Author: Ajal

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Innovations in bridging and foundation education in a tertiary institution

Author/s: Rae Trewartha

Edition: Volume 48, Number 1, April 2008

Summary: A 2006 survey of programs at Unitec, New Zealand concluded that, in the main, Unitec programs and courses were not meeting student needs in the area of foundation and bridging education. Invoking international research and practice, a report was compiled proposing a number of recommendations to remedy this situation. Academic Board, in accepting recommendations that were based on developing and re-developing foundation and bridging courses and programs to better staircase students into degree programs, and to support first-year students in undergraduate degree programs, has challenged the Unitec community to think in new ways about the needs of students entering the institution. It was argued in the report that the key determinant in developing these strategies should be the need to provide students with bridging/foundation education that supports them to develop the contextualised discipline knowledge and academic literacies they need in order to transition to the next level of study as independent, critical learners – as students who know ‘how to learn’. Over the last few months, many exciting and challenging developments have occurred in relation to this initiative. This paper begins by examining the research that informed the recommendations in the report. Initiatives that are proposed or underway arel then outlined, and discussed in conjunction with examples of the challenges associated with making this shift in institutional thinking and practice.

Keywords: foundation, education, bridging, Unitec, courses, programs, literacies

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Travelling against the current: an examination of upstream and downstream educational interventions across the life span

Author/s: Jenny Silburn and Geraldine Box

Edition: Volume 48, Number 1, April 2008

Summary: Current social and economic circumstances are presenting universities with a more diverse general student intake whose support needs are increasingly similar to those of traditionally
defined equity groups. This paper examines a Murdoch University equity program to demonstrate that simply increasing access does not always translate into increased benefit. It presents an argument for the restructuring of existing equity enabling programs and increasing transitional support for all students to achieve more substantive equality in student outcomes.

Keywords: equity, social, economic, access, transitional support

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Participation of elderly women in community welfare activities in Akinyele local government, Oyo State, Nigeria

Author/s: Stella O. Odebode

Edition: Volume 49, Number 3, November 2009

Summary: This paper assessed the participation of elderly women in community welfare activities in Oyo State, Nigeria. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 120 elderly women from six out of the twelve political wards in the study area. Both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection were used to elicit information from the respondents. A focus group discussion was conducted with the elderly women groups, in each of the six wards. Frequency counts and percentages were used to summarise the data, while chi-square and the multinomial logit regression model were also used to analyse the data.

Keywords: elderly, women, community welfare, Nigeria

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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 49_3. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.

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Investigating students’ beliefs about Arabic language programs at Kuwait University

Author/s: Shaye S. Al-Shaye

Edition: Volume 49, Number 3, November 2009

Summary: The current study attempted to identify students’ of Arabic programs beliefs about their chosen programs. To achieve this purpose, a survey was developed to collect the data from randomly selected students in liberal-arts and education-based programs at Kuwait University. The results showed that students were statistically differentiated as a function of different beliefs insofar as the Arabic language programs are concerned. Yet beliefs were not just confined to materialistic benefits; students tended to value other types of benefits as well. Implications for educational policies and recommendations for future research were also included. The most important implication is that students along with their beliefs should be included in evaluating or revising the educational programs.

Keywords: Arabic programs, liberal arts, education, policy

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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 49_3. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.

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Wicked learning: Reflecting on Learning to be drier

Author/s: Barry Golding, Mike Brown, Annette Foley, Erica Smith, Coral Campbell, Christine Schulz, Jennifer Angwin & Lauri Grace

Edition: Volume 49 / Number 3 /  November 2009

Summary: In this final, collaborative paper in the Learning to be drier edition, we reflect on and draw together some of the key threads from the diverse narratives in our four site papers from across the southern Murray-Darling Basin. Our paper title, Wicked learning, draws on a recent body literature (Rittel & Webber 1973) about messy or ‘wicked problems’ as characterised by Dietz and Stern (1998). It picks up on our identification of the difficulty and enormity of the learning challenges being faced by communities, associated, at best, with a decade of record dry years (drought) and severely over-committed rivers. At worst, drought is occurring in combination with and as a precursor to recent, progressive drying of the Basin associated with climate change. Our research is suggestive of a need for much more learning across all segments of the adult community about ‘… the big picture, including the interrelationships among the full range of causal factors …’ (Australian Public Service Commission, APSC 2007: 1) underlying the presenting problem of drying. We conclude that solutions to the messy or wicked problem of drying in an interconnected Basin will lie in the social domain.

This will include building a wider knowledge and acceptance of the problems and likely future risks across the Basin including all parts of communities. The problem of drying as well as its causes and solutions are multidimensional, and will involve comprehensive learning about all five key characteristics of other ‘wicked’ policy problems identified in previous research in the environmental arena. The narratives that we have heard identify the extreme difficulty in all four sites of rational and learned responses to being drier as the problem has unfolded. All narratives about being drier that we have heard involve a recognition of a combination of the five characteristics common to wicked problems: multi-dimensionality, scientific uncertainty, value conflict and uncertainty, mistrust as well as urgency. All narratives identify the importance of social learning: to be productive, to be efficient, to survive, to live with uncertainty, to be sustainable and to share. Combating the extent and effects of drying, causality aside, will require new forms of learning through new community, social and learning spaces, apart from and in addition to new technological and scientific learning.

