to them, recognising factors such as morale and ‘change fatigue’. Unnecessary jargon should be avoided, but unfamiliar terms may be needed for unfamiliar but important concepts. The model needs to fit within existing information about the quality of pedagogy in a school. These qualities have been incorporated in the New South Wales Quality Teaching model (QT). The QT was formulated by the author and others, and draws on their work with the productive pedagogy approach developed in Queensland. The QT measures pedagogy through the dimensions of intellectual quality, or pedagogy focused on imparting deep understanding; of the quality learning environment, through which teachers set high expectations and foster positive relationships among students; and of intellectual significance, through which teachers make learning meaningful and important to students. Each dimension is broken down into a range of ‘items’ that describe specific aspects of the dimension. Each item has an accompanying rating scale. A school needs to audit existing practices against the model. The audit is both a ‘reality check’ and a review of the distribution of school resources. The quality of existing evidence needs to be closely examined. Evidence might be collected by classroom observation, but as this method can be confronting for teachers, school leaders may prefer to begin with a study of assessment tasks and lesson designs. An ethic of mutual respect and trust is essential. 2010-04-27T06:51:40.836Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:2331 In this paper we outline key theoretical concerns relating to the professional learning interests of the SIPA study. In particular, we draw on the release of the NSW model of pedagogy, Quality Teaching, as an opportunity to examine issues of power in professional learning and school reform agendas. In this context, we explore such issues as (1) the operation of the Quality Teaching framework as a regime of truth, (2) discourses surrounding schools' implementation of the Quality Teaching framework, and (3) the circulation of power as teachers engage with the Quality Teaching framework. Working hypotheses are posited and some preliminary data are analysed in relation to these questions. We also consider implications of this specific case (Quality Teaching and SIPA) for teacher professional learning in general. In so doing, we offer some preliminary ideas on how commonly accepted principles of professional development both produce and constrain teacher learning and impact on the accomplishment of reform goals including, in this case, the substantial goals for pedagogical improvement that underpin the Quality Teaching framework. 2010-04-27T06:46:54.621Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:2342 In the past decade there have been several well publicised school reform initiatives in Australia designed to improve the quality of what happens in classroom, as a means of improving student learning outcomes. While there remains heated public debate about the implications of these initiatives, there is wide consensus about the importance of pedagogy and the need to focus on classroom practices as the core business of teachers. Central to these developments has been an attempt to develop models of pedagogy for both research and professional development purposes. This paper provides an empirical overview and assessment of the development of the Productive Pedagogy model used in Queensland and the NSW Quality Teaching model, a summary of their immediate origins. Included in this paper will be an analysis of the limitations of prior Australian research using these models and an outline of how the current research (SIPA) will address some of these limits. 2010-04-27T06:46:49.419Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:5374 Writing in 1962, in his then widely recognised analysis of anti-intellectualism in America, Richard Hofstadter wrote ((in so far as the teacher stands before his pupils as the surrogate of the intellectual life and its rewards, he unwittingly makes this life appear altogether unattractive (Hofstadter 1962, p. 313). This comment was simply a small note in a larger analysis of the ways in which public education contributes, and would continue to contribute, to a broad social hostility toward intellectual life and intellectuals that had become so apparent in the McCarthyism of the US 1950s. For Hofstadter and many of his contemporary social commentators it was clear that public education generally and teacher education more specifically was destined to produce intellectual mediocrity so long as there was insufficient political will to invest in these institutions at levels yet unseen, then and now. Given the historical context in which Hofstadter was writing. as the cMcCarthy years) waned on the seemingly cyclical horizon of the United States' national sensibility, it seems most appropriate to ask again what role public education generally and teacher education specifically might play in any future attempts to avoid the clearly unfortunate consequences of the central role of anti-intellectualism in US life. In Australia, the Institutes of Teachers are now positioned to make major claims on Universities in the content, structure and delivery of teacher education programs. In light of the absent presence of any serious acknowledgement of the need for intellectual approaches to teaching and teachers, one has to query whether we have moved far beyond the historical origins of teacher education, or done much to lessen Hofstadter's cutting observations and concerns. 2010-04-27T04:37:57.812Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:5305 In this broader view of institutionalism it is clear that there are many more mechanisms for global convergence than those identified by an economic view. While I think these theories are eminently compatible once you get beyond the prima facia, apparent, differences in foci; to do so requires understanding the social and cultural basis of that which we call material and economic (Bourdieu, 2005). To this end, applying economic theory, our modern version of moral philosophy, to understanding teacher education can only be worthy of our attention. To take this economic view and place it in the larger body of literature seeking to explain the question at hand would be to invite a more universal, intellectual conversation on the dilemmas and future dangers facing teacher education in our future. 2010-04-27T04:33:20.059Z ]]>