Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Theses

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    How Can We Teach/Learn Emotion Words and Complex Abstract Meanings? – A Relational A/r/tographic Conversation In-between Images and Words
    SAJADI, NEDASADAT ( 2022)
    This a/r/tographic doctoral research is a pedagogical, cultural, methodological, and theoretical dialogue between a written exegesis and an a/r/t exhibition. Together, this 50/50 dynamic responds to this research, serving as a contiguous outcome. As an Iranian a/r/tographer I invite the viewer/reader to follow and engage with multimodal discussions by moving in-between the two inter-connected spaces of words and visuals. In this rhizomatic research, I explore the dynamics in-between images and words in communicating the complexities of meaning that are affected by our experiences and, in turn, continuously affect our understandings. I ask, How and to what extent can a/r/tography as a living inquiry contribute to the learning of complex abstract concepts such as emotion words and inter-personal/cultural meanings? Through entangled artmaking/writing, this a/r/tographic inquiry calls attention to uncertainty, process, and knowledge in the making. It introduces Persian miniatures as culturally specific artworks to stimulate learning with the unfamiliar. The entanglement within this arts-based educational research, addresses the overlooked or less discussed gaps which often result from commonly practiced, linear, established, or result-focused systems. Therefore, it offers a chance to interrupt the expected and negotiate meanings through affect. The thesis forms two parts: a written exegesis and creative component. The creative component comprises narrative colour-pencil/B&W illustrations on paper, acrylic painted/collaged paper mache sculptures, prints, and images on foam boards and acetate sheets. The creative outcomes of the research were presented and captured through a physical exhibition held at The University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education, prior to completion, on 1 April 2022. This completion exhibition provided a space of reflection which led to the curation of a final virtual a/r/t exhibition. To create a living and accessible collection/exhibition, all creative works have been photographed, scanned (JPG files), or processed as 3D models and assigned an individual digital object identifier (DOI). These artworks are stored in an online open access repository, called Figshare, and within the Pedestal 3D digital data management platform. As a collective, these digitised artworks were housed and then recorded to an immersive virtual space inside Mozilla Hubs which constitutes the a/r/t exhibition contributing to 50 percent of this doctoral research.
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    Refiguring sustainability education: Reckoning with relationships to place and Country on unceded urban Lands
    Belcher, Fiona Margaret ( 2021)
    Sustainability education is a dominant site for the production of ideas about place and Country. At the international level, Education for Sustainability broadly references social justice; however, place-based pedagogical frameworks neither stem from nor centralise Indigenous concerns and futures. Similarly, in the Australian National Curriculum, the Sustainability cross-curriculum priority is represented as commensurable with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures, without the associated foregrounding of sovereign claims. At the same time, First Peoples of the place known as Melbourne have long storied possible futures in which invader/settlers take seriously the protocol of not harming Country. As a white invader/settler researcher, I respond to this tension between sustainability curriculum and sovereignty. This thesis investigates the possibility held in curriculum and its enactment; that of producing in a generation of young people specific ideas about their relationships and responsibilities to place and Country. This thesis is therefore grounded in the question, what relationships to place and Country are produced through the Sustainability cross-curriculum priority in secondary schools on the Country of the Kulin Nations? This thesis is an original contribution to knowledge about the ways white invader/settler logics are produced via sustainability praxis. In doing so, it contributes to a deepened understanding of the relationship between Education for Sustainability and Land education. While the field of Land education identifies place-based education as a site of possibility, this thesis contributes to an understanding of the specific ways these possibilities are delimited by the influence of the priorities and assumptions of Education for Sustainability frameworks on sustainability education practice in Victoria. By employing white possessive logics as a key conceptual framework, this thesis contributes to increasing the theoretical possibilities of Land education. This theoretical contribution enables further analysis of how patriarchal white sovereignty operates through sustainability education to produce incommensurable imaginings of not only the future, but of the past. Curriculum texts alongside secondary school and sustainability hub educators across Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung Country form the sites on which this thesis is located. My research findings emerge from analysis of the material and representational elements of sustainability education on these school grounds, revealed through walking interviews, go-along methods, photovoice, and policy analysis within a critical place inquiry approach. In this context, I find that sustainability education as represented in policy and curriculum reduces the concepts of place and Country to resources, framed by the problematisation of scarce environmental resources between nation states. This policy emphasis on resources is mirrored in classroom settings, whereby students’ relationships to displaced objects, such as single use waste, is framed through a moral