Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemPolicy, theory and practice in early childhood curriculum design and implementation: a study of one Australian state: Victoria( 2003)This thesis seeks to identify how and who informs the state-funded preschool curriculum program for four-year-old children in Victoria, Australia. The study took place over a one year period, and involved interviewing nine officials, eight academics and twenty seven preschool teachers regarding their beliefs and espoused theories about the preschool curriculum in relation to policy, theory and practice. Twelve of the teachers interviewed were invited to participate further in the study, so that the relationship between their espoused theories and practices could be determined. This part of the study involved field visits and this provided a means of collecting data through direct observation using the Framework of Perspectives and Descriptions of Practice (Raban et aI., 2003a, 2003b), a tool designed by the Early Childhood Consortium at The University of Melbourne. Other means of data collection included informal discussions with teachers, and collecting and analysing different documents. The paradigm for this research study was predominantly qualitative but combined some quantitative data. This approach was incorporated into the design of the study because the nature of the investigation demanded a holistic and naturalistic approach. Multiple sources of data collection also helped to improve the reliability and validity of the findings, by converging lines of enquiry. This comprehensive approach meant that appropriate comparisons and contrasts could be made using numerical data, and this required the inclusion of some quantitative techniques. The findings of this study reveal a strong need for curriculum guidelines to be reconceptualised to reflect current understandings about young children's learning and development. The need for greater depth in a curriculum framework was evident, not only in relation to how children learn but regarding content and guidelines for appropriate goals for children. These views were also consistent with beliefs and understandings about the two existing curriculum documents for four-year-old children in funded preschool programs, in the year before compulsory schooling. These two documents are the Early Childhood Curriculum Guidelines 3 - 5 Year Olds (Department of Health and Community Services, 1991), and the Preschool Quality Assessment Checklist (Department of Human Services, 1996b). The overwhelming consensus was that both documents had little or no influence on preschool practices in Victoria. This study also found that stakeholders held similar views and understandings about the importance for preschool teachers to know about curriculum theories and pedagogical practices. However, the findings revealed that 83% of preschool teachers' practices were not congruent with their espoused theories. This study concludes by addressing further research issues and recommendations for policy-makers, academics and preschool teachers, in order to foster high quality preschool programs for children in Victoria.
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ItemExpeditions, travels and journeys: reconceptualising teaching and learning about indigenous Australians in the early childhood curriculum( 2004)This thesis aimed to explore the terrain of early childhood educator's inclusion of Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures within their curriculum practice. Within this it was anticipated that these explorations would draw from early childhood reconceptualist literature to explore and trouble understandings of curriculum theory and practice. It was also anticipated that my research companions and I would use our beginning understandings of postcolonial theory to theorise, explore and disrupt our constructions and understandings of Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures that were based on the colonial understandings and discourse circulating within Australia and our local communities and that influenced our curriculum practices. In order to explore and disrupt this curriculum practice, my research companions and I set off on an action research journey. We travelled and journeyed within monthly meetings over one year as we located and explored curriculum practice. Action research provided the maps for this journey as we attempted to explore the curricula practices of my companions and locate and explore the issues and challenges that arose as they attempted to disrupt this practice and find reconceptualised ways towards inclusion of Indigenous peoples and cultures. Throughout this journey however, while curriculum practice was located and explored and changes to this practice occurred at superficial levels, discussions around how the reconceptualising of this practice was limited and constrained by the influences of colonial discourse upon our personal understandings of Indigenous peoples and cultures was avoided. As I travelled back into the research meetings after a prolonged absence from the research journey, I became more aware of the silences that existed within our travels that enabled us to resist change in our practices around inclusion of Indigenous peoples and cultures in ways that opened spaces for this inclusion in equitable and respectful ways. I journeyed again through postcolonial theory and while this provided me with important and useful waymarks in which to locate and understand the research travels and moments within it, this theory did not provide me with pathways to explore the resistances. Early childhood reconceptualist literature also provided and guided my reflections on curricula practice in important ways, however, similar to my struggles with postcolonial theory, did not provide for waymarks to understand and locate the silences within the research travelling group. Silences that ensured discussion of personal understandings of Indigenous people and how these understandings were constructed was avoided. Within my searching of alternate theories and ways of exploring the terrain of this research journey, I stumbled across whiteness theories and found that the silences in the research could be located, positioned and explored through and within these theories and understandings. The thesis journey then followed white pathways that led into explorations of whiteness within the research and made it possible to see how both the research companions and myself had constructed ourselves, Indigenous Australian peoples and curricula theory and practice through and within these white understandings. As I located and explored my experiences through narrative and mapped and traced whiteness within the research travels and journeys, it became possible to view how strategies of whiteness operated to discourage the explorations and locating of our personal within our professional understandings. Given this, the possibilities for shifts in personal understandings, and as a consequence, professional and curricula practice, were limited and constrained within this journey into reconceptualising Indigenous inclusion in early childhood curriculum. The journeying within this thesis into reconceptualising early childhood curriculum around Indigenous inclusion and the drawing from both postcolonial and whiteness theories, however, has resulted in more complex understandings of how this work could take place. Mapping postcolonial viewpoints and waymarks and tracing white viewpoints and waymarks within these can allow early childhood researchers and educators to view how these discourses intersect and overlap to silence Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures as well as work to avoid and limit discussion and awareness within white communities about the existence of prejudice and discrimination. Further, the effects of these colonial and white discourses on both personal understandings and the influence of these on curriculum practices aimed at including Indigenous peoples and cultures can be uncovered, located, explored and disrupted in order to create spaces and places for Indigenous voices within early childhood curricula practice.
