Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemFactors influencing the vocational decision making of high-ability adolescent girls( 2003-06)The current study is the first of its kind in Australia. It is breaking new ground therefore and is exploratory in nature. Attention is focused on the variables influencing the vocational decision-making of highly-able adolescent girls in Victoria, Australia. This is a complex study and the design incorporates both quantitative and qualitative data collection spanning a six year period. The importance of this study lies in the of research strategy of identifying and examining different educational settings and application of the findings from the first two studies (n=112) to a very specific educational setting in Study Three (n=14). The external socializers of family, friends and the media as well as the internal dimensions of self-esteem, aspirations and interest have been investigated systematically through three interrelated but independent studies. A combination of methodologies has been employed to identify those variables that might, over time, influence the vocational decisions of these young women. It is an accumulation of the young women’s perceptions and self-report using questionnaires, formal inventories and interviews. The data collection was progressive and the information gathering procedures included inventories of self-esteem and vocational preference, questionnaires completed by the subjects, interviews as well as anecdotal comments made by the students. Overall the analysis in this study depended on an interpretation of aggregated data employing simple frequency counts, cross tabulations and t-tests which described observations, explored relationships and identified differences between the two groups, high-ability and control, on the variables selected. A matrix enabled a triangulation of the data, both quantitative and qualitative. The data were coded to determine constant themes and to identify important influences and trends across a time frame. Different cases were compared and patterns which emerged were then analysed. In Study One the high-ability cohort differentiated from the controls in three major areas. These were in their aspirations, self-esteem and the relative influences of parents, especially father. Although the high-ability girls in Study Two had made vocational choices commensurate with their interests identified in the VPI these choices were by no means stable over the six-year period. Both the home and school environment were found to have impacted on these collective factors as they modified and developed vocational interest. In Study Three the findings of the earlier studies were applied to a very specific cohort with important differences identified in the areas of self-esteem and subject choice. The environmental contexts of home and school again proved to be salient. The dissimilar contextual experiences of the high-ability cohort were found to impact on their vocational choices and their subsequent career trajectories in a different way to that of the non-gifted schoolgirl. Based on this study, a model of vocational choice informed by the findings has been proposed.
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ItemExpeditions, travels and journeys: reconceptualising teaching and learning about indigenous Australians in the early childhood curriculum( 2004)This thesis aimed to explore the terrain of early childhood educator's inclusion of Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures within their curriculum practice. Within this it was anticipated that these explorations would draw from early childhood reconceptualist literature to explore and trouble understandings of curriculum theory and practice. It was also anticipated that my research companions and I would use our beginning understandings of postcolonial theory to theorise, explore and disrupt our constructions and understandings of Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures that were based on the colonial understandings and discourse circulating within Australia and our local communities and that influenced our curriculum practices. In order to explore and disrupt this curriculum practice, my research companions and I set off on an action research journey. We travelled and journeyed within monthly meetings over one year as we located and explored curriculum practice. Action research provided the maps for this journey as we attempted to explore the curricula practices of my companions and locate and explore the issues and challenges that arose as they attempted to disrupt this practice and find reconceptualised ways towards inclusion of Indigenous peoples and cultures. Throughout this journey however, while curriculum practice was located and explored and changes to this practice occurred at superficial levels, discussions around how the reconceptualising of this practice was limited and constrained by the influences of colonial discourse upon our personal understandings of Indigenous peoples and cultures was avoided. As I travelled back into the research meetings after a prolonged absence from the research journey, I became more aware of the silences that existed