Faculty of Education - Research Publications
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ItemTransnational education: our expectations and our challenges. Is anyone listening? From teachers’ and students’ perspectives( 2006)In the 70’s and early 80’s, many Malaysian students went to the West to further their tertiary education. They completed their undergraduate program from year one in the respective foreign countries. In the late 80’s, there was a shift in trend. More students conducted their initial years in Malaysia before finishing off their final years in the West. Multiple twinning programs that utilize foreign curriculum but implemented in Malaysian environment are offered at various private educational institutions. In the light of this phenomenon, trans-national education or cross-border education is not novel within the Malaysian educational landscape. This paper is a reflection of the author who had experienced trans-national education as a student and currently experiencing it as a teacher. We ponder upon the nature of experiences that students involved in trans-education encounter that potentially modify their learning behaviors. As for the students, we conclude that they generally experience three types of shocks that are cultural shock, learning shock, and assessment shock. Observations made on the challenges faced by the students to adapt to the demands of the curriculum, novel strategies of teaching and learning as well as requirements of assessments are reported. Finally, we proposed some steps that could be taken to reduce the impact of multiple shocks and enhance learning in trans-national program.
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ItemGlobal challenges for land administration and sustainable development( 2006)An important government activity of all nation states is building and maintaining a land administration system (LAS) with the primary objective of supporting an efficient and effective land market. This includes cadastral surveys to identify and subdivide land, land registry systems to support simple land trading (buying, selling, mortgaging and leasing land) and land information systems to facilitate access to the relevant information, increasingly through an Internet enabled e-government environment. For most countries a cadastre is at the core of the LAS providing spatial integrity and unique land parcel identification in support of security of tenure and effective land trading. For many cadastral and land administration officials and for much of society, these are the primary, and in many cases the only roles of the cadastre and LAS. However the role, and particularly the potential of LAS and their core cadastres, have rapidly expanded over the last couple of decades and will continue to change in the future. But what is a land market in a modern economy? Since our LAS were developed, land commodities and trading patterns have undergone substantial changes: they have become complex, corporatised and international. Are our current LAS designed to support a modern land market that trades in complex commodities such as mortgage backed certificates, water rights, land information, time shares, unit and property trusts, resource rights, financial instruments, insurance products, options, corporate development instruments and vertical villages? Modern land markets involve a complex and dynamic range of activities, processes and opportunities, and are impacted upon by a wide range of restrictions and responsibilities imposed on land especially since WW II. These restrictions are continually evolving, primarily in response to economic, energy and sustainable development objectives. They are equally being driven by developments in information and communications techn
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ItemCreating a culture of human rights from a Muslim perspective(Multi-Faith Centre, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 2006)In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, issues of human rights have drawn an increasing amount of international attention. Some people view traditional understandings of Islamic law, particularly in areas such as gender rights and freedom of religion, as contradicting values accepted by many today as universal human rights. In response to this view, Abdullah Saeed examines the ideas of human dignity and the importance of context in understanding Islamic law as it relates to the creation of a culture of human rights from a Muslim perspective. This paper, presented in 2005 at the international symposium Cultivating Wisdom, Harvesting Peace at Griffith University, Brisbane, argues that it is necessary to recognize and highlight the fact that many human rights, which are seen today as universal, may well be supported by the foundation texts of Islam. Saeed explores the importance of contextualizing Islamic laws in order to understand their intended meaning; the need to reinterpret traditional understandings which appear to conflict with today’s human rights; and the interpretative and practical possibilities found in foundational texts and the tradition of Islamic thought which can be drawn on to formulate a philosophy of human rights in the modern period.
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ItemThe Agony of the Democratic Paradox( 2006)Against Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe insists that there is no necessary conceptual relation between democracy and human rights but only a contingent historical relation. Moreover, these principles are fundamentally irreconcilable: while democracy presupposes an historical act of exclusion in the political constitution of a demos, human rights presupposes a universally inclusive moral community. Yet, Mouffe argues, the accommodation of these conflicting legitimating principles within a liberal-democratic regime is productive. Although irreconcilable, their paradoxical articulation keeps the limits that enable democratic deliberation and decision-making in view for being political and, therefore, contestable. Radical democracy, she argues, is premised on the recognition and affirmation of this ‘democratic paradox’.In this paper I want to examine whether a commitment to radical democracy requires that we affirm Mouffe’s account of the democratic paradox. Might one be a radical democrat and yet understand human rights and popular sovereignty to be co-original as Habermas does? Specifically, I want to consider what is at stake politically in conceptualising the relation between these two legitimating principles of modern regimes. I will suggest that what is at stake is the representation of political claims. To understand human rights and democracy as ‘co-original’ in the way that Habermas proposes is to peremptorily exclude radical political speech and action that would fundamentally contest the terms of political association. For it diminishes the representational space in which a claim could be articulated that would contest the particular determination of the “we” that authorises that order in the first place.
