Curios of the week #7

Clippings, endnotes and reaping the Twitter harvest

Image via AI

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This week has been the second and final week of our term break. The family and I made it down to the beach at Point Lonsdale.

I’ve been reading a couple of books, a 1984 history of the D-Day landings by Max Hastings that I posted online and a few took exception to — Hastings is apparently a declinist — and the first novel I have picked up in a while — The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I haven’t made it very far with the novel yet.

In my role, you can go to the beach but you can never quite leave work behind — in a sense, I never do anyway with all the writing. This is worth considering if you are making your way in a career as a teacher.

This week’s curios include news from Canada, England, Finland and Scotland, a little reflection on the design of research studies, misinformation and conspiracy theories, and more.

Senate inquiry of the week

Submissions to the Australian Senate’s inquiry into the issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms have now closed and this week, the final ones have been appearing on the inquiry website.

I wrote about the Queensland University of Technology Centre for Inclusive Education (C4IE) submission earlier in the week, as well as a bizarrely off-topic submission from the Australian Education Union.

In addition to these, there is a curious submission from Children and Young People with a Disability Australia (CYDA) which is based around a series of three case studies. Reading these case studies, I feel empathy for the parents and students involved. However, short of hinting at the need for some kind of revolution, it is difficult to figure out what these parents and students think would be concrete and practical steps to address the issues they face. Much of the submission is about challenging the language used by the senate inquiry and equating the ‘disruption’ mentioned in the inquiry with children with a disability.

I do not believe all disruption, or even the majority of it, is the result of disability — although I guess that depends on how broadly we define disability. Kids are not perfect and sometimes they just mess about because they can or because it’s fun or because it avoids work.

To illustrate the difficulty of enacting reform based on the views of disability and inclusion campaigners, the author of ‘Case study 3’ in the CYDA report strongly rejects an evidence-based approach known as, “School Wide Positive Behaviour Support.” This is pretty much the same Positive Behaviour Intervention Supports (PBIS) praised by C4IE in their submission.

It’s difficult terrain to navigate but I’m am sure the Senators will figure it all out. It seems they have now started holding hearings. I’ve checked my mailbox but as yet, I have found no invitation.