Search results

Visual representations of teachers and teachers’ work over the past century and a half, in both professional literature and popular media, commonly construct teachers’ work as teacher‐centred, and built around specific technologies that privilege the teacher as the active, dominant and legitimate principal agent in the educational process. This article analyses a set of photographs that represent an ‘alternative’ educational approach to normalised mainstream schooling, to explore the ways such practices might enact pedagogy within different social relations. Butler’s discussions of performativity and Foucault’s concept of technologies of self, offer a theoretical framework for understanding the educative and political work such visual representations of teachers work might perform, in the construction of capacities to imagine what teachers’ work looks like, with implications for capacities to enact teaching. The photographs analysed present a pedagogy in which the teacher is less visibly central and less overtly directive in relation to children’s learning than in normalised pedagogy. Thus, in important respects, they offer material from which to construct a different vision of what teachers’ work looks like, and, consequently, to enact teachers’ work differently. In this article I explore a set of photographs of Montessori methods at Blackfriars School in Sydney in the early twentieth century. I do so in order to establish whether such photographs offer a representation of teaching that differs significantly from conventional ‘normalised’ understandings of teachers’ work. This in turn is intended to inform one part of a transformative agenda to address problematic aspects of contemporary schooling.

Pictures are routinely identified as possible sources for researching history yet they are widely either neglected or underused. This article explores the use of pictorial materials, in particular photographs, in historical analysis. It describes some common, or standard, uses of photographs in historical writing, and critically discusses them. It identifies and examines methodological and ethical issues in using photographs as evidence. And it draws on a current project which is using a rich body of photographs as an integral part of its analysis of the history of one educational institution to explore these issues

Recently at the Westland Helicopters facility at Yeovil Somerset, Rear Admiral Michael F. Simpson RN, Director General Aircraft (Naval), inspected the first production version of the Sea King Mk2 Airborne Early Warning (AEW) helicopter, equipped with the successful THORN EMI Searchwater AEW radar.

This chapter explores strategies for engaging students in the first year of university study. It draws on a national study of the first year experience in Australia and proposes a model of student engagement, highlighting the multi-faceted nature of the construct. A holistic student life cycle approach to student engagement is proposed as the basis for transforming learning experiences in the first year of university study. This approach includes consideration of the role played by pre-arrival engagement opportunities, the importance of engagement with institutional cultures, practices and communities, along with engagement with disciplinary contexts and cultures. A whole-of-institution approach to student engagement is argued, along with the importance of focussing on shared responsibilities for learning.

The BP Conferences Mathematics. The first of the BP conferences examined the problems arising in the teaching of mathematics and referred to the use mad: of mathematics, in its widest applications, by industry. It was attended by about 50 mathematics masters from all parts of Great Britain, chiefly from public and grammar schools, but representing also other schools and colleges of technology.

WHEN this country began its transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, the journeyman used to own his personal tools. The carpenter brought his hammer and saw when he started a new job. Today the plumber with his bag of tools is probably the closest approximation to the worker of those early days, in which there subsisted between the two sides a sense of partnership which is too rarely found in this age.

Since 1945, there have been significant changes in the pattern of Indian overseas immigration. Australia has become a popular destination for Indians, particularly skilled immigrants, during this time. Until the 1950s, Australia maintained a strict ‘White Australia’ immigration policy, which was eased by a formal agreement to favour immigrants from select European nations, particularly the United Kingdom. The policy’s original aim was to increase the population for defence purposes. Its goal in the 1950s and 1960s was to bring in workers to help with Australia’s industrial development. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Australia began to see the benefits of a multicultural immigration policy, a mostly bipartisan approach that has helped Australia’s economy grow and its society become one of the world’s most progressive. By the early 1990s, the immigration policy had become more flexible, incorporating humanitarian, social, and economic goals. Over the previous two decades, the policy has placed a strong focus on skilled immigration. As a result, Australia now has a genuinely global immigration policy that promotes a culturally diversified and socially united society. In Australia, the pattern of immigration has changed dramatically, and the Indian population is rapidly growing. Even though most of the research on cultural diversity in Australia has centred on unskilled foreign labour, many immigrants hold management positions. On a daily basis, however, several of them face prejudice, discrimination, and racism.

The increasing interest in economic, social, and ecological sustainability has important implications for the traditional views on organization effectiveness, organization design, and organization development. Managers need to design organizations to achieve a “triple bottom line.” A review of the organization effectiveness literature suggests that no single model seems to provide the necessary guidance, and there is a clear need for creation, revision, and integration. Organization effectiveness criteria in the future require a clearer modeling of the multistakeholder demands so that organization designers can specify appropriate strategies, structures, systems, and processes as well as the changes necessary to develop them. We propose an integration called “responsible progress” and suggest that it represents an important new stream of organization development theory. The relationships between this new criterion of organization effectiveness and the design features necessary to pursue them must be tested.

“Give us the tools …”—one of those clarion calls which will sound down the years, has certainly been answered by the successive Conservative Governments of the past decade when it comes to the legislative tools for those engaged in public health and consumer protection. From the sole standpoint of politics, it seems curious that so much of our social legislation comes from Conservative Governments, rather than Socialist, but looking back, it is obvious that this is so.