lens. The final finding of this thesis is that educators’ impetus for sustainability praxis is for establishing an affective re-connection between students and place. This educational assumption of students’ disconnection amplifies an investment in cultivating an imagined return to love of place. The primary argument of this thesis is that white invader/settler benevolence is produced through sustainability education in secondary schools, while contested relationships to Country are disavowed. Sustainability education at the sites on the Country of the Kulin Nations produces two related affects that stem from the central concept of the environment. First, an investment in displaced objects is cultivated as a way for students to inhabit a moral subject position in relation to unceded Country. This thesis argues that the reduction of place and Country to resource relations enables moral positions to be assigned to consumer choices. As a result, students who choose keep cups and Boomerang Bags are able to inhabit not just an innocent but a moral subject position. Further, invader/settler relationships to place are rendered innocent, framed in terms of a depoliticised love. The depoliticisation of relationships to Country and emphasis on individual relationships to displaced moral objects work in tandem in an attempt to secure patriarchal white sovereignty. This thesis contributes to an understanding of the ways these two affects work in concert to produce benevolent settler subject positions, reinscribing postcolonising processes through sustainability praxis. The implications of this are significant and also Country-specific. In contrast to the language of resources, the affective enactment of Education for Sustainability on Kulin Country reveals the ways that students’ futures and histories are produced to actively deracialise relationships to Country. Such enactments work in an attempt to legitimise white invader/settler replacement of First Peoples across the past, present and future. Despite these attempts, the materiality of Country – such as the extractive histories revealed through landfill – continues to work against this attempted reinscription of relations.
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    Stories of language, culture and race from African Australian children, their caregivers, and educators
    Iser, Rose Mary ( 2021)
    This study responds to ongoing and highly racialised public and political debate surrounding young people from refugee backgrounds, in particular African backgrounds, in Australia. The study investigates how the languages and cultural backgrounds of second-generation African Australian students are understood by educators, students and their families at one primary school in inner-Melbourne. It builds on scholarship that, over many decades, has sought ways of conceptualising the languages and cultures of students who have been marginalised in monolingual classrooms. The application of theories of cultural capital and funds of knowledge in previous research has supported asset pedagogies that value the skills and knowledge brought to classrooms by students from marginalised communities. However, it is argued here that the application of these theories, and specifically their transformative potential, has been limited by the normalised devaluation of marginalised students’ ‘resources’. This study investigates existing arrangements and new possibilities for conceptualising the languages and cultural backgrounds of the African Australian participants. A tri-part theoretical lens employed critical race theory (Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, & Crenshaw, 1993), theories of plurilingualism and translanguaging (Garcia, Lin, & May, 2017), as well as the emerging concept of LangCrit (Crump, 2014) to explore racialised understandings of languages and cultures by the educators, caregivers and the children themselves. The theoretical framework was applied to expose racial inequality (Gillborn, 2005; Rowe, 2020), focus on languaging, or language practices that challenge the social and political construction of linguistic codes (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007), and identify how socially constructed categories connect race and language (Crump, 2014). Employing an interpretivist qualitative research design layered with a lens of critical inquiry, data were collected at one primary school in Melbourne that caters for a significant population of second-generation African Australian students. Three cohorts of participants contributed to the study providing multiple perspectives to address the research problem: the educators at the school, the second-generation African Australian children, and their caregivers, with community members providing additional insights and context. Data collection methods involved language portraits, recordings using Garage Band, and in-depth interviews of varying lengths with participants from each cohort. The results of this investigation support the usefulness of the theoretical framework, revealing how narratives reflecting raciolinguistic ideologies in a school are constructed and reinforced as stock stories by the educators. These stories perpetuate deficit beliefs about inferior language acquisition, and sideline home languages as irrelevant to in-school academic pursuits. The students, caregivers and community members’ alternative counter-stories both accept and reject these constructions and signal a profound gulf between school and home. The findings also contribute conceptualisations of language and culture that depart from transactional notions of resources, and the racialisation of languages in schools, and instead honour subjective experiences of languages, cultures and identity. The study reveals the persistence of monolingual approaches to language learning, noting the constrictive implications for students and caregivers, and urges the adoption of approaches to learning aligned with culturally sustaining pedagogy to support the multilingualism of second-generation African Australian students in Australia.
