Archive for the 'Book' Category

Discursivity, International Students and Representation: Walking through Different Worlds  by Margaret Kumar  is now available as part of The Learner series.

I suspect that in future, Kumar’s Discursivity, international students and representation, will be seen as a significant point of the departure in the literature, a work that helps to make possible a deeper and better discussion of international education.

Professor Simon Marginson, Foreword to Discursivity, international students and representation

Discursivity, international students and representation: Walking through different worlds is a text that will help academics, support services staff and administrative personnel who are involved in the teaching and learning practices of international students. The question it answers is: what constitutes an international student? In relation to this it looks at strategies for internationalising the curriculum at a micro level. It also offers a new approach towards understanding the multiple subject positions of international students whilst at the same time providing an analysis of the ways in which students are identified through various forms of labelling.

Framing My Name: Extending Educational Boundaries edited by Margaret Kumar, Supriya Pattanayak and Richard Johnson is now available from The Learner imprint.

Framing my name: extending educational boundaries addresses issues of name and the naming process and its impact on higher education pedagogy. In bringing together the perspectives of the authors, the book shows how students’ names are an agency of their learning. The manner in which names are articulated impacts on how students relate to learning. The process of naming involves an ontology that is related to students’ histories, their culture, their place and position within a social matrix of group and community. For educators, this means undergoing a scaffolding process of learning the background to names and naming processes and then applying this knowledge to an understanding of students.

‘This book explores a wide and rich array of cultural stories and meanings, of hybrid forms and possibilities, or tradition and encounter in names and naming. It has great practical value and is a pedagogical investment of its own, but a possibly greater virtue is its ability to look at boundaries and ask about their role, to push beyond them but acknowledge their function and enduring presence, to offer ideas about how identity and place, names and roles are constructed and how these function.

In several chapters, we encounter students and teachers negotiating their local modus operandi based on cultural sensitivity and draw the conclusion of the key importance of an advance awareness of the need to think more seriously and systematically about personal names. In Margaret Kumar’s discussion of names, we see how names and their multiple meanings is an instalment in the very process of global education itself, in which the expectations of teachers, lecturers and administrators about who they will be teaching and ‘servicing’, have been scrambled. The norm is less and less a norm. The editors, bring the perspectives of educators, concerned with effectiveness in education (‘good’ teaching) but also good effects from education (‘just’ teaching) and this double element pervades the ethical stance that the volume exhibits. This is one of its most ennobling characteristics.’

Professor Joseph Lo Bianco, Foreword to Framing my name: extending educational boundaries.

Multiliteracies, Multimodality and Teacher Professional Learning by Anne Cloonan is now available from The Learner imprint.

In the midst of an epochal shift in the communications environment, rapid cultural change and transformations in knowledge, there is an urgent need for bold educational responses. While responsibility for educational resourcing belongs to the broader community, the extent and quality of pedagogical change ultimately rests with teachers. Student learning is dependent on teachers developing knowledge and pedagogical practices. Central to our educational response to the changed environment is teacher professional learning.

This scholarly book draws on research which investigated the impact on teachers of their engagement with the New London Group’s multiliteracies theory. Four Australian teachers of primary school students committed themselves to exploring multiliteracies theory and to putting their learning into practice in diverse classroom settings.

Anne Cloonan, then a literacy policy and project officer at a state Education Department, explores the context, processes and impact of film-driven participatory action research action learning, in which the teachers researched their learning and practice over a period of eight months. She describes new ways of working shoulder to shoulder with teachers to develop resources and policy advice while deepening their professionalism. She offers contextualised examples of teachers extending their print-based literacy pedagogies to incorporate multimodal literacy practices.

This book will be of interest to teachers, educational consultants, policy makers, and researchers concerned with: agentive collaborative teacher learning; innovative policy and resource development; enhancing teachers’ professionalism; and the operationalisation of multiliteracies theory.

Improving Teaching and Learning through Assessment: A Problem-Based Learning (PBL) Approach by Betty McDonald is now available from The Learner imprint.

With a constant call for accountability, classroom facilitators are obligated to provide transparent assessment procedures and report results in a professional manner. Improving Teaching and Learning Through Assessment: A Problem-Based Learning Approach seeks to convey to the reader exactly what it says; a holistic approach to continuous assessment in order to improve learning.

This book seeks to present readers with a solid background about the various kinds of assessments available. Readers are taught to design a number of fit-for-purpose assessment instruments. Throughout the text, the primary methodology used is Problem-Based Learning (PBL) that seeks to hone in students several skills like creativity, critical thinking and innovativeness.