Ron Toomey

Values Pedagogy and Teacher Education: Re-conceiving the Foundations

The article explores the research findings of values pedagogy, both Australian and international, and makes application to the need to re-conceive many of the assumptions and foundational theories that underpin teacher education, based on the new insights into learning, human development and student wellbeing that have resulted from these research findings.

Values Education as Holistic Development for All Sectors: Researching for Effective Pedagogy.

The paper argues that values education has moved from being associated most heavily with the religious agenda of faith schools to being central to updated research insights into effective pedagogy. As such, it represents a vital approach to education in any school setting. The paper draws on an array of values education research and practice in making the case but centres especially on findings from a number of recent publicly funded projects in Australia with which the authors have been associated. Of special importance is evidence from the Values Education Good Practice Schools Project and the Project to Test and Measure the Impact of Values Education on Student Effects and School Ambience that provide both anecdotal and empirical evidence that high quality values education contributes to holistic educational development, including academic advancement, of students across all school sectors.

Addressing issues of religious difference through values education: an Islam instance

The article’s main focus is on exploring ways in which modern forms of values education are being utilized to address major issues of social dissonance, with special focus on dissonance related to religious difference between students of Islamic and non‐Islamic backgrounds. The article begins by appraising philosophical and neuroscientific research relevant to the underpinning concepts behind such forms of education. It then explores evidence from the federally funded Australian Values Education Program, and its various related research projects, that suggests that values education has potential to impact on a range of educational measures, including those related to enhancing understanding and tolerance across lines of religious difference.

Policy on lifelong learning in Australia

This paper provides an account of the extent to which the concept of lifelong learning has been incorporated into the education policies of the Australian Commonwealth and State Governments and the Catholic and Independent schooling sectors, taking particular note of the application of lifelong learning to policies pertaining to teacher education.

Values and the Curriculum

This chapter will explore values pedagogy as a contemporary approach to engaging students in the most complete forms of learning that are directed towards and, increasingly evidence suggests, result in holistic student achievement. It will address those aspects of values pedagogy that focus particularly on the place of curriculum as a driver of whole person development and to the forms of implicit and explicit teaching that serve those ends. It will explore a range of research projects from different countries that illustrate findings related to the comprehensive learning effects elicited by well-crafted and pedagogically sound curriculum content, implementation, assessment and evaluation. It will also focus on the positive effects that, research tells us, emanate from creating a positive ambience in which values-oriented curriculum can function.

Overcoming Barriers that Impede Participation in Lifelong Learning

One approach to conceptualising lifelong learning suggests that lifelong learning is primarily concerned with the promotion of skills and competencies necessary for the development of general capabilities and specific performance on given tasks. Skills and competencies developed through programs of lifelong learning will, on this approach, have a bearing on questions of how workers perform in their tackling of specific job responsibilities and tasks and how well they can adapt their general and specific knowledge and competencies to new tasks (OECD, 1994). This approach presents us with a relatively narrow and limited understanding of the nature, aims and purpose of lifelong education. Nevertheless, this instrumental view tended to dominate earlier approaches to lifelong learning, especially in the Australian policy arena. It is evident from the work of OECD, UNESCO, the European Parliament and The Nordic Council of Ministers, however, that there are much broader and more multi-faceted ways of approaching the conceptualisation of lifelong learning. Instead of seeing education as instrumental to the achievement of an extrinsic goal, such as the acquisition of job skills, education may also be perceived as an intrinsically valuable activity, something that is good in and of itself. On this view, lifelong learning offers the opportunity for people to bring their knowledge up to date. It enables them to enjoy activities which they may have either long since laid aside or always wanted to do but were previously unable to. It allows them to try their hands at activities and pursuits that they had previously imagined were

Values Education, Instructional Scaffolding and Student Wellbeing

This chapter comprises a case study of the values education practices of a school heavily involved in the Australian Values Education programme. It is constructed in a way that fleshes out and illustrates the concept of the student wellbeing pedagogy that was outlined in Chapter 1. Instructional scaffolding is the lynchpin of the pedagogy and it can take a variety of forms. The case study of the Student Action Team approach to teaching and learning with its service learning dimension illustrates how such an instructional scaffold enables a school to shape teaching and learning in line with its core values as well as have students constantly transact the core values in ways that enhance student social, emotional and academic wellbeing.

Clusters and Learning Networks: A Strategy for Reform in Values Education

The Australian Commonwealth Government is investing heavily in educational reform. Increasingly, a key feature of the projects undertaken as part of Australian Government programmes is the encouragement that schools work collaboratively to develop innovative approaches to teaching and learning. This approach is intended to improve student learning whilst at the same time strengthening both the member schools and the provision of education across Australia. This emphasis on collaborative clusters and learning networks is consistent with a number of international initiatives. At expert meetings organized under the auspices of OECD/CERI in Paris in 1999 and Lisbon in 2000 in association with the OECD activity “Schooling for Tomorrow”, the importance of collaboration through networks and clusters was recognized. Experts from OECD countries including Australia, Germany, Portugal, Canada, and the UK pointed to the potential of collaborative networks as a new model for managing schools and school systems (OECD, 2000). The National College for School Leadership (NCSL) in the UK has invested heavily in a collaborative approach to reform. The unique characteristic of the NCSL project is “networked learning” in the organizational learning sense. Networked learning communities are committed to learning from, learning with, and learning on behalf of, each other (Haeusler 2003). Notwithstanding such government support and committed school-based activity, collaborative cluster, or network arrangements and their impact on innovation and reform is still a very under-researched field. This chapter reports on a study that was informed by the policy-oriented and conceptual work on collaborative clusters and networks undertaken by the OECD, the work on clusters in the Australian context and the work on networked learning communities being undertaken in the UK. The specific purpose of the study was to investigate the use of collaborative clusters and networks in the implementation of the Australian Commonwealth Government’s Values Framework through the Values Education Good Practice Schools Project (VEGPSP). The Values Framework identifies nine values for Australian schooling: Integrity; Freedom; Responsibility; Respect;

Lifelong Learning and the Assessment and Evaluation Practices in Some Australian Faculties of Education

Abstract This article reports the findings of a project – Lifelong Learning and Teacher Education – undertaken by the Centre for Lifelong Learning, Australian Catholic University, under the auspices of the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training. The study was designed to investigate the operationalisation of lifelong learning in Australian teacher education. The assessment practices within Faculties of Education were among a range of issues investigated in the study. The study revealed that there is a range of existing innovative assessment practices that are in keeping with emerging ideas about lifelong learning. In this article, some of the current practices with procedures for setting and assessing standards in Australian Faculties of Education are described and discussed from a lifelong learning perspective

Values and Behaviour

This chapter will pick up the strands of previous chapters and explore the much vexed issue of student behaviour and teacher control over learning in the school. Of all the practical issues that have confronted teachers from time immemorial and continue to challenge teachers today, behaviour management is beyond all others. Amidst the many attempts at creating and maintaining an environment of sufficient teacher control, very few have made the clear connections with the notions of the caring, trusting ambience of learning that characterizes values pedagogy. The chapter will pay particular attention to those findings from the empirical studies being cited that have highlighted the impact of such an ambience on the overall atmosphere of learning that results and the ramifications of such an atmosphere for student behaviour.