within our travels that enabled us to resist change in our practices around inclusion of Indigenous peoples and cultures in ways that opened spaces for this inclusion in equitable and respectful ways. I journeyed again through postcolonial theory and while this provided me with important and useful waymarks in which to locate and understand the research travels and moments within it, this theory did not provide me with pathways to explore the resistances. Early childhood reconceptualist literature also provided and guided my reflections on curricula practice in important ways, however, similar to my struggles with postcolonial theory, did not provide for waymarks to understand and locate the silences within the research travelling group. Silences that ensured discussion of personal understandings of Indigenous people and how these understandings were constructed was avoided. Within my searching of alternate theories and ways of exploring the terrain of this research journey, I stumbled across whiteness theories and found that the silences in the research could be located, positioned and explored through and within these theories and understandings. The thesis journey then followed white pathways that led into explorations of whiteness within the research and made it possible to see how both the research companions and myself had constructed ourselves, Indigenous Australian peoples and curricula theory and practice through and within these white understandings. As I located and explored my experiences through narrative and mapped and traced whiteness within the research travels and journeys, it became possible to view how strategies of whiteness operated to discourage the explorations and locating of our personal within our professional understandings. Given this, the possibilities for shifts in personal understandings, and as a consequence, professional and curricula practice, were limited and constrained within this journey into reconceptualising Indigenous inclusion in early childhood curriculum. The journeying within this thesis into reconceptualising early childhood curriculum around Indigenous inclusion and the drawing from both postcolonial and whiteness theories, however, has resulted in more complex understandings of how this work could take place. Mapping postcolonial viewpoints and waymarks and tracing white viewpoints and waymarks within these can allow early childhood researchers and educators to view how these discourses intersect and overlap to silence Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures as well as work to avoid and limit discussion and awareness within white communities about the existence of prejudice and discrimination. Further, the effects of these colonial and white discourses on both personal understandings and the influence of these on curriculum practices aimed at including Indigenous peoples and cultures can be uncovered, located, explored and disrupted in order to create spaces and places for Indigenous voices within early childhood curricula practice.
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ItemAn examination of how Australian art gallery educators perceive their role: two case studies( 2003)This study investigates six art educators working in two Australian art galleries at the turn of the millennium. The study examines how they perceive their role as reflected in the beliefs they hold, the type of lessons they present, and the kind of techniques they use to teach secondary school students in a gallery environment. The study also explores the influencing factors and institutional processes that have acted to inculcate existing attitudes and practices or to instigate change. Research in the area of gallery education indicates that whereas gallery educators twenty years ago felt obliged to analyse and explain artworks for viewers, gallery educators today see the viewer as an active agent in the construction of meaning. This implies that gallery educators seek to empower students by encouraging them to interpret artworks. This notion is based on the premise that knowledge is socially constructed, determined by the individual's respective background and experiences. The six case study subjects explain their roles as complex and demanding. Each offers a different account of the strategies they use to 'engage' students and to involve them in the process of interpretation. All utilise a 'floortalk' approach but with considerable variation. Different approaches such as drama, humour, stories and questioning are used by the teachers. However, the key link between all six case subjects is that they perceive their key role as being to 'engage' students and to stimulate them to actively construct meaning for themselves. In Bourdieu's terms this involves a process of providing students with "cultural capital', namely the kind of knowledge pertaining to the field of art education, its language, content, logic and aesthetic "grammar'. Such art language is needed for students to think, act and talk in relation to the social orthodoxies and heterodoxies established by the field. It was therefore these objectives and the strategies each case subject used to achieve them that are the focus of this study.
