Peter Rawlins

Integrating Educational Technologies into Teacher Education: A Case Study.

This article is a case study of an integrated, experiential approach to improving pre-service teachers’ understanding and use of educational technologies in one New Zealand teacher education programme. The study examines the context, design and implementation of a learning activity which integrated student-centred approaches, experiential learning, authenticity and the particular needs of the New Zealand school curriculum to foster pre-service teachers’ learning about educational technologies as both pedagogical tools, and as ‘disruptive’ forces which can promote the re-imagining of existing practices. Evaluation data are used to highlight support for an integrated approach to the use of educational technologies outlined in the case in question.

The ontological politics of evidence and policy enablement

Abstract Ontological politics has received increasing attention within education policy studies, particularly as a support for the notion of policy enactment. While policy enactment offers serious challenges to traditional approaches toward policy implementation, this paper takes up ontological politics as a concept that extends beyond implementation and holds consequences for policy formation as well. Analysing the different uses of evidence in recent policy documents from Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper argues that an ontological politics of evidence grounds policies in ways that define what can and cannot be enacted, what this paper terms policy enablement. The analyses illustrate an ontological politics of evidence that excludes non-experts in the first instance, and that sanitises the critical elements of enactment in the second. Both analyses highlight the ways policy enablement emerges from ontological politics and offers a supplement to policy enactment. Following these analyses, the paper offers some provisional thoughts on the relationship between enablement and enactment as an approach that attends to context as a constitutive element of policy-making.

Immigrant or Refugee: Perceived Effects of Colonisation of Academia by Market Forces.

Managers and personnel within tertiary institutions colonised by neo‐liberal ministrations and buffeted by the winds of a ‘change culture’ formed within the philosophical shifts of the last century can be considered in terms of ‘immigrants’ or ‘refugees’ within this new territory. The case story of this article is set in a college of education newly situated within a traditional university culture. Superimposed on that scenario is an ontology shift from academia to a neo‐liberal business model. The article considers how people, enculturated with an already established socio‐cultural paradigm where research, collegiality, democracy and the concept of academic freedom predominate, are challenged to reform their epistemologies to fit the definition of the new culture. The article is a theory‐based, qualitative report of a case study using anthropological parameters and terminology of cultures and culture change to map the impact of the change process on the epistemologies of people involved in claiming the post‐colonial space.