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    Change leadership when implementing innovative learning environments
    Osborne, Mark Ian ( 2020)
    The educational architecture that has been built in New Zealand since 2011 has predominately been in the style of innovative learning environments (ILEs). While ILEs potentially offer teachers access to a wider range of teaching and learning approaches and more collaboration opportunities than traditional classrooms they also often require significant shifts in teacher practice to be successful. Leadership is often seen as an important factor in the successful implementation of such environments but there is very little research into the specific change leadership practices principals can employ to successfully transition their schools to ILEs. As part of the Australian Research Council-funded Innovative Learning Environments and Teacher Change project (ILETC) an analytic autoethnographic study was undertaken to identify the change leadership practices that are most likely to lead to a successful ILE implementation. A literature review was undertaken, the key findings from which were used to develop a conceptual framework. This framework was then used in a series of interactive interviews with New Zealand primary school principals to compare their personal experience (and those of the researcher) with change leadership principles in research literature. This joint sense-making was complemented by a range of other data sources including field notes, workshop artefacts, workshop transcripts, memories and recollections. Two ‘key informants’ (recognised experts in the field) were also used throughout the research process to support sense-making. The findings outline two sets of change leadership principles; a set that are important to uphold throughout the entire change process (persistent principles); and a set that are important (respectively) in the preparing, implementing and sustaining phases of a change (phase-dependent principles). These principles, when intelligently and sensitively applied by school leaders throughout the innovative learning environment implementation, will increase the likelihood a transition to ILEs will be successful, ultimately leading to improved learning and well-being outcomes for teachers and students.
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    Translating neuroscience and psychology into education: Towards a conceptual model for the Science of Learning
    Donoghue, Gregory Michael ( 2019)
    This thesis reports on an empirical comparison between disciplines of educational psychology and educational neuroscience. an integrated conceptual model for the emerging field of the Science of Learning that subsumes both disciplines. After developing a conceptual framework that divides educational phenomena into five discrete layers, and a translation schema, the thesis reports the results of a systematic review of 548 studies in the educational neuroscience literature. To compare this impact with that of Educational Psychology, the thesis reports on two empirical reviews of the educational psychology literature: first, a meta-analysis of 10 well-established learning strategies, and second a meta-synthesis of over 42 learning strategies and their moderators, which formed the basis of a proposed Model of Learning. Finally, the respective strengths and limitations of both disciplines formed the basis for an integrated conceptual model for human learning – the Pedagogical Primes Model for the Learning Sciences. This model provides a means by which all learning-related disciplines (including but not limited to neuroscience) can meaningfully communicate with each other, and in so doing enhance the valid translation of Science of Learning research into educational practice.
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    What drives schools to implement a successful change process that is more inclusive of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) students and staff?
