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Application is using skills and knowledge learned through discussion, explanation, observation and demonstration to undertake a particular activity. It is usually the replication of something that has been demonstrated, following instructions or drawing together pieces of knowledge and skills, to show the students’ level of comprehension. The transfer of knowledge, on the other hand, is using the skills and knowledge in a new and novel situation, which demonstrates the understanding of what has been learned.
Often we can replicate what we have seen, but to use that skill or knowledge in a new way or an alternative situation is challenging, so it is through the application and transfer of the skills and knowledge that true learning will be demonstrated.
Replicating, complementing and supplementing knowledge
There are three types of application: replication, complementing and supplementing. These assist in the setting up of the learning and enable evaluation of the students’ understanding.
Replication involves students recreating what has been demonstrated to them, following the process that was undertaken in the same fashion as the demonstrator. They mirror the actions with the same resources in a similar timeframe.
To complement is to combine a new process/product with an existing product, therefore making another product that will enhance the original product. The thought process concerns the second, complementary, product and how to improve the existing product.
We are a visual community, and we rely on the use of sight to inform us in many ways. Walk down any street and you see amazing images, both in nature and created by humans. Some are there to help us stay safe – for example, traffic lights and signs to tell us when it is safe to cross a road. Some are in buildings, on billboards or in gardens. Then there are the actions of people around you and their behaviours with each other. Being able to observe is crucial, and should be regarded as the first learning strategy developed by both the teacher and their students. However, students need to be taught how to observe and how to use this skill in their learning.
How to observe
Observation is second nature to most of us, but in a teaching and learning situation both the teacher and students should develop a strategy of observation. The process of undertaking effective observation needs to be taught, and requires some preliminary knowledge from the observer. First, they need to know the purpose of the observation and what attributes are to be examined – something that requires prior knowledge. Students observing will then need to have some way of recording the information that they acquire.
I’m a Marda Marda 1 from Miriwoong Country in the East Kimberley of Western Australia.
I’ve lived moving between my ancestral country in the Kimberley, and my birth country of the South West of Western Australia, to which my family’s narrative was transported when my grandmother was removed from her country as a child. We’re all products of our past, yet we make judgements every day about how these foundations manifest in our present. The American writer William Faulkner summed up this notion perfectly: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even the past . . .’ (Faulkner, 1950, p. xx), describing the substantial ghosting of my present by long shadows cast by shifting lights of my ancestors, black and white.
I was born on Sunday, 28 May 1967 in Noongar Country in Perth. This was the first day after the 1967 Referendum that resulted in the now legendary ‘Yes’ vote that turned the tide, symbolically, if not in reality for all, on the issue of civil rights and the ideal of equality before the law in Australia. The National Museum of Australia’s Defi ning Moments in Australian History project included the 1967 Referendum on the initial list of 100 moments in Australian history created ‘to stimulate a public discussion about the events that have been of profound signifi cance to the Australian people’ (National Museum of Australia, n.d.). On the world stage it was part of the sweeping tides of change that marked the 20th century as one of rapid and signifi cant social and political transformation. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people it was a key turning point, a ‘defining moment’, if you will, in a long community-led political struggle for equality, and beyond this, a reaffi rmation of collective Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights bound to our respective language groups (sometimes referred to as nations).
At the outset, I wish to congratulate Cambridge University Press, and in particular Nina Sharpe, for the initiative in commissioning this outstanding contribution to Australian studies. The work includes participation from some of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia’s leading academics, whose works have explored our past, commented on our present and given great thought to our future.
Knowledge of Life is not just an undergraduate text; it is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling at its finest, where authors share not only their knowledge from areas of expertise, but introduce the reader to aspects of their own lived experiences. The authors challenge the popular mainstream media presentation of Indigenous Australia and ask the reader to consider Indigenous Australia from a fresh perspective.
In this volume, the authors present a wide range of topics essential to those who will at some point in time reflect on the content as they work within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia. Some readers may feel confronted by the way in which racism is reflected while at the same time reiterating the historian Henry Reynolds’s question, ‘Why weren’t we told?’ This is a question I have heard many times within my many roles as a senior public servant, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and Race Discrimination Commissioner with the Australian Human Rights Commission, and as Chancellor of the University of Canberra. This book, with its cross-section of themes, addresses many unasked questions and questions some readers have never thought to ask. As some students have said to me, ‘How do I ask about something if I don’t know it exists?’
