Editorial.

Issue 49.2 of the Australian Journal of Education opens with Paul Ginns on 'Imagining instructions'. When Tiger Woods lines up the putt that will win him the Masters, he has already rehearsed that move countless times in his mind. While the efficacy of mental practice in sports is well established, there has been little corresponding research in education and training. Paul's paper draws attention to recent research on the incorporation of mental practice into the learning of non-motor, complex cognitive skills. For more experienced learners, 'imagining' worked examples, paired with practice questions, enhances learning. Study activities are more appropriate for students less experienced in a given domain. For some readers the potential of this line of inquiry will be new: it has many applications in educational programs, including workplace settings.

In 'State differences in achievement among secondary school students in Australia', Gary Marks and John Cresswell analyse data from the OECD's 2000 PISA study of the achievement of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics and science, which was conducted in 32 countries. The Australian data from PISA comprised 5477 students from all states and territories. Gary and John find that state/territory differences are non trivial and some of them persist after socioeconomic and grade level/education differences have been taken into account. The ACT, NSW, WA and SA exhibit higher mean scores for reading than any single nation in PISA except Finland. ACT scores higher than Finland: Gary and John attribute this to the relatively high socio-economic status backgrounds of territory students. Generally, students from Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and WA are significantly more likely to be at or below the lowest OECD proficiency level than students from NSW. The results raise a host of questions about causes and contexts and will generate significant debate. One question that arises is whether the results are affected by variation in inclusions/exclusion protocols, across Australia. In 'Educational accountability and students with a disability in Australia', Ian Dempsey and Robert Conway discuss the degree to which students with a disability participate in national testing programs. They suggest that there are inconsistencies between states/territories in the extent of participation; that it is necessary to develop consistent definitions of students with a disability, and protocols for exclusion where these apply, and to clarify the type and extent of additional testing provisions.

Indigenous students have relatively low rates of retention to the end of secondary school. At the same time they are twice as likely to participate in Vocational Education and Training programs in Schools as are non-Indigenous students. In 'Indigenous students and Vocational Education and Training in Schools', Sue Helme draws on data from a survey of 20 000 young people and their experience of vocational learning, and a qualitative study that included interviews with 118 Indigenous students and 160 school staff and others. Vocational Education and Training in Schools can enhance the opportunities of Indigenous students, especially when it is sited within a larger group of programs designed to engage Indigenous students at all levels, and also provided that it is a voluntary option that does not lock Indigenous students out of academic pathways. Sue finds that 'nurturing relationships with individual Indigenous students and their families were fundamental, as were school environments that affirmed Indigenous cultural values and identities'.

In 'You don't bring me flowers any more', Suzanne Rice considers the apparent discrepancy between poll findings indicating that teachers are valued in the community, and teachers' own perceptions that they lack status, a significant cause of dissatisfaction in the profession. The gap between the two valuations appears to be a longstanding one. Rice conducted interviews with eight teachers, with varied profiles, over a minimum of four hours per interviewee. Suzanne explores a broad range of factors contributing to self-perceptions of low status, distinguishing between longer-term structural factors, and contextual factors. They may be scope for deliberate policy action by governments and school administrations/communities to lift status. The study provides the basis for further qualitative and quantitative research on a larger scale.

In 'Good teachers know where to scratch when learners feel itchy', Song-Ae Han follows up some issues discussed in AJE 49.1 on international education, with its focus on educational identities in the context of cross-border mobility. She examines the work of native speakers of English working in Korea, through the eyes of 12 Korean adult learners. Teachers bring their beliefs, world views, learning habits and styles and expectations to the classroom. So do learners. This apparatus affects judgments about teaching quality. The often hidden assumptions of teachers and learners become a more urgent educational issue when the two groups are from different cultural contexts. Song-Ae emphasises that knowing where 'to scratch' learners is not simply a technical teaching skill, but requires an understanding of the cultural context of learners. Teachers working in non-native language contexts need to build a knowledge of how to 'scratch' in culturally appropriate, effective ways.

In a lively paper, immersed in the increasingly thick public debate on universities and their conduct, Erica McWilliam, Alan Lawson, Terry Evans and PeterTaylor investigate how certain doctoral practices come to be seen as scandalous--whether silly in content, soft in academic standard, or involving suspect conduct or credentials--and the impact of the consequent risk management problems in universities. Managing such issues in the public domain has become part of the requirements of academic life. 'What is less clear', conclude the authors, 'is whether and how the very same arbitrariness, maverick behaviour, quirkiness and idiosyncrasy that seems to be as important to intellectual life as it is anathema to audit, can be tolerated at all as a condition of doctoral education'.

