Over the last decade, Papua New Guinea (PNG) has pursued educational reform in elementary teacher education. Because elementary teachers and teacher education are central to the reform agenda, there is a need to gain empirical evidence about how PNG teacher trainers' understandings about learning and teaching impact on their practice. The study…

The purpose of this support document is to: (1) provide a fuller version of the literature review than in the report and issues paper; and (2) provide the interview schedules that were used to gather the data for this project. (Contains 7 footnotes.) [Funding for this report was provided through the Australian Department of Education, Science and…

This year the Research Institute for Higher Education in Hiroshima University hosted an international conference in close collaboration with Hijiyama University. The main purpose of the 2008 conference was to enable the participants to give preliminary country/regional reports based on their national/regional surveys. This publication reports the…

Excursions are extremely important to the education of students in the geography curriculum. However, personal observations demonstrated a lack of readiness to conduct excursions in secondary schools. This apprehension of the teachers in this school to implement excursions in geography education was the basis for this study. The study addresses…

This study aimed to extend previous studies into resilience, by identifying the roles that teachers played in fostering resilience (N=57: females n=43; and males n=14). A quantitative scale was administered to teachers in South Australia's Catholic education sector to determine the extent to which they were involved in fostering resilience. A…

In this article, I present an analysis of professionalism as defined and enacted by the History Teachers' Association of New South Wales (HTANSW). This analysis was part of a larger doctoral project (2000-2005) in which I employed critical qualitative inquiry to compare and contrast the contribution that two subject teaching associations (science…

This paper focuses a sociological lens on what two early years Australian school boys labelled as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and an early years teacher have to say about social relations within informal play environments. The boys participated in separate semi-structured interviews where they predicted the likely…

Background: In the Australian state of Queensland, many Department of Education Policies include behavioural directives for school teachers, whereby "the teacher must..." behave in a certain manner. The introduction of an education policy, such as the mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse by teachers, has significant and wide-ranging…

Constructivist pedagogies are generally not considered to support the teaching of mathematics for externally assessed examination-based courses. In large part, teachers have believed that such approaches are inefficient in covering a set syllabus. This article summarises the author's learning journey in Year 12 mathematics in 2004 where attempts…

This paper discusses the emerging field of place-based education or place-based pedagogy--an approach that seeks to enhance children's perspective of "place" via school and community related environmental projects. Place-based education is proposed as an approach that enables students to establish a connection to a place, its people, and…

Since the 1980s there has been significant growth in the engagement of higher education with workforce development, with among other things the emergence of a distinct if varied area of provision commonly referred to as work-based learning. Recent examination of practice and literature indicates a growing sophistication in the way that work-based…

Worldwide teachers are faced with the task of continuously facilitating and implementing educational reform that has been designed without their participation. This exclusion of the key agents, who must mediate between the change agenda and actual change in the classroom, from the planning and decision-making processes, is detrimental to…

Two perspectives are used to reflect on the learning design of a postgraduate online course--that of the designer/facilitator and that of the learner. While the course focus is on online pedagogical approaches, the main aim is to connect learners with each other and with the facilitator so that together they may investigate, trial, challenge and…

The Response Ability Project, funded under the Mindframe National Media Initiative in Australia, seeks to influence tertiary curricula so that graduates in journalism will be aware of and able to respond appropriately to issues relating to suicide and mental illness. Whilst the initial multi-media resources developed to support journalism…