Mark Anthony Tyler

Mentoring First Year Police Constables: Police Mentors' Perspectives.

Purpose – Mentoring as a tool for the support and development of novices in many organisations has been considered a putative success. Nevertheless, the literature reveals a paucity of reporting of the mentoring strategies used within the policing profession within Australia. This paper aims to focus on what mentoring is and how it is deployed from the police mentors perspective. This inquiry intends to shed light into this contextual gap by illuminating the mentoring experiences of 13 police officers from the district headquarters of a regional city in Southeast Queensland.Design/methodology/approach – These officers, who presented with varying lengths of police service, were interviewed to ascertain their experiences of being a mentor, and to investigate whether they deployed what could be interpreted as a particular model of mentoring. Also considered were their perspectives and impressions of undertaking the role of mentor, their descriptions of how they mentored, and their preparedness for mentoring...

Struggling for Purchase? What Shape Does a Vocational Education and Training Agenda Take Within a Contemporary University Education Faculty?

Abstract This paper focuses on the discourse among academics with a shared interest in the relationship between vocational education and training (VET) and higher education within the University of Southern Queensland’s Faculty of Education. The authors endeavour to make sense of how VET pedagogies and praxis are currently envisaged and enacted within the faculty, how they respond to present-day influences and developments in the VET sector and how they will in turn shape teaching, learning and research activity. In the paper, the authors put their personal and professional ideologies under the microscope in a dialectic that aims to inform the development of a shared set of meanings that will serve as a platform from which to move forward in their practice. This dialectic examines the nuances of practices from the perspectives of a reflective (Schön, 1983, 1987) and a reflexive (Usher, 1987) practitioner. Theoretical lenses drawn upon in this reflective and reflexive dialectic include critical theory (Habermas, 1972, 1973), criticality (Barnett, 1997) and the humanist tradition in education (Dewey, 1916, 1938). The results of this dialectic are then used to engage pedagogies that relate to further education and training (fet) within the faculty. To guide this situated engagement, several questions are asked. The conclusions drawn confirm that the convergence of these personal and professional ideologies is helpful in shaping the contributions of fet to the existing and emerging needs of the faculty’s lifelong learners.

Collaborative Concept Mapping: Connecting with Research Team Capacities

Concept mapping has generally been used as a means to increase the depth and breadth of understanding within a particular knowledge domain or discipline. In this paper we trace the deployment of collaborative concept mapping by a research team in higher education and analyse its effectiveness using the crime metaphor of motive, means, and opportunity. This case study exemplifies two iterations of the research team’s collaborative concept map and shows how the process of the construction of such maps enabled the opportunity for team dialogue and coconstruction that was focused, hands-on, and visual. The concept mapping process provided the team with a meaning-making mechanism through which to share understandings and explore the team’s potential capacities.

Curriculum Leadership, Quality and Technology in a Suite of Australian Further Education and Training Teacher Education Programs: Making Meaning, Performing Practice and Constructing New Learning Futures

Abstract Constructing new learning futures is an ongoing challenge and opportunity for contemporary learners and educators alike. A crucial element of that construction is making meaning by and for all participants in the educational enterprise. Such meaning making depends in turn on the performance of practice – that is, on the regular, repeated enactment of situated learning and teaching in specific contexts and environments that turns abstract and hypothetical ideas about education into experienced and lived realities. This paper applies and demonstrates this argument in relation to a suite of further education and training (FET) teacher education programs at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Australia. The authors elaborate a set of evaluative questions for the leadership, quality and technology dimensions of the curriculum of those programs. On the basis of those questions, the authors generate a conceptual framework that they argue is productive in identifying the principles and strategies of making meaning and performing practice that are most likely to promote the construction of new and enabling learning futures.

Learning in Response to Workplace Change

Across the world, and particularly in developed countries, workplaces are changing, arguably more rapidly than ever before in response to external and internal forces. Altering the ways workplaces operate inevitably requires changes in the knowledge and skills workers need. This relationship is evident in the conclusion by the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency (Future focus: 2013 National workforce development strategy, AWPA, Canberra, 2013) that the major influences on the nation’s skills and workforce development needs are driven by globalisation, technological change, the changing nature of work, the need to respond to climate change impacts and issues of sustainability. These are very broad influences that raise questions about the extent to which they impact workers, as distinct from affecting industries and enterprises. In order to examine how employees perceive the impact of change, 86 workers in various occupations in four different Australian industries were asked about current and anticipated changes in their jobs. Analysis of the semi-structured interview transcripts revealed that workers tend to perceive workplace changes in terms of their immediate work tasks rather than with, say, an organisation’s strategic directions or industry workforce development perspective. That is, their need to learn as a result of workplace change is essentially based on maintaining their individual competence and hence their employability. This focus on their own workplace practice suggests that the most appropriate setting for individual learning in response to change appears to be the workplace itself, which in turn has implications for the way such learning is organised.