Brian Denman's book review introduces a collection on comparative and international education, edited by Peter Ninnes and Meeri Hellsten, that is published by one of the world's leading research institutes in the field, the Comparative Education Research Centre at the University of Hong Kong.

This is the last issue of AJE that I will edit, as the final number for 2005, AJE 49.3, is guest-edited by Michael Singh and MargaretVickers at the University of Western Sydney. I was invited to edit AJE by Geoff Masters at the Australian Council for Educational Research, the publisher of AJE since its inception, from the beginning of 2001. Like my predecessor Gaby Lakomski at the University of Melbourne, I have served a five-year term as editor and have been deeply grateful for the opportunity to do so. Editing AJE enables a unique perspective on education studies in Australia, though less so on Australian education, as the contributions received by and initiated by a journal have their own patterns and idiosyncrasies specific to the field of knowledge and to journal publishing.

No doubt the editorship offers each editor the opportunity to place a stamp on the field. Generally, however, I have not sought to play much of a shaping role and AJE has been primarily contribution-based. Convinced when I began that the best Australian work was not being published in AJE but was more likely to be going offshore, I have sought to lift quality by throwing open the journal to the whole miscellany of what could be termed 'education studies'--across all sub-fields--while pushing the bar of quality as high as possible. Others can judge whether the effort to lift overall quality was successful, but I note that while most of what was published in the 'normal' issues of AJE (i.e. not guest-edited) was contributed rather than solicited, the quality of the solicited material was generally much higher, as was the quality of the guest-edited issues. I do think we maintained standards in relation to the contributed material, much of it sent back without going to reviewers, but at times in 2002 and 2003 I was worried that we would not have enough to fill a competent issue. Many of the papers sent to AJE consist of summaries of research theses with narrow compass, and university project essays, of limited interest to AJE readers, reflecting a drive to publish for publication's sake rather than to carve out a distinctive contribution of knowledge.

I doubt whether I was successful in encouraging into AJE much material that would otherwise have gone offshore. The need to take part in global research conversations is compelling, they can hardly be avoided, and it has increased in the last five years. The exceptions were cases where I pursued the authors energetically. There is a lesson there about the need for the editor to take a more aggressive role, but fundamentally, AJE will only attract more high standard Australian contributions if it can slowly improve its own international standing. In that regard AJE's best long-term strategic option is to become more strongly nested throughout the Asia-Pacific as a leading regional publisher of educational research and scholarship. In the last half decade we have made a determined effort, with some success, to build regional content either from universities outside Australia, or from international doctoral students studying in Australia. I have been fortunate to work at Monash where both University and Faculty are strong in the global dimension, and many of our best doctoral students are those from outside the country.

The 'publish or perish' syndrome merits a little more discussion, because it bedevils journals, and has implications for the health of Education as a field of study and research. Having made my own academic career only in the past decade or so, the era of performativity, I appreciate what drives the desire to publish for publication's sake. It is all too obvious. But it is crucial for both the state of Education Studies, and the sake of individual careers, that mentors stop pushing their students and junior charges into publishing at every possible turn, and concentrate also on improving the quality and originality of the work and on inculcating a dynamic of self-improvement within a reflexive field. We might need also to reset some performance indicators. For example, it seems mad to require a history of publication in established academic journals as a prerequisite for a doctoral scholarship, which surely, in most cases, is prior to serious research? It is also essential that we find better ways of rewarding the high quality part of the research and scholarly work that is expressed in domains other than academic publishing, in reports and professional contexts. But the major issue is that Education Studies, as a field, like Business Education and some other academic domains, has become overly fixated on fulfilling the performative forms of academic life (credentials, publication, promotion) at the expense of building content qua content and pushing the inquiry deeper. There are many exemplary exceptions to the generalisation. Nevertheless, there is a problem overall. Unless we develop a stronger professional commitment to knowledge building, individual conduct and the factors that drive it will continue to be in tension with the collective requirements of the field, and the public interest.

