title: The impact of neo-liberalism on the idea of public office: Legal office in New Zealand

authors: Wilson, Margaret

abstract: In this paper I shall assess the impact of the recent reviews of the Crown Law Office in New Zealand and the public legal office of Solicitor-General. In 2011 the State Services Commission, The Treasury and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet commissioned a review of the Crown Law Office as part of Performance Improvement Framework (PIF). The Performance Improvement Framework " .. .is a framework applied by a small group of respected organisational leaders to provide insights into agency performance, identifying where agencies are strong or performing well and where they are weak or need to improve."3 The PIF is part of the Better Public Services project that is " ... part of a shift to a more explicit standard of defining and tracking performance, changing the nature of incentives in the public sector, boosting the role that the corporate centre can play and enhancing the ability of stakeholders and the public to scrutinise what they are getting for their tax dollars."4 The Crown Law review then was part of a wider review of state agencies that was essentially shifting the focus of the agencies to be more efficiency-based and performance driven.

text: The impact of neo-liberalism on the idea of public office: Legal office in New Zealand In this paper I shall assess the impact of the recent reviews of the Crown Law Office in New Zealand and the public legal office of Solicitor-General. In 2011 the State Services Commission, The Treasury and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet commissioned a review of the Crown Law Office as part of Performance Improvement Framework (PIF). The Performance Improvement Framework " .. .is a framework applied by a small group of respected organisational leaders to provide insights into agency performance, identifying where agencies are strong or performing well and where they are weak or need to improve."3 The PIF is part of the Better Public Services project that is " ... part of a shift to a more explicit standard of defining and tracking performance, changing the nature of incentives in the public sector, boosting the role that the corporate centre can play and enhancing the ability of stakeholders and the public to scrutinise what they are getting for their tax dollars."4 The Crown Law review then was part of a wider review of state agencies that was essentially shifting the focus of the agencies to be more efficiency-based and performance driven.

year: 2017

title: Body Weight as a Motivating Operation: The Effect of Body Weight on Demand for Food in Hens.

authors: Andrews, Tegan Emily Anne-Marie

abstract: Demand for wheat and puffed wheat was examined in six hens, using an ascending geometric progression of fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Hens responded by pecking a key for 2-s access to food in 40-min sessions. The body weight criterion used to decide if a hen was to be placed in an experimental session differed across conditions, to determine if this would affect performance, using wheat and puffed wheat as reinforcers in different conditions. In the first experiment the hens were maintained by post-session feeding at 80 ± 5% of their free-feeding body weights. In Conditions 1 and 2 the hens were placed in a session even when they were more than 5 % above the target weight. In Conditions 3 and 4 they were placed in a session if their body weight was within the specified range, meaning there could be several days between sessions. There were clear differences resulting from food type, both in behaviour under the fixed ratio schedules, and in the resulting demand functions (with consumption measured as either number of reinforcers or weight of food obtained). Wheat resulted in lower overall response rates than puffed wheat at low fixed ratio values. The body weight criterion did not result in large effects on performance, however, the more relaxed body weight criterion gave a higher essential value for puffed wheat than for wheat (replicating Foster et al., 2009), whereas, the strict body weight criterion gave a lower essential value for puffed wheat than for wheat under the analysis proposed by Hursh and Silberberg (2008) and using number of reinforcers as the consumption measure. A second experiment replicated Jackson (2011), using the same two foods, strict body weight criteria and sessions which terminated after 40 reinforcers or 40-min. The resulting data were similar to Jackson (2011), who found similar performance for both foods. The difference between the demand functions for the two foods, with reinforcer rate as the consumption measure, were greatly reduced in comparison to Experiment 1. The essential value of the two foods was not consistently different across hens. These results suggest that the session termination criterion did affect demand.

text: Body Weight as a Motivating Operation: The Effect of Body Weight on Demand for Food in Hens. Demand for wheat and puffed wheat was examined in six hens, using an ascending geometric progression of fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Hens responded by pecking a key for 2-s access to food in 40-min sessions. The body weight criterion used to decide if a hen was to be placed in an experimental session differed across conditions, to determine if this would affect performance, using wheat and puffed wheat as reinforcers in different conditions. In the first experiment the hens were maintained by post-session feeding at 80 ± 5% of their free-feeding body weights. In Conditions 1 and 2 the hens were placed in a session even when they were more than 5 % above the target weight. In Conditions 3 and 4 they were placed in a session if their body weight was within the specified range, meaning there could be several days between sessions. There were clear differences resulting from food type, both in behaviour under the fixed ratio schedules, and in the resulting demand functions (with consumption measured as either number of reinforcers or weight of food obtained). Wheat resulted in lower overall response rates than puffed wheat at low fixed ratio values. The body weight criterion did not result in large effects on performance, however, the more relaxed body weight criterion gave a higher essential value for puffed wheat than for wheat (replicating Foster et al., 2009), whereas, the strict body weight criterion gave a lower essential value for puffed wheat than for wheat under the analysis proposed by Hursh and Silberberg (2008) and using number of reinforcers as the consumption measure. A second experiment replicated Jackson (2011), using the same two foods, strict body weight criteria and sessions which terminated after 40 reinforcers or 40-min. The resulting data were similar to Jackson (2011), who found similar performance for both foods. The difference between the demand functions for the two foods, with reinforcer rate as the consumption measure, were greatly reduced in comparison to Experiment 1. The essential value of the two foods was not consistently different across hens. These results suggest that the session termination criterion did affect demand.

year: 2014

title: Aro mai aro atu: Raising Māori-medium students' academic oral language proficiency

authors: Shandley, Rosina Mary

subjects: Māori-medium

abstract: From the early 1860s, colonial governments worked systematically to eradicate the language and culture of the indigenous people of Aotearoa / New Zealand, and, by the late 1960s, the death of the Māori language was being predicted by leading linguists. Māori leaders responded in the 1980s with language regeneration initiatives that included the birth of Māori-medium education. Today, this uniquely indigenous education system is a significant site of language learning for new generations of Māori children. In Māori-medium education, children are nurtured, educated, and loved as Māori, and they are more likely to attain educational qualifications than their Māori peers who attend English-medium schools. 