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ItemOn being an academic: a study of lived experience( 2003)To be an academic and work in an Australian university at the beginning of the twenty-first century is to be caught in a web of change, contradiction and turmoil. Amidst this tumult, academics are experiencing increased pressure to maintain high levels of performance, and university life is expected to continue as normal. However, to describe what normal means for higher education today (indeed for any age) would be to answer a great vexed question. As Australia awaits the blueprint for reform of higher education that is to be released with the May 2003 budget there is much hope that things in the future will be different, that the pressures on the higher education system will lessen, and that academics will be able to focus on the core elements of being an academic. Regardless of the outcome of this or any reform there is inevitability that life for the academic will continue to follow paths that are coloured by traditional understandings of what constitutes the life and work of the academic. Admittedly, the time and place where academics live and enact their academic work will influence the lived experience of each academic thus rendering it extremely difficult if not impossible to offer a simple or unified description of what it is to experience life as an academic. However, understanding the meaning of such experiences is important to shaping the future directions in academic life. One vehicle to achieve this understanding is through researching lived experience. This study seeks to uncover the points of unity that academics experience in their daily work, to identify the similarities and differences amongst academics as they face the challenge of working in a university at this period of time, and to provide academics with the voice to define and describe what rests at the core of their professional being. Ultimately, this study provides the opportunity for academics to comment on the uniqueness of their lived experience of academic life and to move towards defining the essential nature of being an academic. This study is located in a large, established university in a metropolitan capital in Australia. Academics from varying disciplines and at different levels of academic appointment participated in the interviews for the study conducted in the closing years of the twentieth century. Fifteen academics were interviewed on a bimestrial basis over a sustained period of time (over two years for most participants) and three academic managers from the university chancellery participated in a single interview. The focus of each of these interviews was to describe the lived experience of being an academic and to determine the meaning of what it is to be an academic in today's world. The theoretical framework for structuring this study is that of hermeneutic phenomenology and the guiding objectives for the study were to identify meaning in the lived experience of being an academic and to understand how being an academic is experienced today. The study draws heavily on the existing knowledge of higher education and academic life. The literature review addresses the phenomena influencing higher education and examines the responses of higher education to accommodate such globalising trends. Policy decisions in Australia that have shaped higher education and influenced the direction of academic life and work are also explored in this review. Clear from this review is that the extant body of knowledge reports strongly and offers significant commentary on the influences shaping academic life. What is missing in this body of knowledge is clarification of the meaning of what it is to be an academic living and working in today's world. Accordingly, in identifying the essential elements of what is required for an academic to be an academic, this study attempts to bridge this gap in the literature by presenting and re-presenting that matter that constitutes the phenomenon of being an academic. The analysis of data and findings of this research utilise strongly the voices of the participants in this study. The integrative themes of the Boyer scholarships (1990) have been employed to present the elements identified as essential to the phenomenon of being an academic. A phenomenological narrative is included to capture the lived experience of the participants in the study and to describe the phenomenon of being an academic. The study concludes with an overview of the significant outcomes of the study presented as challenges to the key stakeholders influencing academic life and also includes suggestions for further research.
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ItemGiving voice and being heard: searching for a new understanding of rehearsal processes and aesthetic outcomes in community theatre( 2004)This thesis is an examination of rehearsal processes and aesthetic outcomes in community theatre practice. It is a qualitative study, focusing on a community theatre project in a small outer suburban primary school near Melbourne, Australia. The researcher is a highly involved reflective practitioner, taking on the multiple roles of researcher, community artist and community member. At the heart of the thesis is a novella embodying a range of perspectives and experiences from the case study. The study began with the questions: how is it possible for a community theatre project to satisfy the participants’ artistic and community needs and what are the factors which contribute to the achievement of these ends? The tension between the contrasting needs and experiences of different participants, ranging from theatrically trained artistic facilitators to the children who struggle to be heard, to the parents looking to connect with the school community, informed the study. The inevitable challenges and difficulties of the fieldwork propelled the study into a wider exploration of questions of community participation in the arts as a means of individual and collective expression and as an experience of cultural democracy. Drawing on an extensive review of theoretical foundations underpinning the practice of community theatre, and a review of practice itself (both the researcher’s own and a range of exemplars), the study proposes an analysis of the key stages of development of community theatre practice. This analysis has been synthesised into a Community Theatre Matrix. At the core of the matrix is the notion that collective community art-making takes place within an Engaged Space, where key elements of Artistry, Agency, Pedagogy, Pragmatics and Critical Reflection shape and inform the practice. Those who choose to participate in the collective art-making process become a temporary community of art-makers. This Engaged Space is based on the conceptualisation of a ‘community aesthetic’ - participants engage in collective art-making processes predicated on an invitation to aesthetic and social engagement. Such a space is charged with the potential for a politicising experience as well as a community one. This new understanding is framed by an appreciation of the interplay between artistic invention (and intervention) and pedagogy. In order to give voice to the silent community, the artist employs the tools of emancipatory pedagogy along with modernist and post-modernist theatre understandings. The thesis concludes with the proposition that community theatre offers individuals and communities the possibility of a shared experience of art-making and the social and artistic possibilities associated with ‘giving voice and being heard’.