There is much at stake in getting this right. What is required in Education Studies is nothing less than a wholesale renovation, which can open up the kind of cross-disciplinary, basic/applied, quantity/quality and modern/post-modern conversations occurring in many other fields of knowledge, and push deeper into fundamental issues of learning theory, the social and cultural character and conditions of learning, and the relations between policy and practice. One would like to see psychology and sociology (and their more recent offshoots and associations) re-establish a premier place in educational policy, in place of economics and generic business management, which have shown little capacity to develop insights specific to educational problems and improvement (Marginson, in press). But the education-specific disciplines not only require a more sympathetic policy environment, they need to earn their place. To do that they need to develop intellectually--and to do that they need successful longer term research programs, and articles and books that genuinely make a difference.

I hope that at least some of what was published in AJE from 2001 to 2005 has contributed to the reflexivities of Education Studies. I am conscious however that the balance of what was published did not necessarily mirror the balance of research and scholarly work in Australia. I managed to refrain from contributing an article between 2001 and 2005--my colleagues at Monash will no doubt imagine how difficult that was!--and the topic of only one of six special issues (49.1 on international education) fell into one of my own areas of research and scholarship. Nevertheless, unintended by me, the pattern of contributions and book reviews tended to follow my scholarly interests, with a relatively strong flow of materials in sub-fields such as higher education, comparative and international education, and national policy, some material in philosophy and cultural studies/cultural politics of education, and--with some exceptions--a paucity of strong quantitative material, especially larger scale studies of national significance in fields such as psychology and sociology. Perhaps it is natural that contributors will tilt their manuscripts towards Editors expected to be interested in them; my predecessor attracted relatively strong contributions in the philosophy of education. Nevertheless, the journal was weakened because the quantitative side was underplayed. This may now change. The next Editor will be Steve Holden, who is Publishing Manager (Journals) at ACER. One consequence of the decision to bring the journal back to ACER is that it can be expected to draw a more representative group of papers from ACER's own research program, including the comparative international studies of student achievement (see Marks and Cresswell in this issue). ACER's contract research program has gone from strength to strength, without the help of government subsidy. It is much the largest and most important centre for educational research in Australia. However, it is vital both for the sake of the journal, and of the broader recognition of Australian research, that AJE become an online journal as soon as possible, with full copy access (whether free of charge or subscription-based is a matter for ACER to resolve). All major education journals are now available online. Most of us spend overwhelmingly more time on the web than inside library buildings. There is now no choice if AJE wants national relevance and international profile.

As Editor I have benefited from the very professional work of a number of ACER people, particularly Bronwyn Hay who recently retired as an outstanding copy editor--I cannot speak too highly of Bronwyn's work--and Amanda Pinches. Let me sincerely thank Geoff for the opportunity to edit AJE, and for his courtesy, and also Gaby for her kindness in encouraging me in this and other matters. We share a common respect for serious scholarly inquiry, as distinct from the funded project research which most education researchers become immersed in as a way of life, but which is less likely to produce conceptually original work. I want to thank Sue Willis at Monash, in my opinion an outstanding Dean of Education, who provided the conditions in which AJE was housed for the last half decade. My academic colleagues at Monash have been called in extensively as reviewers--it is often hard to find reviewers willing to work in the time frame--and I must pay special tribute to Terri Seddon, John Loughran, Peter Gronn and Jo Deppler; and also Julie McLeod from Deakin. I also sincerely thank Silvia Gamarra and Erlenawati Sawir for their help and support. Finally, I want to pay tribute to the fine work of Phan Le Ha as AJE Administrative Assistant throughout the last four years of my Editorship. Ha took over from Silvia Gamarra, and in this same time period, in her mid 20s, she found time to finish her PhD and also had twin daughters. Ha not only did the AJE work well and with speed, enthusiasm and an ever-positive outlook, but found the work very easy because she quickly came to understand the field of study both as an epistemological and an administrative space: I have no doubt that she should edit either AJE, or an equivalent journal in Vietnam or South East Asia, at some time in future. Ha's involvement in the journal strengthened its face to the Asia-Pacific region, especially Southeast Asia and East Asia, which I sincerely hope will be maintained. I am sure that the future of Australian education and educational research and scholarship, like the future of Australia itself, lies principally in Asia.

References

Marginson, S. (in press). Education and human capital. In P. Saunders, & J. Waiters (Eds.), Ideas and Influence: Social sciences and public policy in Australia. Sydney: Academy of Social Sciences Australia and UNSW Press.

Simon Marginson, Monash University