Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Theses

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    The development of a model for the management of major strategic investment decisions in universities
    Miller, Loren Kaye (University of Melbourne, 2013)
    Major investments in infrastructure, growth or productivity enhancement are crucial for a university in shaping its strategic direction and addressing the challenges of a changing landscape. Through a case study of Monash University, supplemented with the investigation of views of practitioners in the field, this research thesis has developed a model to optimise the management of major strategic investment decisions in universities. The model starts from the proposition that effective strategic investment decision making has two primary purposes: � Identifying major investments that are worth doing: Determining the infrastructure, activities and other enablers that are required as major investments to shape the future capacity, capability and operation of the university; and � Prioritising the ones that are best to do: Optimising the prioritisation and allocation of constrained resources to maximise the future benefit that can be achieved consistent with this strategic vision. The research reflects the hypothesis that investment decision making at universities under traditional academic leadership models has had a greater emphasis on the first of these objectives. The research suggests that there are opportunities to learn from business case/cost-benefit financial analysis approaches that are more commonly used in business. It proposes a mechanism (need to do/able to do criteria) for prioritising investments, based on which investments provide the most return given the existing or future capacity of the university to delivery them. In developing the model as mechanism for universities to enhance the management of major investments, the research considers and brings together data and analytical based approaches with the human and organisational dimensions of decision making. The major investment management (MIM) model comprises recommendations for university practices in four areas: Strategic Planning and Prioritising: facilitating effective strategic planning as the context for the identifying major investment needs and to provide a mechanism to evaluate and prioritise a portfolio of major investments. Defining Expected Strategic Outcomes: analysing and articulating the specific expected strategic outcomes for major investments by reference to four major drivers: growth and development of markets and products and services; infrastructure development; productivity enhancement; and improving rankings and reputation. Understanding Financial Implications: enabling the management of information and the development of financial analysis for understanding the financial implications of major investments, setting financial expectations and constructing major investment budgets. Adopting a Governance and Management Framework: establishing roles and responsibilities in an organisational structure that are supported by a framework of policies and processes for the governance and management of major investments, and setting up arrangements for accountabilities, project management and review of investment implementation. The study aims to contribute to the understanding of the context and factors at play in strategic investment decision making at Monash University, as an example of a large Australian public university and, by proposing a structured model, to enhance major strategic investment decision making and the management of an investment portfolio in practice. The study seeks both to add to the body of research on university management and strategic decision making and to inform and assist practitioners in the higher education sector.
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    Constructing nurses' professional identity
    Willetts, Georgina Anne Parkes ( 2013)
    There is limited evidence, and research on nurses’ development of their professional identity within the social context of their daily work environments. The overall aim of this project was to investigate elements that constitute the performance of nurses’ professional identity within a specific work environment. The particular focus was on the interplay of nurses with other nurses, and with other health professionals in the context of their work environment. This ethnographic case study investigated the interactions of nurses within two specific clinical wards/units. The application of the theoretical perspective Social Identity Theory was used to study two specific professional daily activities. These activities of shift handover, and multidisciplinary team meetings were videotaped as part of the data collection. Further qualitative methods of data collection included; participants viewing the videotapes, and then being interviewed (individual or focus group). The findings generated evidence that the social context of the ward environment plays a significant role in the development of nurses’ professional identity. Professional activities such as handover contribute significantly to the formation of nurse professional identity. Handover is a structured formal social process developed, and performed entirely by nurses. This activity is a central mechanism by which nurses enculturate, new nurses, and construct, and sustain their professional identity through interaction with each other. In contrast the activity of the multidisciplinary meeting is a platform for the expression of professional identity through the interaction with other health professionals. The findings have implications for understanding how nurses when they are together create, and self- categorise their identity, and how this is changed expressed, and lived differently in a multidisciplinary group. These findings generate important possibilities for further research, and need testing in other nursing work environments. Implicitly the findings are directly relevant to professional leadership, education, and service development in the nursing profession. Additionally the structure of the research design should enable similar investigation in different contexts.
