Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Theses

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    What is logical deduction, in relation to physics, and how can students improve in this?
    McKenzie, Russell David ( 2023-11)
    This research was done in the context of the increasing emphasis on thinking in education and the contention by many researchers that improvement in thinking leads to improvement in learning. The other context is the difficulty of physics as a subject at high school and the constant search for better methods of teaching the subject. The objective was to investigate the suitability of logic education as a method to improve students understanding of physics. The current state of physics and thinking education was explored in the Literature Review. This included an analysis of methods aimed at improving student performance in physics, improving thinking and improving performance in physics by improving the thinking that occurs in this subject. Consequently, logical deduction in physics was deemed an area with the potential to support such improvement. As well, the process of logical deduction was found to need clarification. The nature of logical deduction was, therefore, explored using a philosophical method. The first outcome of this was that the process usually thought of as ‘logical deduction’ was reconceptualised as ‘deductive inferring’. This was to better reflect its nature as a thinking process. Wittgenstein’s critique of solitary rule-following was then applied to the processes of deductive and inductive inferring, and they were problematised accordingly. Consequently, a more accurate delineation of these processes was given as deductive-like and inductive-like inferring. To assess the suitability of logic education for physics education, the thinking involved in physics problem-solving was investigated empirically using a think-aloud method. It was found that deductive-like inferring played a key role in this thinking. For instance, it was implicated in moving from the information given in a question, alongside assumed knowledge, towards an answer. The results strongly suggested that logical deduction should be an element in a suite of thinking skills explicitly taught to high school physics students, and that more emphasis should be placed on logic and thinking more generally in education. The results of these analyses also motivate further research in this area and suggestions for these were made.
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    Gesture-based approaches to language learning
    McKinney, Jennifer. (University of Melbourne, 2012)
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    Aims and experience in outdoor education
    Nicolson, Malcolm A. (University of Melbourne, 2010)
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    Investigating the Use of Augmented Reality Game-Based Learning in Classrooms to Support Student Learning in Victoria
    Dixon, Janelle Denise ( 2023-09)
    In our rapidly changing world, technology has become an inescapable part of people’s lives. Unprecedented availability of cost-effective technology offers opportunities to innovate teaching practices to match the demand for young people to understand and use emerging technologies. Despite the importance of augmented reality as an emerging technology that affords students access to tools and environments not available previously, and the opportunities it offers when combined with game-based learning to form augmented reality game-based learning (ARGBL) for innovative practice in education, there has been limited research conducted into the emerging area of ARGBL. Specifically, there is a lack of research into teachers’ perceptions and use of ARGBL in classrooms in Victoria, Australia. This two-phase qualitative case study that consisted of an online survey and semistructured interviews investigated how ARGBL is used in classrooms across Victoria and identified how teachers use ARGBL in classrooms and for what purpose. The online survey and semistructured interviews had eleven and four participants, respectively. The study found that a range of teachers in different school settings across Victoria use AR and ARGBL across nearly all learning areas. The affordances of ARGBL were focused on the unique presentation that ARGBL facilitates and how this benefits student engagement and learning outcomes. The main areas teachers found challenging when implementing ARGBL were cost, technical issues, easy-to-use technology, and the ability and confidence to employ an emerging technology in their classrooms. This research also demonstrated how the TPACK Framework can be used to model and analyse the knowledges required to integrate ARGBL into the classroom. This study contributes a new understanding of the ways in which teachers integrate ARGBL into their classrooms to support student learning in Victoria, providing a new perspective on Victorian teachers’ practice, experience, and perspectives on using ARGBL in their classrooms.
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    Shame and Stigma: Investigating Teacher Awareness, Understanding and Response
    Maguire, Alanna Kate ( 2023-07)
    This research has taken an interdisciplinary approach to exploring teachers’ awareness, understanding and response to shame and stigma occurring in the classroom. Shame is an affective experience of failure by comparison, where the research suggests stigma causes shame (Lewis, 1998). A review of the research literature showed that teacher perspectives of students’ shame and stigma was an under researched phenomenon. Situated within Social Constructivism, and making use of qualitative methods, specifically semi-structured interviews, this research has made four contributions to knowledge on shame and stigma in schools. First, that teacher understanding of shame can be narrow, and that sometimes teachers unknowingly use language that can minimise their students' experience of shame and stigma. Second, while possessing limitations, the Compass of Shame could be used as a tool to ameliorate this issue by helping teachers to identify and name their students’ affective experience through their behaviour. Third, the data showed that teachers were blocked from acting in support of their students due to performativity pressures related to neoliberal education. Finally, drawing on the Positioning Theory framework, this study revealed that students’ experience can be analysed to understand how shame and stigma were circulated and reproduced to the detriment of equity of access to the classroom environment.