Learning takes place when students are asked to derive their own meanings and understandings from the experiences that are presented to them. The concept of discovery learning is challenging to many teachers, as it requires handing the content over to the students so they can independently investigate and understand the information. The teacher then becomes a facilitator of learning, and only mentors the students in their learning. Relinquishing the role of teacher as instructor can be a challenge for students as well as teachers, as it requires the students to be ready to take the lead and become more accountable in their own learning.
Like all popular terms in education, discovery learning has taken on a range of meanings, but it most commonly refers to a form of pedagogy in which students are exposed to particular questions and experiences that enable them to ‘discover’ for themselves the intended concepts (Hammer 1997). The learning is an inductive form, moving away from the teacher as the centre of learning to a student-centred approach.
Teachers and students have a set of stimuli, beyond which the students need to go to form concepts and relationships. The students can add to the stimulus material or rearrange it so it is more meaningful to them.
An experiment provides two ways to investigate information. The first is a formal procedure that is followed in order to learn about the effects of different things. The second involves experimenting to see how something works and how successful it is. The aim of an experiment is to validate a hypothesis.
Experiments give students the opportunity to take the leadership in the learning and to demonstrate their knowledge and understandings. They can utilise their skills to prove that they have an understanding of different concepts.
An experiment is asking, ‘What would happen if . . . ?’ and it is through the manipulation of variables that different results are obtained. It is the challenge of creating a situation, and varying or controlling the variables, that makes undertaking an experiment so rewarding for the students. In an experiment, the students are first-hand researchers of particular phenomena, and they undertake the task in order to gain the data to prove their work. An experiment is an alternative way to answer a question and to determine why certain phenomena happen in certain ways.
The role of the teacher is very important in organising experiments. The teacher becomes a facilitator by setting up stimuli to be used, and challenges the students to go beyond what they have been given to form concepts and relationships. Experiments combine a range of processes that are undertaken in learning, and may be part of any curriculum area.
A gambler may not know, off the top of his or her head, the exact probability of the winning cards in a hand of Poker or a doctor the exact likelihood of a particular diagnosis. They both may have a gut feeling for how likely or unlikely such an event is to happen. Calculating a probability provides, in this sense, a precise quantification for our intuition about the likelihood of an uncertain event.
In this chapter, we pursue a class of examples designed to stretch intuition and test beliefs about the idea of probability. Many of the examples presented here and in the exercises are commonly referred to as paradoxes. A paradox is a statement or problem leading to contradictory conclusions or solutions. True paradoxes in mathematics are rare and significant phenomena. For example, a simple paradox about “truth” known as the Liar Paradox (see Exercise 10.6) ultimately led to Gödel's remarkable Incompleteness Theorem in mathematical logic. In our own study, the Condorcet Paradox is the basis for Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (Theorem 18.19) and the central example in social choice theory. While we retain the term “paradox” in the names when this is common use, the question of which examples to follow are truly paradoxical is an interesting one and left to your interpretation. We begin with what is perhaps the most popular example of a probability puzzle.
Example 19.1 The Monte Hall Problem
Monte Hall was the flamboyant host of a television game show created in the 1960s called Let's Make a Deal. Contestants on the show were led by Hall through a series of guessing games and deals for cash and prizes. The scenario for our problem is the following: the prize is a new car, which is hidden behind one of three identical doors. Behind the other two doors are cows. The contestant must guess the correct door to win the car. Once the contestant has chosen a door, Monte Hall opens one of the remaining doors, and a cow walks through onto the stage.[…]
I was born and raised in Ballarat, a provincial city in Victoria with a history built on gold. My father’s people were ‘local’. They had participated in the gold rush of the 1850s and had made small fortunes as miners, mine owners and shopkeepers. These people had come from England. My mother was not a ‘local’. She was born on the banks of Orange Creek in the Northern Territory about 100 kilometres south of Alice Springs. Her people were the Pitjantjatjara people; they had come from the Tjukurrpa (or ‘The Dreaming’). As a small child, like small children everywhere, I was colourblind. I didn’t notice that my mother had brown skin and I didn’t know what people meant when they called her an Aborigine or a half-caste. I guess I thought that my family was just like everybody else in the suburban Australia in which I lived.
