Welcome to the July 2005 edition of the CSRP Newsletter. If you wish to have anything included in the newsletter, please e-mail Kelly Dwyer at kelly.dwyer@csrp.com.au
Welcome to Dr Daniel Southam and Ms Jennifer Lowe, who have recently started as Research Fellow on the “Geopolymer Concretes from Regional Waste Streams” project.
Two new projects have been approved for inclusion in Program 5.
Developing Sustainable Attitudes – Teacher Professional Development (5B1)
A school teacher professional development workshop was held on 14 July at Murdoch University . Staff from Murdoch Extractive Metallurgy ran the one-day course entitled “Advanced Extractive Metallurgy”. The teachers started the day with a brief overview of copper extraction methods and then proceeded to “mine” a secondary copper-containing ore by chipping off approximately one kilogram of rock. Under the guidance of the “technical consultants” (Murdoch staff), teachers crushed and grinded the rock, screened and sorted the sample in the mineral processing laboratory. After lunch, the workshop continued in the hydrometallurgy lab where participants leached the ore and collected the loaded solution. Atomic absorption techniques were used to assay a small portion of the sample. Finally, the teachers used electronwinning to complete the workshop. The day concluded with a wine and cheese social. This “advanced” professional development was offered to teachers who had completed at least one previous activity with the Teacher Program. There are now over 100 school teachers in WA involved in the teacher network.
Understanding Personal Motivation in Resource Sector Career Selection (5B2)
In response to the mineral resource sector’s increasingly dangerous shortage of young people willing to follow a career path within the industry, Project 5B2 is designed to enhance our understanding of why people choose the career paths they do. It is hypothesised that recruiting efforts designed to successfully attract young people into the feeder disciplines for this industry can be greatly enhanced by identifying factors that contribute to career choices. In order to acquire a better understanding of the motivating forces that induce baccalaureate holders with science and technical backgrounds to choose careers in the resource sector, CSRP Education Manager Dan Churach and his Curtin Uni colleague Tony Rickards have developed a new investigative tool, the Science Career Inventory (SCI). The questionnaire is aimed at finding why mineral resource/energy sector professionals may have chosen a career in the industry in the hope that this will offer some insight into recruiting more young people as students and/or employees.
To date more than 150 paper versions of this questionnaire have been completed and we have recently posted an on-line version at the CSRP website. We encourage you, your staff and your students to participate in this pilot project and assist us in better understanding what attracts young people to our industry by completing the online version of the SCI at the following CSRP link: www.csrp.com.au/education/sciproform.html
All individual data will be treated confidentially and you will have access to the results of this research through the CSRP website.
Congratulations to Murray Johnston, who won best student poster at the recent John Floyd Symposium held in Melbourne at the beginning of July. His poster was on the “Thermodynamics of Se and Te in Metallurgical Slags”.
If you are aware of any upcoming conferences that would be of interest to other CSRP members, please e-mail the details to Kelly Dwyer. Links to these conferences (where available) will be published in the newsletter each month.
It would be wonderful to keep our publications lists up to date. If you have anything that has been published as part of CSRP (including conference presentations), could you please send Kelly Dwyer a copy of or the reference for the publication? Listed below are publications received this month and a complete list can be found in the Publications section.