Helen Huntly

Teachers' Work: Beginning Teachers' Conceptions of Competence.

Worldwide, teachers’ work continues to be the subject of discussion and debate, especially in terms of teacher competence and its appropriate appraisal. Available literature offers a number of perspectives of beginning teacher competence, yet the voices of beginning teachers themselves are not represented. This paper outlines the findings of a phenomenographic study that sought to uncover the conceptions of competence held by beginning teachers. The results of this study suggest that beginning teachers believe that teaching competence requires demonstration of thorough preparation, a sound knowledge base, effective classroom management, professional communication with a range of stakeholders, and an accurate sense of self-awareness in the role of teacher. These conceptions will be compared to a selection of the available literature about teacher competence and associated teaching standards.

An Approach to Understanding the Professionalism of Financial Planners

The aim of this research is to investigate how key stakeholder groups involved with the certification of financial planners experience the phenomenon of the ‘professionalism of financial planners’. The study is to be carried out to provide insight to the international financial planning community in establishing relevant and superior professional standards for Certified Financial Planner (CFP) professionals. This will be a qualitative study using phenomenography as a research methodology to describe the qualitatively different ways in which certified financial planners, lecturers of the CFP curriculum and association managers understand or experience the phenomenon of ‘professionalism’. Research participants will be interviewed from the United States, Australia and Hong Kong and these interviews analysed to reveal the variations in the conceptions of ‘professionalism’ and the attributes that can be identified from the phenomenographic outcome space to inform financial planners, academics and professional associations of what is required to be a CFP professional

Making Space for Community Learning: Engaged Research with Teacher Aides in Disadvantaged Schools

Community groups are connected to much larger social, cultural and organisational systems that shape members’ perceptions, identities, roles and capacity to adapt to change. This chapter examines the constraints that social and organisational discourses place on the role perceptions of community groups and their subsequent ability to participate actively in collaborative partnerships in engaged research projects. Using data from one community research project conducted with teacher aides in a regional city in Queensland, significant themes emerge to illustrate the power implications of discourse memberships that threaten to constrain reciprocity and true collaboration between university researchers and communities. This study highlights the importance of engagement strategies that acknowledge and respond to these contextual factors to empower community groups.