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Youth Research News Vol 10 No 2; August 2000In this issue: A Report for the Victorian Full Service Schools Program Out of Education The Out of Education report was launched by the Minister for Post Compulsory Education, Training and Employment, Lynne Kosky, at the Brotherhood of St Lawrence on Wednesday 26 July. A number of young people who are currently out of education attended as well as one of the young people interviewed for the report. Each of them spoke briefly about their experiences of school, their lives now and further education opportunities. Helen Stokes from the Youth Research Centre spoke about the report, emphasising the finding that while the young people might be given the label `at risk', they did not see themselves in that way. They saw themselves in at times difficult, but changing, temporary circumstances. This is illustrated by some young people who were interviewed for the report. They were unable to attend as they are now in full time education or work. The report is available from DEET, contact Jill Anwyl (fax: 03 9637 3755) or from the Youth Research Centre. There is no cost for the report but a postage and handling fee of $5 applies if ordered from the YRC. As of 14 August anyone using the old 9344 telephone prefix to call the YRC (or any University of Melbourne number) will no longer get through. Only the new prefix 8344 will work from that date. A recorded message will be in place for 3 months on the 9344 prefix advising that the old prefix is decommissioned and to use 8344. Strategies for Engaging `At Risk' Youth in Education to Year 12 The project is well under way. Interviews have been completed in most of the States and Territories. Getting all the places and young people to interview has been quite a challenge and some different ways of contacting the young people have been used. We have a few placement students from different ethnic backgrounds who are interviewing young people in their communities. We have also asked some of the young people we have interviewed to now be the interviewers and they are locating other young people that they know in their communities. With the final report due at the end of September much of late August and September will be spent compiling and analysing the data. This should keep us all very busy throughout the Olympics! Victorian Youth Roundtables The Victorian Government's Office for Youth (located within the Department of Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs) is holding a series of Ministerial Youth Roundtables. The first was held on June 9, in which approximately 50 young people discussed and provided views of post-compulsory education and training. Members of the Post-Compulsory Education Review were present and took part in small group discussions. Roger Holdsworth from the Centre was the facilitator for this Youth Roundtable. A full report will be available in the near future. Further Roundtables will be held in Victorian regional, rural and metropolitan areas, around topics brainstormed and nominated by participants. Civics and Citizenship Education The Civics and Citizenship Education project is currently winding up, and is preparing its final publication. Roger Holdsworth, Debra Tyler, Helen Stokes and Shirley Carson from the YRC have been supporting a group of 25 Victorian schools who have been developing and researching approaches to the teaching of Civics and Citizenship Education in conjunction with the Commonwealth Government's Discovering Democracy project. These schools have now written about their initiatives and their findings and these reports are being compiled into a book which will highlight school practice. Four major sections: 'Whole School Approaches'; 'Classroom Teaching and Learning'; 'Active Citizenship' and 'Community Linkages' will be used to organise the stories. This book will be available later in the year. School and Service Links Roger Holdsworth and John Stafford are working on a small project to recommend on the development of more effective links between schools and youth service agencies in the area around Wodonga. The study will get perspectives from school-based and agency-based personnel, and develop some recommendations for ways to work together productively. Student Welfare Initiatives Evaluation Project Catholic Education has approved the research model to be used in the Student Welfare Initiative Evaluation project. The research project has been developed as a collaborative study between the Youth Research Centre and the Catholic Education Office, in conjunction with the Student Welfare Course in the Department of Learning and Educational Development at the University of Melbourne. It aims to determine the impact of participation in the Postgraduate Diploma in Educational Studies (Student Welfare) on whole school change in the area of health promotion and suicide prevention. The study will follow a number of course participants and schools across three years in order to provide the evidence of the effectiveness of both the processes and outcomes of student welfare professional development. Focus groups, interviews and surveys will begin shortly in a range of participating schools. Sue Wright has joined Johanna Wyn and Helen Cahill to work on the project. Sue will bring her extensive experience in Health Education to the task of conducting a literature review. Professional Development Workshops Helen Cahill has conducted a series of three drug education training workshops for teachers in Geelong, Colac and Warrnambool with a focus on the use of interactive teaching strategies. Workshops on Enhancing Resilience and Promoting Mental Health Education have been conducted for: Catholic