Keywords: Murray-Darling Basin, climate change, environment, community education

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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 49_3. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.

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Learning to be drier in dryland country

Author/s: Erica Smith & Coral Campbell

Edition: Volume 49, Number 3, November 2009

Summary: This research project, part of a much larger study, considered how people in regional communities learnt to deal with the impact of reduced water availability as a result of drought or climate change. The communities in the Mallee-Wimmera region of Victoria, Australia, were the focus of this study and a range of local people from different sectors of the communities were involved in interviews, which became our main data source. We recognise the limitation that not all viewpoints could possibly be accessed in the participant selection process. The resultant data indicated that significant changes were being made to local practices as a result of the learning taking place and that there were a range of processes which enabled adult learning across the communities.

Keywords: Mallee-Wimmera, local practice, adult learning, communities, climate change

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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 49_3. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.

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Learning to be drier: a case study of adult and community learning in the Australian Riverland

Author/s: Mike Brown & Christine Schulz

Edition: Volume 49, Number 3, November 2009

Summary: This article explores the adult and community learning associated with ‘learning to be drier’ in the Riverland region of South Australia. Communities in the Riverland are currently adjusting and making changes to their understandings and practices as part of learning to live with less water. The analysis of adult and community learning derived from this research identified six different forms of learning. These are, learning to produce, learning to be efficient, learning to survive, learning to live with uncertainty, learning to be sustainable and learning to share. These forms of learning do not occur in isolation and separately from each other but to the contrary are occurring simultaneously with and alongside each other. Further, it is argued that the people and communities in the Riverland, through learning to live with the effects of climate change and less water, are at the forefront of learning to be drier.

Keywords: sustainability, climate change, drought, adult and community learning

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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 49_3. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.

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Bearing the risk: Learning to be drier mid-river

Author/s: Barry Golding & Jennifer Angwin

Edition: Volume 49, Number 3, November 2009

Summary: This paper investigates learning related to the phenomena of drying over the past decade in the southern Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, as perceived in a mid-river site within the western Riverina of New South Wales, Australia. The insights from audio-recorded interviews, with a wide range of adults across the water-dependent community, mostly relate to the catchment of the Murrumbidgee River in the Shire of Hay. Our overarching theme is about how people are learning about, understanding and bearing the risks, of what is widely regarded as a prolonged drought. For some, the learning is about how to cope with less water in the Basin, and particularly from the river, as predicted in the climate change literature. Our narrative-based, empirical research registers the felt experience of those located, in situ, as a severe ‘irrigation drought’ extends into 2009. The paper dramatises the many obstacles to learning how to think and act differently, in difficult and rapidly changing ecosocial circumstances.

Keywords: Murray-Darling Basin, drought, risks, climate change

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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 49_3. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.

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Water, weeds and autumn leaves: learning to be drier in the Alpine region

Author/s: Annette Foley & Lauri Grace

Edition: Volume 49, Number 3, November 2009

Summary: Our paper explores how and what adults living and working in the Alpine region of Victoria understand and are learning about the changes to water availability, in a time when the response to water availability is subject to extensive debate and policy attention. Interviews for this study were conducted in the towns of Bright and Mount Beauty, with participants drawn from across the Alpine region. The interviews focused on what local stakeholders from the Alpine region understood about water availability in the region and how and what they had learned about living and working with climatic changes in their local area. The findings of our study see that there was evidence of a strong understanding of the direct and indirect impact of climate change on participants’ local community area. The study also sees evidence of learning through a community ‘frames of reference’ as outlined by Berkhout, Hertin and Dann et al.

Keywords: water availability, policy, climate change, community

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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 49_3. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.

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Learning to be drier in the southern Murray-Darling Basin: Setting the scene for this research volume

Author/s: Barry Golding & Coral Campbell

Edition: Volume 49, Number 3, November 2009

Summary: In this paper we undertake a brief review of the literature related to the background of water in the southern Basin, and of the literature related to adult and community learning about water. We also describe the overall method of the project, in order to set up the context for the four, site-specific case studies that follow. These ‘site’ papers are presented in terms of their perceived positions in the broad Basin or water catchment. The first site paper, Water, weeds and autumn leaves: learning to be drier in the Alpine region  (Foley & Grace 2009) examines water-related learning issues in the Victorian Alpine region, particularly from the perspective of diverse community frames of reference (Bekhout, Hertin & Gann 2006). In this alpine ‘water harvesting’ area, the learning has to do with the many impacts of drying, aside from less snow and water runoff, particularly to do with wildfires, weeds, conservation and tourism.

Keywords: Murray-Darling Basin, water-related learning issues, Victorian Alpine, water harvesting, environmental impacts

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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 49_3. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.