Faculty of Education - Theses
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Item“Eat, play, go, repeat”: Researching with older primary-age children to re-theorise School Age Care( 2017)School Age Care (SAC) is a setting that is little researched and the research that has been conducted has not often sought the perspectives of older children. This research used a combination of participatory methods and ethnography to gain a deeper insight into older children’s experiences of SAC, seeking their views about how to successfully program for this age group. Older children in SAC are commonly spoken of as rebellious, bored, disruptive and unsuited to SAC. The poststructural and feminist poststructural theories of Foucault (1977, 1980) and Butler (1990, 1993) are used to challenge the normative developmental discourses that circulate SAC. The data shows that older children have access to these developmental and maturational discourses and actively engage with them to perform themselves as more mature and separate from younger children. Their multiple performances of age intersect with gender and time as they both resist and work within the care practices that are experienced as a form of power over children’s bodies. Whilst the Australian Framework for School Age Care conceptualises SAC as a site of play, leisure and education, this research invites a re-theorisation of SAC for older children. It demonstrates that older children’s engagement with SAC includes ongoing acts of identity work, waiting and emotional labour that make play and leisure less free and more work-like. The findings suggest that practitioners should be aware of how developmental discourses are both enacted by the children and reinforced through programming design, and consider the impacts of segregating routines and practices on children’s play and leisure. Implications for programming in SAC and other settings include addressing the reality that waiting is unavoidable in SAC, and should be programmed for in the same way that play and leisure activities are planned. Whilst this research does not ‘solve’ the question of older children in SAC, it unsettles dominant understandings, therefore inviting practitioners to imagine new programming approaches that might improve SAC for older children.
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ItemChildren aged nine to twelve years in Outside School Hours Care in Australia( 2013)Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) Services provide care, leisure and education for children aged five to twelve years in the hours before and after school and during vacation times. The number of children using OSHC in Australia has grown significantly over the last ten years. This thesis is a qualitative research project into the experiences of nine older children aged nine to twelve years attending OSHC at one of three research sites in Melbourne, Australia. In OSHC, older children are a minority group that practitioners have long regarded as more challenging than those aged 5 to 8 years. How practitioners currently understand older children appears to be greatly influenced by developmental theory. This study investigated the experiences of the nine participants using poststructural theories of knowledge, power, discourse and binary oppositions in order to provide new knowledge of how older children participate in and experience OSHC. The analysis provided evidence of how developmental discourses operate in OSHC and how older children and practitioners use them differently. Older children use the discourse to advantage themselves and position themselves as superior to younger children. Practitioners, in enacting the discourse, sometimes privilege younger children at the expense of the minority older child. The analysis showed that what is considered ‘true’ about older children can vary depending on the perspective of who is creating the truth, and that these truths can have power effects. The study also documents how binaries are used to create knowledge about older children and younger children and that the knowledge these binaries create differs depending on whose perspective is adopted. This project also chose to adopt postmodern views of children by positioning the participants as co-researchers rather than research subjects, with the power to influence research method and implementation. The participants embraced this level of involvement in the project and demonstrated themselves to be capable decision makers and researchers. Their involvement in this way contributed to data that more closely represented their own opinions, experiences and understandings of OSHC. In applying poststructural theories to the question of older children in OSHC, this study has provided new knowledge about a question that has concerned practitioners for many years. It provides knowledge that will add to that already afforded by developmental theory and represents an opportunity for practitioners to develop new approaches to working more equitably with older children.