Academic literature on the topic 'Batchelor College'

Batchelor College is a tertiary education institution servicing the needs of Aboriginal communities mainly in the Northern Territory and “top end” of Australia. Within the School of Education there is the Teacher Education programme which has been operating in various forms since 1976, and has successfully piloted and implemented a community based operation known as Remote Area Teacher Education (RATE) (see Kemmis 1988). The program at mid- year 1990 underwent re-accreditation, and in his paper Reconstituting the Curriculum Framework for the Batchelor College Teacher Education Program, Ian Stewart (Head of School) argued for the development of four integrated strands over four sequential stages (Stewart 1989). These strands are: Community Studies; Curriculum Studies; Language Studies; and Professional Studies.

Since first coming to the Northern Territory in 1982 I have spent much time in Aboriginal Education in many different roles. Remote school Principal. Batchelor College lecturer and Centre of Aboriginal and Islander Studies Maths lecturer to name a few. I would like to share with you some of my findings over this time.

Aboriginal teacher education is a distinctive educational activity. How distinctive Aboriginal teacher education needs to be and the forms it might take are a matter for action research (McTaggart and Garbutcheon-Singh, 1986) by Aboriginal teachers, their communities, and teacher educators working in Aboriginal schools, and from teacher education instititions. But there is experience available from which it is reasonable to propose some general principles which should guide immediate efforts in Aboriginal teacher education.The pedagogical principles outlined below come from an action research project in Aboriginal teacher education conducted in the Northern Territory over the last two years. The project is known as D-Bate, the Deakin-Batchelor Aboriginal Teacher Education Program, a joint project of Batchelor College in the Northern Territory and the School of Education of Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria.

George Batchelor was a pioneering figure in two branches of fluid dynamics: turbulence, in which he became a world leader over the 15 years from 1945 to 1960; and suspension mechanics (or ‘microhydrodynamics’), which developed under his initial impetus and continuing guidance throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He also exerted great influence in establishing a universally admired standard of publication in fluid dynamics through his role as founder Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics , the leading journal of the subject, which he edited continuously over four decades. His famous textbook, An introduction to fluid dynamics , first published in 1967, showed the hand of a great master of the subject. Together with D. Küchemann, F.R.S., he established in 1964 the European Mechanics Committee (forerunner of the present European Society for Mechanics), which over the 24-year period of his chairmanship supervised the organization of no fewer than 230 European Mechanics Colloquia spanning the whole field of fluid and solid mechanics; while within Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Trinity College and successively Lecturer, Reader and Professor of Applied Mathematics, he was an extraordinarily effective Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from its foundation in 1959 until his retirement in 1983.

The interviews and discussions which are the main focus of this paper were conducted with five experienced teachers involved with Aboriginal education in remote rural schools in the Northern Territory – the minimum experience being five continuous years and the most being 15 years. Although the teachers have had greater experience working in the southern regions of the Northern Territory, many have experience in the Top End, interstate or overseas experience in indigenous and special education. As all ofthe teachers are stationed in the Northern Territory and all are currently teaching or supporting teachers in remote Aboriginal schools, the discussions regarding Aboriginal teacher training specifically concerned courses offered by Batchelor College and predominantly by the Remote Access Teacher Education Course (RATE).

Despite the introductory ‘rider’ being provided so that readers be ‘advised to remain aware of the possible cultural bias resulting’ from the fact that ‘those interviewed, although possessing vast experience of Aboriginal education are non-aboriginal people’ (p. 26), Buckley's article is a confused and poorly articulated comment on the views of a small number of non-Aboriginal educators relating to attendant issues to implementation of the Batchelor College Teacher Education program. Buckley gets off to a poor start by not getting the name of the program correct. His Remote Access Teacher Education program is in fact known as the Remote Area Teacher Education (RATE) program and has been referred to as this for most of the last fifteen years.

In the past ten years there has been an increasing interest in early childhood education in Aboriginal communities, particularly for 4-year-olds and under. The reasons for this are varied. One of the main reasons is the existence of the Community Development Employment Project (CDEP) where Aboriginal people in remote communities receive the equivalent of the unemployment benefit in exchange for work and training, usually four hours per day for five days. Other larger communities, for example Yuendemu or Maningrida in the Northern Territory, have considerable numbers of people studying, often at Batchelor College, and therefore some type of support is needed to take care of their young children. Increasingly Aboriginal people are taking on professional jobs in communities — teachers, health care workers and office administrators. All these factors are leading to a need to re-evaluate traditional forms of child care, which in these changing times is putting an unacceptable burden on older women and the extended family generally. Other pertinent reasons are the need for a more cohesive strategy to pass on cultural knowledge, to support language maintenance and language revival and support very young mothers who need the support of older women with more experience.

