Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemAnother world like here : futures studies and early childhood education( 1995)This thesis examines the discipline of futures studies and its potential for application in early childhood education. The need for an increased futures-orientation in education is established by a survey of the overwhelmingly negative commentaries of youths on the topic of the future. These comments, it is argued, point to a vacuum of understanding about the future which educators should seek to counterbalance. This task should be particularly emphasised by early childhood educators since they share a commitment to the central objective of laying foundations for life-long learning. Futures studies offers a useful methodology for this task. The thesis examines the major tenets of futures studies and its translation into primary and secondary educational settings. The applicability of futures studies to early childhood education is established by demonstrating the many principles which futures studies and early childhood education share in common. A futures-focused curriculum need not involve the educator in any radically new philosophical and educational frameworks. It, rather, provides a means of extending and re-articulating existing developmental objectives from the vantage point of new perspectives. The thesis resolves the issue of whether or not futures concerns are beyond the reach of four and five year olds by examining how pre-school children conceive time and the future. Young children are seen to possess many of the qualities which futures studies seek to re-instill in adults and older children. The educator should seek to capitalize on this by combining the positive aspects of children's innate perceptions of future time with the more abstract 'adult' understanding of time. A research project on pre-school children's attitudes towards the future sheds further light on their understandings of the future while also enabling their own opinions on the topic to be heard. The thesis then defines the principal objectives of a futures-focused curriculum and translates them into practical learning experiences. It concludes by exploring the implications of the findings contained in the thesis for early childhood education and by discussing some of the ways in which the educators themselves might come to terms with the issues articulated in this study.
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ItemChange management for teachers in the restructuring of Victorian education( 1995)The subject of this thesis is change management for teachers in the restructuring of Victorian education. The introduction outlines the restructuring policies for Victorian education and consequent changes in the past decade. Chapter One, the Literature Review, looks at some of the literature written about policies, the nature of change, the place of values and vision in the change process, professional development, leadership and the devolution of power and resourcing. This literature forms the basis for the questionnaire asked of D.S.E. participants to obtain data. Chapter Two, methodology, discusses the nature and implementation methods and questions for collection of data from personnel. Chapter Three states the findings of the data collected from the questions asked of D.S.E. personnel. Chapter Four consists of an analysis and discussion of the findings referred to in Chapter Three in light of the literature discussed in Chapter One. Chapter Five is a discussion of conclusions drawn in light of the Literature Review, questionnaire responses and the analysis of these. Overall, the thesis concludes that given the time frame of the restructuring implementation, resourcing for Professional Development, planning and implementation needs to be reassessed.
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ItemAn investigative model for implementing the Certificate of General Education for Adults( 1995)The study is concerned with the implementation of the competency-based credential, the Certificate of General Education for Adults at two different education providers in Victoria, Australia. It establishes one model of implementation derived from theoretical research into educational change management and from selected documentation of competency-based credentials in the UK and Australia in the period 1988 to 1994. The model is tested at the Study Sites, for acceptability to teaching and co-ordinating staff, using selected variables. It is also used to collect data on the implementation experiences of the respondents. Data collected confirms the acceptability of the model to respondents at the two Sites and the statistical insignificance of differences in the responses. Interpretation of the qualitative data on implementation provides information on the characteristics of the change itself and the roles and influences of associated parties, including teachers and management and external policy makers. It identifies some themes of successful change management, notably the importance of monitoring implementation processes, collaboration among parties involved and the value of initiative taking. Evidence of the organisational and pedagogic impact of the implementation, at the study sites, is assessed. The role, content and focus of an encompassing professional development program, which emphasises collegiality, partnership and flexibility, as an essential adjunct to successful implementation, is explored.
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ItemSchools of the Future and curriculum development and implementation : an investigation( 1995)Restructure of the Ministry of Education has ensured that schools are no longer centrally administered but are self-managing within the Schools of the Future program under the Directorate of School Education. As a result, changes have occurred in many areas including administration, financial management, staffing structure and teacher support in areas such as curriculum. This study investigates three schools that are members of the Schools of the Future Pilot Program and seeks to find the effect that the changes from the Program, have had on Curriculum Development and Implementation. The study reviews the literature available on the topic, in particular the notion of self-managing schools in Victoria. Therefore it reviews information on the Schools of the Future Program. It also seeks to understand the effect of changes in curriculum policy and the provision of professional development. The study also seeks to explore the effect of leadership style on the implementation of curriculum within a school. Qualitative research methods were employed when data was collected from the three participating schools. The schools were selected for the following reasons: (i) they are members of the Schools of the Future Pilot Program(or Intake 1); (ii) they are situated in a similar socio-economic area; (iii) the author had ready access to those schools. By applying grounded theory technique to the data a model was developed - The Curriculum Triangle. This model is a suggested representation of what is occurring in the selected schools and could be used further to analyse data from schools, and thus generate the possible areas requiring professional development and curriculum leadership.
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ItemThe gifted child who has literacy learning disabilities( 1995)The present research examines the learning characteristics of a group of children who displayed the characteristics of being both gifted and literacy learning disabled (that is, GLitD students). Such a group had not, in the review of the literature, been specifically targeted previously. The approach taken was from the combined perspectives of giftedness and literacy learning disabilities. Because the investigation is exploratory, the focus is on a detailed analysis of patterns in reading for individual readers, rather than on the analysis of group trends. This design ensured that differences between the readers were not masked by combining the performance patterns of individual subjects. The performance of eleven students, ranging in age from 8 to 15 years, in several reading-related areas was measured; reading words both in connected prose and in isolation, phonemic awareness and orthographic knowledge. Information about each reader's cognitive performance was used to examine trends in these areas of reading. The reading disabilities were shown to be attributed to an immature orthographic knowledge of words. This lack of knowledge at the word level of reading meant that these students needed to invest a comparatively large amount of their attentional resources in deciding the words in the text read. As a consequence, they had comparatively little attention for tapping into their well-developed general knowledge and using this to facilitate either word recognition or reading comprehension. This lack of knowledge was shown to be related to immature phonemic awareness knowledge. As a consequence, some of the GLitD students activated either attention-demanding non-orthographic reading strategies or distinctive visual feature processing strategies. They also had difficulty using their orthographic knowledge of some words to recognize others through analogy processes. The second part of the investigation examines the success of an intervention program with one of the GLitD students. The program was developed from a synthesis of gifted students learning and effective teaching strategies for literacy-disabled learners and focussed on teaching three types of knowledge (1) a knowledge of word structure, (2) a range of mental actions or strategies for constructing a text representation and (3) a range of attitudes about reading. The program was implemented by the investigator over 22 one hour sessions and was associated with an improvement in reading performance. Future directions of research with GLitD students are discussed.
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ItemTeachers concerns in the implementation of laptop computers: four case studies( 1995)This study examines the concerns four teachers experience when confronted with technological innovation: the introduction of the laptop computer into their classroom. It attempts to define the factors which inhibit or encourage the move from an emphasis on personal concerns to ones which focus on the student as learner and finally lead to the teacher reflecting on their own practices and being able to share new knowledge with others. Through interview; observation and discussion this study explores these teachers' feelings and reactions to what is happening in their classrooms. The study is located in the social action of the teachers in their schools. It has chosen to emphasise the institutional factors in particular rather than looking to social uses the computer has been put to in classroom.