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Those working in the field of adult literacy and numeracy are currently anticipating changes in the near future as the federal government has flagged the development of a National Foundation Skills Strategy (Australian Government 2010). 'Foundation skills' is a term that has recently been suggested as a way of simplifying discussions about literacy and numeracy (Perkins 2009:8), and it has gained traction in various Australian national policy environments (e.g. Gillard 2009, Council of Australian Governments [COAG] Reform Council 2009, Australian Government 2010). Foundation skills appears to encapsulate adult language, literacy and numeracy, and more broadly, it may also include so-called employability skills such as communication and teamwork (Roberts and Wignall 2010:1). In this paper, our main focus is on the adult literacy and numeracy dimensions of what is needed in the policy renewal.

1. Introduction -- 2. The Crisis of Higher Education: International and Australian -- 3. Struggles Against the Precariousness and Fragmentation of Academic Work -- 4. The Australian Context and Background to the Research -- 5. From Precarity to Security? 'We've got to do a better job for the casuals' -- 6. Managerial Motivations and Contexts -- 7. Silence in the Academy? Impacts of Role Fragmentation -- 8. Teaching and Research in the 21st Century University. 9. Conclusion.

AbstractThis paper is focussed on literacy and the literacy experiences of people who are experiencing homelessness or are at risk of homelessness. Drawing on 23 in‐depth interviews with people who have lived experience of homelessness in Sydney, Australia, the paper examines literacy, literacy needs and interest in literacy programmes from a social practice perspective of literacy. Amartya Sen's (1999) capability approach is drawn on to examine the multidimensional barriers that impede access to literacy. Our findings show literacy needs and how literacy is understood and valued in the lives of people with lived experience of homelessness. We show the ways that spatial and temporal conditions enable and create (im)possibilities for the realisation of literacy as a capability. We also discuss how the capability is imagined to fit into existing worlds, as both an instrumental tool, as well as for personal satisfaction and broader participation in social life. Our interviewees also point to the possibilities of literacy learning and programmes supporting the realisation of other capabilities, emphasising the prospects of achieving multiple capability realisations through program design. We show how the findings bear out the principles of a social practices pedagogy in adult literacy programmes.

Integrating sustainability into an undergraduate engineering program at the University of Technology, Sydney has been a challenging project. The authors of this paper have been participant observers of the integration process. In this paper, they have attempted an analysis of that process, focussing on the dynamics of the network of people and interests, which have shaped the process. Actor network theory was used to provide an analytical framework for the analysis. The interests and experiences of the authors in the process necessarily influence the analysis. All three authors have been active in positioning sustainability as a central theme for the critique and practice of engineering. Paul Bryce and Stephen Johnston have had long‐standing involvement in technology transfer projects in development. Both have published on engineering as a social activity, critiquing the undue emphasis in engineering education on engineering science, at the expense of attention to engineering practice. Their experience and scholarship have given credibility to their efforts in the faculty to press for a new paradigm of engineering practice. Keiko Yasukawa is an educational developer in the faculty who has been working with staff and students to help them reflect on their idea of what engineering is about in their teaching and learning. She has taken a leading role in shaping the new curriculum.

Learning takes place both inside and outside of the classroom, embedded in local practices, traditions and interactions. But whereas the importance of social practice is increasingly recognised in literacy education, Numeracy as Social Practice: Global and Local Perspectives is the first book to fully explore these principles in the context of numeracy. The book brings together a wide range of accounts and studies from around the world to build a picture of the challenges and benefits of seeing numeracy as social practice ? that is, as mathematical activities embedded in the social, cultural, historical and political contexts in which these activities take place. Drawing on workplace, community and classroom contexts, Numeracy as Social Practice shows how everyday numeracy practices can be used in formal and non-formal maths teaching and how, in turn, classroom teaching can help to validate and strengthen local numeracy practices. At a time when an increasingly transnational approach is taken to education policy making, this book will appeal to development practitioners and researchers, and adult education, mathematics and numeracy teachers, researchers and policy makers around the world.

Museum exhibitions are literacy rich environments. Visitors may engage with a range of texts including texts that constitute the exhibition objects themselves, those that convey information about the objects and those that instruct visitors about how the visitors are expected by the museum to navigate through the exhibition. The ways in which visitors engage with these diverse texts are important defining factors of the visitors' museum experience.For museums, understanding how texts in their exhibitions are influencing the museum experience, and the possibility of a museum experience for the broad public community is important in the fulfilment of their public mission as cultural and education institutions. In this paper, we adopt a view of literacy as a social practice, the perspective of New Literacy Studies (NLS), that offers a fruitful way for museums to consider the interactions between exhibition texts and their audiences. Such considerations, we argue, can inform museums' approaches to broadening their visitor demographics to more strongly fulfill their public mission. We show that the goals of NLS resonate with some of the goals of the New Museology movement in museum studies, a movement that aims to democratize what museums represent and how. From NLS, we employ the concept of a literacy event to describe an exhibition visit through a literacy lens, and the concept of a literacy mediator to examine the literacy event not exclusively as an individual event, but a collectively produced event. The paper draws on data on how the literacy events of two groups of 'non-traditional' visitor groups were mediated in an exhibition, and show how they reveal the range of different literacies that visitors need to negotiate in a museum exhibition.

Statistical data and evidence-based claims are increasingly central to our everyday lives. Critically examining 'Big Data', this book charts the recent explosion in sources of data, including those precipitated by global developments and technological change. It sets out changes and controversies related to data harvesting and construction, dissemination and data analytics by a range of private, governmental and social organisations in multiple settings. Analysing the power of data to shape political debate, the presentation of ideas to us by the media, and issues surrounding data ownership and access, the authors suggest how data can be used to uncover injustices and to advance social progress