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    20 Days of 2020: Moving through the institutional body language of Melbourne museums in lockdown
    Walker, Yvette Lauren ( 2023-07)
    This visual digital a/r/tographic inquiry uses trace and the in-between as method to speculate upon posthuman visual languages and future museum education pedagogies in a combined visual and written exegesis. This research harnesses the remote disruptions of pandemic conditions for responsive research creation while critically analysing the digital traces of five Melbourne museum Instagram archives from 2020. The study seeks to unfold and reimagine with the visual languages, codes, architectures and frames that contribute to a museum’s institutional body language in a time of forced physical closure, it asks; What can we learn about the changing nature of museum education from exploring Melbourne museums through Instagram posts in 2020? Underpinned by a/r/tography and connectivist concepts this exegesis applies feminist new materialist methods in data-led, iterative, generative visual cycles to speculate with social networks, virtual encounters and the influence of new technologies upon visual digital a/r/tographic praxis. Emergent visual questions arising from the archived data, were fed through an embedded Instagram feedback loop to the museum industry. These dialogic visual questions between digital collaborators, museum industry and a/r/tographic ‘selves’ formed provocations about what feeds and shapes our ways of visually knowing the world. A triggering event led to rethinking trained research methods and the development of an alternative museum narrative set, instigating new lines of inquiry. Readers move between text and image to experience the entangled meaning making processes of this inquiry and are invited into the virtual visual exegesis as avatar for a disembodied encounter with/in the metaverse research ‘world’. Working as architect, curator, artist, participant and builder in the metaverse of Spoke Mozilla, opened pedagogic imaginings and sensorial wonderment for the possible multiple narratives that future museum’s might welcome. A recorded walk through and still screen shots are also provided. All (d)a/r/ta work is stored in figshare depository and is accessible from chapter links within the text.
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    Unveiling the Third Teacher in the Early Years: Investigating early childhood teachers’ conceptual understandings of learning environments in International Baccalaureate World Schools
    Zinn, Fiona Clarke ( 2023-04)
    Since the 1960’s, educators in the municipal pre-schools and infant-toddler centres of Reggio Emilia have described the environment as the “third teacher”. This declaration has prompted early childhood educators around the globe to re-consider the role of learning spaces in a quest to understand its pedagogic, cognitive and affective impacts on young children’s learning. Contemporary learning environments research highlights the relationship between teachers’ spatial analysis competencies, the iterative design/construction of learning environments and the resulting impact on learning/experience. Much good work has already been done in this field; however, little empirical research exists to guide early childhood teachers’ conceptual spatial analysis processes, particularly those in International Baccalaureate (IB) World Schools. This study examines data from IB early childhood teachers undertaking a conceptual approach, to interrogate their learning environments, unveiling them as the third teacher. The conceptual framework for this investigation is derived from the IB Primary Years Program (PYP) framework and is based on the seven PYP key concepts: form, function, change, causation, connection, perspective and responsibility. Through collaborative and conceptual analysis of learning environments, this study addresses the following research questions: a) How do IB Early Years Teachers’ understandings of the term environment as the third teacher change through a process of collaborative concept-based analysis? b) How do the seven key concepts of the PYP support educators to unpack and expand their understandings of the structure, function, purpose and impact of their learning environments? c) What are the benefits, limitations and possible applications of using concept-based analysis processes to explore teachers’ co-constructed professional learning about the learning environment? This research draws on an interpretivist approach through a multi-site case study and rhizomatic analysis; it produces contextual descriptions of the educational potential of early childhood learning environments. It examines a sample of four early childhood teams across three IB Schools, that draw upon the educational approach of Reggio Emilia to extend implementation of the PYP. Adopting the PYP concepts as tools for constructivist investigation, participants engaged collaboratively over a five-month period to extend their understandings of the design, assemblage, influence and aesthetic vibrations of their learning environments. Discussions with participants, across three phases of participatory action research (PAR), identified four lenses for data analysis: purpose, structure, function and impact. Findings assert two arguments: advocacy for the creation of professional learning experiences that target the development of spatial competency skills, and validation of the concept as method approach as a suitable and relevant scaffold for learning within the IB education community. This study contributes to the field of early childhood education and learning environment design in three specific ways: to increase understanding of the pedagogical role and educational potential of learning environments in the early years; to heighten educator awareness of the applicability of the PYP curricular concepts in professional learning; and to propose a strategy for constructing and applying informed understandings to iterative learning environment re/design.
