Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemImagining Futures: Youth Identities in Transnationally-Linked Villages in the Northern Philippines( 2019)Each year a sizeable proportion of mothers leave their villages in the Philippines to work abroad. While they leave behind their families and onlookers who remain, attend schools, and work in the villages, the mother’s connection and sense of belonging persists, reinforced through sending home gift boxes, remittances, and ideas. These women’s left behind children and their peers are connected too – directly or vicariously – to the rest of the world because of the flow of these material and cultural goods into the villages. These create a complicated relationship between home and away that transforms the villages, making them into a new and different kind of place. The disciplines that have studied this complex phenomenon include transnational, migration, diaspora, and youth studies, and have two general focal tendencies. First, they tend to be adult-centric such that experiences of migrant women are well studied from Barcelona to Taiwan while young people are framed as merely secondary to the struggles of their parents. Second, they are mobile-centric. The research literature teems with accounts of social and emotional challenges faced by immigrant children while left behind children are rarely studied. These focal proclivities render the left behind and onlooking children as not full subjects in terms of their stake in the emigration of their mothers, and their participation in emergent globalising processes, because of their age and of remaining moored in the villages respectively. Therefore, there is a need for scholarship to move beyond the dualism of the active and agentic, adult, mobile citizen in global cites and the passively receiving left behind children in rural areas. This thesis is borne out of biographic and historical connections to transnational movements, a curiosity to understand young people’s complex experience of it while they are moored in the villages, and a desire to engage with existing scholarship on transnational movements and rural youth. It enquires about the ways in which young people who remain in villages respond to the deluge of global forces; and more specifically, it examines how young people in the villages of the northern Philippines come to imagine the world and their futures, in light of the pervasive and different sorts of movements they experience. By using conceptual resources drawn from the mobility turn and the imaginative turn, as well as insights from an ethnographically-informed study that mustered various approaches such as go alongs, focus groups, interviews, and use of student-generated materials, this thesis examines three salient domains of young people’s lives: schooling, labour, and gender. This thesis found that young people respond to challenges brought forth by the transnational mobilities in these domains through the use of an imaginative capacity that I conceptualise as practices of making do. I argue that their responses possess tactical, creative, and calculative qualities yet are less eventful, or ordinary. They come in the form of affective grammatical practices, acts that disrupt conventional notions of logical responses, and at times, as playful responses. I show how these bundles of imaginative practices of making do have significant material and discursive effects that, in turn, produce their village as locality. This thesis seeks to contribute to theoretical discussions by opening a space for the possibility of operationalising imagination as a form of everyday practice, undertaken not by artists or activists, but by ordinary people. By focusing on young people’s imagination of their futures in relation to mobilities and transformations in school, work, and home, the underlying costs and labour necessary for the work of the imagination are also surfaced. Overall, this thesis illuminates the complex, contingent, and dynamic character of transnational movements by highlighting their asymmetrical impact upon people and institutions in specific localities, and their tactical and creative responses.
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ItemOral language in the 'everyday life' of young rural children( 2014)Rural children have been underperforming in national Australian assessments of education, such as the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2010) and are also under-represented at higher levels of education. Literacy, which is underpinned by oral language, is needed to access many areas of the curriculum for successful learning. This research examined the context and development of rural children’s oral language over the first year of school using a constructivist approach and predominantly qualitative methods. The participants were nine rural Australian children (representing 90% of their class), their parents, class teacher, and preschool teacher. Their language use outside school was examined through interviews at the beginning and end of the school year. The children’s developing control over language for retelling stories and recounting their experiences was also compared and contrasted using a range of linguistic measures to gain insight into their lexical choices, cohesion, fluency, and their ability to convey meaning with accuracy and precision. The children’s oral language was also examined through language-assessment tasks, including the Record of Oral Language (Clay et al., 2007), SEA Tell Me (Curriculum Corporation, 1999), and the CombiList (Damhuis, de Blauw, & Brandenbarg, 2004). The results indicated that the children’s interactions were often limited to those within the community, which impacts on their need to use new words. Further, the analysis indicated their developing control over language was nonlinear and context dependent. However, key indicators of competency, measures of mean length of utterance, and number of within-utterance pauses increased. Though varied, all children reached acceptable outcomes after one year at school in English learning areas. The study’s findings contribute an understanding of how a teacher’s awareness of the children’s lived experiences and language use may facilitate the implementation of shared frameworks. This could strengthen connections between home and school, and provide a basis of continuity of learning. Targeted teaching may then move these non-mainstream children towards the use of the more complex language essential for early literacy learning and school performance more generally.
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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.