Education Curriculum Co-ordinators and the Year 9 & 10 Conference, `The New Frontier'; and the ACHPER Tasmania Annual State Conference. Here & Now Theatre Forums Helen Cahill has workshopped and presented two forum theatre events with groups of young people. In May she led a group of primary and secondary students from a cluster of schools in Diamond Valley in a forum theatre piece developed as the keynote presentation for a middle years professional development conference. The theme of the forum was `Engagement and Us'. In June, Helen worked with a group of 18 Tasmanian students, aged 11 to 18 years to present the keynote address for the ACHPER Tasmanian annual state conference. The theme of the forum theatre was `Healthy Solutions: Insights and Challenges'. Completion of Drug Education Resources for Hong Kong Life Education Activity Program In June, Helen Cahill, in partnership with Fiona Banks of Ruby Pictures, worked with a range of students from schools in Hong Kong to workshop and shoot a series of trigger videos raising issues about substance use. The students aged 9 to 19 performed in a twinned set of materials developed in both Cantonese and English. July saw the final editing of the videos and animations. Helen will provide professional development training for the L.E.A.P (Life Education Activity Programme) team of educators who will implement the new program in schools in Hong Kong in September. Learning Conference Helen Stokes and Debra Tyler ran a workshop at the recent RMIT Learning Conference in Melbourne. Their topic was The Multidimensional Lives of Young People. Interestingly Helen and Debra combined the work of two research projects (Out of Education and Life Patterns) to provide the foundational thinking behind their presentation. Even though one project (Out of Education) deals with young people generally marginalised from the schooling and educational experience, the other (Life Patterns) looks at young people, who in the main, have gone on to do some form of tertiary education and are in general deemed successful in their schooling process. The workshop focussed upon issues which were relevant to both cohorts. Although a number of themes were explored in the main the message was a straightforward and simple one: schools, in particular, need to be more aware of the multidimensional lives of young people and cater more fully for that complexity and diversity of experience. The Victorian Association for the Teaching of English (VATE) State Conference The Victorian Association for the Teaching of English State Conference was held on 14 and 15 July at La Trobe University. Michael Crowhurst, a PhD student at the Youth Research Centre, facilitated a panel on Bullying and Homophobia that included Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli (Deakin University), Rodney Croome (Australian Council of Gay and Lesbian Rights/HREOC) and Nan McGregor (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays - PFlag). Around 200 teachers attended the session and posters and flyers were all snapped up. The bulk of the questions and comments from the floor concerned: the need for training that addressed practical strategies that teachers might use in classrooms; the need for work to open up the curriculum; the need for policy that supports sexual diversity; the need for policy that addresses harassment. Another key issue that surfaced was the need for school communities to work strategically to identify parents who might support work around sexual diversity. International Developments in Rural and Regional Education During July, the International Research and Training Centre for Rural Education hosted a research planning meeting in Beijing. The International Research and Training Centre for Rural Education, which is known as INRULED, was established at the University of Nanjing with the support of UNESCO. Its mission is to achieve socio-economic development in rural areas, especially in countries in which the majority of the population are rural dwellers, and to achieve the UNESCO goals of `Education for All'. This meeting brought together participants from ten countries (Australia, Mongolia, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Iran and Thailand) with administrators of the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO and participants from Chinese Universities. The goal of the meeting was to initiate a comparative study program on education for rural development in ten countries of Asia-Pacific. Johanna Wyn attended the meeting as the Australian participant, to report on recent work on rural education and to summarise the development of rural education in Australia. She reported that a review of the development of rural education in Australia from 1945 to the present day reveals three recurring themes: overcoming the difficulties posed by distance, isolation and low population density; developing culturally appropriate educational programs for Indigenous people; and overcoming the educational challenges posed by social division. In the 2000s, rural education is facing the additional challenges of social and economic change (which has been particularly detrimental for many rural communities), and the need to provide the necessary infrastructure that would enable rural communities to make use of the latest information technology. Increasingly, rural education is linked with community and regional development: education is seen as an integral and strategic element in the development of sustainable rural economies and viable rural communities. Within a broad pattern of disadvantage, the evidence reveals that some rural communities have developed highly successful and innovative educational programs. Innovative use of technology