Diary dates

Teaching and Learning Seminar Series

Date: Various dates in August - September
Time: 1pm-2pm
Venue: Harold White Theatre, 757 Swanston Street
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A series of seminars and discussion panels will be presented throughout semester 2 to showcase exemplars of evidence-based practice in teaching, learning, and assessment. Speakers from a range of disciplines across the University will discuss the approaches they are taking to engage students in large class lectures, blended, and fully online learning environments.

Perfection Exhibition

Date: 12 September to 3 November
Time: 12.00pm - 6.00pm Monday to Saturday
Venue: Melbourne Science Gallery at the Melbourne School of Design
More Information

Dr Maurizio Toscano (Science Education) will be exhibiting work in the Melbourne Science Gallery’s exhibition: Perfection. His installation, Ark of Imperfection, captures what we consider imperfect about ourselves. The tension in the work between scientific and metaphysical symbolism heightens the sense of an existential crossroads brought about by scientific perfectionism.

R U OK? Day – September 13th

The University of Melbourne is a supporter of the R U OK? program.
Thursday September 13th is national R U OK? Day.

https://www.ruok.org.au/join-r-u-ok-day

Spring Writing Festival

Date: Saturday 15 September
Time: 10.00am - 4.30pm
Venue: Alan Gilbert Building, level 1, Theatre 4
RSVP

Registrations are now open for the Spring Writing Festival, Sat 15th September
Join this all day workshop to hone your writing skills.
For more information and to register: http://go.unimelb.edu.au/v7b6

Join the Spring Writing Festival! All day workshop – Sat 15th September
Register here: http://go.unimelb.edu.au/v7b6

Confirmation Seminar – Cristina Guarrella

Enacting the Northern Territory Preschool Science Games: Investigating teacher competence in early childhood science education

Supervisors: Professor Jan van Driel & Dr Caroline Cohrssen
Chair: Associate Professor Wee Tiong Seah
Date: Monday 17 September
Time: 9.00am
Room: L413/414

Exploring science through play based learning in early childhood education is emerging in state and federal policy agendas, emphasising the importance of science and innovation for Australia’s future economic prosperity. Research demonstrates that early childhood science education enables children to develop process skills to apply across learning contexts and facilitates enhanced understandings of science when studied formally at later stages of education (Eshach & Fried, 2005). Process skill development is promoted in the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009) which provides teachers with significant scope yet little guidance for teaching science, making early childhood teacher competence in science education critical. The role of the teacher is to apply pedagogical and content knowledge and skills while enacting the early years planning cycle to incorporate science learning into informal curricula. Using a multiple case study approach, this research aims to explore how teachers in the Northern Territory apply the early years planning cycle in the context of science education. This work will contribute to an emerging body of ethnographic evidence of early childhood science teaching practice in Australia and aims to develop practical strategies to support teacher competence in early childhood science education.

Jeff Kinsman - PhD confirmation seminar
Immeasurable knowledge in secondary school Humanities Education

Date: Monday 17 September
Time: 11.00am
Venue: Room: Q372, Level 3, KLD Building, 234 Queensberry St

Immeasurable knowledge in secondary school Humanities Education

Supervisors: Dr Maurizio Toscano and Associate Professor John Quay
Chair Advisory committee: Professor Fazal Rizvi

The curriculum and pedagogy of middle years humanities education has been shaped in recent times by innovations in assessment, measurement, clinical practice and the use of standards. Underpinning the emergence of this performance and auditing culture in schools are assumptions about the nature of human knowledge and learning. This raises questions about the extent to which knowledge in the humanities is measurable, and whether there exists a valuable but immeasurable form of knowledge. These assumptions and questions are to be investigated from the perspectives of the leading philosophical traditions of knowledge – namely the empirical, the analytical and the phenomenological. The findings will possibly have implications for the planning of Humanities classroom activities and the education of pre-service Humanities teachers.

Mathematics & Science Education Research Seminar

Why do students keep or drop mathematics in Year 11?
Presenter: Dr Ning Li

Date: Tuesday 18 September
Time: 12-1pm
Venue: Theatre Q227, Level 2, Kwong Lee Dow Building,
Melbourne Graduate School of Education
RSVP

It has been a national concern that in the last decades, participation in mathematics at intermediate and advanced levels continues to decline, and the gender gap in mathematics participation continues to widen. In a study aiming to understand the reasons for mathematics course enrolment choice, we derived an integrative motivation model as the theoretical base for an exploration of underlying factors that may affect the student’s choice. In this talk, I will report the rationale for identifying the related constructs in the model among a variety of alternative theories, and will use the derived model to write survey items for an instrument to measure factors predictive of mathematics enrolment choices.