The whisperings of a Doctor of Philosophy student's phenomenography

Abstract “Yes, I’m going to enrol in a PhD”. There are those who relish the proclamation, and others who shiver at its mere whisper. From the position of the whisperer, this paper traces my doctoral journey from the budding concept through the public announcement and resting to taking a breath at the position of attaining full candidature. In this article I capture and express what I have used to sustain me thus far against the conceptual challenges that I have experienced along the way. This journey through my inner terrain depicts a kaleidoscope of decisions and emotions that have produced a diversity of ideas, some of which have flourished and others of which have died. Yet it is those ideas, seeded from past experience, which have sustained and been partly kind. These have a strong emotional component, and it appears that they have fuelled my progress, yet also fuelled degrees of doubt, a paradox that facilitates and restricts. Phenomenography is used to make sense of this experience. This is my struggle for conceptual ground and workspace. This paper describes the resources that I bring to bear in reflecting and reflexing around my choice of topic, my sense of identity as an academic, my doctoral progress and my collaborative alliances, as I make guesses as to ‘what might be’ and stand to take another step forward.

The Critical Role of Workplace Managers in Continuing Education and Training

As workplaces respond to ongoing internal and external change, continuing education and training has become an imperative, as Chap. 11 and other chapters in this book have made clear. Within this dynamic framework, the roles of managers are also changing, partly through what has been called ‘job enlargement’. That is, more responsibility for an increasing range of activities that were once handled elsewhere in the organisation, usually by specialists. These expanded responsibilities may include occupational health and safety, budget control, and human resource management, but there is also emerging evidence of an increasing role for managers in the training function, both direct and indirect. In the research reported in this chapter, 60 managers in five industries and across four Australian States were interviewed about the changes influencing their workplace policies and practices, and of the role of learning and training in helping workers keep current and employable. The findings show that ongoing worker development is an overt, but often under-acknowledged part of these managers’ everyday responsibilities within their workplaces. Specifically, these managers’ roles in training were found to be essential for effective continuing education and training, including fostering workers’ positive attitudes towards lifelong learning for work-related purposes. This chapter discusses the range of training roles required of these managers, as identified in the research, and concludes with a discussion of how managers’ capacities as trainers might be supported and further developed.

Towards a more systematic approach to continuing professional development in vocational education and training

ABSTRACT Vocational education and training (VET) teachers and trainers have a key role in ensuring that workers in business and industry are upskilled and up-to-date in a rapidly changing industrial, economic and technological environment. It follows that the VET practitioners should themselves keep up to date, not only with industry developments but also with the pedagogical skills needed to embrace technology and adapt to new sites for learning. However, in Australia and other Western nations, continuing professional development for VET practitioners has been spasmodic and not always well supported, in contrast to the ways it has been established and accepted in other professions. This paper examines the professional development approaches of some of those other professions and identifies the key features that might be adopted in any genuine attempt to develop a more purposeful and systematic provision of ongoing learning for teachers and trainers in VET. The paper concludes with a number of recommendations aimed at Australian VET practitioners in particular, but which might be applicable to VET in any developed country.

Older adult Internet super-users: counsel from experience

ABSTRACT There is evidence that digital technologies including the Internet have the potential to improve older adults’ social participation and inclusion. This in turn is said to improve their quality of life. Older Internet super-users are in a unique position to inform us about what it takes to be a successful “silver surfer”. This article reports on a study exploring the digital experiences of older Australian (65+) retirees, who are Internet “super-users”. Super-users are defined as those who effectively use many Internet applications as part of the normal rhythm of daily life. The data gathering methods of this study were (1) photovoice, (2) a diary of Internet use, and (3) a semi-structured telephone interview. The project identified what makes a good Internet experience for older adults. This was then translated into a set of guidelines to improve Internet use for other older adults, who are yet to fully realize the potential of the Internet to enhance daily life and wellbeing. The results are considered from the perspectives that older adults’ digital participation is best conceptualized by incorporating self-efficacy theory, digital competence and personal learning environments (PLEs) and demonstrates a pathway toward digital participation for older adults through the development of digital self-efficacy.