Utilising Pierre Bourdieu's formula for studying social practice, this study explored the construction of technological expertise amongst a heterogeneous group of New Zealand teenagers. The qualitative study employed observations and interviews with five boys and three girls aged 13-17, who considered themselves to be technological experts; their…

This paper reveals how the provision of teacher professional development is conceptualised within the Australian Government Quality Teacher Programme (AGQTP) policy text and its predecessors, and uses these texts to infer the nature of the production practices associated with the development of these policies. The paper argues that multiple…

The move to a market model of schooling has seen a radical restructuring of the ways schooling is "done" in recent times in Western countries. Although there has been a great deal of work to examine the effects of a market model on local school management (LSM), teachers' work and university systems, relatively little has been done to examine its…

This paper tracks the development of gender equity and schooling policy in Australia from the "National Policy on the Education of Girls in 1987", to current policy concerns with boys' educational underperformance. The paper's key focus is on the ways in which feminist informed equity policy has been undermined by broader imperatives of economic…

This paper explores the ways in which senior female academics' leadership practices are informed and negotiated in relation to a multiplicity of fields. As part of the shift in the logics of practice underpinning the Australian academic terrain, there has been a movement from the implementation of equity policies to that of diversity in relation…

Many studies and papers have explored and critiqued the "what" and the "why" of working at the cultural interface of mainstream curricula and local Indigenous knowledge, but this project sought to understand the "how". Participants went beyond explorations of "cultural items" and worked in the overlap between the New South Wales Department's…

In their paper, "How has school productivity changed in Australia?" social economists Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan (2008) attempt to show that Australian (government) schools and their teachers' productivity has declined by some 73 per cent between 1964 and 2003 compared to an overall increase of 64 per cent across the Australian economy. In…

The Learning to Learn in Schools Phase 3 Evaluation was a four year project across England exploring the concept of Learning to Learn in 33 primary and secondary schools. The project was funded through the UK based Campaign for Learning. One of the key aims of the project was to ensure that the locus of control in terms of development remains with…

Non-completion of senior secondary schooling continues to be a matter of concern for policy makers and practitioners in Australia today. Despite the efforts of governments to improve participation and retention rates, 30% of students drop out of school before completing Year 12. Further, some students remain at school, just biding their time until…

In this article, the author revisits the interlinked conceptualizations of globe, of an unconscious, and of the child, which subtly shape repetitively appearing issues that educational research now entails, confronts, and works through. By looking exclusively at institutional structures, educational policy, or classroom-based interactions, the…

Regional Australian students were surveyed to explore their understanding and knowledge of the greenhouse effect, ozone depletion and climate change. Results were compared with a parallel study undertaken in 1991 in a regional UK city. The comparison was conducted to investigate whether more awareness and understanding of these issues is…

This paper identifies the ways in which the Productive Pedagogies framework has been refined as a research tool for evaluating classroom practice within a current study into issues of school reform in Queensland. Initially emerging from the landmark Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (1998-2001), the Productive Pedagogies has been taken…

The aim of this study is to understand the relationship between metacognition and students' everyday problem solving. Specifically, we were interested to find out whether regulation of cognition and knowledge of cognition are related to everyday problem solving and whether students who perform better in the decision-making problem will better…

This paper draws on the concept and process of deeper learning, namely the U theory (Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, & Flowers, 2004a). As a driver to get a deeper exploration of organisational change process, the theory of U goes beyond the interpersonal aspects of learning, instead focusing on a deeper personal generative learning that emphasizes…

This article sets out to examine the experiences of college student activists involved in Students Against Sweatshops on the Beautiful River University campus. Based on observation and interview fieldwork, the paper explores how students negotiate and understand their activism against the backdrop of neoliberalism. The paper concludes that being a…