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    An investigation of principals’ views on the factors that influence the place and provision of music in primary schools
    Perry, David John ( 2023-03)
    Though music remains an historically strong part of Australian school life, it is vulnerable to low resourcing and lack of status. Much of the literature specifically references the barriers to achieving a level of music provision that meets the needs of students in each individual school community. Research indicates that the principal is a significant influence on music provision in schools compared to other factors, although this is often overlooked in the literature. While the principal as change agent is well documented in certain music education literature, it is unusual to see their views explored in great depth. To investigate this gap, three primary principals from state schools in Melbourne’s northern suburbs in Victoria, Australia, were recruited for an interview-based study that sought to explore the question: What are the perspectives and ideas that shape principals’ views of music education? The study design used semi-structured interviews following a pre-interview survey and used an interpretivist paradigm due to the study’s emphasis on observation and interpretation. Interview data was categorised by theme, and language use was analysed using Conversational Analysis and Discourse Analysis methods. Critical theory, with its emphasis on social and power structures, was chosen as a theoretical framework. Findings suggested that the constraints on principals in Victorian schools, that had been identified in other, non-music education literature, could impact their capacity for provision of music. Principals are identified as possibly the strongest factor in the level and quality of provision, and as provision has been shown to be inconsistent, it is reasonable to assume that the capacity of individual principals is also inconsistent. While many principals value music and will endeavour to resource it in spite of barriers, it is suggested that the benefits of having music in schools be more broadly communicated to all stakeholders to elevate its status. All participants demonstrated a commitment to prioritising music provision at their school, and a willingness to learn more about its benefits. Furthermore, they also articulated the broader concept of needing to extend the knowledge about music’s benefits at a system and / or principal network level, in order to better support principals’ capacity to ensure music provision.
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    Fostering students’ dialogic imagination: the potential of CLIL to promote cosmopolitan learning
    Fompudie, Celine Elizabeth ( 2023-02)
    In the context of global connections, there has been a widespread recognition of the potential of language learning to promote intercultural skills. However, current language teaching practices seem to promote a fixed notion of culture by focussing on teaching cultural achievements and celebrations. In order to recognise the complexity of cultural practices engendered by globalisation, this thesis argues that the teaching of intercultural skills in language education might be best conceived within a cosmopolitan paradigm. This thesis adopts a view of cosmopolitanism as a cultural attitude towards others based on our dialogic imagination. What makes a cosmopolitan attitude possible is our imagination, our capacity to explore and incorporate other ways of living and thinking. The thesis develops a view of cosmopolitan learning as a teaching approach aimed at fostering students’ dialogic imagination by providing them with the necessary conditions to develop a cosmopolitan attitude. The thesis articulates the idea that to be cosmopolitan, learning needs to be dialogic, transformative and ethical. To explore how intercultural competence and understanding might be better developed from a cosmopolitan lens, this study examines the potential of the Content and Language Integrated Leaning (CLIL) approach to foster students’ dialogic imagination. CLIL emerged in transnational Europe in the mid-1990s as an innovative approach to language learning whose key principle is to teach content in an additional language. A case study of a year 9 class studying history in French was conducted and data was generated from classroom discourse and students’ interviews. Findings shows that by creating transnational and translingual spaces, CLIL promotes an interactive learning space where students critically engage and dialogue with a multiplicity of voices, suggesting that the CLIL approach has the potential to promote cosmopolitan ideals. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that adopting a cosmopolitan lens to the teaching of intercultural understanding and competence allows us to articulate a dynamic view of culture that recognises the cultural complexity brought about by globalisation.