Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemA qualitative study of developing problem solving competence in students of a food technology diploma course( 2000)This thesis is a qualitative study of developing students' problem solving competence or ability in a Technical and Further Education (TAFE) Diploma course. The problem solving ability has been identified as highly desirable by the Australian food processing industry. Its development in students has been specified in the Course Aims Statement as a requisite learning outcome of the Food Technology Diploma course. The thesis research aimed to explore the situation if the development of problem solving ability happened as envisaged by the major stakeholders of the course and how it was accomplished in the classroom. To facilitate the thesis research, ethnographic methods, including observation, interviews and document analysis were used. Activities of teaching and learning in classrooms and laboratories were observed and recorded on videotapes. Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders including Industry Representatives, Course Designers, Course Administrators, and Module Teachers were conducted. Document analysis included review of approved Accreditation Submissions for the course (accredited by the Food Industry Training Accreditation Board in the Victorian Department of Education), review of students' written work of practical reports and answers to test questions. From the interviews, two divergent views emerged that might be regarded as 'aspirant' and 'practitioner' stances. The 'aspirant' stance represented the views of industry representatives, course designers, and course administrators, whereas the practitioner stance those of the module teachers. The 'aspirant' view concurs with the industry's desire and expectation of developing Diploma students' problem solving ability in the classroom. It did not however stipulate to what standard or level this development should attain. The practitioner side on the other hand maintained that the development of problem solving ability is not their job but it belongs to other educators including teachers of degree courses in higher education. Also the practitioner side maintained that as bona fide TAFE teachers, they know what and how the course should be taught. The TAFE teachers in this particular case believed what they do is appropriate because there has not been any complaint from the industry regarding the quality of the Diploma graduates that they produced. In terms of improving students' problem solving ability, the official stance in the approved Accreditation Submission is that the Diploma course should be delivered in a manner consistent with the constructivists' problem based and situated learning approaches and presented in a holistic, integrated manner based on predetermined learning objectives. In their classroom practice, the Diploma course teachers in this particular case simply delivered what they considered necessary in a ' teaching as telling ' mode, without attending to the recommendations described in the approved Accreditation Submission or an objective-based plan, which incorporates strategies for developing students' problem solving ability. There was no apparent modeling or benchmarking by the teachers of attitudes and dispositions, attributes acknowledged to be required for superior problem solving ability, including reflection, metacognition, self-directedness in learning and construction of individual meaning from knowledge learned, as well as thinking critically or creatively. On the contrary, their delivery and assessment of learning was tuned down, encouraging students to learn in a 'surface approach'. The teachers' practice thus affected adversely the quality of students' reports of experiments. The review of students' reports of the three applied science modules, Food Chemistry, Food Technology, and Microbiology, established that students (1) did not understand the theoretical bases of the experiments, (2) did not show critical reflection or objectivity on the conduct of the experiments or the validity of the results obtained, (3) tended to exert minimal effort in the reporting, and (4) were generally unable to articulate and communicate their thoughts and knowledge. Another parcel of data supporting the conclusion of students' poor state of professional knowledge and inability to apply it came from their answers of test questions. Review of their answers showed that they did not understand the knowledge. Although the test questions of the three applied science modules did not really test them for the application of knowledge in resolving some industry-related issues that is solving industry related problems, the students' answers demonstrated that it was highly unlikely they could do so because of their lack of understanding of the fundamental concepts and theories underlying many of the current or contemporary industry problems/issues. The triangulation of the data from three sources, that is observation, interviews, and document analysis, converged to illuminate this particular situation showing (a) the teachers did not teach in a manner conducive to the development of students' problem solving ability and (b) students did not learn effectively to improve their problem solving ability. In explaining the occurrence of this situation, it has been rationalised in terms of teachers' low expectation of their students, the teachers' inadequacy to teach problem solving skills, and the failure of those in authority to properly communicate this specific course aim to all those who need to know, the students and teachers in particular. Based on this explanation, this thesis made the suggestion whereby improvement in the development of students' problem solving ability can be effected for the Diploma course in the short term by attending immediately to the teachers' practice in the classroom.