    Moolman, Robert John ( 2019)
    Schools are rarely the spaces of fairness, kindness, inclusion and equality that some perceive them to be. At its heart, this work is one that considers how school leaders understand and react to the discrimination and oppression of lesbian, gay, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) individuals within their environment and, more importantly, what drives engaged, visible school leaders to change these situations. The key research question that is going to be considered is; ‘What drives schools to implement a successful change process that is more inclusive of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) students and staff?’ Flowing from this question are the sub-questions - What is the role of school leadership? What is the role of teachers? What are the significant forces and factors that help or hinder the drive for change? This thesis utilises qualitative research and narrative inquiry using semi-structured interviews to collect data from participants at school sites in Victoria, Australia. The semi-structured interviews are analysed using critical theory, in order to understand motivations, actions and behaviours. Critical theory concepts such as power, oppression, culture, repressive tolerance and leading change have contributed to the analysis. The data chapters in the thesis first consider the broad, wide-ranging idea of culture and environment and how these impact LGBTQ change processes. There is a focus on visible leadership within school spaces and the ability to manage change in a difficult social environment. In the two final data chapters, there is a more detailed description of the factors that enable change and those that hinder it within schools. The conclusion draws together the findings from the data chapters in order to address the research questions. This thesis ends with a section considering the road ahead for LGBTQ inclusive practice. The underlying emphasis of this thesis is to understand what prompts school leadership to move from a position of wanting to do something for their LGBTQ community to overt action, with leaders engaging and driving the change process in a positive and affirming manner. There are schools in the State of Victoria that have adopted overt and clear LGBTQ-inclusive policies or programs, and this work illuminates the way they went about managing the process of implementing and running those policies and programs. The thesis investigates the point that exists between the expectations of diversity and inclusivity, documented by government and education authorities, and the eventual adoption and implementation of school policies or actions focusing on LGBTQ students and staff. The underlying purpose of doing this research is to inspire change within the schooling system and to document the path to success and its benefits. It is envisioned that the research will help schools and education authorities to drive more action in this space. This thesis will assist schools, facing the legal and increasingly social expectations for change and with the prerequisite tools and resources for change, to move beyond a hesitant position and into one of action, so that, one day, schools can indeed become spaces for fairness, kindness, equity, and inclusion.
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    Social area indicators and educational achievement
    Ross, Kenneth N (1947-) ( 1982)
    This study was concerned with the development and validation of a national indicator of educational disadvantage which would be suitable for guiding resource allocation decisions associated with the Disadvantaged Schools Program in Australia. The national indicator was constructed by using a series of stepwise regression analyses in order to obtain a linear combination of census based descriptions of school neighbourhoods which would be highly correlated with school mean achievement scores. A correlational investigation of the properties of this indicator showed that it was an appropriate tool for the identification of schools in which there were high proportions of students who (1) had not mastered the basic skills of Literacy and Numeracy, (2) displayed behavioural characteristics which formed barriers to effective learning, and (3) lived in neighbourhoods having social profiles which were typical of communities suffering from deprivation and poverty. A theoretical model was developed in order to estimate the optimal level of precision with which indicators of educational disadvantage could be used to deliver resources to those students who were in most need of assistance. This model was used to demonstrate that resource allocation programs which employ schools as the units of identification and funding must take into account the nature of the variation of student characteristics between and within schools. The technique of factor analysis was employed to investigate the dimensions of residential differentiation associated with the neighbourhoods surrounding Australian schools. Three dimensions emerged from these analyses which were congruent with the postulates of the Shevky- Bell Social Area Analysis model. The interrelationships between these dimensions and school scores on the national indicator of educational disadvantage presented a picture of the 'social landscape' surrounding educationally disadvantaged schools in Australia as one in which there were: high concentrations of persons in the economically and socially vulnerable position of having low levels of educational attainment and low levels of occupational skill, low concentrations of persons living according to the popular model of Australian family life characterized by single family households, stable families, and separate dwellings, high concentrations of persons likely to have language communication problems because they were born in non-English speaking countries.
