Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemTeacher advocacy for LGBTIQ equality: teacher perspectives, changes and supports( 2017)This thesis has interrogated the relationship between teachers, advocacy and the inequality of LGBTIQ students in Australian schools. Despite improvements in Australian schools, educational environments remain profoundly unequal for LGBTIQ students, who continue to face victimisation and exclusion through policy, the curriculum, teacher practice and their day-to-day interactions with peers. At the core of sexual orientation inequality is the ongoing conflict between neo-liberal and social justice ideals, manifesting most prominently through competing agendas regarding the role of the teacher in society. Because of the significance of this conflict, this study sought to explore teacher perspectives regarding LGBTIQ inequality in schools, as well as teacher perspectives regarding the role of the teacher in improving equality. Furthermore, this study investigated whether teachers could change their beliefs and behaviours regarding sexual diversity, as well as the supports required to assist and facilitate change. The study was conducted utilising an emancipatory action research cycle of planning for action, action, observation and reflection. Following a one-off semi-structured interview, six secondary school teachers engaged in six group sessions over six months. The research group, consisting of myself and the teachers, participated in group discussions, reflective writing, guided observation and analysed passages of their transcripts, in order to express perspectives concerning a range of issues regarding LGBTIQ inequality and equality in schools. The teachers also engaged in change strategies, demonstrating changes to their beliefs, behaviours and the practice of sexuality and equality. The study generated several significant findings relating to teachers and advocacy. The perspectives of teachers regarding diversity, their role in change, the role of the school and policy demonstrated the importance of awareness, and when awareness was lacking, the importance of exposure to alternative types of sexual identity. Regarding change, throughout the process, the teachers exhibited changes in their beliefs, in their emotional engagement, in their language and in the way they perceived the school and their own part in making the school are more fair and equal place for LGBTIQ students. Whilst awareness, fear and anger presented as prominent barriers in both engaging and committing to advocacy, the teachers were able to overcome these obstacles with empathy, collaboration and an orientation to their values.
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ItemExploring an appropriation of reader-response theory for teaching and learning English literature in Vietnam( 2016)While learner-centred approaches to literature in second/foreign language education have enjoyed wide empirical support, the teaching of English literature in Vietnam still focuses on transmitting an objectified interpretation of a text. This study explores the potential of appropriating reader-response theory (Rosenblatt, 1994), which locates the meaning of a literary text through the reader-text connection, with the following question: In what ways can reader-response theory make a contribution to the teaching and learning of English literature at the undergraduate level in Vietnam? This research was conducted through the implementation of an innovative teaching intervention based on reader-response theory. The teaching intervention appropriated reader-response theory to nurture students’ own experiences of and responses to English literature through interactive activities. This intervention was designed to work within an institutional syllabus at a university in Vietnam. The study used action research, in which the researcher participated as the teacher implementing the teaching intervention. Action research complements reader-response theory as both attend to interactive meaning making in context. Data were collected from 48 English-major students through pre-course and post-course questionnaires, class recordings, a teaching journal, after-class evaluations, online communications and reading logs. The data were analysed using three perspectives: those of the teacher and student participants, and a real-time view of class conversations and artefacts. This research found that appropriating reader-response theory in this context involved creating a transition from teacher-centred to student-centred learning, where dialogic teaching and interactive activities were used to evoke students’ own responses to the text. This transition required the teacher to adopt a dynamic role taking students’ learning styles into account. Through this approach, the students became dialogic and critical in developing their own responses to the texts they studied. However, they showed some contradictory attitudes to the unconventionality of the reader-response approach, which asked for and helped develop the students’ own responses to literature rather than giving them final answers. The mixed reaction indicated the complexity of creating a new learning paradigm in a traditional context. The students seemed to negotiate this complexity and become more critical about their own learning as a result. An important implication of this study is that it illustrates the potential of reader-response theory to contribute to teaching programs that seek to enable learners to experience literature in a second/foreign language individually and interactively. Based on the research findings, a model for appropriating reader-response theory is proposed that coalesces and balances active individual reading, collaborative exploration of responses, and language and literary scaffolding. In authority-abiding, exam-oriented institutional contexts such as in Vietnam, appropriating reader-response theory also requires mindfulness of a potential tension between the old and new practice, especially with regard to assessment issues.
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ItemThe waterhole: using educational drama as apedagogical tool in a foreign languageclass at a public primary school in Japan( 2006-07)This study investigates Japanese primary school students’ and teachers’ responses to educational drama as a pedagogical tool in their English language classes. Along with the participants’ responses, the applicability of educational drama as a teaching method for the Japanese teachers is also discussed. The study was conducted in Japan as ateacher-researcher using participatory action research methods. The participants of the study are three Year Six classes and their teachers in a public primary school in Japan. Educational drama is introduced as an alternative teaching and learning method to these participants who have had no experience of drama in education.
