The Master of Arts program in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (MATEFL) has been operating since 1998. To date, it has produced approximately 300 graduates expected to fill various English teaching positions in Thailand at all levels. Up till the time that this research began, the MATEFL program had never been formally evaluated. Therefore, there was practically no information regarding the effectiveness of the program. The introduction of educational reform and increased quality assurance in Thailand raised concerns about the quality of educational programs and acted as an impetus to program evaluation. This evaluation examined the impact of the MATEFL program on the graduates from the first three years of the program. The research design included a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods: document reviews, surveys, and semi-structured interviews. The program documents and the quality assurance documents were examined. Survey questionnaires were administered to the program stakeholders: (1) the graduates; (2) the students who started but did not complete the program; (3) the staff; and (4) the graduates’ employers. The interviews were conducted with purposefully selected participants from the first three groups of stakeholders. Data analysis methods included descriptive statistics and content analysis. The evaluation findings indicated that the program had a positive impact on the program graduates in preparing them to be English teachers. In addition, the program achieved its goal in developing the quality and standards of English teachers to meet workplace requirements. The evaluation offers recommendations for improvement of the program in six areas: professional development, teaching and learning process, teacher education, evaluation utilization, program management, and organization change. The evaluation also offers recommendations for the improvement of the program evaluation process, as well as for future research.

This study focused on a developing volunteer training program provided by the Royal Thai Police, using a responsive evaluation to improve its effectiveness. The research was set in the context of significant changes being made in the training of tourist police volunteers in Phuket, one of the main tourist locations in Thailand. The study was based on considering phases of the training program’s development, using the Responsive Evaluation approach of Stake (1967, 2004) within an Interactive Form of Evaluation as categorized by Owen with Rogers (1999) and Owen (2006). The research considered Stake’s three phases or ‘countenances of evaluation’: antecedents, transactions and outcomes. Antecedents were concerned with the preparation step before the training programs were launched. Transactions were concerned with the program delivery which involved the processes and problems identified when the programs were in operation. Outcomes involved the results of the training programs which provided a measure of how effective the training programs had been. The three phases of the evaluation, in which standards were established and judgements made in order to identify the effectiveness of three specific programs, involved both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The antecedents included questionnaires, a focus group interview and a document analysis. The transactions included various types of data provided by the stakeholders – namely, the program staff, volunteers, trainers and tourists – and the inquiry involved document analysis, a focus group interview, semi-structured interviews, a course feedback survey (volunteers), a simple street survey (tourists), logs and journals (trainers), personal reflections (program staff) and three case studies. The outcomes included a course feedback survey of the volunteers, a simple street survey of tourists in Phuket, and observations made by the program staff. The findings of the study were validated by means of triangulation of the outcomes in each phase. The research had small but significant outcomes. These included the development of a policy for creating more effective volunteer training programs provided by the Thai Tourist Police, demonstrating the effectiveness of Responsive Evaluation in assisting in the development of a training program policy, and highlighting key elements that are required to improve the organisation of volunteer training in Thailand. Overall, the outcomes drawn from the volunteers, trainers and tourists suggest that the volunteer training programs had, indeed, proved to be effective.

In 2004 the Victorian Office of Higher Education accredited a four-year undergraduate degree: Bachelor of Health Science (Myotherapy). This degree had stemmed from a three-year competency-based, Advanced Diploma of Myotherapy which is no longer accredited in the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. Myotherapy can be defined as the treatment and management of musculoskeletal pain. The Myotherapy degree program was developed as a content-based curriculum without a formal competency-based component. As with many vocational programs in the Higher Education (HE) sector, Myotherapy requires the development of both underpinning and acquired knowledge to carry out a number of procedural tasks. Consequently, this study intended to ascertain if there is a place for the formalisation of Competency-based Learning in Higher Education. A qualitative methodology using principles of grounded theory was used for the study. The data examined comprised documentation pertaining to competency-based programs combined with information from descriptive surveys and semi-structured interviews conducted with a cohort of participants experienced in teaching, lecturing and/or designing curriculum for competency-based programs in the VET and HE sectors. Data collected was coded throughout the collection process and analysed for identification of themes and interpretation. Results of the study suggest that competency-based learning has a place in the higher education sector and can be effective in those elements of a course which place an emphasis on procedural tasks. Its suitability was acknowledged as a component part of an integrated curriculum rather than the complete program. Results also suggest that the nature of competency-based programs in the VET sector tends to produce a rigidity of thinking which can be described as ‘protocolic’ and based on the ability to following specific procedures, whereas the aims of the HE sector require graduates to acquire functional knowledge based on analytic inquiry. This implies that the HE sector needs to look ‘beyond competency’ to an approach such as ‘capability’ to produce graduates with the required generic skills and graduate attributes considered to be both employable and possessing acceptable qualities within the broader community.