PhD completion seminar – Tamara Borovica

Creative investigation of the embodiment of womanhood through dance: bodies, gender and becoming

Date: Tuesday 18 September
Time: 2.00pm-3.00pm
Venue: L514-515, 100 Leicester Street
Supervisors: Professor Helen Cahill and Professor Johanna Wyn
Panel Chair: Dr Dianne Mulcahy

This thesis uses dance as a method to explore the intangible, sensory and affective dimensions of young women’s bodily becomings, through a feminist lens. In doing so, I develop a rhizomatic, diffractive and aesthetic exploration of the embodiment of womanhood that evolved through collaborative performance ethnography with a group of tertiary students interested in creative methods and feminist issues. Drawing on Braidotti (2011), I consider women’s bodies as complex assemblages that cut across natural and cultural domains and can be seen as flows of becoming. To explore this complex entanglement of the natural and cultural in young women’s becomings, a group of non-dancers danced together to produce and explore feelings, thoughts, ideas, sensations and/or creative artefacts about embodied womanhood.

This approach to exploring embodiment and gender grew out of my reading of materialist ontologies of difference and becoming (Spinozian, Deleuzo-Guattarian, Baradian and Braidottian). By choosing dance as method and poetic analysis as an aesthetic form of writing, I aimed to create space for exploring the relationality and messiness of embodiment (and gender) while recognizing sedimented and stuck states, as well as flows of becoming. The open-endedness of the inquiry mediated exploration of the body as a series of processes or events through which the body is affecting and being affected by other bodies. These processes are situated in socio-material and historical contexts, but never fully limited by them. To this end, I sought to explore embodiment as flows of becomings of which only one element is gendering. When the body is experienced as a series of processes, embodiment is simultaneously about gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, belonging, longing, ability, talents and choices, economy, ecology, and much more. In this research, I discuss the embodiment of womanhood as a series of multidirectional reversible processes of connecting to, and disconnecting from, different material and virtual bodies, the effects of which were sometimes complimentary and sometimes conflicting. I suggest that young womanhood is actively produced (and provoked) through events of becoming, in a range of ways, often simultaneously contradicting its own production. Gendering, as a molar process, informed and limited young women’s becomings in this research, as much as it kindled and provoked their further unpredictable becomings. In that sense, this thesis presents a creative, collaborative exploration of the messiness of embodiment (of gender, and of living).

Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Australian Childhoods

Date: Tuesday 18 September
Time: 3.30pm-4.30pm
Venue: Frank Tate Room
Website

How do rural children negotiate economic insecurity and difference in their everyday lives? In this talk I present Australia-based data from my new book Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods to show how children draw on class-based ideas of moral worth, anchored in localised, racialised and gendered understandings, to negotiate financial hardship and insecurity. From cultural values around ‘hard work’ and egalitarianism, to local identities such as ‘feral’, ‘rough’, ‘rich kids’ and ‘blockie kids’, this talk will outline the central role of morality in children’s everyday efforts to navigate the precarious circumstances of the present. Based on 18 months ethnographic research with diverse children, their parents and teachers in a rural Victorian town, this data takes us deep into children’s everyday struggles to manage insecurity and belonging within a polarised economic landscape and at a time of rapid and far-reaching change in rural communities and the world at large.

Unpacking Education Brown Bag Seminar
Educating and Training Young People in the Nordic Therapeutic Welfare State

Date: Wednesday 19 September
Time: 4.00pm - 5.30pm
Venue: Room: L713/L714, Level 7, 100 Leicester St

Educating and Training Young People in the Nordic Therapeutic Welfare

This seminar focuses on current neoliberal Nordic welfare state reforms, era of multiple crises, therapeutic policies and practices and post-welfarist (youth) subjectivities. Taking Finland (“the happiest country in the world” and “the model country of education”) as an example, the seminar demonstrates a new more hybrid model of network governance in terms of education and training. The big question relates to the future of education and how changes and pressures in societies and globally impact education. The seminar is based on on-going research relating to current changes in transnational and cross-sectoral policies, support systems in the ethos of vulnerability and young people’s agency.

