This is the column in AARE News dedicated to publishing news on recent doctoral theses in education.
The PDF and the thesis - Universities are now often requiring completing research students to lodge both the traditional bound copy of the thesis - and an electronic version. So the thesis is very much a part of the vast amount of research literature available electronically. It is now possible to quickly locate a thesis, then browse or search it in portable document format (pdf).
The pdf thesis can be an excellent source of information - and is an important resource for research students.
With all this technology, it is also interesting to ponder some questions, such as what skills may be needed for more elaborate electronic production (for both students and supervisors)? What will a 'good pdf thesis' look like? And, will it become something that examiners will require/expect/need? These questions became far less pressing when I desperately tried to get hold of a thesis from overseas that wasn't available electronically. I am still awaiting the arrival. But I think that, after all this waiting, when I open the wrapper, it will be a very good read.
Education Research Theses Collection available from the Cunningham Library, Australian Council of Educational Research. At: http://cunningham.acer.edu.au/dbtw-wpd/sample/theses.htm.
Digital theses can also be accessed via the Australian Digital Thesis Program, coordinated through the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL). http://adt.caul.edu.au/
This issue of Recent Doctoral Theses in Education includes two abstracts. The first is an abstract submitted to me by Elizabeth Hartnell-Young, for her PhD thesis titled "Towards Knowledge Building: Reflecting on teachers' roles and professional learning in communities of practice," The University of Melbourne. The second is by Michael Furtado for his PhD thesis titled "Funding Australian Catholic Schools in New Times: Policy Contexts, Policy Participants and Theoretical Perspectives," the University of Queensland.
Please consider sending me abstracts of recent doctoral theses! Abstracts of completed doctoral theses can be sent to me at: vharwood@uow.edu.au
Guidelines for your submission can be found in AARE News Issue 42 (available on AARE's website).
Valerie Harwood
Executive Member
Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young (PhD), "Towards Knowledge Building: Reflecting on teachers' roles and professional learning in communities of practice", PhD Conferred August 2004
Department of Education Policy and Management, The University of Melbourne,
Supervisor: Professor Peter Cuttance
The purpose of this study was to identify the forms of teachers' professional practice that enhance knowledge building, in order to inform teacher development policy and pre-service education. Knowledge building is based on a constructivist approach to learning and teaching, and this, with the spread of computers, is said to have changed the role of the teacher in the classroom: from the expert dispensing knowledge to the facilitator of learning.
Using an ethnographic approach based on observation and reflective conversation, the study identified current and emerging roles of teachers using computers with students. Three substantive roles were identified: designing the learning environment, managing people and resources and mediating student learning. A fourth role, improving practice, captures the workplace learning that is recognised by all teachers in this study. Teachers demonstrated these interdependent roles to varying extents, individually and, in some cases, collaboratively. Many had moved past facilitation to knowledge building, and there were hints of specialisation that could lead to a future separation of roles.
By recording single instances of emerging practices as well as the more frequent occurrences, the findings indicated a range of characteristics pertaining to each role, presented as a framework, which can inform teacher education and lifelong learning.
In turn, these were considered in light of Wenger's (1998) theory of communities of practice, in terms of individual classrooms and of schools as constellations of communities. Knowledge-building teachers were members of deep and strong local communities whose task was co-constructing knowledge. They recognised that technology could be used for consumption, (re)production and creation purposes, and they used open frameworks, which allowed students to explore and construct knowledge. They also acted as brokers, crossing boundaries to communicate with other communities. Technology was a medium for this communication, and a means of managing and storing knowledge objects.
This study was supported by ARC Linkage Grant No C77906981
Dr Michael Furtado (PhD), Funding Australian Catholic Schools in New Times: Policy Contexts, Policy Participants and Theoretical Perspectives. University of Queensland.
The thesis explores the replacement of discourses of the public good in New Times, emphasising a needs-based, compensatory/redistributive policy rationale, by an alternative based on discourses of entitlement. It then recounts the role of the substantial Catholic system in Australia in making such a replacement possible in terms of the policy, now transcendent, favouring the increased Commonwealth funding of non-government schools.
In doing this it explores the contradictions and tensions inherent in such a position in terms of the strategies employed by Church authorities to initially quarantine their schools from the equilibriating effects of such a policy but inevitably resulting in their recent capitulation to full membership of the independent school funding policy arrangement, regardless of its potentially negative policy effects on their schools.
The thesis demonstrates the failure of such a policy to safeguard the interests of those aspects of Catholic schooling committed to and reliant upon compensatory educational rationales, especially in terms of funding in return for educating the marginalised, and the pressures that such an oversight place on low SES diocesan systems.
The thesis reasons that there are better alternatives in New Times to save both the deregulatory principle as well as the notion of education as serving a common Australian good rather than the positional sectional interests of some Australians over others.
It does this by proposing that Catholic and similar systemic universal-purpose type schools be brought within the aegis of an expanded and deregulated but choice-driven and fully-funded public education system, as in New Zealand, all of the British Isles educational jurisdictions, some of the Canadian provinces and large parts of Western Europe, all of them OECD countries with substantial high quality religious-character preserving school systems in the public sector.