Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemUnravelling management practices in vocational education and training : identity at the frontline(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemJourneys of adaptation of Chinese and Vietnamese international students to academic writing practices in higher education( 2007)The study reported in this thesis explores how Chinese and Vietnamese international students exercise personal agency and mediate their academic writing to adapt to disciplinary practices at an Australian university. It also examines academics' attitudes toward student writing. The study employs a trans-disciplinary framework for interpreting student writing practices and lecturers' views within the institutional structure. This framework has been developed by infusing a modified version of Lillis' heuristic for exploring students' meaning making in higher education with positioning theory. The study documents the complexities and multi-layered nature of the adaptation processes that the students go through in their attempts to mediate their academic writing. A prominent finding of the study indicates the emergence of three main patterns of adaptation, committed adaptation, surface adaptation and hybrid adaptation, that the students employ to gain access to their disciplinary writing practices. The students' process of adaptation arises from their intrinsic motivations to be successful in their courses and to participate in their disciplinary community. However, where they differ is in their internal struggle related to what they really value amongst the possible disciplinary writing requirements they adopt in constructing their texts. The findings of the study show that the students' journeys of adaptation appear to be much more complex than what is often described in the current literature as being largely related to language and cultural factors. The analysis or the students' practices shows that they exercise personal agency by drawing on various strategies to facilitate their understandings of disciplinary expectations. In particular, the students have transformed their own practices through seeking ways to contact their lecturers to deepen their understandings of the disciplinary expectations, ask for feedback on draft versions of writing assignments and go through the redrafting process. The students are quite successful in using different ways to increase their understandings of the disciplinary expectations and even find the process rewarding. This shows that contrary to popular belief, international students in this study are able to demonstrate initiative and problem-solving skills. They actively exercise their own power as students, which allows them to participate in their disciplinary written discourse. The findings also indicate that what is of paramount importance to students' success is the interaction and dialogues they establish with their lecturers. The students' varying practices in spelling out what is expected of them establish a case for the importance of individual factors of each student and that success or failure is likely to relate to the possession of certain dispositions, regardless of one's ethnic background. The positioning analysis of the four lecturers involved in the study shows that they appear to be aware of the needs of international students and are determined to accommodate them in many ways. There are however a number of mismatches in the display of disciplinary knowledge among the academics themselves and between the academics and the students. Yet, in the relevant literature, what challenges international students is often attributed to such factors as English language, study skills and cultural adaptation, which arise from international students themselves. The study reported in this thesis reveals that the inconsistency and subtlety of the lecturers' explanations of the academic expectations makes it more challenging for international students to make sense of what is required of them in specific disciplines. Even though the lecturers attempt to find ways to facilitate students' understandings of the conventions, there is little mutual transformation occurring in terms of negotiating different ways of constructing knowledge. The findings of the study give insights into ways that a dialogical pedagogic model for mutual adaptation can be developed between international students and academics rather than the onus being on exclusive adaptation from the students. The model offers concrete steps towards developing mutual relationships and changes of international students and staff to each other within the overarching institutional realities of the university. Such a dialogical model is put forward as a tool to enhance the education of international students in this increasingly internationalized environment.
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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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ItemEthnicity and educational inequality: an investigation of school experience in Australia and France = Ethnicité et inégalité scolaire : une enquête sur l'expérience lycéenne en Australie et en France( 2008)This thesis examines the contribution of ‘ethnic’ background to the school experiences of educationally and socially disadvantaged students in the senior years of high school (n=927). To investigate the role both of ethnic identification and its interplay with institutional factors, a comparative analysis of secondary student experiences in two national settings was undertaken. The case of Turkish-background students in Australia and France suggests that the influences of ethnic identity are thoroughly transformed from one setting to the other by distinctive pedagogical structures. Streaming and severe academic judgement in France lower academic self-esteem, while creating resentment and social distance between students and teachers. By contrast, the deferral of selection and judgement in Australia allows, temporarily, for a more convivial classroom atmosphere, but fails just as surely to successfully navigate students through the curriculum and achieve academic success. The accommodations of both systems to students in ‘peripheral’ locations constitute logics of marginal integration which enable and legitimise ‘exclusion from within’. Student efforts to make meaning of school life through peer cultures which share many similarities across institutional and national boundaries emerge as what I have called strategies of marginal integration. Ethnic-minority students appear to be particularly susceptible to those logics and strategies, which reinforce their position within the system as marginal. This study therefore identifies the difficulties facing both systems as emerging from common overarching structural qualities. Cette thèse examine, au niveau lycée, la contribution de l’origine ethnique aux expériences scolaires d’élèves désavantagés (N=927). Elle a pour objectif d’étudier les rapports entre inégalité sociale, expérience scolaire, et structure institutionnelle. Afin d’enquêter sur le rôle de l’identification ethnique et sa relation aux facteurs institutionnels, une analyse comparative a été menée dans deux pays. L’étude du cas des élèves d’origine turque en France et en Australie indique que les influences de l’ethnicité sont transformées d’un contexte à l’autre par des structures pédagogiques distinctives. En France, les filières et les jugements académiques sévères en réduisent l’estime de soi, en créant de l’aliénation et de la distance sociale entre élève et professeur. En Australie, au contraire, le différemment de la sélection et du jugement permet, de façon temporaire, une atmosphère plus conviviale en cours, mais ne réussit pas à assurer le succès académique des élèves. Les efforts des deux systèmes dans les sites périphériques constituent des logiques d’intégration marginales qui permettent l’exclusion de l’intérieure. Les efforts des élèves pour donner un sens à la vie scolaire à travers des cultures de pairs qui se ressemblent dans les deux contextes font partie des stratégies d’intégration marginale. Les élèves d’origine immigrée semblent particulièrement concernés par ces logiques et stratégies, qui renforcent leur position subordonnée dans le système. L’étude identifie alors les difficultés auxquelles sont confrontés les deux systèmes comme résultant de caractéristiques structurelles.
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ItemIndigenous self-determination and early childhood education and care in Victoria( 2008)This thesis explores how Victoria’s early childhood community negotiates colonial constructions of Aboriginality around dualisms such as Indigenous/non Indigenous and intersecting constructions of the child as ignorant or innocent of race and power both in concert and conflict with the non Indigenous early childhood community. It found a need for a reconceptualisation of Aboriginality around complexity and multiplicity as well as continuity and uniformity. Such a reconceptualisation can better address those issues of race, culture, identity and racism that see Indigenous communities marginalised within non Indigenous early childhood programs. These negotiations around the colonial and the implications for Indigenous inclusion within the early childhood field are framed within post colonial theory which unites and connects major themes across tensions and contradictions. These themes act as a basis for each data chapter.
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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’.