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    The decentralisation of curriculum decision making in Australia : developments and effects in three states
    Sturman, Andrew (1948-) ( 1988)
    The decentralisation of educational decision making and the involvement of a wider range of participants in decision-making processes have been key features of the administration of education in Australia over the past two decades. Among the arguments supporting reforms to the centralised education systems in Australia was the belief that decentralisation would lead to the development of curricula more suited to the needs of students. However, the relationship between changes in the control of curriculum decision making and the nature of the curriculum has not been well researched. This study was designed to address this deficiency. The freedom of teachers to make decisions about the curriculum is constrained by many factors. These can be grouped into a number of 'frames': the system, school, community and individual. The system frame refers to the influence of educational offices and assessment authorities; the school frame is concerned with the role of different school-based personnel such as administrators and faculty coordinators; the community frame refers to the participation of parents or other community members; and the individual frame is concerned with how individual teachers' values or epistemologies might translate into curriculum practices or preferences. These frames relate to different types of decentralisation that have emerged to a lesser or greater extent in Australia: regionalisation, school-based decision making, teacher-based decision making and community participation. This study sought to address the effects on the curriculum of types of decentralisation by examining the relative influence of the four frames. Three States, which had experienced different degrees of decentralisation, were selected for historical and current comparison and within each a number of schools were selected for case study. The schools were grouped according to their administrative and curricular styles, and according to teachers' perceptions of the influence of the community. Within schools, teachers were grouped according to their epistemological views. Data were collected through the administration of questionnaires and through interviews with teachers and administrators. The analyses revealed that in the program in practice there were considerable similarities in teachers' responses. Notwithstanding this, the system, school and individual frame were important influences on the curriculum. There was little evidence that the community was directly affecting curriculum decision making, although this frame did have an indirect influence. In the ideal program, the State differences were reduced and the school differences almost completely disappeared. On the other hand, teachers' epistemological views continued to be associated with the curriculum variables measured and teachers argued that the community should have somewhat greater influence than it had in practice. Among the findings reported, it was found that teachers in the most centralised system, in more tightly coupled schools and with a 'technicist' epistemology were, compared with their counterparts in decentralised systems, in loosely coupled schools and with an 'hermeneutic' epistemology, more likely to favour what might be called traditional curriculum structures and teaching practices.
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    Parents in the classroom
    Hall, J. M. ( 1987)
    The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of the presence of parents in the classroom on children, parents, and teachers. The study took the form of a sequenced set of action research style interventions in an outer-suburban secondary school and an inner-city primary school. Attitudes of parents of students in year 7 to creativity, frustration, control, play, and teaching/learning were measured with Strom's Parent as a Teacher inventory, P A A T. Achievements of the children in word knowledge, comprehension, spelling, and maths were measured with tests of ACER. There were some significant correlations between attitudes of parents and achievements of their children. For example, attitudes of mothers to control and the achievement of their children in maths were very highly correlated (N=105, p=.001). After one year of secondary schooling, there was no significant difference between the entering and final achievements of the year 7 students in this study in comprehension and maths (N=123). End-of-year scores of students for word knowledge and spelling were below the scores that would have been expected of students one year younger (N=175, 174). The numbers in these comparisons differ because of absences from school. Classroom experiments were conducted with parents in classrooms in a junior secondary and a primary school. "Parents" means adults who may be parents, other relatives or friends of the students, or friends of the school. In year 7, three different treatments for six weeks were compared, namely, two parents for two classroom periods a week (T), two parents for four periods a week (F), and no parents (Z). There was a significant interaction between mathematical aptitude and treatment (p=.021) such that at the low level of aptitude, achievements in maths with treatments F and T were superior to treatment Z. Also, with the low and medium levels of aptitude combined, treatment T was superior to treatment F (p=.038). With respect to attitude to learning maths, treatment T was superior to treatment F at both the low and medium levels of mathematical aptitude. However the effect on post attitudes was not significant. The attitudes of students in one grade 2 and two composite grades 3/4 were measured to sixteen items that were related to their school and TV. Coincident with the presence of parents in the classrooms of grade 2 and two composite grades 3/4 , there was an increase in positive attitudes of students to eight items in which there was a high level of teacher/parent involvement (HTPI) compared with eight low TPI items (grade 2, N=26; grades 3/4, N=50). In grades 3/4, the presence of parents in the classroom over a period of eight weeks had useful cumulative effects on time on task, teacher stress, and inappropriate class behaviour. Parents, students, and teachers in this study recommended that experience with parents in the classroom should be expanded.