Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemShame and Stigma: Investigating Teacher Awareness, Understanding and Response( 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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ItemAn analysis of evaluative reasoning in education program evaluations conducted in Australia between 2014 – 2019( 2022)The Australian government spends millions of dollars every year on grants that support new and innovative programs in the education sector. For example, in the 2020- 2021 Australian budget, financial support for interventions in the primary and secondary school sectors equalled more than $72.9 million dollars. Usually, and in order to account for spending the money, granting bodies ask for an evaluation of the intervention. One of the key activities of evaluation is to determine the value, merit or worth of a program. This is achieved by reaching an evaluative conclusion/judgement about the educational intervention that is credible, valid, and defensible to stakeholders. The defensibility of an evaluative conclusion/judgement relies partly on legitimate and justified arguments. In evaluation, legitimate arguments are made using the logic of evaluation. Justified arguments are made using evaluative reasoning. However, the reasoning process underpinning the logic is doubly important because readers need to be convinced of the credibility, validity, and defensibility of the evaluative conclusion/judgement. This study investigated the presence of a legitimate and justified evaluative conclusion/judgement in publicly available education evaluations conducted in Australia between 2014-2019. Using the systematic quantitative analysis method and new integrated logic of evaluation and evaluative reasoning conceptual framework, this study found that only four of the 26 evaluations analysed provided a legitimate and justified evaluative conclusion/ judgement about program value. The remaining 22 ‘evaluations’ were categorised as research because while they provided descriptive facts about the intervention, they did not ascribe value to it. The findings highlight the need for more credible, valid, and defensible evaluations of educational programs, achieved in part by using evaluative reasoning, as they provide an evidence-base for decision-making and for ensuring that quality education is available to all members of society.
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ItemInstitutional influences on approaches to teaching within a flexible university : a cultural historical investigation( 2010)This study investigated the teaching approaches of two business academics located within an Australian university developing its flexible teaching and learning practices over the past twenty years. The interview subjects are highly regarded educators with formative backgrounds in on-campus or off-campus distance teaching. Each has had a long professional relationship with the researcher in her centrally situated position's as an educational developer within the institution. A review of the student learning literature pertaining to teaching and learning approaches in the higher education sector over the last thirty years, shows that "teaching approaches" can influence "student learning approaches"(Ramsden, Paul 2003) and outcomes, (Biggs, J. 2003; Lizzio, Alf, Wilson, Keithia & Simons, Roland 2002) however "institutional influences" upon teaching approaches seems to be substantially overlooked. (Kernber & Kwan 2000) The academics were invited to participate in this study agreeing to retrospectively review and discuss their teaching in three progressive phases of their working history. They were invited to consider their teaching approach using the Approach to Teaching Inventory (Trigwell, Prosser et. al. 2005) in order to reflect upon their personal positioning (Harre September 2004), institutional practice and societal rhetoric in relation to an academic life in various periods of their teaching history. Discursive analysis has been undertaken of the resulting conversations guided by Cultural Historical Analysis Theory, (Vygotsky 1978, Engestrom 1987). This investigation reveals profound institutional influences on the approaches of teachers to their work. Influences on academic life have usually been studied independent of the Higher education teaching and learning literature. This study points to an urgent need to integrate these research interests to inform understanding of material transformative activity for policy makers in higher education.
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ItemMulticultural and diversity education in the globalised classroom in Australia( 2012)Australia is no longer an “isolated backwater” island floating around the Asia-Pacific region. It has become a country of great importance as a multicultural hub that continues to flourish in a time of social, cultural, and population growth. With this changing environment the needs of its people, in particular its children, have also changed. As multicultural awareness begins to expand and borders cease to define the cultural differences of those around us, the needs of the learners in school are also in a state of flux. This paper tracks the evolution of multicultural and diversity education policies in Australia through seven key documents: these are The National Policy on Languages (Lo Bianco, 1987), the Asian Studies Council Report – Asian Studies Council (1988), National Agenda for Multicultural Australia (Commonwealth of Australia, 1989), Adelaide Declaration (1999), Melbourne Declaration (2008), Blueprint for Education and Early Childhood Development (2008) and Education for Global and Multicultural Citizenship: A Strategy for Victorian Government Schools 2009-2013 (DEECD, 2009). It concludes with implications and impacts of this history and these documents and addresses the need for continued teacher preparation and instruction through recommendation new initiatives.
