In March this year, the Shaping Paper for the Australian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education (HPE) was released for consultation. It suggests Health and Physical Education should take a strengths-based approach, focus on educative outcomes, develop health literacy skills, value learning in, about and through movement and include a critical inquiry approach.

In this lecture, Lead Writer Professor Macdonald will introduce the research and thinking behind the paper, helping to illuminate this case of curriculum-making. It will also reflexively ask if this case is notable for its gradualism, interrogating the strength and weakness of gradualism as applied in curriculum reform.

This lecture is hosted in partnership with the Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (ACHPER) Victoria.

This presentation describes the birth of the global educational reform movement, which has seen the emergence of an educational reform orthodoxy based on increased competition, more school choice, use of data from standardised tests to determine teacher pay, more prescription, and stronger accountability. Student assessments that measure academic performance at different points of schooling are one of the most visible products of this movement.

In this lecture, Dr Pasi Sahlberg will discuss some of the movement’s key implications, and suggests alternative policies and practices that have kept Finnish education system immune to these global influences. It warns that we should be cautious with the dominant supranational education policy discourses, and questions experiments underway in some of the systems most influenced by the global educational reform movement.

Throughout the world, educational agendas based on privatisation and marketisation are being pushed, as are calls for a return to a romanticised and standardised view of common culture and curricula. At the same time, competitive testing and external control of teachers' work are increasingly evident.

These reforms are having major effects and can create even more inequalities. What can we learn from these kinds of policies? Why are they being accepted? Are there more critically democratic alternatives? Given the importance of education in our society, these questions are critical to ask and to answer.

Gregg Pasquarelli, American Architect and a founding partner of SHoP Architects of New York, will join the internationally renowned speakers of the Dean's Lecture Series on 14 May this year, as he presents his lecture, Out of Practice.

Gregg, with his firm SHoP, has pushed the Architect's realm past form making and into software design, real estate development, emergent construction research and the co-development of new sustainable technologies. SHoP's recent work includes the Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, a two-mile esplanade and park along the East River Waterfront, the Innovation Hub government complex in Botswana, Africa, the South Street Seaport redevelopment, a new Major League Soccer stadium in New York and projects for google in Mountain View, CA.

Gregg will present Out of Practice, a look at the office's current projects, with a focus on how the firm seeks to reinvent the business model of architectural practice. As both practitioners and educators, SHoP's commitment to challenging the process of building seeks to prove that beauty and technological proficiency are not mutually exclusive. Great architecture demands that design, finance and technology work together - SHoP is combining these forces in innovative ways to create a new model for the profession.