Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemAccessibility and effectiveness of early childhood education and care for families from low socioeconomic status backgrounds in Australia( 2016)This thesis focuses on the potential for high quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs to narrow the cognitive achievement gaps associated with family socio economic status (SES). Large benefits have been observed in carefully designed experiments that implement model ECEC programs. In such programs, achievement gaps between children from lower SES families and their more advantaged peers are narrowed and potentially closed. This is not, however, the pattern observed in everyday ECEC programs in the population where typically small, no, or negative effects are observed. This thesis considers how families are constrained by the availability of ECEC programs in their local area (availability), how the choice of ECEC program is influenced by family context (decision making), and how much ECEC programs contribute to the learning and development of children from low SES backgrounds (effectiveness). Using data from the E4Kids study, negotiated data linkages, and public data collections this thesis contributes new knowledge about the Australian ECEC market and its effectiveness. Altogether, 2494 children participated in the study and longitudinal data is used from the years 2010 to 2012, covering the children’s transition from ECEC programs into school. Major findings include that: • The local ECEC market (the ECEC programs near to family’s homes) is smaller than previously thought. • There are relatively fewer ECEC spaces per resident child in low SES areas, and on average they were found to be of lower quality. • Families from low SES background tend to select lower quality ECEC programs particularly when children are two or more years before school. • The typical ECEC programs observed in Australia provide small and positive effects for the children who attend them, controlling for the local market size and the family selection process. There was, however, no evidence found that children from low SES backgrounds catch up to their more advantaged peers. The everyday ECEC market in Australia is not organised to deliver a reduction in the inequality of outcomes observed for children from low SES backgrounds. There is substantial potential to lift the quality of all ECEC programs, but particular attention should be given to programs operating in low SES areas, and serving the youngest aged children.
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ItemInclusive education and school reform in postcolonial India( 2015)Over the past two decades, a converging discourse has emerged around the world concerning the importance of socially inclusive education. In India, the idea of inclusive education is not new, and is consistent with the key principles underpinning the Indian constitution. It has been promoted by a number of educational thinkers of modern India such as Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Azad and Tagore. However, the idea of inclusive education has been unevenly and inadequately implemented in Indian schools, which have remained largely socially segregated. There are of course major exceptions, with some schools valiantly seeking to realize social inclusion. One such school is in Kolkata, which has been nationally and globally celebrated as an example of best practice. The main aim of this thesis is to examine the initiative of inclusive educational reform that this school represents. It analyses the school’s understanding of inclusive education; provides an account of how the school promoted its achievements, not only within its own community but also around the world; and critically assesses the extent to which the initiatives are sustainable in the long term. Methodologically, the research reported in this thesis involves an ethnographic case study of the school. Interdisciplinary in its approach to data analysis, the thesis utilizes both international and indigenous theoretical resources, taking into account both local experiences, as well as transnational processes. It suggests that while the school has been enormously successful in establishing a program of reform that is inclusive in many respects, consistent with both global designs and local conceptions of inclusive education. However, it represents a model that is hard to sustain in light of the changes in its leadership, the context of a highly competitive education system in India, shifting student and parent aspirations, and the emerging neoliberal pressures under which most Indian institutions now have to work.
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ItemJourneys to university and arrival experiences: a study of non-traditional students transitions at a new Australian university( 2011)The broad context for this study is the rapid shift in recent decades from elite to mass Higher Education in Australia, and new government policies and institutional strategies which are geared to building university graduate numbers and increasing successful participation by working-class and other non-traditional students in degree courses. This study of a cohort of commencing humanities students at a new university aimed to produce a more in-depth and holistic account of non-traditional students’ transitions in Higher Education in Australia than is available through large-scale survey-driven reports or available through studies focused on curriculum matters; notwithstanding the valuable contribution to knowledge made by many of these studies and reports. This is a mixed-method study weighted towards the analysis of 33 students’ biographical stories produced through in-depth interviews and contextualised by survey results and other data. The study investigated the students’ social and family backgrounds, their educational experiences prior to coming to university, their aspirations and career goals, their dispositions towards Higher Education and their preparedness for degree level studies on arrival. It also investigated the daily lives of these students in the early weeks and months of their time at university, and investigated on-campus and off-campus matters impacting or intruding on their first-year studies including financial worries, paid-work commitments and household duties. And it explored how students were dealing with the difficulties they faced, and the resources they were bringing to meet various challenges. In seeking to understand the wider context or backdrop to these students’ experiences and perspectives the study drew on strands of youth sociology concerned with persistent inequalities amidst rapid social change, non-linear life-course transitions, and pressures on young people to produce their own biographies. In seeking to understand the nature of people’s class-based relationships with educational institutions and practices, and education’s role in social reproduction, the study drew on work by Pierre Bourdieu and some scholars who draw on and critique his ideas. The thesis foregrounds a framework which draws on theories and concepts from critical social psychology – including the work of academic Margaret Wetherell and therapist Michael White – concerned with the transformative potential of biographical reflexivity and narrative practice. This framework aligns to the narrative research method of using in-depth interviews to produce biographical stories about people’s lives in education.The study found that the majority of these non-traditional students at a new university had strong educational aspirations and clear career goals, were socially and intellectually engaged and satisfied with their courses, felt well supported by families and by the institution, and were generally enjoying successful Higher Education transitions, despite various difficulties and challenges most faced on-campus and off-campus. The study also argued that students’ reflexive capacities and their use of ‘narrative as a discursive resource’ (Taylor 2006) seemed to be contributing to their production of learner identities, including a strong sense of belonging in Higher Education. Several interviewees described ‘finding themselves’ through participation in Higher Education. Overall, conceptually, this study brings some new questions to analyse the contemporary relevance of arguments about working-class people ‘losing themselves’ in Higher Education. The study’s analysis and presentation of non-traditional students’ successful first-year university transitions at a new university supports the view that there is in Australia a changing relationship of working-class people to Higher Education; a field which remains beset by inequalities but one which has become literally and culturally more accessible. This accessibility is evidenced in the collective stories produced here and more generally in the take up by working-class people of the new places and opportunities which have become available in the current political climate.