Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemSocial justice and rural education in Australia( 2009)This thesis is an exploratory study of what social justice means to rural school participants within their school contexts. While social justice is usually invoked as an explicit concept, research has rarely looked at how rural school participants construct and make meaning of it. Without this understanding, policy makers, educators and researchers alike risk continuing to adopt an insufficient or limited model of social justice, a one-size fits all approach to issues of social inequality. Moreover, exploring the subjective element of social justice can make an important contribution to understanding how social injustices are experienced, tolerated and perpetuated in disadvantaged settings. This is a qualitative study based on focus group and semi-structured interviews with rural school participants - students, teachers, principals and parents - in two government schools in rural Victoria, and documents (mostly school reports and community newsletters). In this thesis I apply three dimensions of social justice to rural education. The dimensions in which I am interested are distributive justice (e.g. the distribution of resources), associational justice (e.g. participation in policy-making and decision-making), and recognitional justice (e.g. recognition of different social groups and individuals in schools). My theoretical framework draws on the work of political theorist Iris Marion Young. Like Young, I search for a position that offers a plural model of social justice — one that overcomes the shortfalls of the liberal-egalitarian model that equates social justice solely with distributive justice. The concepts of space and time play an important role in this thesis. I argue that structuring social justice in space and time provides a more nuanced understanding of the context for rural school participants' responses. In the institutionalised space and time of rural schooling –the present– the participants favoured the dimension of distributive justice, expressed as equality of opportunity or access to resources. In considering postschool options, the scenario and expression of social justice changes within a context of greater uncertainty. Young people and adult members of the communities are aware of the need for youth to migrate to gain further and higher qualifications to gain access to meaningful employment opportunities. In the scenario of youth out-migration to metropolitan and regional centres, my participants hold closely to notions of self-reliance, hard-work and seizing opportunities to confront a future of uncertainty. I argue that these individualised notions over-determine their agency to dictate their own future overlooking structural barriers, inadvertently making participants themselves solely responsible for their successes and failures. Moreover, the prevalent principle of social justice is desert, where the concept of merit justifies unequal outcomes, creating a danger of a normalisation of inequalities in society. Further to these limited conceptualisations of social justice, I look for discourses and experiences of plural social justice and social change in the rural schools. That is, I look for possibilities of hope and social change. Some teachers mediate it through the relational process of teaching and learning; focusing on social inclusion by recognising and giving a voice to all students, including those that did not fit within the mainstream school and community population. These examples demonstrated how rural school participants can be agents of social change. This possibility of becoming agents of social change, I claim, can only be sustained if we adopt a plural framework of social justice, one that gives the actor resources, recognition of his/her condition and spaces of participation. This thesis argues that a good quality of education that contributes to redress issues of social injustice in society needs a better and greater distribution of resources but it also fundamentally requires an understanding of issues of recognition and participation in areas of schooling, such as policy-making, curriculum issues and teachers' professional needs.
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ItemPathways to work: a micro-study of young people through post-compulsory education to work( 2009)Social background and gender have long been recognised as factors which shape the quality of post-school outcomes. The children of professional families and girls have stayed longer in school and achieved better than the children of non-professional families and boys. Governments, both in Australia and around the world, use policy to counter this persistent problem. The focus of these policies on preventing school dropout presumes that the longer a young person is engaged in school the better the post-school outcome. This is still not always the case. One such policy was the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) which, amongst other things, increased the breadth of post-compulsory school curriculum to address the needs of an increasingly diverse student body and act as a conductor of relevant learning through these years. The aim of this work is threefold - A better understanding of both the pathways, including curriculum, taken through school taken by each of the members of the Class of ’95 and the work outcomes of the school experience, including academic achievement, of each of them. - A better understanding of the connection, if any, of these pathways and outcome with individual family background and gender. - An appraisal of the contribution of the school in neutralising social origin as a factor determining the quality of post-school outcomes. In order to explore the quality of post-school outcomes this research follows the pathways through secondary school to work of one hundred and sixty-three young people who commenced their secondary school journey in Year 7 together at the same college. A longitudinal case study, this work explores the journey of these students for thirteen years by which time all were established in work. The secondary education of this cohort was provided by a non-selective co-educational Catholic Regional College located in the outer urban fringe of Melbourne. The cohort was socially diverse and dominated by children from the families of non-professional white-collar workers. This dominance increased over time since students from this social background were the least likely to drop-out of school for work. It was found that social background permeated all aspects of school experience from Year 7 to Year 12 academic achievement to the decision to stay on in school and choice of subjects in the post-compulsory secondary school years. The latter influenced competitiveness for university and TAFE course places. All in the cohort who stayed in school passed the VCE. But competitiveness for university and TAFE course places was again aligned on social and gender grounds which favoured the traditional users of education who studied the traditional VCE. This meant that school policy of providing a broad based curriculum aimed at meeting needs of the very diverse student population was in tension with the limiting policy of university course selectors.
