Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemFrom developing child to competent learner: a genealogical study of the kindergarten child and progressive reform in Aotearoa New Zealand( 2017)Historically through to the present day, early childhood education has been the focus of myriad and potent investments; a persistent, if variously inflected, feature is its reforming and progressive impulse. This thesis offers a history of the kindergarten child in Aotearoa New Zealand in which themes of subjectivity, knowledge, temporality, truth, and freedom are central. The history, a form of genealogy (Foucault 1984), examines two moments of significant early education reform in New Zealand. Analysis of these reforms is anchored by, and extends from, the landmark policy statements of Pre-School Education: Report of the Consultative Committee on Pre-School Educational Services (DOE 1947) and Education to be More: Report of the Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group (DOE 1988). Working with diverse historical sources – textual, visual, socio-spatial, expert, professional, and practice oriented – the thesis develops a historical account of these reforms and their respective elaboration as self-consciously new and leading-edge practices. It explores the kindergarten child as the subject of changing progressive discourses through analysis of epistemological and affective investments and close examination of practices within what I conceptualize as free-play, developmental pedagogies of freedom (late 1940s and 1950s), and sociocultural learning pedagogies of empowerment (late 1990s and 2000s). The identified pedagogies and their respective conditions of reform are situated in juxtaposed rather than linear temporal relations. That is, I conceptualize them as two differently liberating “timespaces” (Baker 2001, 24), each animated by fervently held understandings of the nature of young children, and what their good education should entail. Engaging a non-binary and practical understanding of processes of subject formation, I understand the pedagogies, spaces, concepts, materials, and practices under examination as technologies of government and subjectivity, and the forms of natural – free or empowered – conduct that they presumed and promoted are analysed. Motivated by critical genealogical aims, the thesis seeks to unsettle current certainties and commitments to the truth of the child in early education, a subject who is commonly understood and called forth as a competent, social and culturally diverse learner. Overall, the thesis argues that these reforms and their respective pedagogies have a “double gesture” (Popkewitz 2009, 397), entailing a valorization and promotion of particular forms of liberated conduct and work-upon the self, whilst simultaneously foreclosing alternative possibilities. Developing a somewhat anti-progressivist account, the history illuminates the surprising – and often neglected in present-day critique – forms of caring attention towards children as embodied, affective subjects within mid-century developmental pedagogies. It surfaces, too, the often overlooked essentializing effects of discourses of empowerment, diversity, and competence within recently ascendant learning-framed pedagogies. While illuminating the affordances of discourses of growth, along with the normative foundationalism of learning discourses, the thesis does not simply call for a restoration of developmental pedagogies or for the wholesale repudiation of empowerment and learning. Rather, this historical study seeks to produce an opening in which present-day investments, including those formulated as counter-discourses, may be appraised with an alertness to their subject-forming effects as well as the blindspots and ambivalence of progressive discourses. Further, while grounded in the cultural politics of Aotearoa New Zealand, the issues raised and arguments developed have relevance to wider shifts and flows in critique, policy, and practice in early education during the twentieth century through to the present day. Grappling with themes of knowledge, subjectivity and temporality, the thesis aims to contribute new and contextually rich insights into the history of the child in and through early education. In doing so, it seeks to reframe that history and open up fresh ways of rethinking the effects of progressive ideas in early education. Finally, this thesis attempts to contribute conceptually and methodologically to approaches for the exploration of educated subjectivities in the past. It does so through a reflexive engagement with Foucauldian concepts of government and ethics in critical interaction with space, materiality and the visual in the history of education.
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ItemThe nature of the studio: an artist's method of inquiry( 2016)The studio is traditionally regarded as a hallowed space, one that underpins the artist’s process, temperament, inquiry and work. It is steeped in a history of myth and mystery. From cave to monastery, medieval guild to Renaissance study, Romantic genius working alone in the garret to a site recording experiences of natural phenomena and scientific perceptual observations, from the 1960s Factory, to the kitchen table and laptop, the nature of the studio has responded to cultural shifts and critical contexts. The demise of the studio was first coined in the 1960s and 1970s and heralded the idea of the ‘post studio’ age. In recent literature, particularly in the visual arts, the ‘fall’ of the studio is declared again and suggests it is still suspect to speak of certain kinds of solitary studio-based art practice. Yet, further debates position a ‘post-post-studio’ era, one that supports a reinvestment of the space via artistic practices of an expanded, collective or hybrid nature. These perceptions are said to be symptoms of a bigger picture: the ‘persistent lacunae’ in critical scholarship on the artist’s studio. This research seeks to address that gap. This research project backgrounds the history of the studio, its myths and legacy in order to present an understanding of the studio now. It examines the studio from the cave to the contemporary space exploring how the studio has responded to changes in cultural contexts and shifting modes of production. As we are in another cycle of change with information technology, globalisation and neoliberal values that favour ‘immaterial labour economies’, this research investigation asks: What is the nature of the studio today? What were the terms and conditions that made the proclamation, ‘post-studio’ possible? What is the nature of the post-post-studio and how do different models of the studio function across the arts in an academic setting? By examining the studios from disciplinary perspectives at the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne, this research investigates the nature of the studio in contemporary art practices across six disciplines: Music, Dance, Art, Theatre, Production and Film and Television from student and academic perspectives, to give an Australian outlook on the function of the studio in the early 21st century. Using a mixed method study the project engages a quantitative and qualitative survey and qualitative interviews to reveal findings that declare the importance of the studio space as a vital ingredient to teaching and learning across all the art disciplines at the VCA.
