This article takes the form of an interview with Sandy O'Sullivan, who is a partner on the Australian Indigenous Studies Learning and Teaching Network, about key issues that have arisen through Network discussions. She is a Wiradjuri woman and a Senior Aboriginal researcher at the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education.…

This paper critiques a 2008 Queensland Studies Authority (QSA) assessment initiative known as Queensland Comparable Assessment Tasks, or QCATs. The rhetoric is that these centrally devised assessment tasks will provide information about how well students can apply what they know, understand and can do in different contexts (QSA, 2009). The QCATs…

Suggests ways of improving the effectiveness of the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) in raising the quality of university teaching, including: (1) the wide reporting of more accurate teaching performance indicators; and (2) a revised university funding model in which university income is based on teaching performance indicators. (EV)

In 2003 John Fien presented an argument for environmental education to encompass deep and wide caring for human and nonhuman nature (Fien, 2003). His philosophical discussion of care outlined work by Nel Noddings (1984; 1992). In this paper I continue that project by indicating how Noddings' work provides signposts for environmental educators to…

Asserting that traditional egalitarian objectives for education have been rejected by the government as incompatible with a modernized system offering diversity and choices, examines some effects on educational opportunity of British policies, both Conservative and New Labour, which have both preserved old forms of relative advantage and created…

Within the context of recent controversies over child abuse, including sexual abuse, by school officials, discusses the indispensability of trust. Asserts that an acknowledgment of wrongdoing is the first step towards restoring public trust, but is not sufficient on its own. Explains that it must be accompanied by a demonstration of genuine…

Faced with the paradox of a large global increase in conservation reserves and a simultaneous global decrease in actual effective protection for biodiversity, conservation scientists and policymakers are questioning established conservation theory and practice. I argue that the fundamental premises, the foundational myths, for Western-style…

For many children across the globe, whether in low or high income nations, growing up in the 21st century will mean living in overcrowded, unsafe and polluted environments which provide limited opportunity for natural play and environmental learning. Yet Agenda 21, the Habitat Agenda and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child…

This critique of the "West Review" (Review of Higher Education Financing and Policy, 1998) raises objections to the Review's recommendation that Australia's higher education program offerings should be decentralized and funded based on student preferences, as well as to the recommendation that research activities be centrally prioritized, with…

Argues that although Gardner's conception of human cognition, characterized by a set of multiple and distinct cognitive capabilities, is an advance over the narrow conception of IQ, it runs into fundamental difficulties of a methodological kind and is based on a discredited empiricist theory of knowledge which work with artificial neural networks…

Replies to "The Theory of Multiple Intelligences: A Case of Missing Cognitive Matter," also in this issue. Disagrees about the role theory of knowledge plays in the context of justification of multiple intelligences. Specifically, asserts that the article's criticisms based on philosophy of science claims and work with artificial neural networks…

Argues against the increasing vocationalization of university education as exemplified by workplace approaches to learning. Suggests that this trend threatens the existence of the liberal university that was traditionally isolated from the economy and fostered knowledge acquisition for virtue rather than utility. Evidence of this trend is seen in…

Fifty-two Indigenous adults in Northern Territory (Australia) who were returning to education reflected on their earlier experiences in school and on factors that contributed to their motivation to stay in school or drop out early. Factors included family support and family problems, influence of friends, problems with other students, and good and…

Despite concerted efforts to increase the vocational content of school curricula, a major problem that remains is a class-based, discriminatory educational system that separates the more challenging intellectual and academic from the practical and occupationally focused. A real revolution in schooling and vocational preparation will occur only…

A study of grade 12 curricula in Victoria (Australia) secondary schools showed a positive relationship between school size and number of subjects offered, although many small schools did offer a diverse curriculum. Increase in curriculum diversity relative to school size was uneven across fields, and evidence of actual enrollment in the additional…