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ItemExperiential learning programs in Australian secondary schools( 2010)Experiential programs in special environments are common in Australian education, notably in independent secondary schools. Without overt reference to research, they claim the special features of their program lead to personal development. The study sought to discover the underlying theoretical elements common to experiential learning programs, and by extension, sought to identify the elements of the experiential learning that might be incorporated into mainstream learning. Adopting a constructivist interpretive framework drawn from the work of Dewey, Vygotsky, and Bruner, the study examined six Australian independent school experiential learning programs offered to Year 9 students at dedicated, discrete settings ranging from wilderness to the inner city. The methodology employed in the research design was qualitative, drawing on Argyris and Schon’s notion of theory of action as an overarching framework in the documentation of six case-study programs. A preliminary probe into a single experiential program and an Australia-wide survey of school-based experiential learning provided a base of reference for the main study, which focused on 41 teaching practitioners as the primary informants on the programs. Data sources consisted of public documentation on programs, ethnographic interviews, questionnaire responses and researcher observations. Charmazian grounded theory method and Argyris and Schon’s ladder of interference were used as the primary tools for data analysis. The study found challenging setting, constructed social interaction, tolerance of risk, and reflection to be the essential design components that enable personal learning, and these thus form the model of experiential learning that emerges from analysis of the data. Together with the learner and cognitive dissonance, the spatiotemporal setting of the experience is identified as the defining characteristic and third component of experiential learning transactions. Specific properties of each learning setting interact with learners in ways that afford specific learning opportunities. Individual student status and collective social structures in remote experiential settings that rupture contact with the home community are profoundly altered through the experience. Risk emerges as an indispensible property of novel learning experiences. Reflection, both facilitated and unfacilitated, is the mechanism by which experiential learning is stored in episodic memory and informs the process of knowledge creation. The theoretical model of experiential learning derived from the programs studied describes the essential differences between experiential and mainstream learning. This model offers a basic design template for the development of experiential learning programs in other settings to meet the particular learning needs of Year 9 students in mainstream schools. Finally, these programs provided evidence of close parallels with traditional initiation rites, suggesting that they serve an important socialisation function for adolescents.
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ItemPrimary teachers and the Information and Communications Technology domain: figuring worlds, identities, knowledge and practices( 2010)This study investigates the development of teacher professional practice in the context of government education policy in Victoria (Australia) that aims, through the education of its youth, to shape a successful economy that capitalises on information and communications technology (ICT). Specifically, the study examines how selected primary teachers from an ICT network conceptualise, articulate and develop a body of knowledge to teach and implement the Information and Communications Technology domain of the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (Victorian Government, 2005) curriculum framework. Through a constructivist grounded theory approach, the study investigates the practices of six female teachers in three government primary schools as they implement changes to curriculum in response to government reforms and local expectations. The three primary schools are within close proximity of each other in a residential growth corridor on the fringes of metropolitan Melbourne, and serve a diverse and multicultural community. Innovation with ICT is seen as necessary for addressing the challenges that arise from the social and economic context of the research sites, and is integral to improvement plans in each of these schools. The participating teachers are regarded as leaders with ICT within their schools and their efforts are deemed intrinsic to their school’s plan. Rich descriptive data of these six teachers and how they construct their worlds is utilised to develop a theory of how teachers learn to teach with ICT, with a view to understanding how they continue to learn in the context of these changes. Change efforts often focus on the importance of knowledge building to empower professionals for new directions, however while a critical component, knowledge is not the only factor in increasing capability. The study highlights that learning to teach the ICT domain is more complex than developing content knowledge, pedagogical repertoire and skills in the use of ICT. It involves networked learning where values, beliefs, vision, practice and identities are made and remade. In making changes, teachers consider new ideas in light of the old, and through the lens of their core values and beliefs, they figure a technologically rich world of vast imaginings that they can embody. They author identities to assert themselves in relation to imposed positioning and prior conceptualisations. Through changed activity related to ICT, they redefine their conception of teaching and inhabit it with their activity and energy.