The success of Māori-medium education is achieved in the face of a raft of ongoing challenges that teachers and students confront on a daily basis. Years of language marginalisation, including the disruption to intergenerational transfer, mean Māori-medium students are required to learn the curriculum through their second and less-developed language. They have limited opportunities to hear or use the Māori language outside of the school, and this places huge pressure on teachers who are often their most significant language models. The challenge is compounded by the limited education that has been made available to teachers in relation to second-language pedagogies specifically designed for Māori-medium classrooms. The resulting situation is that Māori-medium teachers are often left struggling to find ways that they can develop students’ Māori language proficiency at the same time as their curriculum achievement so that one is not sacrificed for the other. 

This study designed and trialled pedagogies to support Māori-medium students to develop their academic oral language proficiency at the same time as their curriculum achievement. It was a mixed methods study grounded in a kaupapa Māori approach, and involved three teachers and 24 students across three separate Māori-medium schools. An Anga Putanga Ako (Curriculum Outcomes Matrix) was developed to support the students to understand what they needed to learn to progress through the writing curriculum. Teachers then learnt to share explicit learning outcomes from the Anga Putanga Ako with students before lessons and to allow them time to discuss their achievement of those outcomes in pairs at the conclusion of those lessons. Linguistic scaffolds were developed to support students’ learning conversations, including the self and peer assessment of the learning outcomes, and decisions about their curriculum achievement levels and next learning steps.

The quantitative and qualitative results of the study revealed that the confluence of the self and peer assessment practices, supported by the Anga Putanga Ako and linguistic scaffolds, improved the students’ academic oral language and accelerated their reading and writing achievement significantly beyond what is usually expected in a Māori-medium classroom in 14 weeks. The study also found that, through implementing the self and peer assessment pedagogies, teachers were able to identify ways they could develop their students’ academic language and curriculum achievement simultaneously and how these approaches could be applied across the curriculum.

It was clear from the research results that pedagogies that support second-language development and curriculum learning, such as the self and peer assessment pedagogies demonstrated in this study, need to be explicitly taught with consistency across initial and in-service teacher education programmes. This development is necessary to help ensure Māori-medium students are supported with the thinking and linguistic skills needed to contribute to the creation of new knowledge, to support or challenge the current social order as they see fit, and to continue to transfer the Māori language to new generations of mokopuna.

text: Aro mai aro atu: Raising Māori-medium students' academic oral language proficiency From the early 1860s, colonial governments worked systematically to eradicate the language and culture of the indigenous people of Aotearoa / New Zealand, and, by the late 1960s, the death of the Māori language was being predicted by leading linguists. Māori leaders responded in the 1980s with language regeneration initiatives that included the birth of Māori-medium education. Today, this uniquely indigenous education system is a significant site of language learning for new generations of Māori children. In Māori-medium education, children are nurtured, educated, and loved as Māori, and they are more likely to attain educational qualifications than their Māori peers who attend English-medium schools. 

The success of Māori-medium education is achieved in the face of a raft of ongoing challenges that teachers and students confront on a daily basis. Years of language marginalisation, including the disruption to intergenerational transfer, mean Māori-medium students are required to learn the curriculum through their second and less-developed language. They have limited opportunities to hear or use the Māori language outside of the school, and this places huge pressure on teachers who are often their most significant language models. The challenge is compounded by the limited education that has been made available to teachers in relation to second-language pedagogies specifically designed for Māori-medium classrooms. The resulting situation is that Māori-medium teachers are often left struggling to find ways that they can develop students’ Māori language proficiency at the same time as their curriculum achievement so that one is not sacrificed for the other. 

This study designed and trialled pedagogies to support Māori-medium students to develop their academic oral language proficiency at the same time as their curriculum achievement. It was a mixed methods study grounded in a kaupapa Māori approach, and involved three teachers and 24 students across three separate Māori-medium schools. An Anga Putanga Ako (Curriculum Outcomes Matrix) was developed to support the students to understand what they needed to learn to progress through the writing curriculum. Teachers then learnt to share explicit learning outcomes from the Anga Putanga Ako with students before lessons and to allow them time to discuss their achievement of those outcomes in pairs at the conclusion of those lessons. Linguistic scaffolds were developed to support students’ learning conversations, including the self and peer assessment of the learning outcomes, and decisions about their curriculum achievement levels and next learning steps.

The quantitative and qualitative results of the study revealed that the confluence of the self and peer assessment practices, supported by the Anga Putanga Ako and linguistic scaffolds, improved the students’ academic oral language and accelerated their reading and writing achievement significantly beyond what is usually expected in a Māori-medium classroom in 14 weeks. The study also found that, through implementing the self and peer assessment pedagogies, teachers were able to identify ways they could develop their students’ academic language and curriculum achievement simultaneously and how these approaches could be applied across the curriculum.

It was clear from the research results that pedagogies that support second-language development and curriculum learning, such as the self and peer assessment pedagogies demonstrated in this study, need to be explicitly taught with consistency across initial and in-service teacher education programmes. This development is necessary to help ensure Māori-medium students are supported with the thinking and linguistic skills needed to contribute to the creation of new knowledge, to support or challenge the current social order as they see fit, and to continue to transfer the Māori language to new generations of mokopuna.

year: 2022