Higher education systems in developing countries have mixed results in satisfying their nations’ labour market requirements, and community needs and expectations. Oman, a member of the Gulf Country Council (GCC), sustained the rapid economic development that has featured within the region over the past three decades. However, a contentious issue for the GCC, including Oman, is the provision of higher education qualifications sufficient for graduates to compete successfully in local labour markets dominated by experienced expatriates. This study explores the factors contributing to high unemployment for the mass communications graduates of Oman’s principal educational facility, Sultan Qaboos University (SQU). Semi-structured interviews with graduates, students and their parents, university and government representatives and public and private employers have revealed a range of views about the employability of the graduates and the university course which sought to prepare them for the labour market. The analysis of the interview data revealed that conventional human capital themes failed to account for the range of views about the effects of the course on graduate employability. Until a decade ago, human capital principles that value years of learning served Oman well as it provided sufficient educational capacity to deliver graduates for its expanding public services. However, when the country’s burgeoning public sector ceased the automatic acceptance of SQU graduates, later cohorts from mass communications courses were unable to source work in Oman’s small private sector mass media industry. The findings from the study were that traditional human capital accumulation is insufficient to deliver jobs; the human risk capital is too high. Risk factors for mass communications students include course admission, curriculum content and delivery, language fluency and technology. Further, employer perceptions of the mass communications qualification and of graduates’ commitment to a work ethic were barriers to employment. A significant contribution of the research is the recognition that the framework of educational practices, associated with what has been termed social capital, provides an alternative and more constructive means of analysis the data. The findings of the research point to the need for a university in a country such as Oman to expand its educational responsibility by taking on a social capital curriculum whose principal feature is the establishment of communicative links between local communities, the university and workplaces. A social capital curriculum, increasingly pursued as best practice for developed countries, can deliver work ready graduates acceptable to employers. Valid for GCC and wider use, a model of the capital theory elements, processes and risks is included in this comparative study.

Since beginning in 1974, Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Australia has experienced significant changes due to the implementation of a series of government policies of vocational education and training reform. TAFE teachers are now part of a national Vocational Education and Training (VET) system and responsible for the delivery of National Training Packages and the Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF). Seemingly, the Australian government has underlined the value of a constructivist learning theory by actively seeking to embed this theory through initiatives originally implemented by the Australian National Training Authority (ANTA). These include a major pedagogical change to a student-centred approach that allows multiple perspectives and stresses the importance of collaboration. Since the abolition of ANTA in 2004, their former roles were absorbed by the Federal Government Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) and later by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR). The aim of this qualitative study was to learn how TAFE teachers felt about various professional development activities and examine their individual perceptions of issues, concerns and assumptions about change in their working lives. Ethnographic techniques and participant observation enabled the gathering of primary data. The subsequent identification and rich description of their life in their educational environment added a cultural dimension that is not readily available through the application of quantitative or experimental methods.

This thesis reports on research conducted between 2004 and 2007 into the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in tertiary education institutions in Oman. The research was an exploration of English language teaching pedagogy with a particular focus on bilingual (English and Arabic) versus monolingual (English only) teaching and the role of first language (Arabic) usage in the classroom.