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ItemWorking in Web mode: the transformation of a university environmental subject through its development for online teaching and learning( 2001-04)The university-level environmental studies subject Living in the Environment moved online progressively over two years. A Web-based version of the pre-existing subject was designed, implemented and evaluated over five semesters during 1997 and 1998. By the end of 1998, an online version of the subject was functioning effectively in a manner that enabled a teacher and students to work as a class group transacting teaching and learning activities entirely via the Web. The question of what the subject would be like as a result of going online, in the experience of the subject educators who worked with it, was the starting point for the research reported in this thesis. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemInnovation in university computer-facilitated learning systems: product, workplace experience and the organisation( 2003-06)This thesis reports on the development of a generic online system to support learning and teaching at the University of Melbourne. New online technologies, the fostering of innovation at national and university levels and my position within a central educational unit provided the opportunity in 1996 to adapt a previous software package for online use. My observations of the problematic nature of computer-facilitated learning (CFL) production led me to take an open approach to the development, seeking both a practical product and enhanced understanding. A series of formative questions defined the scope and goals of the study, which were to: *produce a generic online learning system; *increase understanding of the workplace experience of that development; and *develop an organisational model for the further development of generic CFL systems. Given this multi-disciplinary focus, many paradigms in the literature could potentially have guided the study. A number of these aligning with the research purposes, context and constructivist philosophy of the study, were reviewed from the perspectives of learning, CFL development and the organisation.
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ItemContesting identities: in othered voices( 2012)The Australian population is diverse in its ethno-cultural make up due to its history of Indigenous peoples, colonial occupation and settlement, and later immigration with more than 22.2% of Australian population born overseas (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006). Early childhood is seen as a critical period for the development of who you are, the ‘self’, one’s individual and collective identity (Miell, 1995; Schaffer, 1996). Children construct the identities of ‘self’ and ‘other’ using categorical language such as race, ethnicity and colour around the age of two (Epstein, 2009). Epstein (2009) believes that even young children are influenced by the socio-contextual messages available to them about such categorical representations of identities, and thereby choose their identity preferences accordingly. Since 1980s, most educational settings in Australia had developed goals to adopt multicultural policies and practices as their primacy to enable all individuals to maintain their cultures and to educate everyone about Australian values (Leeman & Reid, 2006). However, Aveling (2002) stresses that Aboriginal and multicultural education was about the “other”, as it only silenced the struggles of those that are seen as different, whilst allowing the prevalent white cultural domination to thrive. Leeman and Reid (2006) add that such discourses with notions of maintaining the cultures of those that are seen as different do not abstain individuals from justifying racist constructions based on ethnicity. Therefore, Kowalski (2007) recommends that early childhood teachers need to become aware of their own behaviours, which contribute towards children’s development of attitudes towards their own group and those of others. Thus, I decided to engage with this complex phenomenon through action research methodology, to explore how language was used by us in early childhood settings to ‘speak’ of our cultural identities within the Australian context. Through my action research study, I tell the cultural identity stories that we (children, families, staff and I) as boundary (culture/ethnic/race/religion) ‘speakers’, enacted, shaped and contested such identities for each other within early childhood settings. To tell my cultural identity stories, I use Ganga, the largest river in India as a metaphor to denote everything that this experience was and to ‘speak’ with and about the complexities that were inherent in the topic, the action research methodology and in our subjective understandings and experiences with skin colour and cultures in Australia. By centralising ‘othering’ as a key process in enacting cultural identities, I make meaning of my Ganga-the data using different theoretical interests namely, psychoanalysis and social psychology (Hall, 2003; Crisp & Turner, 2007), Althusserian ideological influence (Althusser, 2008; Fairclough, 1992), and finally through poststructural feminist theory (Weedon, 1987) in combination with postcolonial (Said, 1978) and critical race theoretical paths (Frankenberg, 1993). Each time I channelled my Ganga-the data through a particular theoretical course, my Ganga surfaced different meanings, which I call, cultural identity ‘truths’. She first surfaced the role of ‘othering’ in distinguishing individuals and groups as ‘Australian’ and ‘not Australian’. As my Ganga and I navigated the next course, she unearthed the power of ideological ‘Othering’ in shaping cultural identities in Australia. As I sank deeper into my Ganga I recognised my inability to decolonise my thoughts and mind. With my Ganga, I realised my own subjective postcolonial partialities, and united my colonised, colonising, and postcolonial voices to resist dominance. In our final course, my Ganga and I bring to light the ‘Power’ of ‘whiteness’ and ‘Australianness’ in ‘øthering’ our cultural practices. I then conclude my Ganga-the study with postcolonial silences and voices that disrupted and resisted ideological colonisation, to imagine a multicultural Australia, where all cultures are able to be voiced equitably by all individuals and groups.