Editors’ introduction to special theme issue: Meanings Under the Microscope (Part 1)
Shirley O'Neill
Associate Professor, Language and Literacies Education, Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba QLD, Australia
Patrick Alan Danaher
Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba QLD
PP: 1
Article Text
This inaugural theme issue of the International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning has been divided into three parts. Parts 2 and 3 will be introduced separately in the next two issues of the journal. Here we provide a brief overview of the articles that compose Part 1. While the articles in Parts 2 and 3 relate to primary and secondary schooling as well as to higher education settings, the articles in Part 1 engage with some of the issues entailed in university programs preparing graduates for different kinds of careers: as early childhood, primary and vocational educators and as members of defence forces. The articles in Part 1 also reflect the journal's consciously international focus, by canvassing the perspectives on pedagogies and learning held by researchers working in Australia, Malaysia and Pakistan.
The first article, by Phillip Stacey, Joanne Brownlee, Karen Thorpe, Drew Reeves and the students of Class EAB016 from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, is concerned with the measurement and manipulation of epistemological beliefs in early childhood education students. Several strategies were deployed to facilitate the students' explicit reflection on their personal epistemologies, with a questionnaire being used to trace changes in their beliefs. The authors assert the utility of linking explicit reflection and experience in research pedagogy with a focus on developing sophisticated epistemological beliefs.
In the second article, by Neill Ustick from the Australian Catholic University, the author turns his attention to the strategies needed to enhance the development of deep learning and critical thinking. In doing so, he raises an issue that exercises the minds of most teacher education program designers: the complexities of maximising coherence within and across such programs. The article reports the diverse yet integrated ways in which four teacher education lecturers engaged with the lively and topical theme of 'Constructing the world, constructing meanings'.
Catherine H Arden, Patrick Alan Danaher and Mark A Tyler, from the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, use the third article to advocate a conceptually framed debate about some of the key issues involved in (re)designing a teacher education program for tradespeople and (para)professionals moving into teaching. They present a dialectic drawing on critical theory, criticality and the humanist tradition in education and informed by reflective and reflexive practice. This dialectic is used to engage with a number of fundamental questions about approaches to pedagogy - or andragogy - and learning that are likely to bring greatest benefit to the students and other stakeholders in the program.
The fourth article, by Jowati binti Juhary from Monash University in Australia, focuses on certain pedagogical issues associated with the proposed introduction of e-learning provision to undergraduate cadets studying at the Military Academy of Malaysia. The author contends that some of these issues are more generic, while others are located directly in the context of the Academy and the students' lives. The article is a timely reminder that, like all forms of education, elearning is not necessarily a panacea and that its introduction must be preceded and accompanied by careful and serious weighing of options.
In the fifth article, by M. Jamil Anwar and M. Ashraf Iqbal from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan, attention is given to the teaching of what many students regard as the difficult topic in algebra of group theory. The authors propose a blend of concept maps and discovery learning to underpin this teaching. The study has wider relevance, including to university teachers and administrators concerned with reducing attrition from courses of this type.
Finally, this first part of the inaugural issue of the journal contains what the editors hope will be the first of a large number of reviews of books and media pertaining to international pedagogies and learning. This review, by Phyllida Coombes, Patrick Alan Danaher and Emilio A Anteliz from Australia and Venezuela, is of Chris Tyler's edited book Traveller Education: Accounts of Good Practice, about a specialised pedagogy for learners whose ethnicity and/or occupations reflect/s a mobile lifestyle.
As editors, we are delighted that this inaugural issue of the International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning encapsulates and synthesises such a rich diversity of strategies, issues, concepts and arguments about educational philosophy, policy and practice that ranges so broadly across contexts, countries and sectors. This diversity and range augur extremely well for both the journal's future and the learners and other stakeholders in the various forms of educational provision canvassed here. We look forward to working with educators and learners throughout the world to establish and extend the journal as one among several significant contributions to enhancing and enriching international pedagogies and learning in the 21st century.
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