This myth was first shattered when I travelled to Central Australia for the first time. I was no more than four or fi ve years of age. The Stuart Highway was nothing more than a narrow, corrugated red ribbon that followed the old Ghan railway into the heart of the continent. The vast endlessness of the desert made a lasting impression on me. Alice Springs was still a frontier town of hard cattlemen. From here we travelled to Titjikala, the Aboriginal community where my mother had grown up. Established in the 1940s, the purpose of Titjikala was to provide rationed labour to the white people who ran cattle on Maryvale Station. I had arrived in the immediate aftermath of the equal pay decision, a decision that ended the participation of Aboriginal labour in the northern pastoral industry. This was another world, an Australia that I had never imagined existed. My grandmother and my other mother (aunt in whitefella terms) lived in sheds set on concrete slabs. Everyone at Titjikala lived in such houses.
Explanation is the development of a narration and the sharing of information with students, encouraging them to think logically, aesthetically and morally.
Increasing numbers of magazines and shows are offering instructions on how to make or create something. From creating a new look in your house to cooking tonight’s family dinner, new ways to exercise or techniques to take better photographs, we are amply informed on how to undertake tasks through visual, written and oral explanations.
Think of the radio commentary on a Rugby Union, football or cricket match. The commentators have the ability to create the visual images of the game for listeners. They explain the moves and the momentum of the sport, and provide a description of the intensity of the action. The success of the experience for the listener comes from the commentators’ in-depth knowledge of the game, the players and the expectations of the audience. Various nuances of the spoken word are required to lead to a good understanding by the listeners.
Although explanations are often considered to be one of the easiest learning strategies, they really require thorough preparation and planning. The examples of the novelist, the sports commentators and the journalists writing about cooking or home maintenance all demonstrate the importance of the knowledge of the field in which they work – so an explanation is always embedded in a particular context.
I was born in a small town in Queensland on the country of my maternal great-great grandmother; this country is the Gooreng Gooreng nation. I was raised and formally educated in another Queensland town on the country of my maternal great-great grandfather; this country is the Wakka Wakka nation. My interest in writing dates back to watching Nana reading old westerns and Mum reading historical romances. Like my three sisters, I was able to read and write before going to school, and my Year 3 teacher commented to Mum to the following effect: ‘Whatever Sandra does when she grows up, it should involve words.’ My lifelong interest in publishing had a humble origin in my place on my high school’s magazine committee, and continued through university as I served as a co-editor of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Student Handbook. After my fi rst university degree and some professional work I entered into editorial traineeships with Magabala Books in Broome then with University of Queensland Press in Brisbane, and later went on to become Manager of Aboriginal Studies Press in Canberra. I enjoy writing and as an academic I now have to write and be published in scholarly journals, but I do consider myself first and foremost an editor and a speaker. I have long contributed to public conversation about Indigenous writing and publishing, dating back to my fi rst conference presentation at the Aboriginal Publishers Conference in 1989 in Vancouver, Canada. I have also held leadership roles on arts organisations, including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council and the Queensland Performing Arts Trust, and in 2012 I became a judge of the annual David Unaipon Award for Unpublished Indigenous Writers.
Discussions examine the pros and cons of a particular issue or idea through conversation or debate. We engage in discussions with friends and family every day, but in the classroom context they are a way to develop students’ knowledge on a topic or to assist them to learn more about what they already understand. Any discussion therefore needs to be carefully planned in advance, with consideration given to the roles of the teacher and students, as well as the content that needs to be covered.
The following topics will be explored in this chapter:
when to have a discussion in a lesson
why have discussions
planning a discussion
ground rules for discussions
preparing students for a discussion
grouping
classroom layout for discussions
concluding a discussion
the Socratic method
leading a discussion
assessing discussions, and
the language of discussions.
When should I have a discussion in a lesson?
