Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemGesture-based approaches to language learning(University of Melbourne, 2012)
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ItemAims and experience in outdoor education(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemInstitutional influences on approaches to teaching within a flexible university : a cultural historical investigation( 2010)This study investigated the teaching approaches of two business academics located within an Australian university developing its flexible teaching and learning practices over the past twenty years. The interview subjects are highly regarded educators with formative backgrounds in on-campus or off-campus distance teaching. Each has had a long professional relationship with the researcher in her centrally situated position's as an educational developer within the institution. A review of the student learning literature pertaining to teaching and learning approaches in the higher education sector over the last thirty years, shows that "teaching approaches" can influence "student learning approaches"(Ramsden, Paul 2003) and outcomes, (Biggs, J. 2003; Lizzio, Alf, Wilson, Keithia & Simons, Roland 2002) however "institutional influences" upon teaching approaches seems to be substantially overlooked. (Kernber & Kwan 2000) The academics were invited to participate in this study agreeing to retrospectively review and discuss their teaching in three progressive phases of their working history. They were invited to consider their teaching approach using the Approach to Teaching Inventory (Trigwell, Prosser et. al. 2005) in order to reflect upon their personal positioning (Harre September 2004), institutional practice and societal rhetoric in relation to an academic life in various periods of their teaching history. Discursive analysis has been undertaken of the resulting conversations guided by Cultural Historical Analysis Theory, (Vygotsky 1978, Engestrom 1987). This investigation reveals profound institutional influences on the approaches of teachers to their work. Influences on academic life have usually been studied independent of the Higher education teaching and learning literature. This study points to an urgent need to integrate these research interests to inform understanding of material transformative activity for policy makers in higher education.
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ItemInformed consent for children in Saudi Arabia( 2012)Informed consent is considered an integral part of the ethical dimension of research, especially in educational research undertaken with children. The procedures and details of obtaining informed consent from children’s parents have received much scholarship in the field. This study aims at exploring the issue of obtaining informed consent for children in educational research in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The thesis proposes that that there is a gap in obtaining informed consent from parents of children involved in educational research in KSA. Data was collected through a questionnaire, which was completed by six participants who hold graduate degrees in education research. Results indicated that there were clear administrative processes undertaken by the participants to obtain permission to undertake research in early childhood settings, firstly from the Ministry of Education and then the principal of early childhood settings. There were no formal ethics guidelines, protocols, or processes discussed in relation to obtaining informed consent from children’s parents in KSA. Researchers who discussed informed consent from parents and children when conducting research on children were guided by their experience in the United States or the United Kingdom. This was the major reason behind choosing post-colonialism as a conceptual frame for the study. The point being stressed is that there is no harm in importing academic and research practices from the West as long as they do not contradict major religious and cultural practices— something that goes in line with Islam’s encouragement of gaining knowledge. Post-colonial theory supports a way to navigate western concepts of informed consent with KSA’s social and historical beliefs and practices. The study concludes by stressing the necessity of adopting the informed consent procedure in research conducted on children in KSA. The nature and details of this informed consent can be appropriated to fit the social and cultural realties of KSA. It is also recommended that further research be done in this field.