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ItemDoes Australia have an international development assistance policy?: National interest and foreign aid policy making( 2006)The Australian Commonwealth government is set to release a White Paper in the first half of 2006 that will set the medium-term strategy for Australian development assistance. It coincides with the government’s announcement that the yearly Australian aid budget will be increased to AUD 4 billion by 2010. The evidence thus far is that the White Paper will not alter the core objective of the aid program, which is to “advance Australia’s national interest by assisting developing countries to reduce poverty and achieve sustainable development”. This paper argues that the placement of the aid program under the Foreign Affairs and Trade portfolio, and its alignment with foreign policy interpretations of national interest, has served to reduce the scope of aid policy and initiatives and, ultimately, raise questions as to whether or not Australia actually has a fully fledged international development assistance policy. In exploring this, both the current aid policy process and the history of the foreign aid program are investigated with a view to establishing the nature of the long-running tension between development assistance and foreign affairs institutions.
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ItemThe Public Policy of Human Rights and the World Bank(Australasian Political Studies Association, 2005)
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ItemFidelity to scholarly practice: academic honesty and information literacy in the Faculty of Arts( 2005)Fidelity to the principles and practice of academic practice is a guiding principle underpinning the development of the ArtsSmart suite of online tutorials. ArtsSmart uses educational technology in a creative way to meet a particular educational need - to deliver integrated and student-centred information literacy and academic honesty programs to a broad cohort of first year students from many disciplines across the Faculty of Arts. This fidelity to the development of scholarly practice is accompanied by fidelity to the principle of quality learning. From the start of the project the developers were conscious of the need to ensure that first year students at the University of Melbourne were offered a quality e-learning experience.The tutorial uses purpose built software that allows the program to be customised for diverse disciplines and modes of implementation. This software gives flexibility and also allows for sustainability. ArtsSmart is an online tutorial that supports first year Arts students in learning about, and practising the skills related to academic discourse.
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ItemAre we comfortable yet? Developing a community of practice with PhD students at the University of Melbourne( 2005)The development and initial implementation of a peer support network and online course for postgraduate (research doctoral) students at The University of Melbourne is aimed at increasing the success of these students in achieving confirmation of their candidature (the first formal PhD milestone) by enabling them to have ready access to skills tutorials, resources and ideas. The provision of an online community of practice environment with opportunities to collaborate, interact and form supportive networks is intended to support them in the transition from conventional learning modes into a community of independent learners, reflective researchers and practitioners. The paper describes the development of an innovative online course for postgraduate students at the University of Melbourne and suggests some possible directions for future development. It report on the initial delivery of the courseware.
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ItemDoes education need the concept of class like a fish needs a bicycle, or is class more like water in the fish-in-water problem?( 2006)Class is not only a dated concept that derives from 19th century industrialization and from old world social formations, but is one that is most at home in attempts to do theory and research in particular ways: to build models, identify causal factors, pin down truths, identify lynch-pins of change. In more recent times, theories and models of class have been troubled by social movements of women and race, by changes to the forms of work and the relationships of labour, and by theories more ready to show how research categories do violence than what they might effect for good. This paper takes the case of Australia in the early 21st century and a longitudinal qualitative study of young Australian students going through different school experiences to revisit the value of working with class and gender and class/gender as conceptual lenses in qualitative research, and specifically in relation to longitudinal identity-making in the context of school. The paper argues that in the light of feminist theories, and of major social and work changes in countries like Australia, there is no way to have a model of class that is adequate, and that there are multiple issues rather than a single question which theorists concerned with class work on. Nevertheless, it is argued, that to omit some concept of class in our discussions and research is to deprive research of categories and a history of discussions that can usefully feed what is noticed and attended to and taken as sources of concern. The paper illustrates a perspective on education research which argues against reducing research debates to searches for one perfect model, and for attending to the effects that particular and imperfect ways of doing research can have in particular situations and times.The paper takes up two aspects of the use of ‘class’ in education research and policy. The first concerns class as a tool of policy analysis, where it illustrates some problems of working without or with this concept,
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ItemBefore citizenship: liberalism's colonial subjects(Canberra: Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) & Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS), The Australian National University, 2006)This paper is concerned with the way colonial states established limited forms of access to civic and political life for their subjects. The issue of how colonial subjects were constructed as political and civil subjects is not well understood and one aim of this paper is to propose a new and hopefully more productive way of understanding the relationship between colonial subjects and their colonizers. This might be understood as a new lens through which colonial debates around native participation may be read and understood, or a new ear to some of the nuances of colonial language and concern. At the same time as saying this it must be recognized that the colonial state, and those subject to it, were not homogeneous. Marked differences existed between the early and late periods of colonial rule in British India, just as also between British colonialism in India and Africa, or British colonial rule in India and that practiced by, say, the French in Algeria. The case study for this research has been British rule in India in the second part of the nineteenth century. This should be borne in mind when considering conclusions drawn here and the extent to which they might reasonably be generalized to other colonial contexts. The paper is divided into three sections. Section I provides a brief sketch of nineteenth century British liberal political thought in respect of colonialism and the projection of British rule offshore. Its aim is not to provide a comprehensive review of this topic but rather to indicate some of the broader views and assumptions that animated colonial administration from the latter part of the nineteenth century forward (for a more comprehensive review, see Moore, 1966; Sullivan, 1983). Key amongst these was the idea that liberty rights and political participation were the preserve of societies that had reached a mature level of civilization; for those that had not, despotic government was not only preferable but indeed desirable. Postcolonial the