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ItemRe-imagining professional learning in early education( 2007)This project grew out of my desire to realise an emancipatory vision in my practice of teacher professional learning in early education. Most of the professional learning for early education teachers in New Zealand is designed to assist the implementation of policy, and with broad trends such as standardisation and evidence-based practice dominating political agendas, the space for alternatives is limited. There is growing concern by some with the continuing positivist influence on professional learning which prioritizes technical training over critical inquiry and dialectical debate. Despite this, there is very little research questioning these trends; or seeking ways to work differently with teachers towards social justice. The main aim of this project was therefore to examine professional learning and the inter-related themes of knowledge, the learner, and change from a critical pedagogical perspective, using poststructuralist feminist theory and the work of Foucault to do so. Action research was chosen as the methodology because this is most consistent with the critical pedagogical principles underpinning this project. In keeping with poststructuralist feminist theory and the work of Foucault, action research was reconceptualised within postmodernism and many of the normally accepted conventions of modernist research were therefore challenged and re-defined. There were no attempts made to produce certain and universal answers, or to prove the findings valid through methods such as triangulation. Instead, the aim was to present multiple perspectives, including the contradictory and uncertain. The researcher was not positioned as objective but as wholly present, and the subjectivities, contradictions and challenges experienced because of this were illuminated, not hidden. Moreover, a postmodern stance meant that findings were presented as partial, provisional, and local. To achieve the research aims I worked with seven early education teachers in New Zealand over a period of 2 ½ years, meeting with them both individually and as a group. In group sessions we discussed and debated many educational issues; some raised by teachers and some introduced by me. These sessions were an opportunity to engage on a dialectical level with the discourses shaping beliefs and practices. Most of the data came from these fragmented and discontinuous conversations, and this data was used to examine how power, knowledge and discourse worked together to shape what was counted as normal and worthwhile for these teachers to know and learn. Because the goal of reconceptualised action research is to understand more about the social order so that this can be transformed, data was used to inform social change during and not just after the project. Poststructuralist feminist theory focused the analysis more specifically on how the women teachers in this project negotiated and manoeuvred in and through the competing discourses to which they had access. Foucault's work on sexuality was used to consider how the problematization of teaching affected what teachers believed to be best practice, and how this shaped their becoming. Additionally, Foucault's work on power and the practices of the self became useful for examining how discourse was regulated, preserved and reproduced throughout this project, and how this sanctioned and silenced what could be spoken and by whom. Together, the work of Foucault and poststructuralist feminist theory offered a different lens with which to question and challenge teacher professional learning in early education. The main argument of this thesis is that professional learning for progressive social change involves much more than technical training. If teachers are to engage in the kind of critical inquiry and dialectical debate necessary for the work of social justice, then current professional learning opportunities need to be challenged. In this project, it was employing a Foucauldian analysis of power to the way I organised and managed time and space that brought the biggest shifts. For me, this involved redefining what I valued in terms of knowledge, the learner and change; and shifting what I prioritised in the time and space given to learning. As a result I more actively and intentionally sought to disrupt privileged truths and to create experimental learning spaces where learners could cross borders into the unfamiliar and unsafe. In these spaces both beliefs and practices were unsettled and learners were invited to become otherwise; and when they did, the change was transformational. The following pages share with the reader how this happened. Applying a poststructuralist feminist and Foucauldian analysis to teacher professional learning provided a way for me to re-imagine how teacher professional learning in early education might be a force for progressive social change. This thesis highlights the possibilities presented by such an analysis and challenges others to consider professional learning in early education differently.
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ItemIndigenous self-determination and early childhood education and care in Victoria( 2008)This thesis explores how Victoria’s early childhood community negotiates colonial constructions of Aboriginality around dualisms such as Indigenous/non Indigenous and intersecting constructions of the child as ignorant or innocent of race and power both in concert and conflict with the non Indigenous early childhood community. It found a need for a reconceptualisation of Aboriginality around complexity and multiplicity as well as continuity and uniformity. Such a reconceptualisation can better address those issues of race, culture, identity and racism that see Indigenous communities marginalised within non Indigenous early childhood programs. These negotiations around the colonial and the implications for Indigenous inclusion within the early childhood field are framed within post colonial theory which unites and connects major themes across tensions and contradictions. These themes act as a basis for each data chapter.