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ItemDeepening Australian democracy: what can schools do?( 2000-11)The term, ‘civic deficit’, has been used to describe a situation in which a significant proportion of Australian citizens display low levels of knowledge and understanding of, and low levels of engagement with, Australian political and constitutional arrangements. This civic deficit has attracted increased attention by governments, policy makers, and the broad educational community within Australia in recent years. The Report of the Civics Expert Group (1994) identified school education as a major site in which to address this deficit, and the past decade has seen increased emphasis on civics and citizenship education in Australian schools. The thesis critically examines the role of civics and citizenship within Australia secondary schools. It does this, not purely from an educational perspective, but from within the broader context of the contemporary Australian political system. This thesis regards citizenship as inherently a political concept, and develops the notion of democratic citizenship as the most significant element of this. It is argued that democratic citizens are more than merely knowledgeable about their nation’s democratic traditions, government institutions and constitutional arrangements. While these elements of civics and citizenship education have a role, democratic citizens are genuine members of their political community. It is argues that they are inquisitive participants in that community.
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ItemAustralia's online censorship regime: the Advocacy Coalition Framework and governance compared( 2000-04)This study assesses the value of two analytical models explaining particular contemporary political events. This is undertaken through the comparative evaluation of two international models: the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Rhodes’s model of Governance. These approaches are evaluated against an single case study: the censorship of computer network (“online”) content in Australia. Through comparison evaluation, criticism, and reformulation, these approaches are presented as useful tools of policy analysis in Australia. The first part of the thesis presents the theoretical basis of the research and the methodologies employed to apply them. It begins by examining how the disciplines of political science and public policy have focused on the role of politically-active “interest”, groups in the process of policy development and implementation. This focus has lead to ideas about the role of the state actors in policy making, and attempts to describe and explain the interface between public and private groups in developing and implementing public policies. These, largely British and American, theories have impacted upon Australian researchers who have applied these ideas to local conditions. The majority of this part, however, is spent introducing the two research approaches: Paul Sabatier’s Advocacy Coalitions Framework and Rod Rhodes’s theory of Governance. Stemming from dissatisfaction with research into implementation, Sabatier’s framework attempts to show how competing clusters of groups and individuals compete for policy “wins” in a discrete subsystem by using political strategies to effect favourable decisions and information to change the views of other groups. Governance, on the other hand, attempts to apply Rhodes’s observations to the changing nature of the British state (and by implication other liberal democracies) to show the importance of self-organising networks of organisations who monopolise power and insulate the processes of decision making and implementation from the wider community and state organs. Finally, the methodologies of the thesis are presented, based on the preferred research methods of the two authors. The second part introduces the case serving as the basis for evaluating the models, namely, censorship of the content of computer networks in Australia between 1987 and 2000. This case arises in the late 1980s with the computerisation of society and technological developments leading to the introduction of, first publicly-accessible computer bulletin boards, and then the technology of the Internet. From a small hobbyists’ concern, the uptake of this technology combined with wider censorship issues leads to the consideration of online content by Australian Governments, seeking a system of regulation to apply to this technology. As the emerging Internet becomes popularised, and in the face of adverse media attention on, especially pornographic, online content, during the mid to late 1990s two Federal governments establish a series of policy processes that eventually lead to the introduction of the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999, a policy decision bringing online content into Australia’s intergovernmental censorship system. The final part analyses the case study using the two theoretical approaches. What this shows is that, from the perspective of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, debate over online content does not form a substantive policy subsystem until 1995, and within this three, relatively stable, competing coalitions emerge, each pressuring for different levels of action and intervention (from no regulation, to a strong regulatory model). While conflict within the subsystem varied, overall the framework’s analysis shows the dominance of a coalition consisting largely of professional and business interests favouring a light, co-regulatory approach to online content. From the perspective of Governance, the issue of online content is subject to a range of intra- and inter-governmental conflict in the period 1995-7, finally settling into a negotiated position where a complex policy community emerges based largely on structurally-determined resource dependencies. What this means is that policy making in the case was not autonomous of state institutions, but highly dependent on institutional power relations. Overall, in comparing the findings it becomes apparent that the approaches lack the capacity to fully explain the role of key sovereigns, defined here as those individuals with legal authority over decision making in the policy process, because of their methodological and normative assumptions about the policy process. By showing these individuals as part of wider networks of power-dependencies, and exploring the complex bundle of real, pseudo, symbolic, and nonsense elements that make up a policy, the role of Ministers as “semi-sovereign sovereigns” can be accommodated in the two approaches.