This is a study of a) the nature and incidence of independent learning defined as "knowing how to generate and direct the processes of learning...*(see p.3) in new entrant classroom settings and, b) the nature of the teacher-child interactions associated with such independent learning. Systematic observation was used at school entry and three months later, to identify aspects of independent learning and the associated teacher behaviours. Six categories of child directed acts identified the range of behaviours from which independent learning could be inferred. Each category of teacher behaviour that appeared to facilitate independent learning in children was developed as a "mirror image" of each category of child directed acts. The teacher and four children in two new entrant classes were observed over the whole day for five days during two observation periods, one at the beginning of Term three and the other after 12 weeks. Each class was involved in normal classroom activities that covered the whole curriculum. The children were engaging in a considerable amount of independent learning on entry to school and three months later. Many facilitative teaching acts occurred in the interactive style that was demonstrated in all aspects of the curriculum. The teachers spent a considerable portion of teaching time assisting children in one-to-one teaching situations and in small groups, encouraging their responses and fostering and supporting independence in their learning. There was some difference observed between teachers in the attention given to different categories and in the facilitative behaviour occurring in one-to-one interactions and small group teaching interactions. A way of teaching emerges that differs from a teaching agenda determined by didactic, traditional instruction. The two teachers were deemed to be using the children's agenda to foster and support them in independent learning in the various curriculum areas. Some of the practical and philosophical features of the New Zealand education system that may contribute to this particular style of teaching are discussed. The theories of learning and teaching deriving from this study place a value on independent learning (as here defined) in new entrant children and on the teacher’s role in providing opportunities for it to develop. Independent learning a) ensures the continuation of learning at times when the teacher is directly engaged with other children, and b) derives from a teacher expectation that children will be able to actively process ideas and make some decisions about their learning. It engenders a power in children that sustains the momentum of learning.

An investigation into the assessment of the moral components which were developed by John Wilson, is reported. Tests fox the classroom measurement of two components were developed. The components were; PHIL(CC), the claiming of concern for other persons as an overriding, universal, and prescriptive principle in moral decision making; and; GIG, knowledge of factual information which is relevant in making moral decisions which subjects face. The test development exercise was undertaken at a time when public interest in moral education was growing. The recent demand for moral education in Auckland is reviewed. Over the last fifteen years, since the Currie Commission Report, reports by committees investigating the purposes of schools have increasingly emphasised moral and social education as school objectives. The Department of Education appeared to be sympathetic towards the cause of moral education. The submissions made by the public during the Educational Development Conference suggested that, in general, parents and citizens were prepared to consider innovative programmes in social or moral education, although there was little agreement on what form such training or education should take. A number of teachers were supporters of moral education. The primary purpose in constructing tests for Wilson's components was to provide an instrument which would assist in the evaluation of moral education curriculum projects in Auckland secondary schools. Evidence concerning descriptive, content, domain selection, construct and concurrent validity is presented. Kuder-Richardson, retest and criterion-referenced reliability studies were undertaken. It is claimed that an instrument with sufficient validity and reliability has bean produced for the summative evaluation of curriculum projects, and the diagnostic investigation of class groups using the test as a criterion-referenced measure. Auckland intermediate and secondary school pupils were surveyed, using the tests produced and punch card recording in an attempt to identify significant variables. Over 1,100 children completed the tests under controlled conditions. Significant variables identified using the test for PHIL(CC) were socio-economic level for twelve-year-old children, and intelligence for sixteen-year-old children. The effect of schooling appeared to be significant at all levels. Age does not appear to markedly increase children's concern for others. Age was related to performance in the knowledge test. Older children knew more. Other significant variables for GIG were socio-economic level (middle levels performed better) and the effects of schooling. There was some evidence that females know more than males. In both tests it appears that there is considerable interaction between the variables. Suggestions for the further development of the tests are given.

This thesis investigates the problem of how to speed up the process through which professional educators learn how to significantly improve disadvantaged students’ academic achievement. The problem is addressed through three questions: (i) What are the most effective national and international examples of school improvement? (ii) What is the condition of the evidence base for making claims of effectiveness? (iii) What can be learned about developing and implementing effective school improvement from those national and international examples? The thesis begins by searching international and national school improvement literature to find those initiatives with the strongest evidence of effectiveness. One initiative in England (the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies) and four initiatives in the United States (Success For All, Direct Instruction, The School Development Programme & a district-wide reform in New York District #2) were considered to have strong evidence of effectiveness. Two initiatives in New Zealand (the Numeracy Development Project & the Strengthening Education in Mangere and Otara project commonly called SEMO) had evidence that showed promise. It is argued that patterns of investment in different types of evaluation and ease of access to achievement information account for the difference between the strong international evidence and promising evidence in New Zealand. A series of investigations in the middle of the thesis focus on the processes set up in the initiatives to help practitioners learn effective reform practices. Three models of learning processes are developed which reveal a strong preference for vertical learning in England and the United States and a more balanced vertical-horizontal learning preference in New Zealand. Despite those contrasts, three characteristics were found to be common to all seven effective initiatives. They are a sharp focus on instructional improvement, a set of standardised practices, and, learning connections to transfer the reform ideas into practice. The latter part of the thesis transforms those three characteristics into a theory for schooling improvement which contribute to a faster and more effective reform process.