Mathematics & Science Education Research Seminar

A Case Study of a Teacher’s Belief System about the Nature of Mathematics and its Relationship to his Classroom Practice.

Date: Friday 21 September
Time: 2.00pm -3.00pm
Venue: Theatre Q227, Level 2, Kwong Lee Dow Building, Melbourne Graduate School of Education
RSVP

This presentation reports on a year-long case study which aimed to investigate an experienced high school teacher’s belief systems about the nature of mathematics and its relationship to his classroom practice. Research results indicate that the teacher’s belief system about the nature of mathematics is underpinned by abstractive, applied, social, and dynamic perspectives. Overall, the teacher’s practice adhered to his structuralized teaching trajectories. He believes that mathematics teaching is meant to cultivate students’ literacy through mathematical modelling. Accordingly, systemized problem-posing, in particular, and the designing of open-ended problems featured strongly in his teaching practice.

Tim Brabazon's Farewell

Date: Monday 24 September
Time: 3.00pm - 5.00pm
Venue: StudioFive, Level 5, 234 Queensberry Street Carlton
RSVP
On behalf of Dr Jim Watterston and the Executive of Melbourne Graduate School of Education please join us to acknowledge Tim Brabazon’s contribution to our School and to wish him well as he transitions to his new position at University Services.

2020 ARC DECRA Forum

Date: Wednesday 26 September
Time: 2.00pm – 4.00pm
Venue: 207 Bouverie Street (Theatre 2)
RSVP

This forum is for those who are considering applying for a 2020 ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award.
There will be an introduction by Prof Julie McLeod (Pro Vice-Chancellor, Research Capability), a discussion with an ARC College of Expert member and presentations from two current DECRA Fellows.
If you would like the opportunity to have your 100 word summary critiqued by the panel of experts, please send it through to ric-arcdecra@unimelb.edu.au. We will share a couple of these in the seminar.
A light afternoon tea will be provided from 1.45pm. Places are limited, please register.

For further information please contact: ric-arcdecra@unimelb.edu.au

FREE Professional Development Workshop For Casual Academics

Date: Thursday 27 September
Time: 10.00am - 4.00pm
Where: 120 Clarendon Street, South Melbourne

Are you a casual academic staff member working in Victorian universties?

Would like to learn from senior academics on how to take your career to the next level?

Your union, NTEU, is excited to invite you for a FREE professional development workshop to learn how to develop your career from senior academics, colleagues, and your union.
Also, let’s talk about improving your rights at work and have a social catch-up while we’re together. We’re going to have a quick meet-up of the Victorian Casuals Committee at 5:00pm on the same day of the event. If you’re keen to advocate for a change to the rules around casual employment and work together to win job security for casual academics, come along.

Please find attached the agenda for the workshop. Don't forget to RSVP for the event here .

Not a member yet? Join here

International learning environments research events

The ARC Linkage Project, Innovative Learning Environments and Teacher Change (ILETC) lead by A/Prof. Wesley Imms is organising two international research symposia - Transitions18 in Phoenix, Arizona on 8-9th October and Copenhagen 15-16th October.

Registrations are open for both events with full program details to be released soon. Learn more about the project on the ILETC website.

For any further information, please contact Joann Cattlin joann.cattlin@unimelb.edu.au

UoM: LGBTI+ Awareness Briefing

Date: Wednesday 31 October
Time: 1.00pm - 3.00pm

The aim of the session is to provide participants with an overall understanding of why LGBTI+ workplace inclusion is important to an organisation as well as to provide a level of comfort around terminology, explore challenges often faced by LGBTI+ employees and provide awareness on the impact that a culture has on the lived experiences of its employees.

At the end of this session, participants should be able to:

  • Explain the differences between sex, gender identity, gender expression and orientation
  • Outline some of the unique challenges faced by LGBTI+ employees
  • Respond to some of the common views questioning the need for inclusion initiatives
  • Understand the role that individuals play in creating a more inclusive culture

Steps to enrol and signup

  1. Login to TrainMe: https://uomtrainme.elmotalent.com.au/
  2. At the top of the page, click on Learning
  3. You will see 2 tabs on the page, My Learning and Course Catalogue
  4. Click on Course Catalogue
  5. In the search field, type “LGBTI” and click the search button
  6. The search will return “LGBTI Awareness Employee Briefing”
  7. Click on Sessions, you will see 1 session available
  8. Click on Enrol