Stephen Black

In 1978, just three years after the ending of the twenty-year war in Việt Nam, the author of this article, at the time a high school history teacher from Melbourne, visited the country as part of a university organized educational tour. It was rare in this early post-war period for Western groups to be permitted to visit Việt Nam. This article features photographs taken by the author that provide a visual resource for illuminating aspects of everyday living in what has become known as the “Subsidy Period” (1975–1986). It was a period of high socialism in Việt Nam, a doctrinaire Soviet model of government based on Marxism-Leninism. The state owned and centrally controlled the means of production (a command economy), providing subsidies to industries and agricultural cooperatives, and maintaining control over prices and incomes. The Subsidy Period is known in Việt Nam for its austere and deprived everyday living conditions involving the scarcity and strict rationing of consumer goods, particularly food supplies. In this period of economic and material hardships, citizens were required to be inventive and adaptive to survive. Only in the past two decades has the Subsidy Period been acknowledged officially in Việt Nam as a defined historical era, an “uncomfortable past” worthy of and permitted to being recounted and documented.

This article explores adult literacy pedagogy in the Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector which has long provided most adult literacy programmes. We draw on semi-structured interviews with a small group of eight teachers undertaken in 2005 as part of a project on the social capital outcomes of adult literacy programmes. Through highlighting various elements of student-centred pedagogy, the aim is to demonstrate what is commonly referred to as liberal-progressive pedagogy. We discuss how some educators in this pedagogical tradition have incorporated critical literacy, while others have critiqued it as largely accommodating the status quo. Since the mid-1990s however, the field of adult literacy in VET has been increasingly colonised by neo-liberal ideology which sees literacy equated with human capital. Consequently, adult literacy pedagogy in VET in recent times fits within an industry-dominated, competency-based and nationally accredited VET system in which, we argue, the curriculum provides few spaces for liberal-progressive pedagogy. As teachers express their concerns at the possible demise of liberal-progressive pedagogy in adult literacy in VET, it is timely to reflect on its key elements and its value for social justice.

Adult literacy provision began in Australia during a radical education era in the 1970s, and yet in recent decades, social class as a construct has been largely absent in the academic literature on adult literacy. We argue however that social class is essential to understanding adult literacy provision and furthermore that working class people have not been well served by this provision since the time literacy assumed enhanced status as human capital from the 1990s. We make our case through asking and responding to questions relating to the social class backgrounds of students and their teachers, how people are assessed to need literacy, what is taught, who undertakes research and who influences adult literacy policy. At the macro, structural level of analysis, we discuss the influence on adult literacy provision of the ruling class agendas of international agencies (i.e. the OECD) and national agencies representing capital. At the meso level, we discuss how the main adult literacy provider, technical and further education (TAFE) has failed to meet the adult literacy needs of working class students due to neo-liberal reforms. And at the micro, classroom level, we discuss some implications of class disparities between adult literacy teachers and their students.

Aims and objectives: To explore the resources that patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes drew upon to manage the disease in their daily lives.Background: Type 2 diabetes is a disease affecting Australian adults at a rate described as an ‘epidemic’. Treatment usually focuses on patient self‐management, which may require daily blood sugar monitoring, oral medications or injectable therapies, and regulating diet and exercise. Health research studies of patient self‐management, including those involving type 2 diabetes, have focused largely on individual‐centred definitions, though a number of studies, in particular qualitative studies, have indicated the positive role of social relationships and informal social networks.Design: Exploratory, qualitative.Methods: The project focused on 26 patients attending a diabetes centre for clinical consultations with centre staff including doctors, diabetes educators, podiatrists and dietitians. The consultations were observed and audio recorded, followed by semi‐structured, audio‐recorded interviews with the patients and separate interviews with the consulting professional staff.Results: Overwhelmingly the patients drew on informal social networks of support to manage the disease. Spouses were significant, sometimes presenting with the patient as a ‘team’ approach to managing the disease. Sons and daughters also played a significant support role, especially interpreting during consultations and explaining health information. In some cases neighbours and also local community organisations provided informal support. Only two patients claimed not to use informal social support.Conclusions: Informal social support in patients’ self‐management of type 2 diabetes was found to be an important factor to be considered by clinicians. The study suggested the need for a more deliberate or pro‐active policy to involve patients’ family and other informal social networks in treatment programs.Relevance to clinical practice: Clinicians may need document and incorporate informal social support in the development and implementation of patient management plans.

Much of the literature on social class and language study in schools argues that for middle-class parents and their children, languages are chosen for their capacity to offer forms of distinction that provide an edge in the global labour market. In this paper, we draw on data collected from interviews with parents and children in middle-class schools in Australia to demonstrate how a complex amalgam of elite, cultural identity and/or trade language discourses came into play to explain the choice (or not) to study a language and the choice of specific languages. For many of the parents languages provided a limited form of ‘civic multiculturalism’, as a means of better understanding and respecting the ‘other’. We argue that the value attributed to high status languages via this discourse, means their continued presence in schools hoping to attract middle-class parents, but their relative absence in schools with largely working-class populations, where more ‘practical’ concerns dominate.

This paper analyses research that has impacted on Australia’s most recent national policy document on adult literacy and numeracy, the National Foundation Skills Strategy (NFSS). The paper draws in part on Lingard’s 2013 paper, ‘The impact of research on education policy in an era of evidence-based policy’, in which he outlines the distinction between research for and of policy. The former is privileged in education policy formation and comprises largely statistical evidence (i.e., ‘policy as numbers’), often drawing on the globalised authority of organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), along with research commissioned by policy makers and undertaken by ‘policy entrepreneurs’. Research of policy represents academically oriented research, which is often qualitative, seeks new knowledge and may challenge the status quo. Through an analysis of studies cited in and thus impacting on the NFSS, we detail the main authors of research for policy and indicate their ideological commitment to the neoliberal agenda that now dominates the adult literacy and numeracy field in Australia and other OECD countries. Research of policy in this context has had little policy impact, but is nevertheless promoted by the authors as a means of countering the current reductionist discourses of adult literacy and numeracy reflected in national policy.

Despite the contemporary policy rhetoric of global citizenry and the importance of languages and intercultural capabilities, language learning in Australian schools struggles for recognition and support. The curriculum marginalisation of languages, however, is uneven, affecting some school sectors more than others. In this article, we examine the provision of languages in two government comprehensive high schools, both low socio-economic status, located in urban areas in New South Wales, Australia’s largest state. They are termed ‘residual’ high schools because they cater for the students remaining in the local schools while others attend either private or selective government high schools. We provide a qualitative picture of language provision in these two schools from the perspectives of key stakeholders – school principals, teachers, students and parents. We also draw on observational data of language classes. The aim is to provide, within a largely social class framework, an understanding of the state of language provision in these schools. We argue that currently students in these schools are experiencing unequal access to the linguistic and cultural capital associated with language learning relative to students in more privileged communities and schools.

This paper briefly considers Australia’s only national health survey published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 2008 which has been widely referenced within the health sector. The main issue discussed is the use of a criterion level (level 3) to determine the point below which nearly 60 percent of Australian adults can be considered to have inadequate health literacy. The argument is made that this criterion level is arbitrary and statistically unjustified, yet it serves the purpose of presenting health literacy as a ‘crisis’ demanding action, which in turn represents the interests of dominant groups in this globalised, neo-liberal era.