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ItemThe aspiring spires: momentum and the status university( 2013)Higher education is in many respects governed by market relations and state direction; in some ways, however, it is not. In prestige, it falls back on an elusive force. The university is entrepreneurial, and it is public spirited, and it is also itself. According to perceptions of how much of a university a university is, it is able to relay credibility. Rankings and taxonomical mapping may come at this nebulous prestige from more solid data, including the tracing of market performance and state backing. Crucially, though, it is prestige that any ranking hoping to gauge the calibrations of trust and belief is after, whether prestige already detected or that anticipated according to momentum. Aware of this, inasmuch as an organization can think, the status university continues to grow as a magnet for competitive but remarkably peaceable human endeavour, and as a major junction for the forces of civil religion. The thesis seeks to update the appraisal of the highly evolved sense of status in universities and in progressively expanded higher education systems, and to deepen appreciation of the energy and history with which they swell.
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ItemProvision for the education of Catholic women in Australia since 1840( 1988)An historical perspective of the Religious Orders of women which entered the Catholic education scene in nineteenth-century Australia, and an appraisal of their adaptation to the forces within Australian society which influenced their provision for the education of Catholic women in this country as they operated under the powerful direction of the bishops.
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ItemCultural mission of the sisters of St Joseph( 2004)This research study examines the history of Sacred Heart Catholic School, Newport, Victoria, established within the tradition and application of the educational philosophy of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, founded by Mary MacKillop in 1866. The work includes three distinct areas of research which are: 1. The MacKillop System of Education in its early stages. 2. The growth of multicultural theory and practice in Australia and in Catholicism. 3. The story of one school, Sacred Heart Catholic School, Newport, situated in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria. These areas connect up and illuminate one another throughout the thesis, evoking a sense of school life as it was experienced by members of the school community at different stages of the school's development and within a variety of social and educational contexts. The research appreciates the integral vitality of the founding spirit manifest in Mary MacKillop, especially as it was reflected in the Sisters appointed to the school at Newport as administrators and as teachers. The study examines the long-term adaptation of the mission of the Church, namely the evangelisation of cultures in the local community of Newport throughout its hundred years history. Focus is brought to bear on the interpretation of Mary MacKillop's philosophy of education in its first fifty years and the changes perceived during the later period of massive and fundamental transformation in the ethnic composition of the local community as well as the broader Church and State. By reconstructing the past this study provides a reference point for those involved in education by shedding light on the present and raising questions for the future.
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ItemA history of technical education in Australia: with special reference to the period before 1914( 1966)In this thesis the attempts of colonial man to adapt to his environment and to train the young worker, the artisan and the technologist are discussed. Initially education in the form of practical training was merely an aspect of charitable beliefs or intellectual presumptions. The colonies relied in the main on obtaining their needed skills from overseas. But, especially after the gold rushes, indigenous technological challenges arose to which pragmatic educational response was made. Thus the transition from the mechanics’ institutes, largely agents of ‘improving’ purpose, to the schools of mines, ostensibly dedicated to the service and advancement of colonial industry. Technical education however was retained, throughout its history in Australia, a strong ideological component. Its most effective real contribution, in the period before 1914 at least, was in the field of opening opportunity to the socially and educationally underprivileged; but the general insistence was on its immediate industrial relevance. This latter was largely an illusion, but it served to nurture the technical schools while they performed multi-functional tasks and developed as poor men’s grammar schools. The hey-day of technical education in Australia was between 1880 and 1900, when it became a cause which appealed to free-traders, protectionists, the labor movement, the manufacturers, the nation-builders and many other important social groups. In this period it became a means of liberating the potential of democratic man, and thus a prime plank in the liberal platform. But after 1900 the vision became narrower, and technical education became increasingly identified with the concepts of ‘national destiny’, man as a social unit, and educational specialisation. Instead of being a vehicle for the concept of undifferentiated man, it became an excuse for a narrow and rigorous view of individual function. By 1914 the anti-liberal educational revolution had been achieved, and education in general, and technical education in particular, was henceforward conceived as being subservient to the objects of a modern industrial society. But public response was fickle, and the will to plan an industrial economy, and the educational system such an economy demanded, fluctuated. We are still affected by the ambivalent nature of the origins of technical education, still not clear in our own minds as to what our own responsibilities to the development of our own country are.
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ItemThe systematic delivery of Catholic schooling in Australia: Catholic school systems as living organisations( 2001)This research investigates the systematic provision of Catholic schooling across Australia through the state, territory and diocesan systems of education. It sets out to determine the manner in which the problems faced by the seemingly independent and autonomous schools within the Catholic sector in the early 1970s have been addressed in the systematisation of the delivery of Catholic education. The research was based on a multi-site case study of the sector which involved data collection through interviews with system leaders in 25 Catholic dioceses and was supported by surveys of school principals in every diocese as well as a collection of documents over the period of the study. The study identifies the organisational models and the operational principles evident in the modern systems and investigates the functioning of the localised systems in terms of personnel and resource allocation. Practices within the systems generally align with the theoretical and rhetorical Church statements but the study isolates a number of areas, particularly in the areas of authority, governance and decision making, where there is a clash of priorities between local autonomy and collective wellbeing. The data gathered through interviews and surveys clarify the current challenges facing the sector including the anticipated outcomes of Catholic schooling, the inclusiveness of the systems and the relationship between the systems and the local church.