Karen Murcia

Citizenship, civic education and politics: the education policy context for young Australian citizens

Citizenship education in Australia is embedded throughout the school curriculum. Despite a coherent policy context for the inclusion of citizenship and civic education at all levels of schooling, the links between education and civic minded citizens are tenuous. This paper explores these connections by drawing on the views of participants in an international community service program between Western Australia and Tanzania. By situating the interview data in relation to the policy goals, the paper argues that the current policy framework ‘sanitises’ the political nature of modern citizenship. The results from this study demonstrate that students have little understanding of the connections between the civic, the social and the political realms of citizenship. These results suggest that the current policy context does not adequately prepare young people to position themselves in the political realm.

Integrating Digital Technologies into the Contemporary Science Classroom

Digital educational technologies and ICT have been widely reported as central to innovations in science education. The Australian Government’s School Science Education action plan has recommended as a priority that pedagogy should enable students to learn science by ‘seeking understanding from multiple sources of information, ranging from hands-on investigation to internet searching’ (Goodrum and Rennie, Australian school science education: National Action Plan 2008–2012: Vol. 1. The National Action Plan. Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Canberra, p 14, 2007). Interactive whiteboard (IWB) technology has been embraced in Australia and internationally as an educational tool that enables the convergence of a diverse range of ICT sources and multimodal representations into daily classroom practice. The technology enables students and teachers to interact with all the functions of a desktop computer through the IWB’s large touch-sensitive surface, fixed at the front of the classroom (Murcia, Teach Sci 54(4):17–21, 2008; Betcher and Lee, The interactive whiteboard revolution. ACER Press, Camberwell, 2009). However, to enhance the effectiveness of classroom science, educators must move beyond understanding the technology itself, important as this is, to understanding the impact of the technology on teachers’ pedagogy and students learning (Higgins et al., Learning, Media and Technology, 32(3), 213–225, 2007). A series of case studies conducted in Australian science classrooms, which explored the impact of IWB technology on learning and teaching, are discussed in this chapter. Classroom-based examples of effective interactive digital pedagogy are reported here with the aim of supporting educators moving to or working in contemporary IWB learning environments.

Reasoning Through Representations

Over the last two decades there has been increasing recognition of the central role played by multimodal representational practices as part of the disciplinary literacies through which students reason and learn in science. While there is recognition of the need for teachers to use, interpret and coordinate representational work in science classrooms there has been little research into the specific ways in which such work occurs to support quality learning, or how effective representational practices might be situated within different pedagogical traditions.