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    Is induction and mentoring up to standards?: A phenomenological study of Victorian graduate entry beginning teachers
    ANDERSON, MELODY ( 2013)
    This qualitative study examines a select aspect of teacher professional knowledge. The focus is on the construction of the unique novice-expert relationship commonly referred to as ‘induction and mentoring’. The research aims to contribute to an existing knowledge base about the needs of beginning teachers and their early career experiences. It examines issues of early professionalisation and socialisation, pedagogical knowledge, power and agency, professional identity and the combined impact of these elements on teacher retention. This is a two-phase phenomenological study of the beginning teacher-mentor teacher relationship, conducted over 2007-2009. Phase 1 participants had completed the Graduate Diploma of Education at the University of Melbourne. Phase 2 participants were concurrently enrolled in the final year of their Master of Teaching degree at the University of Melbourne in subjects designed to support beginning teachers in their graduate year. Rich data were yielded from individual interviews with beginning teacher participants (n=18) who were undertaking or had recently completed the statutory process for full registration (16 secondary teachers and 2 early childhood teachers). Fieldwork was carried out in the final school term of 2007 (Phase 1) and 2009 (Phase 2). Transcribed data were horizontalised and searched for the invariant horizons of the phenomenon for analysis. Main themes were identified for discussion. This research is complementary to, and will further support, recent international and Australian research by prominent researchers in the field (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Darling-Hammond, 2012; Devos, 2010; Feiman-Nemser, 2012; Hudson, 2012, Ingersoll, Merrill & May, 2012; Ingersoll & Smith, 2004; Ingersoll & Strong, 2011; Johnson, 2012; Johnson, Berg & Donaldson, 2005; Martinez, 2004; Richardson & Watt, 2006; Wang, Odell & Schwille, 2008). Within an existing international evidence base, the findings contribute to an Australian research focus on models of mentoring for beginning teachers, highlighting that teacher identity, 'turnaround pedagogies' (Kamler & Comber, 2004) and the interrelationship with teacher retention remain central and affirm the enduring issues in respect to the practices of induction and mentoring in the field of education.
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    The positioning of the coach and the transformative agency of teachers: The problem of constituting joint meaning in an “underperforming” secondary mathematics department
    DIMAGGIO, SOL ( 2013)
    The Victorian State Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) instituted a coaching program (2007-2010) to improve teaching in primary and secondary schools. The DEECD policy platform of school improvement through teacher-trained coaches saw the employment of Teaching and Learning Coaches (henceforth “coach”) employed from 2007 to support mathematics and science instruction. Eleven numeracy coaches were deployed across the western metropolitan region of Melbourne in 2008 and placed in schools that were identified as “underperforming” based on student performance data. This research focuses on two school sites in which a coach worked at each on a weekly rotational basis in an onsite professional development program to improve teaching practice using a sanctioned generic mathematics lesson structure. The coaching program in this study involved the teachers of mathematics, the appointment of school-based coaches from among them, and administrators in the targeted “underperforming” secondary schools, with the intention of changing the prima facie unproductive, culturally specific, mathematics teaching practices in those schools. This thesis examines how mathematics teachers in targeted “underperforming” schools reported how they were influenced, by working with a coach. The research is founded on the theoretical belief that there is nothing else to social life but symbolic exchanges and the joint construction and management of meaning, including the meaning of bits of stuff including things we control and things that we don’t, but are expected to use to “remake” ourselves. To become relevant in the teachers’ life spaces the coaching stuff, including the coach herself, had to be interpreted to play a part in a human narrative. Interpretations require grammars that are historically and culturally local. The thesis presents fine-grained descriptive analyses of the semiotic interactions and the psychological positioning of mathematics teachers in the accounts of their experiences of the coaching program. The recommended practices put by the coach were resisted where they were seen not to serve the teachers’ personal identity formation in the local moral order of their school. The teachers’ social activity with the coach shows they live in a double social order. One component consists of the social arrangements for maintaining their teaching lives in their teaching environment, which was difficult by virtue of the educational disadvantage of the community, they served and their own poor training and professional isolation. This is the practical order and the teachers had their local proper place in that order. The other component consisted of the social arrangements for creating honour and status. This is an expressive order. The material world of privileged strategies, tactics, student test performance data and other elements of the program of improvement brought by the coach can be understood in their full human significance only if their roles in both these orders are identified. As to the teachers’ social motivation around these material things, the accounts of the teachers present a strong case for the priority of the expressive over the practical in their social action. The new lesson structure the coach introduced can become a social object only within the dynamic frame of the teachers’ storylines. It is this most ephemeral and “invisible” product of the teachers’ action that is really real, the narratives that are realized in the social orders in their school. The elaboration of a more comprehensive theory of mentoring / coaching practices based on this approach to constructing a new constitutive order involves a study of the social objects as created in and through constitutive practices. This draws on a distinction between constitutive orders of the rules of maths teaching, which are prospective doings, and sayings constructed around social objects, and institutional orders of maths teaching, which are retrospective and depend on “accounts” and justifications. It is essential that constitutive orders of practice are collaborations. Taking all this into account requires thinking of meaning making as one of communication or interaction, or as Harré argues, taking conversation as real or causal. To make sense of, or claim meaning in, the teachers’ constitutively ordered conversational sequences about their interactions with the coach, in the use of social objects, their self organising practices or language games, is to explore their orientation to a constitutive rule and their exhibition of it to others.