In this thesis I portray through a history of music and art education in New Zealand the forms knowledge production took in these subject and the discourses within which they were embedded. This enables a more comprehensive understanding of curriculum and unearths connections with what Lyotard (1984) described as 'grand narrative' used to legitimate knowledge claims and practices at certain historical moments. Through such histories we may chart the progress of European civilization within the local context and provide the historical raison d'être for the present state of affairs in music and arts areas of the New Zealand curriculum. Curriculum and its 'reform' representing in part the distribution of public goods and services, has been embroiled in a market project. I seek to expose the politics of knowledge involved in the construction of the notion of The Arts within a neo-liberal policy environment. This environment has involved the deliberate construction of a 'culture of enterprise and competition' (Peters, 1995: 52) and, in the nurturing of conditions for trans-national capital's freedom of movement, a withdrawal from Keynesian economic and social policy, an assault on the welfare state. The thesis delves beyond the public face of policy-making. It follows and scrutinizes critically the birth of The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum to the production of the first draft of the proposed policy presented by the Ministry of Education in 1999. I examine it as a site of the 'accumulation of meaning' (Derrida, 1981: 57) through a discussion of the history of meaning of 'art' and 'art' education. There is much of value in the Draft document. In particular, the arts have been invested with a new intellectual weight and the professionalism, passion and dedication of those involved in its writing shines through in each of the subject areas within the arts. However, through a process of analysis, I will show that there has been, in fact, a fashioning of a new container for the isolation of artistic knowledge. This is despite official sentiments mentioning possibilities within the document for flourishing separate Music, Art, Dance, and Drama education that implies increased curriculum space. The Draft Arts (1999) document both disguises and rehashes the 'master narrative' of universal rationality and artistic canons and is unlikely to work towards revitalising or protecting local cultural identities though not through lack of intention. I use Lyotard's notion of 'performativity' to critique notions of 'skills' and their 'development' which are implicitly and explicitly stated within the 'levels' of development articulated in the Draft Arts (1999) document. It is argued that this conflation works to enforce cultural homogeneity. There are clear dangers that the Draft Arts' (1999) conception of 'Arts Literacies' might operate as mere functional literacy in the service of the dominant culture's discourse of power and knowledge-one which celebrates the art-as-commodity ideal. It is argued that the Education Ministry's theoretical and epistemological construction of The Arts as one area of learning is unsound, and in fact represents a tightening of modernism's hierarchical notion of culture. New Zealand, now post-colonial or post-imperialist, both bi-cultural and multi-cultural, is situated on the south-western edge of the Pacific Rim. Culturally, it now includes Pacific Island, Asian, and new immigrants, as well as Maori and people of European descent. This therefore necessitates aesthetic practices which, far from promoting a set of universal principles for the appreciation of art - one canonical rule or 'standard' - recognise and reflect cultural difference. Merely admitting cultural difference is inadequate. By working away critically at the deeply held ethno-centric assumptions of modernism, its selective traditions concerned with 'practices, meanings, gender, "races", classes' (Pollock, 1999: 10), its universalising aesthetics of beauty, formal relations, individuality, authenticity or originality, and self-expression, of 'negativity and alienation, and abstraction' (Huyssens, 1986: 209), it is possible to begin to understand the theoretical task of articulating difference with regard to aesthetics. The development of the arts curriculum in New Zealand is placed within the modernism/postmodernism and modernity/postmodernity debates. These debates have generated a number of questions which are forcing us to re-examine the assumptions of modernism. The need for the culture of modernism to become self-critical of its own determining assumptions in order to come to understand its cultural practices, is becoming an urgent theoretical task, especially in disciplines and fields concerned with the transmission of acquired learning and the production of new knowledge. The culture of modernism is often taken as the historical succession of twentieth century avant-gardes (B. Smith, 1998) yet the culture of modernity, philosophically speaking, strictly begins with René Descartes several hundred years earlier, with a pre-history in the Florentine renaissance and the re-discovery of Graeco-Roman artistic and literary forms going back to the thirteenth century. Aesthetic modernism identifies with consumer capitalism and its major assumptions are