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ItemFrom ‘tech’ school to academe: personal narratives and the history of technical education, 1931-1988( 2002)'From "tech" school to academe: personal narratives and the history of technical education, 1931-1988', explores technical education at junior, intermediate, trade, post-trade, diploma, and degree levels, including technical and TAFE teacher education. The methodology is autobiography-as-history and history from documents: the narratives convey life stories of men and women - my technical education people - who have had a significant technical education involvement, their transition through primary, secondary/technical and trade/post secondary education to higher education. Emergent documentary themes include: affirmation of technical education during the Great Depression, notwithstanding the 1931 McPherson 'Economy Committee'; the very important contribution to the war-effort, 1939-45, the Commonwealth Technical Training Scheme, to post-war reconstruction and ex-service rehabilitation, the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, and a program for the war-wounded; the 1950s, extension of Commonwealth Government involvement in university education through the Murray Committee report (1957) and initiatives in senior, apprentice and junior technical education, the latter including psychology and guidance and school chaplaincies; the 1960s, the Martin Committee binary system report, leading to the Victoria Institute of Colleges (1965), in apprenticeship, the introduction of block release and a reduced term of training, and in junior technical education, trends to a liberalised curriculum; 1972-75, the Whitlam Reforms, including the Karmel Schools Commission and needs-based funding, Commonwealth full-funding of tertiary education, the abolition of student fees, and the Kangan Report, its recommendation of capital and recurrent funding of the new TAFE sector with its philosophy of open access, broad-based, vocationally-oriented recurrent education; in apprenticeship, introduction of the modular curricula, and in junior technical education, developments which made it the most comprehensive sector under flexible, autonomous administrative arrangements; the 1980s, the ending of the binary system of tertiary education with the Dawkins' program of 1988, expansion of TAFE's utility function, and closure of the secondary technical schools, an outcome of the 1985 Blackburn Committee recommendations, their passing part political, part technological, part social, part economic and, at official levels, barely acknowledged. Emergent narrative themes include: the antecedent work-ethic and underdog culture; family resourcefulness, resilience and moral integrity; puzzles of childhood; school experiences, for example as a junior student during the 1940s or as an adult in post-war rehabilitation training; employment experiences, for example in sheetmetal during the 1930s; trade teaching in the 1940s and Special Method lecturing in the 1950s; mentoring and role modelling; trainee resourcefulness; diverse pathways to technical education; system flexibility; enabling school leadership; chronic resourcing deficits; teacher professionalism; the vital 'acco' -'tradie' mix; innovations in technical curricula, including co-ed, pastoral and welfare initiatives, for example work experience and the alternative techs; the dynamism of the 1970s, including Kangan and TAFE, university accessibility, and introduction of the new technologies; the 1980s, concern for the loss of the technical schools and their comprehensiveness, inclusiveness and egalitarianism; ambivalence about TAFE - accessible, occupationally relevant yet doctrinaire and narrow; concern for the demise of dedicated technical teacher education; and the personal integration of my technical education people. In the light of the narrative and documentary evidence, I conclude that technical education has delivered clear personal and social benefits.
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ItemThe systematic delivery of Catholic schooling in Australia: Catholic school systems as living organisations( 2001)This research investigates the systematic provision of Catholic schooling across Australia through the state, territory and diocesan systems of education. It sets out to determine the manner in which the problems faced by the seemingly independent and autonomous schools within the Catholic sector in the early 1970s have been addressed in the systematisation of the delivery of Catholic education. The research was based on a multi-site case study of the sector which involved data collection through interviews with system leaders in 25 Catholic dioceses and was supported by surveys of school principals in every diocese as well as a collection of documents over the period of the study. The study identifies the organisational models and the operational principles evident in the modern systems and investigates the functioning of the localised systems in terms of personnel and resource allocation. Practices within the systems generally align with the theoretical and rhetorical Church statements but the study isolates a number of areas, particularly in the areas of authority, governance and decision making, where there is a clash of priorities between local autonomy and collective wellbeing. The data gathered through interviews and surveys clarify the current challenges facing the sector including the anticipated outcomes of Catholic schooling, the inclusiveness of the systems and the relationship between the systems and the local church.