Socio-scientific issues and socially acute questions enable moral judgement through rational, emotional, intuitive and imaginative thinkings. Our research focuses more specifically on the place of the myth in student discussions about controversial issues. We have analysed the mythemes expressed through online exchanges between students from…

We argue that Garrett and Segall's concepts of "doing school" and "pushing back" are valuable tools for analysing pre-service teachers' political views of neoliberal education reforms such as the introduction of charter schools. We extend Garrett and Segall's conceptualization by hybridizing "doing school" and…

This paper describes a lecturer's approach to teaching Bayesian statistics to students who were only exposed to the classical paradigm. The study shows how the lecturer extended himself by making use of ventriloquist dolls to grab hold of students' attention and embed important ideas in revealing the differences between the Bayesian and classical…

The last decade or so has seen an emerging literature supporting the position that school leaders and school leadership are important. This article argues, however, that recent developments in the area of school leadership have led to an orthodoxy that needs to be challenged and tested. It is an orthodoxy that has been driven essentially by those…

There are many reasons to develop closer links between research and teaching. To do this, we argue the need to move beyond university rhetoric that fractures the engagement of teaching with research and instead focus on the development of what is necessary to bring these two core academic activities closer together. Opening with a review of the…

In his book "Physical Education Futures" (Routledge, London) David Kirk (2010) introduces the notion of the idea of the idea of physical education, which challenges all physical educators to think more deeply and broadly about physical education as a school subject. The notion of the idea of the idea enables a "big picture"…

In 2009 international student safety became an issue of immediate concern to Australian international education exporters following a series of demonstrations by Indian students and interventions by concerned foreign governments. With these developments the "industry" became fixated on how best to secure Australia's share of the…

Roger Openshaw and Elizabeth Rata conceptualise Kaupapa Maori as a dominant intellectual orthodoxy in New Zealand, which creates a "culturalist ideological conformity" that limits the university's ability to serve as the critical conscience of society. They argue for the primacy of academic objectivity as the criteria for what counts as…

A report concerning the value of the international exchange debate tour of New Zealand sponsored by the Committee on International Discussion and Debate of the Speech Communication Association is given in this paper. The report provides an examination of the goals and benefits of international exchange debating, discusses how this particular tour…

In recent years sociocultural theory has provided an important conceptual tool for re-thinking many practices in early childhood education (e.g. Anning, Cullen & Fleer, 2004; Edwards, 2001; Edwards, 2003). While much has been gained, many taken-for-granted practices still remain in need of critique. Although the term "Child…