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    Medical teachers in Australian hospitals: knowledge, pedagogy and identity
    Barrett, Jeanette Kaye ( 2013)
    This research aimed to generate a better understanding of the teacher identities and pedagogical perspectives of medical teachers in hospitals. The study focuses on understanding the personal theories of teaching that the teachers bring to their teaching and the ways they think about themselves as teachers. These two factors, known to affect the environments that teachers create for learners, have received little attention in medical education research. A qualitative methodology was employed featuring data collected from audio-recording twenty-five medical teachers in a range of clinical and classroom settings with medical students, as well as data from semi-structured interviews with all participating teachers. The interview and observation data were analysed and interpreted iteratively: through back and forth movements from specifics to general meanings and from the data to theory. The study found that for these teachers, teaching is about knowledge and their pedagogical role in the students gaining a particular form of knowledge. They see this knowledge as deriving from work with individual patients who cumulatively and one-by-one provide the doctor (and student) with particular knowledge that is never forgotten. The teachers also perceive that this knowledge resides in the places where practice and teaching happens. It is intricate, messy, uncertain and dynamic. Thus conceptualized, this knowledge is regarded as superior to formal (‘textbook’) knowledge which is orderly, static and appears in the form of lists and stable sets of instructions. The teachers describe their engagement in contextualising and transforming students’ formal knowledge through making links and bridges between knowledge types and knowledge sources. A second finding concerns pedagogy. The teachers in the study placed primary value on their knowledge, but emphasized and valued too the personal and interpersonal factors associated with teaching. The enjoyment in medical teaching is a reward in itself, and for some a pleasant change from the routine of clinical work. Key to that enjoyment is a preference for a connectedness with students and a commitment to pleasant and friendly interactions. In the absence of other professionalizing influences, many of the personal theories of teaching that these teachers developed when they were students persist into the present. There is a sense of teaching as a commonplace and a commonsense activity – important and pleasant but not complex or difficult. The thesis contends that this understanding is a potential obstacle to developing medical teachers’ understanding of and expertise in teaching. On identity, the study identified four elements in these teachers’ ways of thinking about themselves as teachers. Firstly, central to the ways they think about themselves as teachers is their belief that they possess a particular form of clinical knowledge that is at the heart of being a doctor. Secondly, their teacher identities are connected to the enjoyment that teaching offers and the sense of being a teacher as natural, just a part of being a doctor. Thirdly, the low status of teaching and the inferior status of medical teaching relative to research – influences how they think about themselves as teachers. Finally, the value these teachers place on their relationships with students, contrasts starkly with a sense of disconnectedness from the university. The thesis contends that these medical teachers have understandings of clinical knowledge and medical teaching that are not well appreciated in the literature or in medical education practices and discourses. This situation contributes to their feelings of being isolated – even alienated – from the university, and it also obstructs aspects of curriculum reform and affects teachers’ development as teachers. The thesis suggests a need for revitalised descriptions of the intricacies of clinical knowledge and its construction – a need to re-value the places and the patients as sources of knowledge and to re-value the teachers. A new approach to judgements about medical teaching is also required, particularly an approach based on a broad understanding of the relational and technical aspects of pedagogy. Many of these teachers would respond positively to appropriate support to develop more informed approaches to their teaching and greater technical expertise. To be useful, that support and development requires an appreciation of the culture of heroic individualism in medicine and a fundamental sensitivity to medical teachers’ values, perspectives and teacher identities.
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    Strategies of policy steering: the transnational work of the OECD in education policy
    Wood, Bryan Matthew ( 2013)
    In his thesis, Bryan Wood examined the role the OECD now plays in steering education policies of its member states. He explored the strategies the OECD has developed to enhance its effectiveness, helping to reshape our understanding of teachers' work.
