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Educating Australia: Challenges for the decade ahead
Where is Australian schooling heading? What forces will shape its future direction? How ready are students, teachers, policy makers and education institutions for the challenges being thrust on them? With chapters ranging across the landscape of school-age education, this book proposes new, evidence-based directions for change in teaching, assessment, curriculum, funding and system-wide collaboration. It provides a grounded, forward-looking guide to questions that will be central to Australia’s educational debates, and our performance, in the years ahead. Drawing directly on research, innovation and policy analysis at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, this book creates an engaging and rigorous overview of the issues confronting school-age education in Australia, and provides insights and actions to help shape our responses into the future.
426 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 18, 2017
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About the author
Tom Bentley
24 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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March 19, 2017
This is a (mostly) well written, thought provoking collection of essays concerning the state of education right now in Australia and the challenges we face in improving the system to meet high public expectations. Some of the thoughts will be well known already - it is possible that the various ideas have all been previously aired - but collecting them into a single volume is gold. And yes, some of the essays are informed not just by evidence but also by personal philosophy. But all the ideas provoke thought - not just in terms of defining the problem but also in trying to think of solutions.
One or two chapters are heavy going and seem pretty opaque. One of the contributors in particular is not Voltaire. Mostly, though, the essays are really well written, lucid and engaging. Even the ones that might have seemed obscure - the one on learning Chinese, for example - had an excellent analysis of why non-native speakers are discouraged from continuing with the language, even when they love it and do well at it.
It is especially refreshing to see a collection focused exclusively on Australian schools. So many English language education texts focus on Britain. At best, you sometimes get a Cook's world tour of education. But to have a long and diverse collection of thought dedicated to our own system, dealing with current issues and Australian issues (e.g. high proportion of non-government schools; inequity of funding; lack of a meaningful leaving qualification; the mismatch between curriculum and assessments) is just what we have been waiting for.
I recommend Educating Australia without hesitation.
One or two chapters are heavy going and seem pretty opaque. One of the contributors in particular is not Voltaire. Mostly, though, the essays are really well written, lucid and engaging. Even the ones that might have seemed obscure - the one on learning Chinese, for example - had an excellent analysis of why non-native speakers are discouraged from continuing with the language, even when they love it and do well at it.
It is especially refreshing to see a collection focused exclusively on Australian schools. So many English language education texts focus on Britain. At best, you sometimes get a Cook's world tour of education. But to have a long and diverse collection of thought dedicated to our own system, dealing with current issues and Australian issues (e.g. high proportion of non-government schools; inequity of funding; lack of a meaningful leaving qualification; the mismatch between curriculum and assessments) is just what we have been waiting for.
I recommend Educating Australia without hesitation.
Displaying 1 of 1 review