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Early and middle years of schooling
No full textFrom P-12, students move through a series of developmental phases: early childhood, middle childhood, early adolescence, and late adolescence/young adulthood. This chapter focuses on inclusion for students at the phase of early adolescence because significant education changes have occurred recently in schools catering for those students. Early adolescent education takes place in the middle years of schooling, usually Years 6-9. For the purpose of this chapter, 'students with special support needs' refers to young adolescents who, in earlier times, were excluded from regular or general classrooms and sent to separate and specialist schools, centres and units.\ud
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In this chapter you will learn about:\ud
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- recent reforms in the middle years of schooling.\ud
- how inclusion for young adolescents may be more challenging than inclusion for other phases of learning.\ud
- how small middle school communities promote inclusion for young adolescents.\ud
- strategies teachers can use to build and maintain community in middle schools.\ud
- factors that influence the success of middle years teachers working with young adolescents in inclusive schools. \ud
- practical measures teachers can take, in light of these factors, to promote the success of inclusion. \ud
- whether inclusive teaching in middle schools is generic or young adolescent-specific.\ud
- the different responses to inclusion by young adolescents, how teachers can identify those responses and what they can do to ensure they are
The national schools project at Belmont Senior High School: a formative review of the first nine months
Full text linkManaging change in schools: a review of the Western Australian project
Full text linkIn 1987, the Ministry of Education released a report entitled \u27Better Schools in Western Australia: A Program for Improvement\u27.l It outlined radical proposals to make schools more self-determining and accountable. Although much of the program has yet to be put into effect, the plan and steps taken to implement it caused a major upheaval not only to the system but also to people working in it. For example: the managers of change invested a huge amount of work and worry in the whole process; some of the \u27victims\u27 of change suffered personally and professionally; and a lot of those in between were left wondering about the educational value of the reform program and its viability in terms of the additional workload involved
Issues facing and shaping the role of district superintendents during a period of radical change
Full text linkBefore 1987, the work of superintendents was well known throughout the state education system. Their role had evolved over a long period of time and was firmly established - materially and in the minds of school staff. Sometimes people disagreed with how that role was discharged but they did have a clear idea of what it entailed. Superintendents also enjoyed a high profile. They were commonly seen to occupy powerful and prestigious positions, presiding over teachers\u27 careers and curriculum developments. The Better Schools Report changed much of that..
A social critique of open education: An analysis of the justification of open education in terms of its contribution to social justice and social control
No full textThe central objective of this inquiry is to investigate whether open education - as exemplified in the works of Ivan Illich, A.S. Neill and Charles E. Silberman - can be justified in terms of its intended and likely consequences for social justice and social control. More specifically, it is concerned with examining the validity of allegations that open education is designed to promote galitarianism rather than meritocracy and that it is directed at revolutionary social changes rather than at reforms within the structure of advanced capitalist societies. Embodied in these issues is the overall theme of the study, namely the contribution of open education to the problem of political order in societies characterised by class inequality.
The procedure adopted for developing this theme involved examining and interpreting the views of Illich, Neill and Silberman against the background of the conflict theory and functionalist perspectives on social justice and social control. From these perspectives a conceptual framework was constructed by juxtaposing the different responses of these two models of society to the following questions. Does social inequality necessarily give rise to a problem of social control? How is social control maintained in a class-structured society? What social control role do schools perform? Should schools continue to perform their social control function? What are the determinants of educational disadvantage? What can schools do to promote meritocracy and egalitarianism?
By analysing the open educationists' views against this conceptual framework, it was found that Illich and Neill tend to accept the egalitarian version of social justice because they hold assumptions which commit them to the conflict model of society. Silberman on the other hand emerged as an adherent of functionalism and a supporter of 'equality of opportunity to compete for rewards' rather than 'equality of rewards'. Another finding was that, consistent with their general nee-Marxist orientation, Illich and Neill tend to believe that the removal of educational disadvantage and the maintenance of 'real' social control is possible only by dismantling corporate capitalism; Silberman, however, was shown to believe that both of these objectives can be achieved by piecemeal social improvements. No conclusive case could be made from this study to confirm the view that the implementation of open education would increase the educational disadvantage of low socio-economic-status children. What the findings of this inquiry do suggest is that if implemented, Illich and Neill's educational proposals could help promote egalitarianism by undermining the political values, occupational character traits and social expectations of the subordinate groups which, according to conflict theory, lead them to accept the legitimacy and perpetuation of social stratification; contrastingly, Silberman's proposals were not found to be potentially subversive of social inequality
Contents page, and, Introduction by Rod Chadbourne, Guest editor
Full text linkIn 1992, the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET) released a policy document titled: Teacher Education: A discussion paper. Among other thought provoking points, it presented Australian teacher educators as relatively old and lacking current teaching experience in schools. According to the discussion paper, 81 % of teacher educators are over 38 years old, 37% are over 48, only 20% taught in schools during the 1980\u27s, and more than 50% were school teachers before 1973 (pp 11- 12). Further, consistent with their obsolescent teaching experience (p.12), teacher educators simply pass on the theory of teaching (p.17) and many of them are out of touch with contemporary practice and the most recent educational research (p.l7). The discussion paper also expressed concern that faculty teaching experience has not kept pace with changes in schools (p.12) and it questioned the quality and relevance of (university) education programs (p.16). Part of the problem is a tendency among teacher educators to emphasise the academic content of studies frequently at the expense of a more professional and practical pedagogical orientation (p.16) One way to address these critical issues, suggested the discussion paper, would be to consider transferring a lot of teacher education from universities to schools
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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