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Doctoral education in Australia is currently under pressure to become more industry focused. This report discusses the relatively recent experience of offering doctoral education through professional doctorate programs as a contribution to the improvement of doctoral education in Australian universities. The evaluation focused on the extent to which such programs had developed practices for sustaining closer collaboration between universities and industry, through: • a review of the general literatures relating to the role of doctoral research in contributing to the growth of knowledge and innovation; • a multi-method exploration of the range of practices and relationships associated with professional doctorate programs; and • the development of strategies and policy recommendations for optimising doctoral education in Australian universities in terms of industry-focused outcomes. When set against the 800-year history of the PhD, the professional doctorate is a young doctorate, the first being set up in Australia within the last two decades. The nature and status of professional doctorates remains unclear to many, including a number of university administrators of research training, as well as government and industry personnel. The fact that 61 per cent of professional doctorate programs fall under the classification of ‘research’ higher degrees is not widely understood. Moreover, the 131 programs we found to exist in 35 of the 38 Australian public universities, exhibit a wide range of structures and features. While there is strong evidence of an increase in the number of professional doctorates being offered in Australian universities, and there is some evidence of innovation in a number of professional doctorate programs, it appears that industry-focused doctoral education is still in its infancy. With a few exceptions, neither industry nor universities were engaging in any significant way to develop sustainable partnerships to serve and support the work of doctor

A documentary history of 'literacy' as an issue, topic and problem in the Australia print media, 1945-1994. The accompanying critical analysis makes the case that 'literacy crises' in Australia have arisen during periods of major socioeconomic, cultural and geopolitical upheaval and change, with schools and teachers, youth and families the object of 'blame' for such changes.

This thesis is an investigation into processes of gendered subject production in literate practices in school settings. Focusing on student writing in geography, the study explores gender differences in written texts with a view to asking what is differently at stake for girls and for boys in 'becoming literate' in school geography. The study is an ethnographic case study of a geography classroom, focusing in particular on contexts for the production of two texts which are subject to close textual analysis. Drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives: curriculum studies, linguistics and feminist theory, the thesis argue that classrooms are sites of multiple and competing discourses. Student texts are oriented discursively and generically in different ways. These orientations both reflect and produce wider discursive alignments within the discipline of geography and elsewhere. The thesis investigates the politics of these differences. Part I builds a detailed account of the Year 11 geography classroom as a set of curriculum contexts within which students' literate practices are located. Readings are produced of the official curriculum resources, focusing in particular on the syllabus and the classroom textbook material. The spoken language dynamics of the classroom are investigated in terms of the materiality of processes of speaker positioning along gender lines in the production and negotiation of geographical meanings. Part II produces detailed readings of two student essays: one by a girl, one by a boy. Differences between the two are investigated, drawing links between the texts and the discursive contexts of their production and reception. The argument is made that the two texts enact a significant gender difference in and through different geographies. Part III discusses the consequences of the thesis findings for contemporary debates about literacy pedagogy. This includes a critique of one dominant framework within which the notion of 'c