Barbara Garrick

Creating Catch 22: zooming in and zooming out on the discursive constructions of teachers in a news article

The media regularly present negative news articles about teachers and teaching. This paper focuses particularly on one such news article. Using reflective analytic practices, first we zoom in to conduct a detailed analysis of the text. We find that complex and contradictory moral categories of teachers are assembled within and through the text. We then zoom out to consider the potentially detrimental effects of such public discourses on teachers and the teaching profession. We make visible the dominant discourses in this text, illuminating some of the societal issues and practices that are textually constituted within this and other news articles about teachers. We provide evidence of a public discourse that might be contributing towards continuing concerns and negative public opinion regarding teacher quality and schooling standards. We argue that such news articles may well work to influence public opinion regarding declining teacher quality and standards, and views of public schools as being in crisis, creating moral panic.

Personalised or Programmed? Current Practices of University Systems

This chapter explores our own experiences as a means of exploring the tensions and constraints that arise when educators seek to foster (their own developing visions of) personalised learning in their pedagogical practices, within the contexts of degree-granting university courses. In telling those stories and reflecting on those experiences, we live the history of e-mediated learning, and reflect on the tendency towards programmed learning. Finally, we draw on the Productive Pedagogies (Mills et al. 2009) framework to analyse dimensions and issues important to a productive framing of this tension between personalised and programmed approaches to learning.

A Brief History of E-mediated Education

This chapter considers the ways in which the new affordances of computers for learning have influenced learning. While the general scope is broad, the focus is on the ways in which computers make it possible to personalise learning in novel ways for learners. The simple move from reading the same text on a page to a screen and completing the text with a keyboard rather than a pen is not a significant change, if the approach to learning is still massified. Electronic mediation of learning, however, offers new possibilities for tailoring learning to the learner, and this chapter is focused on this possibility and the ways in which it has played out.

Personalised Learning, Pedagogy, and E-mediated Tools

In this chapter, we highlight some of the recent international debates informing personalised learning as it impacts on pedagogy, with a focus on e-mediated tools. We then reflect on the experience of being on-campus in the past, in the present, and then we look to the possible future. We consider significant challenges impeding technology adoption in higher education, drawing on a time-to-adoption frame. We provide insights into the challenges for effective pedagogy with specific focus on self-regulation, catering for diversity, and other important facets of inclusive education.

Managing the Barriers in Diversity Education that We Create

It is important to provide beginning teachers with the skills they need to support students with diverse needs in the classroom. These skills are especially needed to support students with autism. Without the tools needed, beginning teachers go into schools where the teachers may or may not have the requisite skills needed either. University preparation is therefore crucially important, but we would argue that the importance of this task is dogged by university and auditing authority compliance audits and controls and by a limited view of what catering for diversity actually means. This chapter investigates the tensions that four university academics face in their day-to-day work as they teach a course on diversity and disability studies within a context of audit and control by outside parties. The chapter has four participant authors. Each of these authors has taught in the first year diversity course offered to all students in all education degree programs at our university. Each author was keen to also provide a statement of what they thought the third year diversity course should look like given the constraints of auditing and control previously mentioned.

The Impact of National Agenda on a Local Education Authority's Website: A Visual Semiotic Analysis.

This paper reports an analysis of the website of an education authority in the state of Queensland, Australia during the changeover from a state-based curriculum to a national curriculum. The paper’s value lies in the capture of an exact moment of change. Kress and van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design is employed to analyse the changes to the Queensland Studies Authority’s website from 2009 to 2010. The significant changes to the site show the impact of policy that has been borrowed from the UK and the USA around testing and accountability, and as such has bearing on the international policy environment. The impact of these testing and accountability measures is twofold. First, that regimes of accountability and testing outweigh the significance of changes to curriculum and pedagogy and, second, that this understanding has implications for teacher education and teacher professionalism. We argue that borrowed policy from the international sphere, through a national agenda and then on to a local education authority, has hollowed out and narrowed the provision of education information and assistance available to readers of the site. This is most notable in the shift we observe from informed teacher professionalism through links to professional development available on the site in 2009 to prescription most notably evident in the absence of professional development hyperlinks on the site in 2010. The inference we draw, for example, is that teachers in the state of Queensland are to follow the prescriptions on the web page without access to policy learning through professional development. This has implications for teacher education and teacher professionalism.

Introduction to the Philosophical Arguments Underpinning Personalised Education

This chapter introduces understandings of the concept of personalised learning, as distinct from individualised and differentiated learning, in the context of electronically mediated higher education learning and teaching. We begin a conversation that is revisited across the book about the role of teacher and the role of student and their interactions across the three modes of e-mediated learning. We identify and explain the theoretical construct of Jurgen Habermas’ modes of knowing as a lens from which to explore personalised learning in electronically mediated higher education contexts. And, we begin to situate ourselves as educators in the academy at this time.

Experiencing E-mediated Personalised Learning in Practice—A Teacher’s Insight

The term e-mediation has been defined earlier in this book. Our interest in this chapter is how the term is enacted in practice. Seale (2014) observes that much of the literature around e-mediated learning as accessible learning is written by those who do not have to enact these policies. If the twenty-first century requires a different type of schooling and if personalisation is about tailoring education to ensure that every pupil achieves the highest standard, then there must be ways for the relevant stakeholders to achieve this. These rules or guides to implementation are often implicated with other policies that either enable or trouble the process. E-mediated instruction has provided both the tools to achieve personalisation at the same time as slowing that implementation. What follows is a description of the technical rules of the current policy landscape as they play out in practice. The tone and tenor of the chapter change to first-person narrative so that the story of one writer’s experiences of personalisation can be told. For the remainder of the chapter, we move to the use of ‘I’ as one of us tells her personalisation narrative.

Theorising Personalised Education: Electronically Mediated Higher Education

The core focus of this book is to highlight the impact of personalised learning. Throughout the book, the challenges and opportunities regarding personalised learning is explored by giving specific examples from multiple dimensions. As noted by the authors (Garrick, Pendergast and Geelan, 2017), to comprehend what is beneath personalised education, both similarities and differences in learner characteristics should be taken into great consideration and the concepts namely, de-personalisation, im-personalization, inter-personalisation and re-personalisation should be all revised. All in all, this book examines the theoretical underpinning of the concept of personalised education and observes e-mediated personalised education. The distance education practices are indicated in the book as well. In response to the above-mentioned queries and issues, the following 10 units are covered:

From Policy to Practice—Personalisation and the Higher Education Sector

In this chapter, we query whether personalised learning is about the person, the technology, or the state, and if the latter, how the person might then act and react. This chapter begins with a discussion of the policy terrain internationally and then provides a narrative of constructed accounts of the personalisation agenda in one university. Working through the narrative as co-authors of this chapter has helped us find some sense in the confusing array of discursive constructions of the terms personalisation and e-mediated instruction.