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ItemThere are many Indias: depictions of Indian-ness, epiphanies and moments of transformative exhilaration in recent literature for young adults published in India( 2012)The study ‘There are many Indias: Depictions of Indian-ness, epiphanies and moments of transformative exhilaration in recent literature for young adults published in India ’ takes its impetus from the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority’s (ACARA) ‘The Australian Curriculum’ for English (2012), which stipulates as one of its aims the emphasis of Australia’s ‘links to Asia’ (p.3). As an experienced and practising teacher of English and Literature within the secondary classroom in Melbourne, Australia with an interest in Indian culture and literature, I wanted to explore beyond the Asian texts booklisted by the Asia Education Foundation (2011) for use in the English classroom. Curiosity, amongst other factors, led me to India. It is in bookshops and schools in India where I discovered that there are many more texts, delightful, powerful often confronting texts, written in English and evoking a deep sense of Indian culture, that we teachers of English in Australia were aware of. This thesis analyses a selection of YAL novels written in English and published in India recently. It explores the depiction of Indian-ness within the experience and realm of childhood, against a distinctively Indian backdrop. In an appropriation of Hollindale's concept of childness, the term Indian-ness is adopted, addressing the multilayered nature of Indian experience whilst exposing attitudinal shifts in both the depiction of the child/youth protagonist and societal perceptions of the child/youth as reader. Furthermore, this thesis examines Hollindale’s concept of epiphanies and moments of transformative exhilaration as they manifest in the selected YAL works. Their subsequent implications from within the text (in terms of the protagonist) and beyond the text (in terms of reader response) are also explored. This study analyses the significance of epiphanies and moments of transformative exhilaration in relation to perceptions of society and the world of the young adult and how literature offers another way of seeing and being in the world. Thus the expansive potential of literature to empower and transform the individual is examined. Finally, this study asserts that these factors act as a unifying element and allow for a richness of interpretation which extends and further embellishes the scope of possibility in one’s perception of life, their vision for the future and their perception of the quality of Indian-ness and its many manifestations. Hollindale’s concept of epiphanies and moments of transformative exhilaration serves to illustrate the common humanity that the selected YAL texts expose the reader to, whilst simultaneously suggesting the universality of the reading experience.
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ItemThe dilemmas of junior school science at Caby High School: societal expectations, school structures, student experiences and teacher accounts( 2012)Public claims about the “failure” of science teaching have a 100 year history, which is almost as long as science has existed as a subject in schools. These claims which have evolved to proclamations of a social “crisis” in the post war period have been based in various iterative assertions about the failure of school science to meet its assumed social function to induct young people into a modern scientific structural-economic or functional world view and hence to reproduce a technical class in society. Public discussions of the broader cultural value of science education and scientific humanism, in the education of the person and citizen have been rare. This may be interpreted as a response to the essentially subversive nature of scientific knowledge or the significance of the technical training function that secondary science education is required to perform. Science teaching has been institutionalised as value free, and the skills of science teaching defined in terms of practical epistemologies in various scientific domains. Studies of teachers’ habits of action, of interpretation, of belief and validatory belief have been rare, particularly juxtaposed to the experiences of their students in their classes. Studies of life in science classrooms have attended to teachers or students, rarely both and more rarely even the school as the unit of analysis. Such studies have been small in scale and very poorly funded compared to the numerous formal enquiries into declining enrolments in senior pre-professional subjects in secondary schools. It is a history of social enquiry that seems to be reproduced in each period at the point where the imperfection of the writers’ memory of their experiences in science classrooms meets the past inadequacies of documentation of practice. The current small investigation takes its rise not from an interest in the so called facts about falling enrolments in senior science subjects or to establish a new theory of cause and effect, but from an urge to put together in a new way what everyone knows is there in science classes in the accounts of students and teachers, but not noticed. At Caby High School, an urban, multicultural secondary school, seeking to improve student participation and achievement in secondary education, my three collaborating science teachers and I were not looking for new facts but to better understand what is in plain view to them and their students in their everyday experience in junior science education. In that sense my considerations in this study were not scientific or hypothetical ones, to advance a kind of theory. I have not sought explanations of the supposed “failure” of science teaching in terms of what students fail to accomplish, expect or experience but rather to document what the students’ experiences and expectations are of science classes and how the teachers responded, not directly to the students’ expectations, but in terms of balancing both the social order to which the teachers are retrospectively accountable and the constitutive order in the classroom which requires mutual attention and cooperation. Through the teachers’ dramaturgical interpretation of their day to day practice my brief analyses are aimed at improved understanding of teacher agency in relation to the dilemmas of general science teaching.
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ItemThe wired village: sustainability, social networking and values in an urban permaculture community( 2011)This study is an examination of learning and teaching processes within the Permaculture Out West (POW) community group, a sustainability organization that operates in the Western suburbs of Melbourne. It is posited that key social values are taught and learnt by member participants of the POW organisation through engagement in everyday group activity. Using a multi-sited ethnographic methodology (eg Marcus, 1995) the researcher traces learning and teaching practices amongst participants, with particular reference to group values. These values are examined with reference to the Permaculture concept (Holmgren and Mollison, 1978), the grassroots environmental philosophy which informs sustainability discourse for POW members. The Community of Practice learning framework (Lave and Wenger, 1991) has influenced both research approach and design, and throughout the project, the group is constructed and interpreted as a ‘Community of Practice’ in line with this school of literature. Web-based ICT technologies are regularly used by group members to produce, enact, teach and learn social values, and thus, the role of ICT in group and communications life forms a particular research focus.