It may seem obvious, but we should begin by understanding when to have a discussion in a lesson. This is an important consideration, as a well-placed discussion can help generate better learning outcomes. Answer a few short questions to determine whether it is necessary to have a discussion in a particular lesson. Will the discussion:
generate new ideas
indicate the level of the students’ knowledge and ability
In this chapter, we delve deeper into the idea of an election as a game of strategy (Definition 2.9). The implications of this definition are somewhat unsettling. Is a popular election a game to be won? In a democracy, we expect social choice to be a faithful accounting of the true preferences of the people rather than an outcome arrived at by the strategic cleverness of certain of the voters. Unfortunately, the ideal of a strategy-proof, democratic election is an impossible dream. We state the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem (Theorem 6.4), which asserts that with three or more candidates, every nondictatorial voting method is vulnerable to strategic manipulation. We verify the theorem for each of the democratic voting methods introduced in Chapter 5. We also show how strategic considerations in social choice can elect a third-party candidate in a popular election. The latter result is an example of the Paradox of the Chair. Finally, we give an example of the No-Show Paradox, a scenario in which voters in an election better serve their own interests by staying home as opposed to participating in the election.
The Condorcet Paradox
The developments in this chapter will all flow out of arguably the central example in social choice theory. We introduce this important example by means of the following simple puzzle:
Example 6.1 Choosing the Final
Twenty-five students in a game theory seminar are given the option of choosing the format for their final assignment. The options are to write a term paper (T), take an oral exam (O), or take a written exam (W). The professor proposes that the students vote on each of the options in head-to-head Simple Majority elections and thereby see which option is preferred to the other two. First, the professor pits term paper versus oral exam. The winner is term paper, by a vote of 18 to 7. Next, the students vote on writing a term paper versus taking a written exam. Here the written exam wins by a vote of 15 to 10.[…]
In this chapter, we explore the debate over voting methods that marked the birth of social choice theory as an academic field. Let us briefly recall the history and point of contention. On one side, we have the Chevalier Jean Charles de Borda, a mathematician and military scientist. Borda proposed his voting method in a lecture to the French Academy of Sciences urging the body to adopt his voting method for member elections. Borda's method, as we know, converts voter preferences into a single ranking, the social welfare. While ties do occur, they are not so common. In 1780, Borda published the first mathematical proof of fairness. He proved that the Borda Count can never elect a candidate ranked last by a majority of the voters (a Majority Loser). We proved this result ourselves in Theorem 12.15. In fact, Borda proved a stronger theorem. Answering the open question from Chapter 12, we state the following theorem:
On the other side of the debate is the Marquis Nicolas de Condorcet, a prominent intellectual of the Enlightenment period in France. Condorcet also had mathematical evidence supporting his political ideals for elections. Condorcet had a proof that the best chance for achieving the “correct” result in an election is to obey the majority opinion. Condorcet's Jury Theorem (Theorem 7.10) was stated in Chapter 7. For Condorcet, the majority opinion is expressed through head-to-head Simple Majority elections. As we have seen, the Borda Count does not always select the majority winner as the social choice and so violates a basic principle of fairness.
It was Condorcet himself who pointed out the principal obstacle to his own majoritarian ideals. When there are three or more candidates, the majority opinion, as expressed through head-to-head elections, can be fundamentally conflicted. We can have a Condorcet Paradox. Moving ahead almost 200 years to 1951, Kenneth Arrow used the Condorcet Paradox to prove his Impossibility Theorem, beginning the modern era of social choice theory.
The only two facts relayed to me about my natural family when I was growing up was that my mother was an Aboriginal woman named Mary Williams and that her father was a policeman in the Northern Territory. Consequently, at the tender age of six I resolved to do two things with my life: to fi nd my natural mother and to become a police officer, just like my grandfather.
Six months before I turned 16, I applied to join the NSW Police Cadet Corps. The year was 1967, the same year part of the Australian population voted overwhelmingly in a federal referendum for Aboriginal people to be included in the national census and for the Commonwealth to make laws for and on behalf of Aboriginal people. Although I hadn’t completed the mandatory four years of secondary schooling to qualify to sit the School Certifi cate examination, I was permitted to seek entry to the Cadet Corps and, subsequently joined the Cadet Corps one month before the end of that year. To my knowledge, I was the fi rst Indigenous person accepted into the Cadet Corps and one of only two Indigenous Police Cadets during the Corps’ 40-year history.
When I was 28 years old, I finally located my mother who was alive and living in Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. At the time, I also found out that I was the eldest of nine brothers and sisters and one of 742 Western Arrernte family members. It was some time after meeting my mother that I also found out that the ‘policeman grandfather’ I was told about all those years ago wasn’t my mother’s father, but a whitefella who grew my mother up before she was removed from Alice Springs to Mulgoa Mission near Warragamba, New South Wales, at the eastern end of the Blue Mountains.