Karen Tregenza

New education in new times

This paper is concerned with ‘new times’, new policies for education in Australia and the new issues that they generate for education. More particularly, the papers focus is upon the various educational forms that have emerged now that governments have let the market ‘genie’ out of the bottle. It identifies particularly those market forms to which information and communication technologies are integral and a range of ways in which education, markets and such technologies are coming together. In so doing, it offers a general sociological framework within which to understand these developments and a specific conceptual framework to assist in categorising such new educational forms.

Using digital data and bibliometric analysis for researching doctoral education

As more digital data become publicly available new opportunities for researchers in education are arising. Researchers may be unaware of the existence and usefulness of such data even though these are freely available. In this article the use of one such source of information is described and its potential for research into research education discussed. We sought to exploit the research potential of the existing, yet dispersed, collection of online Australian thesis records to inform their research into the development of the PhD in Australia. Having created a searchable and reliable database from the available records, bibliometric analyses enabled us to map knowledge production and research capability in institutional and disciplinary settings from 1949 to 2003 as indicated by PhD theses. This is in contrast to the more familiar use of data based on student load or completion rates, and complements that data by focusing on research output as opposed to student throughput.

Action Research and the Professional Development of Teachers in the Health and Physical Education Field: the Australian NPDP experience [1]

ABSTRACT [1] This paper reports experiences from a DEET‐funded NPDP project on Health and Physical Education. In Australia a new ‘national curriculum’ has been developed in the form of Statements and Profiles for eight key learning areas (KLAs). Health and physical education is one of the KLAs and in 1994 a project to trial the implementation of the Statement and Profile for Health and Physical Education was initiated in which action research was the process model underpinning the professional development process. This article discusses some of the project experiences in the broad context of the assumptions underpinning action research and in the context of the changing nature of teachers’ work in general and the new curriculum initiatives associated with the National Statement and Profiles. We ask whether action research as collaborative, reflective, systematic self‐analysis and characterised by Stenhouses 1970s vision of teachers as ‘extended professionals’ is a practicable form of professional develop...