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ItemAdapting an organisational capacity assessment tool to meet the needs of both the donor and civil society organisations in Papua New Guinea( 2011)In global efforts to address poverty, civil society organisations such as community groups, local associations, and non-government organisations are important players alongside government and the private sector. There is a general consensus within both the international donor community and the civil society sector that strengthening the organisational capacity of these groups will assist them to possess greater legitimacy and influence. What is contested is how donors can support civil society organisations to monitor and evaluate their capacity in a way that is useful for both the organisation and the donor. Influencing this discourse is debate over the merit of strengths-based approaches for organisational development (Cooperrider and Whitney 2005; Gray 2009), and increasing recognition of: the impact of the power differential between the assessor and the assessed (Reeler 2007); the complexity of capacity development (Brinkerhoff and Morgan 2010); and the limitations of baselines (Kelly, David et al. 2008). This thesis explores these issues through a particular case involving an organisational assessment tool used with community groups in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Using an interactive form of evaluation, action research (Owen 2006), a team of Papua New Guineans and expatriates revised the 'Joint Organisational Assessment' (JOA) tool which had been first developed by an Australian Government-funded program (the Program) in 2005. The purpose of the research was to answer the question: How can an existing organisational assessment tool be improved to meet the needs of civil society organisations and the donor in the international development context? Through two action research cycles, over an eleven-month period spanning 2008 and 2009, the original Baseline JOA was progressively modified and trialled with nine diverse community groups in urban and rural PNG. A Repeat JOA was also developed that could be used to monitor changes in the organisations' capacity over time, and to help evaluate the effectiveness of the Program's support provided to these groups. Data was collected from the participating groups through interviews, surveys, informal conversations, and systematic observation. Technical specialists were also interviewed, and documents and literature were reviewed progressively throughout the research. At the conclusion of the study, the results were shared with donors and community groups within PNG. Internationally, there is no shortage of organisational assessment tools already developed. However, this research adds value by providing an assessment tool that has been tested in the PNG context, and that explicitly seeks to: • Accommodate both accountability and learning purposes • Incorporate elements of a strengths-based approach in order to build on organisations' existing capabilities, and generate motivation for change • Provide the flexibility to accommodate organisations in very different stages of development through using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative questions, and interactive activities • Interpret the significance of donor-supported capacity development efforts, in the context of broader changes that the organisation is experiencing. A set of principles that can guide the development, review or selection of organisational assessment processes in other contexts was also identified through the study. Future research could investigate how a process such as the JOA could incorporate: a review of individual, organisational and cultural values and the effect these have on an organisation's performance; broader systems thinking on organisational capability; and opportunities for feedback from an organisation's beneficiaries.
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ItemMulticultural and diversity education in the globalised classroom in Australia( 2012)Australia is no longer an “isolated backwater” island floating around the Asia-Pacific region. It has become a country of great importance as a multicultural hub that continues to flourish in a time of social, cultural, and population growth. With this changing environment the needs of its people, in particular its children, have also changed. As multicultural awareness begins to expand and borders cease to define the cultural differences of those around us, the needs of the learners in school are also in a state of flux. This paper tracks the evolution of multicultural and diversity education policies in Australia through seven key documents: these are The National Policy on Languages (Lo Bianco, 1987), the Asian Studies Council Report – Asian Studies Council (1988), National Agenda for Multicultural Australia (Commonwealth of Australia, 1989), Adelaide Declaration (1999), Melbourne Declaration (2008), Blueprint for Education and Early Childhood Development (2008) and Education for Global and Multicultural Citizenship: A Strategy for Victorian Government Schools 2009-2013 (DEECD, 2009). It concludes with implications and impacts of this history and these documents and addresses the need for continued teacher preparation and instruction through recommendation new initiatives.