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ItemRethinking indigenous educational disadvantage: a critical analysis of race and whiteness in Australian education policy( 2011)This thesis examines Indigenous school education in Australia, through analysing themes of difference, race and whiteness in contemporary education policy. The study asks why educational inequality and disadvantage continue to be experienced by Indigenous school students, despite concerted policy attention towards redressing these issues. It seeks to better understand how Indigenous education is represented in policy and scholarly debates and what implications this has for Indigenous educational achievement. I argue that in order to succeed Indigenous school students are often expected to assimilate into an education system that judges success according to values and expectations influenced by an invisible ‘whiteness’. The investigation of these issues is framed by insights and approaches drawn from three theoretical frameworks. Michel Foucault’s concepts of ‘discourse’, ‘disciplinary power’, ‘regimes of truth’ and ‘normalisation’, and Iris Marion Young’s work with issues of difference, ‘cultural imperialism’, oppression and justice are brought into critical dialogue with critical race theory (CRT). In particular, CRT is engaged as an attempt to bring some new perspectives to understandings of race and difference in Australian education policy. This combination of theories informs an examination of policy (and policy related texts) guided by Foucauldian discourse analysis and critical policy research methods. Through my analysis I develop a number of arguments. First, that the combined theoretical approach I engage is useful for uncovering some of the silences and assumptions that have typically influenced attempts to achieve educational justice for Indigenous Australians. Second, in the documents I analyse, the ways in which Indigenous students are described commonly positions them as deficient and suggests that these deficiencies are to be remedied through exhibiting more of the behaviours and attitudes of non-Indigenous students. Third, that the commitment to ‘inclusion’ within the policies analysed is important, but typically maintains a relationship in which a powerful and central white ‘norm’ remains invisible and dictates how and when the ‘Other’ is included. Fourth, that in seeking to understand equity issues for Indigenous students it is important to look also at the broader education system and its dominant values and goals. Through analysis of policies related to education for ‘all students’, I suggest that educational success is commonly identified and assessed according to ‘white’ norms, within schools that are expected to improve and be accountable within a neo-liberal agenda, which is largely supportive of standardisation and sameness, and not readily accommodating of ‘difference’. Overall, this study has attempted to bring some important conceptual approaches to analysis of current education policy in Australia in order to build greater understanding of Indigenous educational disadvantage. It has sought to open possibilities for addressing issues of race and justice that are characterised by listening, support of difference and responsibility, and commitment to disruption and discomfort.
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ItemVocational education and apprenticeship: a study of vocational education in the 20th century in England, Australia and the United States with special reference to the role of apprenticeship training and with recommendations for the modification of that training( [1978])My thesis outlines in brief the sorts of traditions and practices on which the institution of apprenticeship has been built, both as a form of training and as a social device to provide both moral guardianship and continuing education for the trainee. Although there is considerable evidence that the system has failed on both these counts since the decay of the old system three hundred years ago, apprenticeship continues to survive as the usual method for contracting training in exchange for service in England and Australia. It even receives official sanction and subsidization. Nevertheless, even on the mundane level of job practice, apprenticeship may be an unsatisfactory arrangement for both trainees and instructors, and the fact that the system has long been exposed to the hostile influences of labour and management still further hobbles its effectiveness as a form of training and of work induction. With the development of systematized and institutionalized technical instruction in the twentieth century, especially in the vocation-conscious United States, youth has even more opportunities to achieve vocational potential outside the cramping service status of apprenticeship. There may even be some doubt whether there should any longer be a place for apprenticeship in modern industrial societies where many sorts of skill must be newly developed and where a spirit of versatility will better ensure the tradesman continuing employment in the last quarter of this century.