is evident from the earliest days of mass provision of education, as a means to provide high quality education for all young Australians. In more recent times, support for culturally appropriate, community-based educational programs has enabled the development of diverse, innovative and more effective rural education. The presentation drew especially on two recent national commissioned reports on the provision and experience of rural and remote education to which are based on research undertaken by the Youth Research Centre. The Higher Education Council's commissioned report, Rural and Isolated School Students and their Higher Education Choices, available on the web at: http://www.detya.gov.au/nbeet/publications/pdf/99_11.pdf The Youth Research Centre's Survey of Rural and Remote School Education *, undertaken for The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's report, National Inquiry into Rural and Remote Education, is also available. The comparative study program and ongoing links with researchers in rural education at INRULED will link The University of Melbourne's interest in rural research and development which is being focussed through the University's Goulburn Valley initiatives. * a limited number of copies of this report are available from the Youth Research Centre, while stocks last. The report is free, however there is a $5 postage and handling fee. Connect 123 Connect is the journal supporting student participation. It has been published bi-monthly since late 1979, and documents examples in the areas of school governance and of curriculum approaches, in which students have a real role in decision-making and implementation. Issue 123 (June 2000) contains articles from South Australia about a series of student forums advising on a review of the Education Act, a discussion of the possibilities of youth partnership accountability for mental health services, a report from Berwick Secondary College in Victoria about their Student Voice organisation, information about primary school SRCs in Queensland and the Northern Territory and a report on an SRC teacher professional development day in Victoria. Copies of Connect are available from the Youth Research Centre for $4 plus postage; or subscriptions ($20 pa individual; $30 pa organisational - 6 issues a year) are available from Connect, 12 Brooke Street, Northcote 3070 Victoria Australia. News from Around the Centre... Peter Dwyer Peter Dwyer is currently overseas. He attended the Nordic Youth Research Symposium 2000 in Helsinki, where he presented a paper titled Destinations and Destiny - Transitions Through the 90s. Peter is now having a much earned break in France and will be back at the YRC in September. Congratulations to Heather Hebron Congratulations to Heather Hebron who has commenced a new two year teaching position in Hong Kong, from everyone at the YRC - we wish her well in this new position! Emma Goedemans Emma Goedemans, a fourth year Bachelor of Social Work student at RMIT is doing her placement at the YRC. She will be working under the supervision of Roger Holdsworth and Johanna Wyn and will be assisting in the Evaluation of the Lighthouse Middle Schools project. We welcome Emma to the Centre and hope she enjoys her time here. GST Reminder! Just a reminder to all YRC subscribers that membership and publication prices have increased as a result of the Goods and Services Tax. Membership rates are now:
For a list of Publications and their cost, please check our website at: http://yarn.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/yarn/yrc-home.html Or you can either call the Centre on 03 8344 9633 or send an email to order a copy of the catalogue. Research Projects Choose YRC Bachelor of Teaching students are required to undertake a project in their final semester. Of the 120 students more than 40 have nominated members of the YRC staff to supervise their projects! Workshops Run By Foundation for Young Australians The Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) is hosting workshops around Australia in August to teach participants from the community, government and not-for-profit sectors the principals of Social Marketing. The workshops will be conducted by internationally recognised Social Marketing expert, Mr Douglas Franklin, who is currently the Executive Director of the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America. With over 20 years management experience in political, private and public sector organisations Doug was formerly the President and CEO of The Canadian Centre for Philanthropy, the Commissioner of the Canadian Red Cross Society and the Director of Social Marketing for the International Youth Foundation Workshop participants will learn the basics of Social Marketing, which is a strategy used internationally in the community and non-government sectors to successfully market 'concepts' and 'ideas' and to attract social investment from the corporate sector. The workshops will address issues such as why Social Marketing is necessary; how NGOs can benefit from partnerships with the corporate sector; how international trends are affecting the need for Social Marketing; and the steps involved in formulating and implementing an effective Social Marketing plan. SYDNEY: Wednesday 9th August 1.00pm to 5.00pm Y on the Park BRISBANE: Friday 11th August 10.00am to 4.00pm Yungaba Conference Centre MELBOURNE: Tuesday 15th August 10.00am to 4.00pm Footscray Community Arts Centre ADELAIDE: Friday 18th August 10.00am to 4.00pm Way Hall PERTH: Monday 21st August 10.00am to 4.00pm Esplanade Hotel For information on one of the workshops please contact: Anna Sale Phone: 02 9357 2344 Email: anna.sale@ayf.org.au |
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