Fluidized beds are widely used in industry for carrying out a variety of chemical reactions and physical processes. Applications are frequently impeded by a lack of fundamental understanding of the mechanical behaviour of fluidized beds. Despite intensive experimental and theoretical study over the last four decades, there are still many aspects of fluidized beds and related fluid—particle systems that remain obscure. Further work is needed to understand interactions between the particles, influence of particle physical properties, development of non-obtrusive experimental techniques, and study of high-velocity beds and of novel-geometry beds in which particulate solids interact with interstitial fluid.An international symposium was held at Stanford University on 1–4 July 1991 to discuss recent developments and the current state of knowledge and understanding of the mechanical behaviour of fluidized beds and related fluid—particle systems. The symposium was sponsored by the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, and co-funded by the US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation and Electric Power Research Institute. The symposium was attended by 58 specialists representing academic institutions, industry and government research organizations in 11 countries. The diversity of background, coupled with differences in approach, ranging from purely theoretical to fully experimental, led to interesting exchanges where participants were often groping to understand the viewpoint of those involved. The result was frequently rewarding, occasionally perplexing, but certainly stimulating of thought and encouraging for further meetings of this nature.The scientific committee for the Symposium were G. K. Batchelor (Cambridge University), J. J. H. Brouwers (Trent University), J. Gibilaro (University College London), J. R. Grace (University of British Columbia), G. M. Homsy (Stanford University) (Chairman), R. Jackson (Princeton University), R. I. Nigmatulin (Moscow University) and W. Schneider (Techische Universität Wien).Each session began with an invited talk for one hour. This was followed by a series of 20-minute presentations. Participants were able at the end of each session to give brief (5 minute) unscheduled mini-presentations. Except for the latter, abstracts were submitted for the presentations, compiled by the organizers and distributed to participants. The meeting also included an informal workshop and a series of video and cinephotographic presentations not reported here. No formal proceedings of the meeting are being published; instead, this report is intended to summarize key findings and areas of discussion.The titles of all formal presentations are identified with asterisks in the list of References. The report is organized around common themes, and the sequence of presentations may not be that in which they were given. The authors have endeavoured to interpret and extract the essence of the presentations, and apologize if any of the presentations have been misinterpreted or overlooked.

The present study focussed on the information needs of the academic staff of Batchelor College.* It examined their access to and the provision of adequate and appropriate resources for the implementation of the Diploma and Associate Diploma level courses offered through the College. Batchelor College, an institute of tertiary education, is situated 100 kilometres south of Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. The content and the modes of delivery of Batchelor College courses are specifically designed to be culturally and socially appropriate to Aboriginal people, particularly those from traditionally oriented and 'remote' communities. It can only be within this framework that informed and sensitive research can be conducted. The main purpose of the current study was to investigate the information needs of staff delivering higher education courses to 'remote' Aboriginal students of Northern Australia. Six distinct areas of study emerged: 1, to identify the information needs; 2, to analyse the information-seeking behaviour; 3, to assess the level of satisfaction with current information sources; 4, to identify inadequacies in the existing information seeking processes; 5, to identify constraints experienced; and 6, to explore how future information needs may be catered for. A mailed survey instrument was specifically designed and implemented, and it attracted a response rate of eighty-seven percent. The population under investigation was the academic staff of Batchelor College, and the variables of: 1, location; 2, sex; 3, academic school; 4, designation; 5, tenure; 6, length of service; and 7, educational background were studied in relation to the questions asked. Results of the survey were analysed using 'Mystat: Statistical Applications', (1990). Frequency distributions were computed to determine the number of respondents who selected each option. A number of questions that elicited a written response were analysed, as were the many extra comments staff members made throughout the survey. The study found that the academic staff of Batchelor College are most affected by the location variable. It appears that how staff members use, regard and value the information sources used to inform their academic practice is affected by where a staff member is located. That is, the more isolated a staff member was, both geographically and professionally, the more significant were the findings of use of information sources. The study concludes with considerations of future planning strategies that could improve the access to and use of information. The study also identifies areas for further research. * Batchelor College, an institute of tertiary education, is situated 100 kilometres south of Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia (see Appendix 3).

The current debate at colleges of teacher education about introducing and redesigning learning programmes by including flipped classroom pedagogy emerged as a technology-integrated teaching strategy as a means to support students in an open distance learning approach. The flipped classroom pedagogy (FCP) is a student centeredness teaching strategy that the lecturer and student teachers interact through in-class or out-of-class activities. This chapter explores to what extent does a Flipped Classroom Pedagogy enhances student teachers' learning as compares to Direct Instruction method when learning to teach Economics at an open distance learning university. The study adopted quasi-experimental design, encompasses a pre-test, post-test and Flipped Classroom Pedagogy Questionnaire. A purposive sampling of Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) and Batchelor of Education (BEd: Senior and Further Education and Training phase) student teachers (n=371) was selected. Results showed that the used of Flipped Classroom Pedagogy in the quasi-experimental design and on the online survey influenced student teachers' performance as compared to the Direct Instruction method in the course. Further research is needed with larger samples including other teacher teaching methodology courses that will yield different results.