Focusing on teachers' practices amid a national curriculum 'implementation' project for schools identified as having high enrolments of students experiencing disadvantage, this paper uses narrative methods to illustrate what we refer to as teachers' everyday work-for-change. Teacher interview data was generated via a longitudinal multi-site case…

Mr. Brendon Thomas, Director of Technologies at Brisbane Girls Grammar School, looks at the importance of the study of design and digital technologies in schools to develop and nurture the next generation of entrepreneurs.

The premise of this brief opinion piece is that the fundamental paradigm of education appeared with Plato. It is that there is a co-location in time and space of learners, teachers, and resources. The absence of any of these elements can lead to shortcomings in the meaning of the term "to be educated". Recent events such as COVID-19…

On 11 and 12 October 2010, the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education held its second annual "Student Equity in Higher Education National Conference" in Melbourne, Australia. The conference theme was "Aspiration, Mobility, Voice". During the conference the three keynote speakers--Gareth Parry (University of…

The National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN)--is conducted through standardized tests that are administered to all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7, and 9. It was implemented in 2008 by the same Labor government that introduced My School (www.myschool.edu.au). Enjoying bipartisan political support and popular with the public…

The renewal of quality assurance in Australian higher education comes at a time when the higher education sectors in Australia and around the world are experiencing a number of key challenges. These include: ongoing decline in public funding of universities; the massification of higher education and demand for it during global recession;…

The author first recognised the transformational power of education when he arrived at university. His career has included over 10 years as a mainstream principal, 7 as executive director of an agency that included being principal of a Special Assistance School, and a 5 year period in between in a leadership role in a community welfare…

Over the last two decades institutions of higher education have been subject to new modes of regulatory governance. This essay applies a "regulatory lens" to higher education governance with a view to understanding the sometimes contradictory relationship between the globalisation and regionalisation of higher education and the…

This paper argues that concepts derived from affordance theories are highly useful in understanding the role of online technologies in learning. However, it is suggested that the value of this approach is maximised when the focus is moved away from the inherent properties of the technologies to the opportunities for learning provided by the total…

Moves are afoot at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) to acknowledge disability within the overall experience of student life. Scheduled to launch in time for UTS Orientation 2010, "UTS AccessAbility" is a student-generated web presence addressing the significant additional layer that experiences of disability add to study…

The globalized nature of modern society has generated a number of pressures that impact internationally on countries' policies and practices of science education. Among these pressures are key issues of health and environment confronting global science, global economic control through multi-national capitalism, comparative and competitive…

This critical essay discusses the challenges and prospects for the reform of school-based literacy programs. It begins with an overview of the effects of a decade of test-driven accountability policy on research and teachers' work, noting the continuing challenges of new demographics, cultures and technologies for literacy education. The case is…

In this end piece, the authors argue that while this special issue shifts debates on the digital divide to address students' capacity to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for productive social purposes, access to ICT remains a major challenge in countries like Uganda, in which less than 1% of the population has access to the…

This article assumes that literacy practices are social practices. Based on the New Literacy Studies (Street, 2005) this view of literacy provides an understanding that the ways a person reads and writes change, depending on that person's identity, the type of texts that are involved and the context in which those texts and identities are located.…

It's official: Online social networking is mainstream. Once the domain of teenagers and techno-geeks, sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter are rapidly gaining popularity with the multi-aged masses. Last year, in fact, Facebook reported its fastest growing demographic was those 25 years and older. There's no question that this new…