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    The development of professionalism in surgeons
    HILLIS, DAVID ( 2013)
    Professionalism underpins the commitment made between a profession and society. This social contract balances the benefits to a profession of a monopoly over the use of its knowledge base, its right to considerable autonomy of practice and the privilege of self-regulation, with responsibilities and accountabilities to the community. However, it is the challenge in further defining professionalism, particularly in day-to-day activities, that has propelled analysis beyond values and beliefs to include behaviours and attributes and the understanding of them within work-based culture and educational programs. This is particularly so in healthcare where unprofessional behaviour ranging from disrespect or rudeness to florid abuse is now being associated with poorer outcomes for the individual client, in this case, the patient. The overall approach to and understanding of professionalism remains variable, patchy and inconsistent in spite of its importance as an area of educational endeavour. This thesis contributes further to this analysis, particularly with regard to surgeons and trainees practising in Australia and New Zealand. This study is an intensive review of the understanding, perceived importance, capacity for improvement and possible educational activities that can support professionalism within the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and the surgical community of Australia and New Zealand. It combines an extensive literature review, with a questionnaire that was distributed to 3000 Fellows and Trainees. With a commendable 60 per cent return rate, analysis has been undertaken across the categories of Fellows / Trainees, Specialties, Regions, Gender and Age Groups. Following this, semi-structured interviews involved 15 Fellows and Trainees in discussing case studies around issues of reflection and planning, pausing in action, providing feedback, dealing with rudeness and seeking feedback. Key issues that emerged include the importance of the ‘codification’ of professionalism that has seen the development of curricula around a topic that was unclear and even previously regarded as ‘non-cognitive’; the proliferation of assessment tools; and an increasing understanding of the cultural and socialisation issues that are necessarily intertwined with the more normative aspects. Surgeons do regard professionalism as important but vary in the priority they give to the various attributes. This puts ‘at risk’ the attributes that are not rated as highly, but which are nonetheless desirable. Surgeons are immersed in a world where unprofessional behaviour is prevalent and they also contribute to this. The fieldwork showed that the role of educator, mentor and role model is vital, not only in demonstrating professionalism, but also in correcting areas of unprofessional behaviour. To more fully undertake these tasks, relationality, resilience and reflection have been highlighted as important concepts that need deeper understanding by Educators and Trainees. The role of the College needs to be more prominent in this regard. It is not viewed as well engaged, nor as providing effective leadership. This can be addressed in the healthcare sector by more clearly identifying areas where ‘signature pedagogies’ can provide effective experiences and education. Examples of signature pedagogies include morbidity and mortality meetings, ward rounds and operating theatre sessions. The main implication of this study is that the College needs to provide education and professional development to increase capacity across a number of areas. At the individual level, this includes the skills that build resilience; the ability to more effectively ask the pragmatic questions that will assist reflection; and the understanding of the importance of relationality, which acts as a bond between a professional and their more senior and experienced colleague. Within the community of practice, through which much of the learning of professionalism occurs, capacity around these issues also needs to be improved. It is again at this level that the importance of providing leadership to nurture professionalism and address unprofessional behaviour within organisations such as hospitals and the broader environment of healthcare will be profiled. Activities to promote this capacity development can particularly occur within the areas where signature pedagogies flourish. There are important policy issues to be considered, as well as the development of educational programs. The policies will influence and then reflect the importance that the College of Surgeons places on professionalism and addressing unprofessional behaviour. Its commitment to both training and assessment of professionalism needs to be incorporated into a model of lifelong learning that particularly influences the workplace and the multiple communities of surgical practice.
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    Teaching energy and change in junior science: working with Boohan and Ogborn's picture language to introduce second law thinking
    Higgins, Paul Christopher ( 2013)
    This work is a commitment to the belief that teachers as curriculum workers should take time to write accounts of their experiences in doing curriculum development and the literature on curriculum development and the improvement of teaching should contain a much higher proportion of accounts and analyses by curriculum workers of their experiences than it does now. Over my 27 years of teaching the Energy and Change curriculum I have found the concepts difficult to communicate to students in most year levels. Boohan and Ogborn (1996a) in their Energy and Change Project funded by the Nuffield Foundation suggest a way of introducing junior high school students to thermodynamics in a variety of everyday contexts. They designed an “abstract picture language” of types of physical change and energy transfer that teachers and students could use to support discussion about what was happening in energetic terms in any natural change situation – for example, coffee cooling, a toy car being wound up and released, the wind blowing, a fire burning, sugar dissolving, running and getting hot or a bomb exploding. Research has reported positively, both in the United Kingdom and Australia, on student and teacher responses to the use of Boohan and Ogborn’s materials. This study investigated how Boohan and Ogborn’s abstract picture language or set of ideograms might work as a Wittgensteinian hinge (Wittgenstein 1969) for me, as an experienced biology/science teacher, and my students. I found the picture language offers a perspicuous example to Second Law thinking for myself and junior science students in my Australian school. The discursive praxeological turn taken in this study to the technical appraisal of new material artefacts proposed for science teaching attends to the affective-perceptual meaning afforded by new resources and may help teachers in training and teachers in schools who feel the need to grow further in the cultural agency of their explanations as science teachers as well as academic researchers who seek to support their reflective enquires.