rationalist, individualist and focus upon the autonomy of both the 'work of art' and the artist at the expense of the artwork, its reception and audience within its localised cultural context. The ideological features of humanism/liberalism - its privileging of the individual subject, the moral, epistemological and aesthetic privileging of the author/artist - are examined as forces contributing to modernism's major values (or aesthetic). Such approaches, it is argued, were limited for dealing with difference. The security and reproductive nature of modernistic approaches to curriculum in the arts areas are destabilized by thinking within the postmodern turn, and the effects of the changes questioning the basic epistemological and metaphysical assumptions in disciplinary fields including art/literature, artchitecture, philosophy and political theory, are registered here, within the field of the education in and through the arts. In a seminal description or report on knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard defines postmodernism as 'incredulity towards metanarratives' (1984: xxiv). Postmodernism, he argues, is 'undoubtedly part of the modern', 'not modernism at its end but in its nascent state and that state is constant (1984: 79). After Lyotard, postmodernism might be seen, therefore, not just as a mode or manner or attitude towards the past, but also as a materializing discourse comprising a dynamic reassessment and re-examination of modernism and modernity's culture. The thinking subject (the cogito) seen as the fount of all knowledge, its autonomy, and transparency, its consideration as the centre of artistic and aesthetic virtuosity and moral action, is subjected to intellectual scrutiny and suspicion. The need for an aesthetics of difference is contextualised through an examination of western hierarchies of art and the aesthetics of marginalized groups. I use the theories of poststructuralist, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, to examine the concept of difference. These theoretical inspirations are used as methodological tools for offsetting the privileging of the liberal individual and individualism. Rather than the mere consideration of difference in curricula, I seek to insert and establish the principle of an aesthetics of difference into relations of pedagogy and curricula. The implications for professional practice resulting from a recognition of a politics of representation are examined and a politics of difference. I argue that art education in all its manifestations can no longer avoid the deeper implications of involvement with representation, including forms of gender, ethnicity and class representation as well as colonial representation. The Western canon's notion of 'artists' and their 'art', often based upon white bourgeois male representations and used in many primary school classrooms, are part and parcel of 'social and political investments in canonicity', a powerful 'element in the hegemony of dominant social groups and interests' (Pollock, 1999: 9). Difference is not appreciated in this context. School art, music, and drama classrooms can become sites for the postmodern questioning of representation of 'the other'. In this context, an aesthetics of difference insists upon too, the questioning of images supporting hegemonic discourses, images which have filled the spaces in the 'chinks and cracks of the power/knowledge-apparati' (Teresa de Lauretis, 1987 cited in Pollock, 1999: 7-8). What would an 'eccentric rereading', a rediscovery of what the canon's vicarly cloak disguises and reveals, mean for music, and for the individual arts areas of the curriculum? I hope to reveal the entanglements of the cultural dynamics of power through an examination of the traditions of Truth and Beauty in imagery which are to be disrupted by inserting into the canon the principle of the aesthetics of difference. Art education as a politics of representation embraces art's constitutive role in ideology. This is to be exposed as we seek to unravel and acknowledge which kinds of knowledges are legitimised and privileged by which kinds of representations. Which kinds of narratives, historical or otherwise, have resulted in which kinds of depictions through image? A recognition of the increasing specification of the subject demands also the careful investigation of colonial representation, the construction of dubious narratives about our history created through visual imaging and its provision of complex historical references. How have art, music, dance, drama been used in the service of particular political and economic narratives? Through revisioning the curriculum from a postmodern perspective, suggestions are made for an alternative pedagogy, which offsets the ideological features of humanism/liberalism, one in which an aesthetics of difference might pervade cultural practices - 'systems of signification', 'practices of representation' (Rizvi, 1994). I draw upon Lyotard's notion of 'small narratives' (1984), and present an investigation of what the democratic manifestation of 'the differend', and multiple meaning systems, might indicate in terms of 'differencing' music education as a site in which heterogenous value systems and expression may find form. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.