Faculty of Education - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableNarrative Language and Literacy Education Research Within a Postcolonial Framework(Springer, 2017)This chapter explores the heuristic value of narrative as it might be applied to researching language and literacy education in postcolonial settings. We focus specifically on the importance of autobiographical writing as a means of enabling educators and researchers to engage with a ‘plurality of consciousnesses’ (Bakhtin MM, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s poetics (Emerson C, ed and trans). University of Minnesota Press, Minneaplois, 1984) and to explore the values and beliefs they bring to their work. In this way we challenge the pretensions to objectivity of the scientific research privileged by standards-based reforms. By locating autobiographical writing in a postcolonial framework, however, we also seek to differentiate our standpoint from the claims typically made on behalf of ‘narrative inquiry’ (Clandinin J, Connelly M, Narrative inquiry: experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass, San-Francisco, 2000). We argue that personal narratives should prompt analyses that investigate how our individual situations are mediated by larger social and historical contexts. This means combining storytelling with analytical writing in order to produce hybrid texts that challenge accepted forms of academic writing. Crucially, this also means embracing ‘trans-lingualism’ (Canagarajah S, Translingual practice: global English and cosmopolitan relations. Routledge, London/New York, 2013), working at the interface between English and other languages, and engaging with issues of language and socio-cultural identity vis-à-vis the globalization of English as the language of science.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableLiterary Conversations: An Australian Classroom(Sense Publisher, 2011)This essay arises from an ongoing discussion about the teaching of Literature which followed after a 'critical friend', Bella Illesca spent a series of consecutive lessons observing the action in Prue Gill's Year 12 Literature class. By examining, interpreting and exploring the events of the classroom as students discussed the short stories of contemporary Australian writer, Beverley Farmer, we were lead to articulate our aims with teachers, our puzzles and our concerns in ways that helped each of us think afresh about teaching.
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Item(In-between) the complicities of the imagination: Teaching English in Public and Private Schools(Phoenix Education, 2014)The following story arises in response to a reading of Hannah Arendt’s essay, ‘The Crisis in Education’ (1954/1976) and her concept of natality found in The Human Condition (1958/1998). In these works, Arendt prompts us to think about teaching not as something that we do unthinkingly in compliance with the dictates of an impersonal bureaucratic system, but as ‘words and deeds’ in response to the presence of the children before us and the worlds of experience and language that they bring with them to the classroom. These ideas are particularly pertinent to us at this moment in Australia’s history when government policies continue to conceptualize curriculum and pedagogy in ways that try to represent students’ human qualities as quantifiable data and English teachers’ professional knowledge and practice as likewise things that can be measured.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBuilding Optimism in Prospective Mathematics Teachers(Springer US, 2011)This three-task sequence, which interconnects congruency, similarity, geometric constructions, and deductive proof, can be accessed by prospective mathematics teachers possessing limited understanding of these topics. Creative thinking is stimulated during work within this sequence: experimenting, recognizing relevant mathematics from earlier in the sequence to progress this experimenting, and connecting mathematical understandings. This chapter focuses on how the implementation of this complex task sequence provided opportunities for successes that theory suggests should contribute to developing psychological factors to increase future teachers’ ability to think flexibly when encountering mathematical and pedagogical challenges.
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ItemHigh Mathematical Performance on Class Tests Is Not A Predictor of Problem-Solving Ability: Why?(The Mathematical Association of Victoria, 2012)
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ItemProblem-Solving: 'Same Pace Of Thinking' Groups(The Mathematical Association of Victoria, 2012)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableStudying learners in intercultural contexts(Springer New York, 2013-01-01)Researchers have increasingly recognized that learning mathematics is a cultural activity. At the same time, research aims, technological advances, and methodological techniques have diversified, enabling more detailed analyses of learners and learning to take place. Increased opportunities to study learners in different cultural, social and political settings have also become available, with ease of access to results of international benchmark testing online. Large-scale quantitative studies in the form of international benchmark tests like Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and detailed multi-source (including video) qualitative studies like the international Learners' Perspective Study (LPS), have enabled a broad range of research questions to be investigated. This chapter points to the usefulness of large-scale quantitative studies for stimulating questions that require qualitative research designs for their exploration. Qualitative research has raised awareness of the importance of socio-cultural and historical cultural perspectives when considering learning. This raises questions about uses that could be made of "local" theories in undertaking intercultural analyses.
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ItemLearning and Cognition in Mathematics(Springer International Publishing, 2015)Learning and cognition is a classical and very vital area in research on mathematics education. Researchers have published many valuable research findings that have contributed to significant development in this area. The continued efforts of researchers now and in the future will, we hope, lead to extensive ‘pay-offs’. Different to many other special and related TSGs, such as teaching and learning of algebra, geometry, measurement, statistics, calculus, reasoning, proving and problem solving, to mention a few, TSG22’s participants will contribute a more general focus on learning and cognitive activity, and insights into students’ characteristics; their strengths and weaknesses in the process of mathematics learning.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableEnlivening STEM education through school-community partnerships(Springer Singapore, 2017-08-09)A major response to the growing concern with diminishing engagement and participation of students in STEM pathways, in Australia and internationally, has been the involvement of the STEM community in school outreach activities. In Australia there has been a proliferation of links between scientists and schools, with the aim of engaging students in authentic activities and providing models of what STEM work pathways might entail. This chapter will draw on a series of projects studying partnerships between the professional science/mathematics communities and schools, to explore a range of partnership models, the experience and outcomes for students and teachers, and challenges for crossing the boundary between school and STEM professional communities. Such school/STEM community partnerships are particularly suited to studies related to environmental and sustainability issues, a focus explored in the chapter. Further, we will draw on a recent evaluation of the Australia-wide, CSIRO-led Scientists and Mathematicians in Schools (SMiS) program. That study provided insight into the use and outcomes of the SMiS model. We will explore some of the challenges of working across the school-STEM professional practice boundary, implications for curriculum, and differences in partnerships for mathematics compared to science.
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ItemTopic Study Group No. 27: Learning and Cognition in Mathematics(Springer International Publishing, 2017)